Truth
Does science make belief in God obsolete?
Abstract
The Templeton Essays
Resolving disagreements about the possible nature of things comes from empirical discoveries about the actual nature of those things.Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Templeton
Christian benefactor, John Templeton has died. Templeton made a load of money speculating mainly on foreign markets when they were unpopular because considered risky by most US speculators. Rich Christians often feel guilty making all the money they do, when their god, Christ, told them that it was the poor who are blessed, and making money by stock market gambling is not socially productive in anyone honest’s book. A man who gets rich by betting, has plainly got rich at someone else’s expense, because dollars do not grow on trees. So, rich Christians ease their consciences by giving some of their wealth away to charities and Christian causes. The millionaire hopes God will notice, and receive him well when the time comes!
So, Templeton set up a foundation with plenty of his ill gotten moolah to use to bribe scientists into supporting belief, mainly Christian, like Templeton’s own. Every man has his price, and most scientists do not get what they are worth, so some of them go for the cash. And why not? To be given a few hundred thousand for a load of tosh will not generally alter their own beliefs, and professional Christians have been feeding us tosh for 2000 years.
So, it means the scientists are insincere? Well there again, they are doing no more than a lot of professional Christians have always done. Most clergymen were insincere, in it for the comfortable life it offered for doing nothing at all, certainly nothing useful. In the eighteenth century, many country parsons took up science as a hobby to fill up the dull hours between sermons, and thereby established science and began the demolition of credulous belief.
Does science make belief in God obsolete?
Among the things Templeton’s money has done is pay for a lot of adverts in which different people, not all scientists, give their views on some question. One such question is:
Does science make belief in God obsolete?
Only one of the scientists has answered affirmatively, and that is Vic Stenger, a professor of astronomy and of philosophy, and author of a must read book, God—the Failed Hypothesis. Stenger treats the notion of God as an hypothesis. Concede to Christians that God is purely spiritual and abstract, so cannot be tested as a scientific hypothesis can, but Christians have certain rituals and procedures that they say influences God to do something in the world, prayer for example, and Christians, in any case, believe God does His own thing in the world, such as designing it, creating it, and sustaining it. That means that even if God is impossible to detect directly, the things he does in the world are!
There is not a jot of evidence that suggests that God is doing anything. In only a few hundred years, science has discovered how one thing after another works, and we know these are not pure conjecture, like religion, because the modern world depends on the reality of the discoveries of science. Science is not just wishful thinking. That is faith.
“The Creation!” Christians will chime. “Why is there something rather than nothing? God is necessary for there to be a universe at all.” Well since Paley, they have said the world must be designed because of its intricacy, and among the modern well funded Christian foundations set up to undo science is the jokingly named “Discovery Foundation” funded to undiscover science, to destroy science teaching in favour of Christianity, and doing it by attacking evolution in favour of Paley’s design. Yet the intricacy Paley thought was a sign of God, is brought about over millions of years by the evolution Christians hate for disposing of the designer God.
For Christians, God is all right as long as it keeps its place, so that, in those places science is not allowed, Christians can still hope to see God. Yet every place headlined by Christians as a gap for God is filled within a few years by science. The design of Nature seemed a huge gap for God but Darwin filled it when he published his first book of massed evidence for evolution by natural selection. In the 150 years since, the evidence has multiplied until it is mountainous, and meanwhile, the evidence for God remains… wishful thinking.
Christians might get comfort from the pure nonsense of the Discovery Institute, and their invention, Intelligent Design, but they cannot find a jot of evidence for it without lying. Much of that lying is omission because the evidence of evolution is there but they do not want to see it. But when Christian millionaires give unscrupulous grifters large sums of money to hand out tosh, then tosh is what we get! No, I do not now mean the scientists of the Templeton gold, but the ones of the Discovery gold!
Stenger
But what about Creation? Why is there something rather than nothing? Stenger shows it is because “nothing” is unstable. It is like a hen’s egg balanced on the top of a fence. It might rest there for a while but soon a slight breeze, or a passing bird, even merely a feather from the bird will make the egg leave its unstable position and fall to a more stable one, on the ground, splashing egg yoke all around at the same time.
Now it is a fact that the energy of the universe adds up to nothing! The matter and free energy is balanced precisely by the gravitational potential energy. So when everything is wrapped up in a singularity in space time, its total energy is nil—nothing. All the matter and energy have disappeared, but that means there is no gravity, so the gravitational potential energy has gone as well. One is positive energy and the other is negative.
So nothing can appear as any combination of gravity and mass/energy you care to imagine, and it is still nothing, but all of those equivalent positions add up to many more states than just the one where there is actually nothing. Nothing is relatively a low entropy state because it can exist in only the one state, but matter has many different states, and this is entropy. High entropy states are more stable than low entropy states, so something is more stable than nothing.
“What about the laws of Nature?” the Christian will plead. Don’t they need a legislator to enact them. Only a Christian can imagine that the laws of Nature need to be enacted, like the laws on the statute book. The “laws” we find in Nature are our laws, human laws. From our experience in life we devise metaphors for more complex concepts based on what we have experienced. It is the way we look at Nature, the terms we use to express our metaphors, that condition the way Nature responds and therefore how the laws turn out.
Thus the need we have for objectivity in science—a need that is predicated on the fact that our individual observations are subjective and so not testable—necessitates our interpretation of Nature to be invariant from whatever point of view it is seen. This need for objectivity causes the conservation “laws” that are central to our science, laws like the conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum. So we are imposing laws on to Nature by our own need for objectivity.
Nature is observed to be knowable under the rules we have adopted for science, because otherwise science would have no predictive value—it would not work, it would be useless. The condition we have of checking our observations against reality, testing them, means we are not inventing or making arbitrary discoveries. Science is not an arbitrary social construct as postmodernists say. It depends upon reality, as does all of our experience, but by requiring it to be objective—the same for different observers—we make our discoveries appear in certain ways rather than others. And science eventually reveals this. We had Newton’s laws, conditioned by an assumed Euclidean space, but Einstein found that space time was not Euclidean, so Relativity was discovered, and scientists realized Newton’s laws were a special case of Relativity.
The universe and life look to science just as they should look if they were not created or designed.
The same is true when tests are made on such things as prayer. Christians like to think that God answers prayers, but it would be ridiculous if the ever sustaining Christian God had to answer prayers because he had not sustained properly. Whenever tests are made on the adequacy of prayer, the results are negative, and the same is true when the people doing the testing are convinced Christians, providing that the tests are done scientifically.
Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.
Sapolsky
So, Stenger shows us that God is both not there and not necessary, and science it is that shows it. How then can other scientists think otherwise. Mainly, it is because they are Christians, but some who are not surprise us with the vacuity of their replies:
Despite the fact that I am an atheist, I recognise that belief offers something that science does not.Robert Sapolsky
Sapolsky, in explaining this beats about the bush, but eventually tells us that science has better predictive power than religion. Well as that is the criterion we have of truth, it seems that science gives us better truths. Besides that religion has a much more shocking history of horror and harm than has science, and its horrors are not abberations either. So religion is a comfort. Well, no that also does not wash with Sapolsky. False solace is poor solace, and often the concern would not be there were it not for religion. Oh, and the world would be a better place without religion.
So why is religion not obsolete? Because it provides ecstasy! Seriously! That is his answer. Is he going for Templeton gold? Or is he taking the piss out of it? Who knows, but he is a professor of biology, so must know that one of the most popular drugs around is called ecstasy. It must do what it claims otherwise it would not be so popular, though it is illegal. Science made the drug, but science is not responsible for selling it. Indeed, it is a fair bet that most of those, in the US at any rate, would be professing Christians. But if the provision of ecstasy is the only reason why religion is not obsolete, it is no reason, because a more reliable ecstasy has been provided by science. Sapolsky has to be joking… or going for gold!
Phillips
William D Phillips is a Nobel laureate in physics, but claims there is no antagonism between science and religion. He is a Christian, so he would, wouldn’t he. Christianity has always had the power to destroy the honesty of the very best of men. That is why, if it is truly supernatural, it is run by the Devil and not any good God. He says, for example, that the media concentrate on “strident atheists”. Since when have strident atheists, or any other kind had regular columns in newspapers to sermonize to the public? Christianity has thousands of such columns, and God TV to boot. If there has been any concentration on atheists, it is a recent and local popularity, but even with it, I doubt that it has had anything like the regular column inches of Christianity. So, even simple observations, what a scientist ought to be good at, are distorted by faith.
It is plain that Phillips has not read what Stenger has to say because he makes the usual claim that the hypothesis of God is not falsifiable, and so is not science. Nor will he bother to express his religious beliefs more exactly, so that there might be a chance of them being testable. Phillips comes up with these examples of nonscientific statements:
She sings beautifully. He is a good man. I love you.
What then makes any statement scientific? It is simply that it can be tested, as Phillips admits. All of these statements can be tested, and so are scientific. The Christian tries to make out Christian claims are in a special category of claims. This type of apology is another of the dishonest ploys Christians use without a shred of compunction. It is called special pleading. He continues as he began—dishonestly.
He cites the Anthropic Principle, which for Christians means the world has been specially designed for humanity, naturally by God, and any minuscule difference would have left it unsuitable for life. The Anthropic Principle to unbelievers is simply that the universe is necessarily suitable for life, notably we humans, because we are in it. It is like a theological fish thanking God for making its world so perfect for fish by making water. Any scientist can see the argument is upside down. The fish lives in water because it has evolved in that environment, has adapted to it, and so enjoys it. In the same way, the theological E coli bacterium would be thanking God for shit! We have evolved in a world that is suitable for us. If it had not been, then we would not have evolved, and could not be here thanking God for letting us live in an unsuitable universe, a miracle that would compel belief.
Phillips says:
There is no good scientific reason for why the universe should not have been designed differently.
Now this man is an expert in quantum mechanics to judge from his fellowship of a Quantum Institute, but makes no mention of the possibilities of many worlds and multiverses that quantum mechanics throws up. Whether they are considered as real or not, the interpretation makes them possible, and it would make the Anthropic Principle banal, because out of all the possible worlds, some, perhaps an infinite number of them, must be suitable for life however special the conditions for it are in terms of fundamental constants.
But even then, the conditions are not as rare as Christians, even Christian physicists, want to make out, because the fundamental constants can change together in such a way that they can compensate. So life is not tied to very few particular values, but to ranges of values in sets that by compensation provide the conditions for life.
Many good scientists have concluded from these observations that an intelligent God must have chosen to create the universe with beautiful, simple, and life-giving properties.
Here a Nobel laureate sounds like a thumb sucking infant, apparently utterly ignorant of evolution, indeed arguing for intelligent design, and utterly ignorant of the arguments that make this statements sound infantile. His final reason is that he feels God’s presence in his life! And some people feel Hitler’s in there’s but do not usually brag about it. Bragging about God’s presence is all right, because it is socially acceptable, but no different. As soon as God began whispering to you that you should kill prostitutes, then you know that the feeling of God’s presence is not good. It is a psychological phenomenon, and doubtless one induced or enhanced by a religious upbringing. A scientist ought to be aware of it. Some readers, Christian ones, will think I am unfair on the man, but if he is not blatantly going for gold, he is a prime example of how Christianity destroys reason, evidence of its inherent wickedness.
Pervez
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, a physicist in a Moslem country, gives a much better answer than the Nobel prize winner. God cannot answer the supplications of the faithful without destroying His own rules of physics, the argument that Stenger uses to make scientific tests for God. Any God that exists does not do it, so the faithful are mistaken in their belief He does, or God just does not exist so cannot do it! The quantum mechanical professor ought to know that God cannot know everything because quantum mechanics does not allow it. “Unpredictability is intrinsic to quantum mechanics.” Christians just ignore this on the grounds that God is omniscient, but will then turn round and say that it is a gap for God, because only He knows! It is like saying that God can make 2 + 2 = 5.
Pervez points out that smarter human beings have smarter gods, just as the ancient Greek philosopher said the god of horses is a horse and the god of pigs is a pig. Taken on a little, white men always had white gods, and black men always had black gods. God is just what He is made to be by His worshippers. In the US, a Protestant fundamentalist will leave any church with a liberal pastor, and find a church preaching a God they like. People choose their God in their own image. So, Phillips could make a God that suited him even though he is a scientist. That is a better explanation of apparently perverse decisions by people like Phillips than their own “apologetics”. But Pervez adds that any God who told you to sacrifice your only son would not only be ignored by most people, but they would be advised to seek psychiatric advice.
Miller
Kenneth Miller, professor of biology at Brown University, and an “outspoken” Christian defender of evolution, says he is faced by Christians who say that the notion of God has to be abandoned once evolution of humanity from earlier vertebrates has to be accepted. It is a poor God, they have, Miller thinks, illustrating the point Pervez made. They want a God who knows something we cannot know, yet they need to know what they cannot know to believe. In other words, their God is the God of the gaps, and it is destruction to their God to fill the visible gaps they need for belief.
Miller does highlight an important point, that faith is seen as the antithesis of science, though it is obviously not a belief of his. His answer is a popular one for Christians, that science itself is a faith. Maybe so, in view of such strange things as quantum mechanics and Gödel’s theorem, but acknowledging it, as Stenger says, cannot make religious faith and scientific faith equal. Scientific faith is confirmed every second, but religious faith is… just faith! Miller evidently cannot see Stenger’s argument that even if God is unnatural and cannot be tested, other Christian claims about Him can be, and when they are they fall short of confirming belief. It is therefore possible for science to prove that God cannot do what Christians think He does. Either they are wrong to believe what he does, like answering prayer, or he is not there at all.
Miller, like the other scientists here, must know these things, but they ignore them. Phillips admits that he wants to believe, and that is it, no answer to the question really, but sufficient for Christians. Miller summarises:
He [God] is the answer to existence, not part of existence itself.
So, here again, he has no idea that the natural state is existence, not nothing, and even a biologist ought to know that when energy is zero, the stable state is the one with most entropy, ie, it is existence! Or maybe he does because he complains about those who think existence is “self explanatory”.
He sees God as an extension of science! One though which does not need science to realize. Science rejected phlogiston but cannot reject God, you might say, because God explains why science works. Well, no it doesn’t explain it. It is an excuse, not an explanation. Miller realizes this straight away, and his excuse is:
Organized religions do not point to a single, coherent view of the nature of God. But to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organized religion would be like rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity.
Well, organized religion has had since start of human society to explain God, while science has existed as the scientific method only for about 300 years. And, if it is necessary to abandon relativity, or quantum mechanics, or both, then science will do it, but there is no prospects of religions giving up God, now, is there? even though they never get nearer to a coherent view of Him. Any such a persistent problem in science would cry out that there is a serious flaw in the hypothesis, but only Stenger has tackled it honestly among the selection chosen by the Templeton Corporation. Stenger does not think a God is necessary to explain the laws of physics, as we saw above.
Miller makes more false comparisons between the concept of God and of science. Science is incomplete so why should religion be complete? OK, but science is progressing, but religion is regressing. The more we know, the less religion explains, and the more incoherent religious concepts of God look. Science has to put up with dishonesty, and so does religion. But religion is a fraud! That is the profound difference. Dishonesty is fundamental to it. Lying is essential to keep it alive. Science abhors crooks and fraudsters, and indeed there have been some, but they are abhored precisely because they hinder science. And they are always found out by the scientific method which is self correcting.
Not so in religion. It is replete with crooks and shysters, but there is another problem with religion. It cannot even face up honestly to its own history. Kids are taught what religion is not, and so it is no wonder that as adults they find themselves unable to throw off their indoctrination, even though they ought to know better, and ought to have read the horrifying background to religion. They will not, and, even if forced to, will find excuses for it.
Surely, a much better hypothesis about belief is offered by psychology? God and religion is a psychological comfort blanket, and as such, it can only offer a feeble comfort for those who like to suck it and rub it against their cheek. It cannot explain anything. If believers cannot bring themselves to think this is all religion is, then why do they not consider that, at best, they have been indoctrinated, and at worst, they are simply deluding themselves?
Groopman
Jerome Groopman, a Jewish medical professor at Harvard, thinks religion is some sort of moral standard. Has he read the monstrous commandments to the Israelites in his own bible, or any of the history of Christianity? He goes further to say that religion and science do not contradict each other!
Yet another clever believer cannot see beyond his eyelashes when God comes into the picture. The only reason I can see for such blindness is that these people are scared witless! They dare not suggest anything untoward about their beliefs for fear of getting punished by God. What other reason could there be for it? Belief and science are opposed at their very foundations, and no one can possibly not see it as long as they have any wits at all. A professor must be able to see it, so is simply denying the obvious out of literally being a godfearer. Just to remind him—science depends on evidence, faith depends on lack of it. Maimonides or no Maimonides, there could be no more fundamental contradiction. And it is not hard to understand, is it?
Moreover Groopman repeats a favorite Judaeo-Christian claim, that science has no moral valence, yet science is used to study society via sociology and anthropology, and to study individual people’s mentality via psychology and neurology, and these studies, inexact as they are, lead us to moral conclusions. One of them is that God is a social metaphor for society. It is society that needs and so finds morals.
Often they have another scientific base in evolution, and a doctor ought to know about evolution. Having evolved as social creatures, primitive men had certain moral instincts, which were made explicit by chieftains then kings as the will of their tribal or national God. There is no need to have a real God doing it, but we can see how useful the concept of God was to the rulers of primitive societies. Evidently it still is, and in no moral way, when it is used as an excuse for killing people. Is a professor unaware of these elementary facts? Of course not. He is simply deluded by his primitive belief—his faith!
He says an atheist creates their own moral precepts in the absence of God. What he does not get is that the believer does too, because there is no God, yet believers think they are more moral than nonbelievers. Statistically it is not generally true, because religion is a great closet for crooks to hide in. In fact, people do not create their own moral precepts at all. We saw that many are instinctive but are brought out explicity by tuition. As western societies have been Christian for hundreds of years, the morality everyone is taught is basically the same one, the one Christians claim as their own.
So even atheists in western societies can be said to be morally Christians, and inasmuch as atheists can read their gospels without the trickery of any Christian professional to “correct” them, they can conclude that much of the teaching of Christ is indeed moral. It is Christianity and its professional purveyors that are immoral.
The teaching of Christ is what is necessary for society to be stable. Those living in it have to love each other, even their enemies—at least to the extent that they are not going to set up vendettas to revenge themselves for perceived slights. Love is a social necessity. The Jews explicity had a law that had to be obeyed. When people begin to hate each other, or even not trust each other, then society becomes untenable for everyone except the powerful. And, if professor Groopman returned to his bible, he will read therein that Christ favoured the poor. The reason is that the rich and powerful can survive in a lawless and immoral society, but the poor suffer.
Groopman dismisses all this because he believes an ancient book of moralistic fables is God’s truth. Has he read any of the discoveries made in the last century about the bible and its account of history, the so called sacred history. It is predominantly false, and is certainly false in its central myths. Christ was sent by God because of Adam’s sin. There was no Adam. The Eden myth is a myth about a perfect if primitive society, some scientists think stands for the hunter gatherer phase of human development. The commandment not to eat a certain fruit is a symbolic law, necessary for the simple society to survive. The fall is a failure to accept the law, to be immoral, and as a consequence that perfect primitive society collapsed.
Morals are for the good of an animal that has evolved as a social creature—humanity. Science sees it, but religion hides it. That is why religion is wicked. It misleads everyone who thinks it is God’s truth. It would be far less harmful if God’s word was accepted as a set of moral fables generally for our own good, at least in the shape of society that existed 2500 years ago. Perhaps Jews do that, for much in them remains true, but none of it is the absolute standard of a perfect God. But this professor really believes that ancient fables are the work of a God who cannot get obsolete. God is not material and does not age. Consequently, His word is forever true no matter how obnoxious it is.
I find it incredible that a professor can believe any such absurdity. If genocide is God’s command to His Chosen people on entering the promised land, then believers reading it will consider genocide acceptable to God. The lifelong Christian, Hitler, did! We are tied morally to standards that are barbaric forever! In practice all Christians ignore much of the bible, and select bits they like. The bits they like cannot get obsolete but the rest can. Adulterous wives do not have to be stoned to death today, so God got obsolete in that respect, but homosexuals cannot be loved, He remains unmoved on that one, so they should be murdered. That is immoral, and such arbitrarily chosen standards are immoral too. Only Jews and Christians cannot see it.
Groopman does distinguish between loony fundamentalists, and liberals like himself, but adds “some” atheists to the list of fundamentalists, and they…
…characterize people of faith as naïve, infantile, and neurotic in their rituals, too irrational to live by the light of pure logic.
It seems that is not so though it is believers who say so, but they cannot refute what is plainly true, so they use the usual mysticism—they can see something others cannot.
Atheists ignore the wisdom found in religious texts.
Here Groopman offers the ploy that is common among apologists called the “straw man”. The straw man is set up because he is easy to knock over. Atheists do not believe in God so nothing the ancient believer had to say is true. That is false, professor Groopman. If something is wise, it is wise not because a God allegedly said or inspired it. In fact the books that are called Wisdom in the bible are collections of maxims and wise sayings that barely relate to God at all, and much of the supposed narrative can be seen as metaphorical sense, like the Adam myth noted already. There is no need to suppose there is a God behind them, and those who think it can only be naïve, infantile, irrational and even neurotic.
Professional believers, knowing their story is truly incredible, tell their sheep that doubt is natural, but faith will be strengthened for it. In other words keep believing, doubts or no doubts, and you’ll feel good in the end. The brain that believers think God put there generates doubts so that the subject of the doubt will be explored more carefully. It is an evolutionary trait that helps people learn, and thereby escape danger and solve problems that might lead to food, a mate, or whatever. Christians, however, have to ignore their doubts about their faith. To anyone who is not a Christian, that is a Satanic teaching. God could be Satan, and this principle stops all Christians from ever knowing. Moreover, to anyone who is a scientist it should be anathema because science, like all knowledge, depends for its progress on doubt. “Infantile” is too mature for Christians—some Jews too, it seems.
Atheists should sometimes doubt their negation of God, because it is not a matter of proof but of subjective belief on their part.
More straw man. It is not merely subjective belief. Proof of a figment is impossible, but most atheists have concluded that there is no evidence for God, and that is a good enough reason to suppose he does not exist. Most atheists put their faith in science, and science based beliefs like Adelphiasophism, so they are skeptics but always open to evidence. They approach it scientifically, but also critically. Prayer, for example often does work, but it works because it is a type of Couéism, self hypnosis, essentially equivalent to “tlc” and the placebo effect. For that reason, when the placebo effect is eliminated, prayer does not work.
Atheists generally are quite unlike Christians. They do not have dogma, and can explore any avenue. They do not have to suppress their doubts. Lifelong atheist, Anthony Flew, became a believer in his dotage on the flimsy evidence of the Anthropic Principle, as interpreted by Christians. It happens, but the dishonesty of Christians is such that they like to boast they were atheists once, but have realized “the truth”. Everyone was an atheist before they began to be indoctrinated as children, so it is merely sophistry to imply some profound revelation.
Religion “at its best” is a vehicle to arrive at the good. Groopman has to introduce the weasel words to make his statement true. You could add those words to almost anything to make it acceptable. What is more important is whether it is commonly good, and just how bad does it get at its worst. Religion has only been good when it is under the secular rule of law, but believers are never satisfied with that. They want to impose their beliefs on to everyone. Groopman says tolerance is part of the Jewish tradition, the bible speaking of respect for the stranger more than thirty times, so how then do the divine commands to the Israelites to kill men women, children and animals, keeping only the young girls for themselves, equate with this tolerance? The Jewish gangs were not tolerant when they drove out the Arabs in 1948 with bullets and bombs to set up the state of Israel. They followed the spirit of God’s previous commandment—just take it, doing whatever is necessary.
The bible is not morally coherent. Believers pick and chose what suits them. It suits Groopman to say Judaism is tolerant on the basis of the Old Testament, as Christians call it, having stolen it for themselves, but Christianity has very rarely been tolerant despite the injunction of God to respect strangers. The Spaniards were not tolerant to Jews and Moslems, and evicted them from their own homes or incinerated plenty of them for not sincerely converting to Christianity, and, doubtless, they found adequate justification in the biblical story of Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land.
Anyway, this tolerance is mentioned because Groopman urges it on to atheists, implying that atheists are not tolerant, even though our modern tolerant societies were built by atheists after the Enlightenment—enlightenment from religion. The intolerance he speaks of is that atheists…
should not belittle or ridicule as fools those who struggle to find meaning in life, to confront mystery, based on a belief in the Divine.
So, he is not talking about atheists suppressing religion, but of merely arguing passionately with it. Atheists actually have for many years kept silent about religion because the secular societies they set up were tolerant, and religion kept in its place. It is the resurgence of fundamentalisms that has changed it, connived in by the US neocons and their Christian puppets like Bush and Blair. Christians are openly trying a takeover, and that is why religion has become an issue. If the fundies succeed, then liberals like Groopman will be suppressed, and Jews will be obliged to convert to Christianity just as they were in Spain. Jews and liberal believers ought to be speaking against the fundamentalists and evangelicals who will gladly take us back to the dark ages.
Midgley
Mary Midgley is sure that God is not obsolete, and she is a philosopher, so she knows. In fact, she is a Christian apologist, but prefers to call herself a philosopher presumably because it sounds better than theologian. She says we trust the world around us, and that trust is not irrational but is nevertheless faith. Now Ms Midgley has written a book called Evolution as Religion, and another called Science as Salvation, so seems to have got her subjects and objects confused, but whether that is true or not, you might have thought she could have read about evolution as science and religion as salvation first.
We trust the world around us precisely because of evolution. We have evolved in this world for uncountable generations, constantly adapting to it, so that by now we are pretty well adapted to how it is. That means we can trust it. If we could not trust the world, then we could not live in it. No faith is involved. Our trust in the world is not consciously chosen, and in that sense is irrational, but it is not as irrational as faith, which is consciously chosen. We do not choose to trust the world, but the opposite if we make a choice about it, yet Midgley argues as if we choose to trust our neigbours, or choose to regard them as the same as us, and not robots, and so on. Unless we do this we would be insane, she says. Quite so, because we would be defying our nature, which we can choose to do, but we cannot choose to be natural, can we? Being natural is being how we are, through evolution, and religious faith is not in it. That is instilled.
It turns out that what she is talking about, or confusing, is the mindset we inherit by evolution, and what we choose to believe as a cultural worldview. Now cultural worldviews are how we manage to integrate our conscious lives, and the modern one is science, but Midgley, brought up as a Christian, cannot bear to think it. In ancient times, culture was the same as religion and the worldview of each society—at first groups, then clans, then tribes, then states, then empires—and at each stage of social development the Gods got bigger and more universal, until in the age of imperialism, Gods became imperialistic—everybody had to believe in them. The Christian God is an imperialistic god, and so too is Allah.
In ancient times religion was useful. It was culture—what distinguished one tribe from another—and it was science—it explained things, inadequately, we now know, but adequately for simple agricultural people, then the first imperial city dwellers. What once was a religion is, in these secular times, called a worldview, but its function is the same. Midgley is right that they let us put our lives in some context, and that of course helps us function less fretfully. What is false is that ancient worldviews, whether Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, or whatever, are better than we can do today. The old worldviews were full of spirits, angels demons and magic that moderns, even supposedly intelligent ones, cannot rid themselves of, but mysterious though they be, they are not better than what we have proven to be true today. If Midgley likes her spirits, then she can keep them, but today we have better names for them, force, energy, entropy, potential, fields. Indeed, they are not just better names for old concepts but they are better concepts because we can use them.
Midgley cannot bear to call science “science” and so she calls it scientism, a word meant to be pejorative, whenever she can. Her claim is that the old worldviews…
don’t see our species as sealed in a private box that contains everything of value, but as playing its part in a much wider theatre of spiritual activity—activity that gives meaning to our own. Scientism by contrast (following suggestions from the Enlightenment), cuts that context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself.
Now each of the old worldviews claimed to be complete in themselves, though they were not complete at all. In some places there was a good deal of overlap called syncretism, but each hybrid that arose in this process then made its own claims to absoluteness. In the age of imperialism, these outlooks found it hard to live together, though some people managed to do it better than others. The point is that each of them claimed to be a “private box” of their own.
To understand them, we translate their concepts into ours, so their jinns, fairies, goblins, yazatas and so on became in translation what was nearest to our own concept that matched them. These were soul, spirit, psyche, angels, demons and so on. Scholars have to harmonize to some degree to make comparisons at all, because strictly speaking there is no comparison. It is like the Romans identifying each barbarous God they met in their conquests by a Greco-Roman name.
Science, or scientism, if that is what Midgley prefers, has its own spirits but they are not identifiable with any of the older ones, any more than the older ones in different traditions were identifiable among themselves. Personality is not soul, though soul is probably what the ancients understood as personality. Energy is not spirit, though ancients might have called energy spirit. The point is that now the meaning—the modern meaning—is in modern science itself, and there is no advantage in clinging to outmoded ideas just because you have an affection for them. Spirituality today just means religion or piety. It does not imply pertaining to spirits, because no one has ever produced evidence of spirits, and few people believe in practice there are any such things. Maybe Midgley believes in them, but that is her problem. She cannot blame science for not finding them.
In desperation, Midgley says that scientists have denied consciousness and thinking, and so are denying the world. Cognitive scientists have shown that we have illusions about our consciousness. Many things we think we do consciously are shown to have started to be done before we think about them. Tennis players like Najal and Federer could not play such wonderful games if every shot they played was done consciously. They react even before they think, and it is these instant reactions, and how well honed they are, that makes a champion. The honing is, of course, the endless training they put in.
What we are finding is that Midgley just does not like what science is discovering. She hates the selfish gene and its author, and hates the idea of evolution all together, especially in its wider connotations. Nor does she like to think that we are much more robotic than she wants us to be. It is not denying consciousness, but that we are, strictly speaking, only semiconscious. And there is an excellent reason for it. We get so many signals into our brain that we could not process them all if we were conscious of them all. We would clog up. Our brain has therefore evolved to be selective, but the selectivity is automatic—it is unconscious. We are conscious about whatever has our attention, and mostly nothing else, but we do still think and make choices. Philosopher she might be, but she is one like Diogenes, except she prefers to keep the tub over her head.
Kaufmann
Stuart Kaufmann is a specialist in biocomplexity and informatics, would you believe, and does not accept a supernatural God:
The Old Testament God created the world and all its creatures for the benefit of humanity. How self serving and limiting a vision of God. How much vaster are our lives understood as part of the unfolding of the entire universe?
But he too does not think God is made obsolete by science, because God Himself evolves. The present western God has evolved from the God of Abraham and Moses, a heartless tyrant, into the Christian God of love whom evangelical Christians think is still a heartless tyrant to everyone except themselves. The imperfect evolution of God so far observed needs to go the whole hog. God must evolve into a “natural God as our chosen symbol of the ceaseless activity of the universe”. He must mean the Goddess of the Adelphiasophists, not rendered a woman out of anthropomorphism, but because the metaphor for Nature is as a procreator rather than a creator. Nature is a mother. She gives birth to things. She is not a potter. She does not make things. Nor is she a father who begets, a metaphore that would then need a mother anyway!
Kaufmann says what we deem sacred is our own choice, and so what is wrong with calling Nature sacred? and treating it with care, like a mother’s womb. We do not want to “abandon the truth of the real world”, he rightly says, and seems to be ready to accept it, but has doubts about people’s readiness for it. But what if they are not? Surely, it is up to them. If we have a better concept of the sacred, we do not have to apply for permission to use it. Kaufman, however, has the odd idea that if we cannot foretell the future, then reason is an insufficient guide to living our lives. The very fact of randomness is sufficient reason why we cannot predict the future, but hardly spoils the value of reason.
Christians hate randomness, and that is why they have invented God. God explains, to them, random events—usually suffering and disasters—although, curiously, good fortune is usually a result of personal shrewdness. Vic Stenger thinks more order in the universe would have been better evidence that the Judaeo-Christian Creator God was designing the place for us. The universe is remarkably random, chaotic to a high degree. We live in one tiny suitable spot in the vastness of chaos, and the Christians think it is well designed. Maybe it is well designed like a prison—to keep us out of harm’s way!
If it were well designed for us, it would be far more orderly, less chaotic, more predictable, and altogether more accessible. Maybe we shall never get to the stars, but we are creative, like God, and within a stone’s throw of creating life. Then we can send it to other places as panspermia, and we shall be God. We should therefore be properly responsible for our actions, according to Kaufmann.
Shermer
Michael Shermer is among our leading skeptics, and editor of Skeptic magazine. Shermer is apparently noncommittal in answering that “it depends”, but his chariness is only because he knows that some people will never stop believing, even if God were a fish. Come to think of it, God once was a fish. Iah is Ea (Oannes) who was represented as a fish. Dagan (Dagon) was represented in the same way, so Dagan was likely to have been the same god as Iah, but named by another nation of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara—the Philistines. In 1 Samuel 5:1-5, a myth is related to show Iah is superior to Dagan, probably simply to justify the renaming of Dagan as Iah.
Shermer agrees that science has made obsolete the reality of God, so a better answer is “Yes”. However he notes that the proportion of scientists who believe in God scarcely altered throughout the twentieth century at 40%. The figure hides the fact that there were many times the number of scientists at the end than there were at the beginning. At the end of the century, Scientists had become a substantial proportion of the population—of whom more than 80% profess belief—compared with the small proportion early in the century. It means a meaningful comparison is with the 80% belief that they might have had, had they not been scientists. Shermer’s point, though, is that science has not made God obsolete for this sizable group of scientists.
Shermer follows the same reasoning as Stenger in showing that the Christian God has consequences, the Christians claim, and these ought to be detectable. They never are! Moreover, as Kaufmann suggested about ourselves becoming Gods, any alien life more advanced than us would seem as if they were Gods. We can almost create life, but they would be able to do it—and maybe use if to replace us! Plainly, then, what seemed God like to we humans only 2,500 years ago will be ourselves, maybe even now, but certainly if we can survive uninterrupted for a few hundred more years.
Pinker
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, agrees that science has made God obsolete, but he rightly includes disciplines like history and philosophy that use observation, reason and testing, and so essentially the scientific method.
Pinker points out that religion began as a primitive science, taking science as a means of giving answers to natural puzzles. The more intransigent of these were explained by God. Thus, the seasonal cycle was explained by the death and resurrection of a God or Goddess of vegetation. But the explanations offered by the bible are explanations that intelligent and educated people today simply cannot accept. The world was not made in six days, and there is no reason even why believers should believe it was. The bible is describing the annual celebration of creation, an important celebration for all ANE civilizations, in which a different creation by God was celebrated on six different days, with a break to recuperate from the festivities on the seventh day before it resumed for another five days, part of which was a sacred wedding (hieros gamos), the whole festival lasting twelve days.
God has no role today in the design of the universe because lifeforms and their relationships are excellently explained by evolution, and Pinker acknowledges Watson and Crick who showed how evolution happened, via the division of DNA, which makes evolution inevitable! The personality—our intelligence and emotions, and recollection of experience—used to be called the soul, and considered to have an independent existence. Science has never found it and has no need for it, but religion needs it to let us live when we are dead, or rather let our personality live after we are dead. Science has no need for souls but religion has, and so the notion lives on!
Human conscience, the feeling of regret for wrongdoing that keeps most of us from doing wrong, can be studied as easily as thirst, or color vision:
Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.
Believers like to say that science cannot prescribe morality, but Pinker echoes the plain view that God, in the Jewish scriptures, is hardly a moral icon. He adds that the morality of the bible and so of believers in it, is so arbitrary that no one genuinely concerned with morality as opposed to ill founded dogma, can take God’s or the bible’s moral authority seriously.
The essence of morality is the interchangeability of perspectives—the fact that as soon as I appeal to you to treat me in a certain way (to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason), I have to be willing to apply the same standards to how I treat you, if I want you to me seriously. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and leaves both of us better off.
One expects animals in evolution to be selfish, but the whole point about living socially is that it is the best expression of selfishness for us. Living socially helps us all individually! We are better off in a group, helping each other than we are living separately, but it is a contract between us of the kind Pinker describes. If we do not stick to the contract, then society dissolves, a civilization falls, and it might take considerable time for it to build up again, and then it will likely be under new management, conquerors in other words. History shows it clearly. Pinker ends up saying we are better off for the growing obsolescence of God.
Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, a controversial writer, thinks it should but it doesn’t. He lists several interesting scientific facts that would have stopped belief at the outset were they known, then spotlights the ineptitude of a designer who lets humankind live and die for hundreds of thousands of years before He thinks it essential they be saved, only 2000 years ago, whereupon he sent “his son” to recruit a set of witless peasants to spread the good news in a remote and desiccated country that He had not noticed was fighting a war of liberation against the world super power of the time, Rome. This almighty God looks more like a halfwit Himself, or a calculatingly cruel schoolboy God, effectively pulling the wings off a captured fly.
Those who dare to claim to be his understudies and votaries and interpreters must either accept the cruelty and the chaos or disown it—they cannot pick and choose between the warmly benign and the frigidly indifferent.
Morality shudders at this idea of God, Hitchens says. Religion was our first attempt at an explanation of science, as we have seen, and it “belongs to the terrified childhood of our species”, when we had to have a tyrannical parent to keep us in control by fear in exchange for “compulsory love”. God was the first totalitarian dictator, and the model for the rest.
Ward
Keith Ward is an Anglican vicar. He says, “No”. Then he goes on to define a minimal God, as a nonmaterial creator of the universe because he liked it. The existence of such a God would entail the observation of certain phenomena such as nonphysical causality and the observation of things that cannot exist according to natural laws. It is a good idea to define God in this scientific way, and fits in nicely with the nature of the question, but keeps at bay any need to justify belief in the ogre who is the God of the Christians and the Jews.
The deduction from the definition is that this God has to be found by science, and it can be found when nonphysical causality is discovered, or things that cannot exist according to natural laws. Of course, nonphysical causality already happens in such phenomena as radioactive decay, and the spontaneous emission of light from excited atoms, and so too, it can be argued, and Ward does, that the universe itself exists without cause or natural explanation. Ward has already scientifically proved his God, justifying his reply.
So Ward’s definition of God can explain some scientific observations, but it is a definition selected so that it could, and there is no necessity that they actually be explained by any such postulate as Ward’s God. In fact, the observed phenomena of radioactive decay and light emission are perfectly explained as statistical sums of decays that are utterly random in time. This God then is merely a random number generator.
As to the origin of the universe, there are several physical mathematical explanations of it, some of them not requiring the universe to be closed at all. Therefore it never actually started because time below a certain length in reality becomes imaginary or virtual. This virtual time comes out of the natural laws of quantum mechanics, so it is not something that cannot exist according to natural laws, but it is a perfect time for any Creator God to hide in until he decided to generate a random number to kick off the Big Bang.
Ward, like most modern Christian apologists love to find in quantum mechanics places for God to hide, or mysterious ways for Him to act. God’s reality is, of course, quite different from ours, and has been at least since Plato invented a “reality” that consisted purely of ideas. Apparently, Ward’s God has a reality based on quantum mechanics that is much the same as Plato’s, and what we see is not real at all.
People are quite confused about this but it is not hard. Reality is what we experience and nothing else! To explain what we experience we make models based on hypotheses, and then test the predictions of the models against reality—what we experience. Models that work—that give us repeatable accurate predictions of our observations in our reality—are accepted as valid scientific models. The models are not real, any more than Plato’s ideas are. As long as they work, we take them to be “genuine imitations” of the reality underlying our reality.
Models like those of quantum mechanics get quite complicated, and mysterious if we try to visualize them, because we have to visualize them metaphorically, in terms of our reality. Ward himself mentions the visualization of a probability wave in Hilbert space, or more simply just visualizing four dimensional space time. What is important is that these models, whether they accurately represent some reality or not, work in letting us predict our reality.
Mathematics itself is the most successful model we have. Beginning with simple activities in our reality, counting, and then measuring, it has grown into a vast and comprehensive set of rules and procedures that we can apply to the most abstruse of conditions. Yet it began in our reality, and is continually tested against our reality. Hypothetical extensions of it can be made, and then have found a real use. That is how wonderful it is, and shows that by starting by checking against observations in the simplest way, we can build the most remarkable models that fit our reality, however weird the models themselves are.
It gives some scientists the feeling that these models do indeed represent an underlying reality, but the corrigibility of science does not encourage us too far. In other words, we keep changing the models to fit new observations, and every so often the revision is a radical one, what has been called a scientific revolution. The revolution does not necessarily invalidate the previous model inasmuch as it had a certain range of application. It still works in that range, but a new model is needed for an extended range. Newton’s mechanics and quantum mechanics are examples. Newton’s mechanics, now called classical mechanics, are still valid for mechanics at our scale. Quantum mechanics are for the very small scale, and become the same as classical mechanics at ordinary scales.
Anyway, the point is that Ward talks about the models as if they are real, as if they refute our own reality. We are never going to get down to Planck’s length any time soon, but if we did, the models suggest that time would cease to be what we understand by it, and in that mysterious time, there would be no beginning at all. That is the time that Ward’s God can sit in for eternity waiting to create the universe, and once he had created it, that eternal time would have happened entirely inside 10-43 seconds. Christiuans will take comfort no doubt, but this God has less substance than Maxwell’s Demon.
Ward says it is untrue that modern physics rules out nonphysical entities. He cites John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Henry Stapp who wanted consciousness to be an ingredient of ultimate reality. Well, it does not matter how eminent scientists are, their every conjecture is not science, something that Christians, brought up to respect authority, cannot comprehend. As we see in these Templeton essays, there are plenty of scientists of considerable eminence who believe in God, but we have no reason to respect their view. Midgley ought to say that scientists speculating about consciousness being an ingredient of matter, or the universe in some way, is scientism, but as she would probably like the speculation she would not be likely to give it a pejorative description.
Ward is right that we have a better expectation of something made by a superbeing like God to be utterly incomprehensible by we mere motes. it is an argument that refutes the absurd notion of the Anthropic Principle, Christian style. An almighty could let us live in chaos or at incredible temperatures. Why should He have to wait for the conditions to get within some ridiculously narrow limits before he made us? Even so, Ward still cites the essence of the Anthropic Principle, citing Freeman Dyson that the universe “knew we were coming”, so it baked a cake.
In the end, Ward says it is materialism that renders God obsolete. Science is no longer materialist, though, Ward thinks, or prays. He is, of course, thinking of the models, the latter day equivalent of Plato’s forms. They seem to offer chances of denying materialism, so Ward eagerly snatches them. They are all suggestive of underlying cosmic intelligence that will make a belief in God plausible. It is called grasping straws. Plausibility is, for Christians, the main criterion of truth, because anything they consider plausible they consider true. They have nothing better, poor lambs.
Schönborn
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, OP, a Dominican friar, concurs with Ward, science makes a cosmic intelligence more likely, so the answer is “No”, but then again, he adds “Yes”, because a reductive scientific mentality has pushed God into “the hazy twilight of agnosticism”. Science seems to be replacing God by its ability to give proper answers for mysteries that God once explained, but this is only evolution, an evolving program of purification from superstition that Greeks and Jews began. Aquinas, quite exploding the modern notion of God continuously sustaining the world, explained that God delegated his powers, as any wise governor would, simultaneously exploding the myth of monotheism. So now we are finding “order, complexity and intelligibility all the way down”.
To view all these extremely complex, elegant, and intelligible laws, entities, properties, and relations in the evolution of the universe as “brute facts” in need of no further explanation is, in the words of the great John Paul II, an abdication of human intelligence.
But compelling as this argument is for many Christians, the preexistence of the explanation is an grossly more “brutish fact” we have to believe instead. Richard Dawkins makes a lot of this, and quite rightly. It is the old counter argument to belief in a creator, “Who created the creator?” It is harder to believe in the preexistence of a superbeing than it is to believe the universe got here of its own accord, especially given randomness in the universe, a nice simple explanation of everything.
Now the old friar gets to sound quite new agey, talking of wholism and reductive explanations. Let anyone speak of “reductive” in connection with science, and they are just saying, “Yah! Boo!”, a typically nuanced reply by science’s detractors whether Christians or philosophers, like Midgley. Science is reductive but not just reductive. Science analyses but it also synthesises.
Reductionism is thinking something is no more than its parts. Christians invite us to believe that a scientist thinks a car is just an bag full of bits. The scientist has not noticed, say, the difference between sodium and chlorine, two poisonous elements and sodium chloride, common salt, essential to life, but vapid clergymen, who believe in nothing on no evidence, notice such things. It is the ability Christians and their allies have of being able to see something when there is nothing that gives them the supernatural ability to detect reductionism, usually in atheistic scientists, though they never discovered anything useful in 2000 years. The example ought to show how the accusation beggars belief, yet plenty of believers, needless to say, gladly accept it.
The Dom joins Midgley in calling science “scientism”, pejorative again—“Yah! Boo! Sucks!” They are so pathetic, their argument hits the floor. More pathetic still is the attempt to blame “hedonism, consumerism, and mind numbing mass entertainment” on to science. Scientists cannot even get half decent science on to TV, free of supernatural or paranormal implications, let alone stop mind numbing “reality” shows, but the top TV executive in the UK is a Catholic! This imaginative chap is sacking production staff to give his executives a large rise, and is putting on more “reality” TV to compensate. Tony Blair, recently gladly accepted into the Catholic brood even though he is a war criminal, was responsible for appointing him. Christian morality?
