Abstract

“Self-evident verities” expire in the oxygen of factually based theories. What seems obvious can change as the science changes.

Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Science and Belief

The Lion Manual called Science and Belief has been mentioned several times. It is typical of Christian books about science—it has nothing essentially to do with it. Yes, it describes certain aspects of science in a bland way that no one would object to in a science book that was honestly explaining how science works, but the intention here is to imply that science is only partial and sadly lacking. Only a belief in a supernatural being called God can explain everything.

An example is that it describes Hertz aiming to show that radio waves are of the same nature as light waves and therefore obeyed Maxwell’s equations. He tried to find out whether they travelled at the same speed and found they did not, suggesting that radio waves were not electromagnetic waves like light. Later it was discovered that Hertz had failed to realize that the dimensions of his laboratory were such that standing waves were set up and their interference pattern spoiled his results. Eliminating the problem, the radio waves were found to travel at the speed of light. This is a useful cautionary tale for science students, but Poole hopes to imply by it that scientists are missing the most important factor of all—God!

A second’s thought shows that in the whole history of science and the longer one of religion, there has never been an instance like the Hertz experiment where an overlooked factor turned out to be God. Christian apologists, always invoke God by analogy, and unformed minds might find the analogies convincing when more experienced adults would laugh at them. As Laplace said to Napoleon, “God is a hypothesis of which I have no need!” Nor has anyone since. Laplace was a religious man but was what Poole is not—honest. He knew that whatever God was, he was not wiggling his index finger in human affairs, and in practice was irrelevant to mankind.

Poole defies all of history by trying to make out that “religious belief encouraged science”. In so doing he admits that the former reverence for Nature held by ancient societies was destroyed by the Judaeo-Christian bible.

In Christianity Nature was demoted from being an object of worship. It was untamed and needed to be subdued.

Of course, that does not mean “exploit”, he chirps, overlooking the fact that it meant precisely that and still does, but Christians like him would rather write worthless apologetic than do something useful. Appropriately Poole quotes a prayer by James Clerk Maxwell here:

Teach us to study the works of Thy hands that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen our reason for Thy service.

Frankly, it makes an Adelphiasophist cringe. Christianity helped science because “a lot of clergymen were scientists”. It is rather like saying the Ku Klux Klan helped the fight against slavery because some southerners were against it. Clergymen had some education, a reasonable income and plenty of time on their hands, so some of them took to science as a hobby and made useful contributions. To extend this into “a partnership of Christianity and science” as Poole does simply serves to show his undisguised bigotry and dishonesty. Christians typically will claim credit for anything as soon as they can find one of their creed who supported a good cause, even if the remainder and the official churches fought it tooth and nail.

At this point appears a box in which a long quotation from a Professor Colin Russell is given in which he pejoratively describes the opponents of Christianity of the nineteenth century as…

…a concerted attempt tp replace conventional religion (which deals with the supernatural) by a world view that involves Nature and Nature only.

They sound quite wonderful to us. “Mother Nature” was “a substitute for God”. “Its aim was the secularization of society”. It is all transparently shock-horror for innocents who think religion will tell them something about the supernatural it apparently “deals with”. It is a fraud because, as the Marx brothers realized but Christians cannot, there “aint no Santa Clause”.

Russell says the work of these scientists, many Fellows of the Royal Society, was “literature that is today almost universally regarded as worthless…” Unlike Christian works. His “universally” means “by Christians”. One such book was A D White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a book well worth reading today. Poole’s Science and Belief, proves that this warfare is still continuing from the Christian side, otherwise his book would not be necessary. It is not the fault of Christians because if the scientists would only cease to contradict them the war would stop! Christians simply do not like to be contradicted. That is why there is warfare.

Right and Wrong

Poole now tells us that science is “imagined” as the final court of appeal for judging all other knowledge, and it could not have got there except through its success. Despite that it can tell us nothing about God. This is called a “limitation” of science. Note that in all of this assertion, Poole does not tell us what religion can tell us about God. The religious people of the world might say there is a God. Skeptics reply that there is not a shred of evidence there is a God, so to believe in one is pure self-deception. Christians assert, skeptics look for evidence. These are two fundamentally opposed attitudes to life, and they are irreconcilable. It is quite impossible to believe without any evidence and to demand evidence before believing. Poole is not fairly comparing the merits of the two attitudes, understandably, because simply believing for no reason is indefensible. So, he leads the readers of his tendentious nonsense to doubt science while leaving no more than an impression that religion can offer something more.

He now says one of the questions science cannot answer is whether something is right or wrong. That is a dubious assertion, as well as implying, without any substantiation, that religion can. Astonishingly, though, Poole gives as an example Robert Boyle who refused to make known some of his chemical discoveries because he thought they would be used for mischievous purposes. Boyle refused to use his inventions because of the scientific knowledge he had of them, even though the knowledge itself was not a direct answer to the question. What similar can religion offer? The Romans were said to have refused to develop steam power, even though they were aware of it and used it in temples to automatically open doors, for example, because it would have made millions of slaves redundant. Was that decision right or wrong? Religion is no better at asnwering such questions than science, in fact rather poorer.

Ultimately, from the theory of evolution, the purpose of any species is to propagate itself, and so what is right is what allows us to do this. It is not what secures us the psychological comfort of an imaginery eternal existence. To continue to “subdue” the earth, or to destroy animals and plants upon which we might subtly depend, cannot be right, because it will lead to our extinction. The Christian religion cannot even get to realize that our existence in the world we know is the only one we are likely to have and should be valued above any fantasy existence in the bosom of a fantasy being.

More assertions of no value follow. Science is concerned with mechanisms but religion is concerned with meaning. “Why am I alive?” is the question used to illustrate this distinction. Science explains what processes or mechanisms allow us to live but religion explains the purpose of life. What then is it? Er…

At this point appears another box about “Logical Positivism”. Logical positivism simply says that only empirical knowledge is practically valuable to us. This outlook bluntly says that speculation such as that of religion is utterly valueless until it finds some empirical base. That is why Christians do not like it, and try to misrepresent it. It supposedly destroys the basis of science because the assumptions upon which science is built are not empirical. That is absurd. It is like saying aeroplanes cannot fly because they are heavier than air. Whether we know the underlying physics or not, it is plainly true that aeroplanes can fly. The success of science shows that its underlying assumptions are true. They began as assumptions (working assumptions) but the continued successes of the enterprise could only continue if the assumptions are true. They have actually been verified empirically.

The claim to logic is the basis of the criticism of logical positivism, and that is because it cannot be included in the set of knowledge that it prescribes. The assertion that “only empirical knowledge is of practical value to us” excludes itself because it is an assertion not an empirical finding. Christians therefore say it falls on its own sword and so must admit God once more into the equation. Yet logical positivism in practice leads us into a virtuous circle of unfolding knowledge, whereas belief in God leads us to spallation and confusion precisely because it has no empirical yardstick, and ultimately every believer has a personal God and a personal religion. Christianity is shot through with fallacies, assumptions and downright lies, so logical positivism by comparison is heaven.

A professor Malcolm Dixon is quoted as saying:

There are more disagreements and contradictions within science itself than there are between science and religion. Conflict between rival views is quite common in science.

Profound, eh? No, but meant to be misleading. The aim is to give the impression that science is arbitrary. This is a Christian slander. Christianity is arbitrary, that is why there are so many Christian sects. There are disagreements and contradictions in science while the scientific view is being established by observation and experiment based on hypothesizing. Once established the agreed view becomes that of the body of knowledge called science. The agreed view in science in many fields is stable and not subject to change. Anyone can disagree with it, but, to repeat, science is not opinion. Disagreements have to hold water and we are sure that many fields of scientific learning are established. At the boundaries of knowledge there are disagreements because through them science progresses, and the greater a field gets, the greater its boundaries.

What of the disagreements between science and religion? There is only one. Science is true, religion is false! Poole keeps saying that science and religion give different types of explanations, again trying to persuade us that they have their own domains of effectiveness. The two domains are truth and lies. What religious truth has ever been established? The intended readership of this kiddies book are being browbeaten. He repeats incessantly that science cannot tell us why the universe exists, meaning for what purpose. The reader deduces that religion does. It does not. It asserts that a superbeing called God made it, and any such assertion tells you nothing! A far better religious hypothesis than the Christian one, and one held by many people at one time, is that the Devil made the world we inhabit. To see the world as obviously evil, makes more sense than Christianity, and the explanation is supernatural. Why then are we to believe the Christian explanation? Because they say so!

Poole says that science can explain perfectly well the best way to cure a bacterial illness, say, but it cannot give the knowledge of a personal kind required to make a friendship—or rather, realising perhaps that this is nonsense, has to add the stupid qualifier “atom-and-molecule explanation”. He realizes that someone who is having problems making friends probably needs the help of a psychologist or even a psychiatrist and has to crudely exclude them. They are the scientists that can offer solutions. He expects a child not to notice his trickery.

Poole now takes us on to what he calls “nothing buttery”, or reductionism. He wants to be able to argue that scientists say things like, “Human beings are nothing but a collection of atoms”. Or, because that is a bit crude he puts it in one place like this: “If we are just accidents then… “ The word “just” replaced the “nothing but”. Scientists know far more than any Christian apologist that we are not “nothing but” atoms or “just” accidents, or whatever, because scientists are the people who are tring to find out what we are. If it were not for scientists, Christians would not have been able to use words like “atoms” in this context.

If scientists have used expressions like this, it has been to emphasize that there is nothing “supernatural” about these things, not that the whole is not greater than its parts. If that were a view seriously held by scientists there would be no point in doing anything other than analysing composition. The Christian is desperate to hold on to the fancy of a soul, in fact “nothing but” a metaphor for life itself—when the soul departs we die. Since Christians have not the courage to face up to death they pretend that when life ceases it goes somewhere else. This university lecturer is trying to dupe young people by denigrating scientists as fools, and elevating mythology into truth. His colleagues should be demanding his sacking.

Explaining Away

The sheer brazen audacity of Christians like Poole defies belief. His next section is about “explaining away”. Explaining away all the absurdities of the New Testament, one might imagine. But no! Scientists explaining away religious experiences is what he means. What would be considered personal prejudices, if they were matters of race, for example, are touted by Christians as true beliefs! These apparently are what scientists want to explain away. Just to make sure that explanations are not admissible he discounts psychological answers!

Some would like to know what happened to the dead saints that rose from the tomb in Matthew’s gospel. Why did they not become leading evangelists with an irrefutable proof of the truth of it all—they had been dead but lived? Where are they now? Resurrection is into eternal life supposedly. Why do they not come forward as still living proof of the message of Christianity? Indeed, if Jesus also rose from the dead, why did he waste his time ascending to heaven to sit on the right hand of God when he could have spent an eternity of life converting skeptics? Ask any Christian these, and they have no choice but to explain it away, because the basis of their belief, that God wanted to atone for the sins of the whole human race, would demand that he did the utmost to persuade humanity it was so—He had made a rule that only through believing could salvation be gained. That being the case, to do less than was possible to persuade people to believe can only be seen as wicked—except by a Christian.

More sections follow that say nothing about religion but are a sort of brain washing, meant to incline the youngsters toward the Christian myth. Finding the Truth, Causes and Grounds and Proof lead on to A Matter of Faith. Again utter brazenness emerges when he tells us that “credulity” means being too ready to believe when there is insufficient or contrary evidence. The difference is the evidence! And the evidence for Jesus is historical! That’s it!

Next we have a long interlude on Galileo meant to show that there was more to the the affair than simply science against Christianity. Personalities were involved too, quite naturally, and Galileo remained a Catholic throughout, unsurprisingly. Even as a Catholic he was threatened with torture. So he recanted, and the church had its way that the earth was at the centre of the world, not the sun. If it is not a conflict between science and belief, then why did the church behave as if it were?

Moving on to Darwin, Poole tells us it was not a question of conflict between science and religion because many of the scientists were religious. You might have noticed the goal posts shift rather markedly. It would not be too surprising that clergymen who were amateur scientists would support Christianity against a professional scientist. Poole actually quotes someone called Dr James Moore as saying:

It was a few theologians and many scientists who dismissed Darwinism and evolution.

And therefore a few scientists and many theologians that supported him? Poole plays down the role of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who adversely reviewed the hypothesis, and the clash between Wilberforce and Huxley, called Darwin’s Bulldog, at a BAAS meeting in 1860, claiming it was not even reported in the newspapers. The fact remains that Wilberforce led the attack, and the church was setting itself against a scientific advance that it saw as troublesome.

Because of the mechanism of evolution, which is the competition for life, God seems to be working through a rather cruel law. He creates new species through starvation and predation. Christians are quite unable to answer this and are forced to fall back on applying it to humans where they attribute the need for it to free will. Poole tells his young readers that no one can be forced to love someone else. It is a meaningless combination of words, and he quotes Clive Staples Lewis again to prove it:

Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

A fine piece of advice, one might think, but one that Christians, even Lewis, do not live by. If God had created his world to live in harmony from the beginning, then how is that forcing anyone to do anything? “Nobody misses what they have never had”, is an old saying. If we had never had free will, how could we have missed it, and how would the love in the world then be forced? As it is we are forced to swat flies, kill snakes and protect ourselves against robbers and murderers. People are so averse to this state of affairs that they have always cherished the idea of heaven where love is obligatory. God could have made it so in the first place according to Christians because He is omnipotent. The whole ragbag is shot full of holes from beginning to end, and yet these clappies find merit in it.

Poole discusses Genesis but his answers are puerile, because he is addressing children, he will claim. The two creation stories in Genesis are contradictory but that “does not necessarily follow”. Unfortunately, it does, and no one except Fundamentalists will deny it. The same goes for the making of men in the “image” of God. An image is a copy or likeness of external form, but Poole tells the young people it is a copy of the spirit. God is described in the bible as having a human form, so within itself it is consistent but, dishonest Christians would rather lie than accept the obvious. This is the explaining away that Christians object to scientists doing. “Do as I say not as I do”, has always been the central motto of practical Christianity.

Coming towards the end of the book with an air of desperation, Poole writes:

Although evolution does not show there is a creating God, it certainly does not show there is not.

He has another of his heroes, Professor Sam Berry, supporting him:

The most persistent misapprehension about God and creation is that knowledge of a causal mechanism automatically excludes any possibility that God is acting in a particular situation.

It is hard to believe that these people are scientists at all. Whether God or Harvey the Rabbit is supposed to be helping out in creation is not pertinent to the scientists simply because there is no evidence that either is, nor any need to suppose they are. That they have to cling to their obsessions takes us back to the psychology of religion. They are obviously deluded but why is their belief so obsessive? What do they get out of it, and out of trying to force it through absurd books on to innocent and, as yet, sane youngsters. It is like the control-freak mother who tells her child what to like and dislike, so that the child grows up with bizarre and stultifying habits and tastes. There is a hint here of some sort of hidden perversion that has been the cause of untold harm in the world.

Scientific Christianity?

Dr Arthur Peacocke tells us that religion is the search for meaning, and contrasts with science which merely provides models for us to manipulate our environments. Peacocke thinks these two tasks, the scientific search for intelligibility and the religious search for meaning, should be integrated at our universities, yet he openly admits that theology cannot be pursued with intellectual honesty and integrity, so far as “unbelieving contemporaries” and “cultured despisers” are concerned. Science seemed solid rock while theology seemed like shifting sand. The authoritarian claims based on the bible or the opinion of some distinguished cleric that Christianity has used to impose its views on ignorant people cannot be validated from anything external that is universally accepted. Quite so.

Scientists describe what they observe, and the consistency and reproducibility of their observations are best explained by something real causing them. Peacocke himself has earlier noted, with apparent approval, the words of Conrad Lorenz:

Our sense impressions must be broadly trustworthy, and so must the cognitive structures whereby we know the world—otherwise we would not have survived.

These cognitive structures represent external reality for us, and must be true enough to allow us to survive in real environments. Hypotheses then explain the observations, and they explain reality to the extent that observations coincide with reality. Peacocke concedes:

Realism is still the majority view of philosophically-informed practising scientists who would not pursue their exacting profession if they did not think they were uncovering real aspects of the underlying mechanisms and relationships in the natural world.

Science might not be as solid as rock but is far more solid than quicksands!

Science challenges other humanist disciplines, including theology, to live up to its epistemological standards in relation to the data and intellectual histories relevant to them.

Peacocke wants to find a response to this admitted truth from the theologian’s viewpoint, but he has immense difficultiy in doing it. The language of devotion, liturgies and doctrine are not compatible with a world the long term events of which are accurately described by cosmology, geology, biology and evolution. Peacocke wants:

1. a God which can embrace science about the cosmos, this planet and our own and other species;
2. a dynamic view of God’s continuous action in the processes of the natural world;
3. a notion of God developed by argument and imagination;
4. a God who is indeed transcendent, incarnate and immanent, in whom the world exists and who is its circumambient reality;
5. theology—defined as wisdom and words about God—which develops concepts, images, notions, metaphors that represent God’s purposes and meanings for the world we actually now find it to be through the sciences.

Quite how he expects to get this absurd set of requirements fulfilled he does not say, so we have to assume it is by faith. Science can have nothing to do with it. Yet Peacocke is determined to maintain his scientific cover. He thinks what he calls “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE), a hypothesis about scientific method invented by one Peter Lipton, will be the miracle he seeks. Peacocke gives no explanation of the value of this theory, or how it differs from other theories, but he likes it as a basis for theology. It stands to reason that any set of observations can be explained by a variety of hypotheses. Peacocke is interested here in which is the best of them. His answer is that it must be the one that is:

1. comprehensive—it explains a lot of data;
2. fruitful—it leads on to new discoveries or investigations;
3. fits in with previous explanations in different fields;
4. coherent and therefore not contradictory;
5. elegant.

Whatever Lipton might be saying in general, Peacocke is saying nothing new here. These are the characteristics of good scientific hypotheses anyway, so quite what the acronym IBE stands for that is new is still not explained. Peacocke says the discussion of these features…

…has been grist to the mill of the last few decades of the philosophy of science.

Well, Lipton’s book on IBE was only published in 1991, so these features preceded the Lipton hypothesis, it seems. Maybe so. Peacocke congratulates himself for having proposed the same thing as early as 1979, and so he is being generous in letting Lipton seem to have the credit.

So, we get to the point. Theology has been weighed “in the balance and found wanting”. An apt way of putting it. So, Peacocke asks:

Dare theology, by using IBE, enter the fray of contemporary, intellectual exchange and stand up and survive in its own right? To do so, it has to become an open exploration in which nothing is unrevisable.

At present theology is dominated by unacceptable methods:

1. The authority of the bible. Most Christian punters insist on this, yet the bible is ancient, inaccurate and has manifestly been multiply revised, proving that the Holy Ghost could not make up his mind what had to be written down!
2. The authority of experts who invent their own language and truths without reference to the external world except for the above mentioned ancient and well edited book. It is therefore arbitrary and has lost relevance to the developing world.
3. a priori truth. No one can today accept any such truth. All are culturally conditioned unless they are verified by the scientific method.

For Peacocke, a modern theology has to accept:

1. science,
2. claimed previous Jewish and Christian revelation,
3. the traditions of other religions.

These require a radical revision of what Christians hold as credible, defensible and reasonable. Indeed, Peacocke soon shows that his conception of Christianity has nothing other than the name in common with the relgion Christians currently practise. Peacocke churns out provocative questions for Christians. Is God omniscient or is He conditioned by certain natural restrictions that simply cannot be broken? If God Himself is subject to the impossibility of seeing the future like the rest of us, does He experiment? Is that the reason why He invented evolution? What is the meaning of eternal life on a new earth made at the end of time when science suggests that the earth will die out for good and all? Is not much of Christian eschatology but empty speculation?

God is closer to natural reality than previously conceived. Peacocke denies the supernatural and therefore the independent spirit or of the soul of human beings. Since death is now plainly seen to be natural, how can “the wages of sin be death”? Nor can God be thought of as stirring His finger in the affairs of the world which He has arranged to be astonishingly subtle and rational. This precludes miracles, certainly so far as the ones normally cited are concenrned. Peacocke asks:

• Should Christians be bound to believe the virgin birth in view of the weakness of the historical evidence for it, its biological implausibility and its reduction of the humanity of Jesus?
• Should Christians believe the Resurrection when our bodies are not resurrectable once our constituent molecules enter those of other living organisms and other people, and so Jesus’s body leaving an empty tomb could never give us any particular hope for our own resurrection?

Human beings seem to be “rising beasts” rather than “fallen angels”… Should we not now be regarding the work of Christ less as the restoral of a past state of perfection than as the transformation into a new as yet unrealised state?

The central question about such a radical revision of Christianity is why keep the notions of God and Christ at all. What is the point of keeping the baggage of ancient myths, when most of what goes with it is unsentimentally interrogated—and rejected—in the light of better modern methods of discovery. Why not just concentrate on what is known because it is testable and verifiable—namely science—and concentrate on that as a religion? It is called Adelphiasophism.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History