You know that feeling when you start reading something and your almost instantaneous reaction just a sentence or two in is, Er…no…?  Yeah.  That.  Just now.

Before I get into it let me say once again and for the record that my own atheism isn’t a reaction to the idea of religion or to any one particular religion or my experiences being raised as a Baptist or the crappy way fundamentalist Christianity treats gay people like me. I was raised in a Baptist household by a mother who loved me very much, and there is still much about the faith of my childhood I consider valuable and worthwhile and that I still hold dear…particularly that stuff about Soul Competency or Soul Liberty, which as I still understand it means we’re all capable of answering the Big Questions for ourselves, that is our right, it is our responsibility and also our obligation to Let The Other Person Do That For Themselves Too.  But I am an atheist now.  I became that when I finally admitted to myself that belief had stopped making sense to me. That’s really all there is to it.

I’m open to having my mind changed about it. I’m open to the possibility that I might one day find myself walking down Newton’s beach and finding one of those prettier than ordinary sea shells he spoke of, picking it up and finding God inside (oh there you were…). But honestly I doubt that’s going to happen. I need a reason to think there might be a greater intelligence behind the entire universe as we see it, and what is more, a reason to think that intelligence is the origin of the universe and all of creation, and that it always existed. Otherwise it’s Gods all the way down, and while I can appreciate a sublime mystery as much as the next person, basing my entire worldview on one makes the left side of my brain cranky.

I appreciate the sincerity of this man’s attempt to convince me.  However, it isn’t working.

4 Responses a Non-Scientist Christian Can Give to Science-Based Atheism

Mmmm…?

Here are four simple responses to those who say that science has either disproved God or has made belief in God unnecessary…

Er…no.  Just…right out of the gate, no. Science can demonstrate that a lot of what is written down in the Bible isn’t factual, but those are testable things like The Great Flood or the evolution of humankind. Researchers can compare biblical accounts to other historical artifacts and written accounts from those same periods. Those are testable things, which are the sort of things science preoccupies itself with. But it is not the job of science to prove Odin, Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster don’t exist either.  Make a testable claim concerning any of them and we’ll see.

As far as necessary goes, it simply isn’t necessary to believe the biblical account of creation. Belief in God isn’t necessary to cure cancer, though a lot of folks suffering it take great comfort in that belief all the same and I would not challenge that for the world, unless it was to deny someone, particularly a child (there’s a reason why Baptists don’t baptise the very young) factual science based medical care in favor of faith healing. Philosophers and theologians still argue fiercely as to whether belief in God is morally necessary. In his book Science and Human Values Jacob Bronowski makes an excellent case for the moral values the practice of science teaches…

Theory and experiment alike become meaningless unless the scientist brings to them, and his fellows can assume in him, the respect of a lucid honesty with himself. The mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford said this forcibly at the end of his short life, nearly a hundred years ago.

If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may even prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should loose it’s property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be a society. This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.

This is the scientist’s moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means. Clifford goes on to put this in terms of the scientist’s practice:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous.

And the passion in Clifford’s tone shows that to him the word credulous had the same emotional force as ‘a den of thieves’

The fulcrum of Clifford’s ethic here, and mine, is the phrase ‘it may be true after all.’ Others may allow this to justify their conduct; the practice of science wholly rejects it. It does not admit the word ‘true’ can have this meaning. The test of truth is the known factual evidence, and no glib expediency nor reason of state can justify the smallest self-deception in that. Our work is of a piece, in the large and in the detail; so that if we silence one scruple about our means, we infect ourselves and our ends together.

-Jacob Bronowski “Science and Human Values” 1956

But this is different from the knowledge science reveals. Science may render dying from certain diseases unnecessary (get your shots), but to render belief in God unnecessary you need to explain what made it necessary in the first place.  If you’re telling me that belief in God is necessary to prevent rabies I would question that. If you’re saying belief in God is necessary for moral behavior I would question that but we might never reach a mutual understanding let alone agreement because first we have to agree on what moral behavior is. Some arguments are like that.  If you’re telling me belief in God is necessary for a job at Baylor University well then I would have to agree with you.

So… (if you’re still bearing with me…): Four simple responses…

1) We cannot know from science if science itself is the best source of knowledge.  

The only way to definitively prove that science explains everything would be to have exhaustive knowledge of all reality, and then be able to explain (using only scientific data) what all reality is and what it means. Such a feat is impossible.

I think there’s another way of putting this: If medicine can’t cure every disease then faith healing is better.  The mistake here, and you see it a lot, is that science doesn’t actually claim to know anything. What science claims to have is a way to discover what can be known. Richard Feynman said of science simply that it is a way of not fooling ourselves. But the mistake here goes further.

In the twentieth century science developed what is now called the Principle of Uncertainty. Speaking on that, in the chapter titled Knowledge or Certainty in his series The Ascent of Man, Bronowski pummels the concept of science as being a dry storehouse of knowledge gathered in the pursuit of absolute truths. That desire for absolute truth Bronowski insists, is outright poison to the human spirit, giving rise to endless examples of human atrocities. Science is not another secular kind of dogma, science and dogma are exact opposites. And where you see that clearly is in this one brief passage:

The symbol of the University [in Göttingen]  is the iron statue outside the Rathskeller of a barefoot goosegirl that every student kisses at graduation. The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.

I am unaware of any religious institution where questioning the revealed knowledge therein is tolerated, or tolerated for very long. In the end, authority must prevail. But in science it is nature, by way of experiment and test, that is the authority.  Always it is nature which speaks for itself. Science is not a book of revelations about nature. It is a way of asking the questions and not fooling ourselves about the answers. That is why its answers are conditional: There may be facts we haven’t uncovered. There may be understanding we missed because we are human and we make mistakes. Think of how the proposition of continental drift was discarded because no one could see how it was possible that continents could move. It seemed absurd on its face.  And then the deep ocean was more precisely mapped and the mid ocean ridges were discovered, and the realization came about that no, the continents did not move, but  the plates they were sitting on did. When we make new discoveries our understanding changes. That is not a flaw in science, it is its profound and beautiful strength.

2) Scientific consensus can and frequently does change. This limits its  epistemological authority.  

This is the My Country Right Or Wrong model of authority, and the best retort to it was G. K. Chesterton’s that it was like saying My Mother Drunk Or Sober. Authority needs to be…well…authoritative. So when I was a kid the  encyclopedia was the authority I consulted for my school projects. The yearly updates never made me question that authority…if anything they helped reinforce it by showing me it was a living growing thing not a dead Easter Island statue,  correcting its mistakes, added fresh new things for me to learn as they became evident.  But there’s something else going on here besides the idea of authority. Epistemological is it?  Ah…you mean…Meaning.  If knowledge changes how can we hope to glean and hold on to meaning from it?

And yet meaning and knowledge aren’t so separate from one another that the falsehood of one conveys nothing to the other. Ask the children of Marx and Lenin what happens to a society that broadly accepts a model of the human identity that is false. Ask the Germans who survived the war. Ask the tombstones in Gettysburg. The intellectual authority of science is right here:

“The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece.   When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.” -Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

Which refers again to that quote from Clifford about society become credulous. It is precisely the case that the consensus of scientists change when new facts or new understandings become apparent that give the practice of science its authority over dogma that never changes and cannot be questioned.  Or as the economist John Maynard Keynes once said:  “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”   Lots of people just close their eyes.  There is meaning in that, but not one suitable for human societies to do anything except spiral into darkness. To survive and prosper, humanity must always ask itself What do we know, and how do we know it?  There is meaning in the honest asking of those questions. There is meaning in the bravery with which we face the answers nature reveals to us. There is meaning in our willingness to acknowledge our mistakes, and move forward. There is meaning in our willingness to not fool ourselves. Meaning is not a stone you can carve into a face that never changes, never sees what its stone eyes behold.

3) Only supernatural theism provides a rational justification of scientific work.  

I quote this one thing from his explanation of that because I think it’s the nugget…

There is little survival value in knowing, for example, the complicated workings of time–space theory, or the genus of certain insects, or the distance of Jupiter from Mars. All of these facts are pursued by scientists as being intrinsically valuable, yet they offer very little information that can help guarantee a species’ continued existence on the planet.

He offers this as a way of explaining that scientists pursue their lines of inquiry out of a supernaturally built-in innate desire to pursue truth, which he says cannot be justified on scientific principles alone. But simple human curiosity needs no supernatural explanations…we are evolved from predatory meat eating east African plains apes and the survival value of predator curiosity is not hard to understand. And if scientists know anything it’s that simple questions can have profound and unexpected ramifications when the answers come back. Science-Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote this parable once concerning support for space exploration, but it could easily apply to any human endeavor that aspires to science…

The analogy I often use is this: if you had intelligent fish arguing about why they should go out on dry land, some bright young fish might have thought of many things but they would never have thought of fire…

To say that there is little survival value in knowing the workings of time and space or the genus of certain insects is basically to say there is little survival value in human curiosity. And it is true there are many authorities, both secular and religious, that like nothing more than stifling that most basic human of urges. Particularly when it comes to questioning Their authority, and all the dogmas it is built upon.  The search for truth begins with a question, whereas a set of received answers serves only to suffocate it.

4) Only supernatural theism gives us assurance that real scientific knowledge is possible.

Here he reaches for a “philosopher” for some help (yes the scare quotes are deliberate)…

If human beings are a more evolved species of primate, then our cognitive faculties (ie, the parts of our body and mind that allow us to be rational creatures) have evolved out of lesser cognitive faculties. But, Plantinga says, if God does not exist, then the only factors that affected human evolution are time and chance. Based on time and chance alone, why should we be confident that our rational minds–which are merely the sum of lesser evolved minds plus time and chance–are actually rational at all?

Well speaking as a Cold War baby you could certainly argue that Mutually Assured Destruction makes a pretty strong case against humanity being more highly evolved and rational than the lesser evolved brains of howling tree monkeys. How rational is it to destroy nearly all life on earth as an act of self defense? On the other hand, howling tree monkeys don’t produce nuclear weapons either.

Yes there is as the “philosopher” he quotes says, “a tension” inherent in our evolutionary nature. And you not only see that tension in the headlines of your daily newspaper every day of the year, but also in the thousands of years of recorded human history that came before. Which would also include the Bible. Witch stonings anyone? But this is exactly what evolution would predict. Evolution doesn’t erase the old and replace it with the new, it builds the new right on top of the old. The lesser evolved is within us also.  We bear within us every day of our lives, the living history of millions of years of life on Earth.  It can lift the cities high. It can also burn them to the ground. Murderous religious extremists calling themselves  ISIS are currently on a rampage destroying priceless ancient artifacts because the very existence of those ancient works of art and human culture challenges and offends them. There’s the lizard brain at work. But it was the more evolved human brain that made those artifacts in the first place. Along with the AK-47s the men of ISIS have slung over their shoulders.

Tension?  Oh yes. But if the darkness was all there was to us, there wouldn’t Be civilization. We are not fallen angels, we are risen apes. There is hope for us. But only to the extent we keep asking that question so central to the practice of science, What do we know, and how do we know it, and by the courage with which we face the answers we discover.

He finishes by referring to Nagel, that “It makes no sense to assume that humans can really make sense of their world on a conceptual level if human consciousness arose out of the very world it responds to.” But that is what makes perfect sense. A being that evolved in an entirely different different universe with a different physical nature might find this one close to impossible to grasp. Think of that classic thought experiment of the two dimensional being trying to make sense of a three dimensional world. The fact that we’re capable of understanding this universe well enough to create the civilization we have is itself evidence that our evolutionary lineage is firmly rooted here not elsewhere.

You can wave your hands and say, but a supernatural force could have done that too, and I’d have to agree. But the simpler explanation is we were born here, we grew up here, and that’s why we fit in here.