Truth
Styles of Religious Belief
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
God the Scientist
Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, England, and well-known for his books on evolution, at the Edinburgh science festival, Easter 1992, debated the existence of God with the Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood.
Fundamentalists recognize that traditionally one of religion’s main functions was scientific—the explanation of existence, of the universe, of life. Historically, most religions have had or even been a cosmology and a biology. Today if you asked people to justify their belief in God, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don’t know it.
Scientists like Richard Dawkins have been accused of arrogant intolerance towards creationists. Can a professional student of evolution have a serious debate with creationists? It is hard and when he refuses, he is accused of arrogance. But should a gardener who has spent a lifetime finding the best ways of growing vegetables take seriously someone who says praying to God would be more productive?
Some religious critics of science are patronising rather than truly critical. For them it does not matter whether the beliefs of religion are true and God’s existence or otherwise is brushed aside in the interest of greater social good. There is precious little evidence for God, let alone for the virgin birth or the resurrection, but, if there is no God, it is necessary to invent Him to keep the uneducated masses out of mischief or to comfort them in misfortune or bereavement. For these religious know-alls religion is good for people, and for society because it provides consolation and a moral code.
Different Dimensions
Some believers claim that religion should not try to compete with science because they are about different things. They put science and religion in different dimensions—“Science is all very well, but it leaves out the religious dimension”. They can continue to accept and spout the biblical account of the origin of the universe and of man, though it is now known to be untrue, pleading that they are not meant to be true in any crude literal sense, but in a different way.
So God is not an old man with a white beard in the sky. What, then, is He? Out come the weasel words:
God is not out there, he is in all of us.
God is the ground of all being.
God is the essence of life.
God is the universe. If you believe in the universe then you believe in God.
God is love. If you believe in love, then you believe in God.
Some modern physicists and scientific popularisers have kow-towed to religious sentiments in contemplating questions such as why the big bang happened when it did, why the laws of physics are these laws and not those laws, why the universe exists at all, and so on. They say there is an inner core of mystery that we don’t understand, and perhaps never can; and they may then say that perhaps this inner core of mystery is another name for God. Or in Stephen Hawking’s words, if we understand these things, we shall “know the mind of God”.
But this sophisticated, physicist’s God bears no resemblance to the familiar God of the paternalistic religions. Just as the hoary old man in the sky is claimed by some Christians to be metaphorical, a physicist can say God is Planck’s constant or a superstring, and we can take it as a picturesque way of saying that superstrings or Planck’s constant are profound mysteries. The physicists’ God has no connexion with an old entity who listens to prayers, forgives sins, cares about when the Sabbath begins or whether women wear veils or expose their arms. Nor has it any connexion with a being who could impose a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of others, many committed before he was born.
The same is true of attempts to identify the big bang of modern cosmology with the myth of Genesis. The resemblance between the sophisticated conceptions of modern physics and the creation myths of the Babylonians and the Jews that revere as God’s word is utterly trivial.
Unquestioned Truths
What do the religious say about those parts of scripture that once would have been unquestioned truths:
- the creation of the world
- the creation of life
- the various miracles of the bible
- survival after death
- the Virgin Birth?
These stories have become for these modern evangelists little more than moral fables, the equivalent of Aesop, of Hans Anderson. Quite right too, but they do not admit it where it matters—in the introduction to the bible and in church. Clergymen are so used to treating the biblical stories as fables that they have forgotten the difference between fact and fiction. It’s like the people who, when somebody dies on The Archers, write letters of condolence to the others.
Dawkins gives the example of the former Chief Rabbi, Sir Immanuel Jacobovits, decrying the sin of racism because everyone was descended from Adam and Eve, the biblical ancestors of all humans. Rabbis are educated men who cannot possibly believe in Adam and Eve and must know that these days few people would be impressed by it as being true. Racism is evil and deserves a better argument against it than an ancient myth even though the sense of the myth in suggesting the unity of the human race is itself laudable. If he was using Adam and Eve as a cautionary tale then really it would have been clearer if he had said so.
Most religious people are loyal to just one religion, though there are hundreds of them. And here is a coincidence that shows God working in a strange way. Mostly they choose the religion of their parents and not the sect that has the most holy reputation. Religious people rarely feel the need to find the religion with the best evidence in its favour, however it is judged—the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music. Indeed, the few who do are decried as apostates. Nobody could deny this as a plain fact, though simple religious people seem not to notice it is arbitrary and those who realize it, nevertheless go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.
Parents’ Religion
Universal truths do not differ in Pakistan, Poland, or India, or even the Deep South of the USA or the Vatican, yet, for most people religious choice is so unimportant that they accept the religion of their parents right or wrong.
If you ask people why they are convinced of the truth of their religion, they don’t appeal to heredity. It is too obviously crass for the devout to admit they hold their deep religious convictions merely because their parents did. It begins not to sound like free will at all. Nor do they appeal to evidence. There isn’t any, and nowadays the more honest and better educated believers admit it. They appeal purely to faith, belief in spite of, or even because of, the lack of evidence. A political position taken up is defended with reasoned argument, but faith has no need of argument. Quite the opposite, it is the churchman’s device to relieve their flocks of the need to argue, to think and evaluate evidence.
The worst thing is that the rest of us, those with no faith, are obliged to respect the primitive behaviour of others and if we don’t, we are accused of violating human rights. So, if people do not comply with the law in respect of cruelty to animals, they are rightly prosecuted and punished, but if they argue that cruelty is necessary for reasons of religious ritual, it is the rest of society that apologises and allows the barbarity.
When Moslem community leaders go on the radio and defend the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, they are inciting murder—a serious crime for which they would ordinarily be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned. But are they arrested? They are not, because our secular society respects their faith, and sympathises with the deep hurt and insult to it. Views justified only by faith deserve no respect.
Some religious people say there is no positive evidence for the existence of God but neither is there evidence against it. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic.
That seems a comfortable position but the trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to anything—the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There is no evidence of fairies at the bottom of the garden, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any so, the theory goes, we should be agnostic about them. We could hold any number of unprovable beliefs, but mostly people do not believe in fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so on, and feel no disadvantage of it. But many people do believe in a creator God, together with the peculiarities of their parents’ religion.
Perhaps most people have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn’t quite big enough to explain everything about life and God still has a place. It is a feeling that disappears as you study and read more about the scientific understanding of life and evolution. The greater the comprehension of evolution, the less the attraction of theism.
Evolution
Complex, improbable things are more difficult to explain than simple, probable things. The great beauty of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that it explains how complex, difficult to understand things could have arisen step by plausible step, from simple, easy to understand beginnings. We start our explanation from almost infinitely simple beginnings—pure hydrogen and a huge amount of energy. Our scientific, Darwinian explanations carry us through a series of gradual steps, many well-understood, to all the beauty and complexity of life.
The alternative hypothesis, that it was all started by a supernatural creator, is not only superfluous, it is also highly improbable. It falls foul of the very argument that was originally put forward in its favour. This is because any God worthy of the name must have been a being of colossal intelligence, a super mind and therefore an entity of extremely low probability—a very improbable being indeed.
Even if the postulation of such an entity explained anything (and we don’t need it to), it still wouldn’t help because it raises a bigger mystery than it solves—what created the creator?
Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.
From John Tate
Why did you find the need to paraphrase Richard Dawkin’s article? A link to the article would have been much better. It is very well written, and self-explanatory. A dumbed down version is hardly necessary.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. I wanted the gist of the ideas presented. Discussions are rarely succinct. If you think it is dumbed down then it is too bad. The trouble with links is that they change or disappear altogether. Nothing stops anyone from doing a Google search to find more by Dawkins, and I provide a Google search engine on every page for anyone to follow up what they read.
