Archive Columns: Religion

Science and Belief

     “Dawkins raised his hand and …asked why anyone would want to look for divine characteristics in the universe.  To which Barrow replied: ‘For the same reason that somebody might not want to.’”  Barrow spoke the thing neither institutionalized belief nor institutionalized unbelief will admit – the great scandal – that neither side can close the deal, leaving it to you and me.  There are wonderful reason to believe  - and not to believe.”   John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer 10/23/05

      Timpane thought that Barrow’s response to Dawkins was the “most incisive thing [he] heard” at a Cambridge conference on science and religion.  But the match-up between belief and unbelief is not as even as Timpane would have us think.  It is not the simple symmetry of two fair arguments.  It is rather that the scientists can’t win because they are playing by rules and the believers can’t lose because they have no rules.  The scientists are confined to a field of reason and demonstration.  The believers can walk off the field without forfeit.  Timpane is right that this will always end in a draw, but you have to think, in the manner of diving, that the scientists ought to be granted an edge on good form.

       Noting that science, especially cosmology, is often not strictly speaking evidential, but abstractly theoretical, and advanced as much by pondering as by measurement, Timpane likens scientific or materialist belief to religious belief.  The materialists are just guessing too, he says, more than they care to admit.

      This is a wreckless blurring of two distinct enterprises.  Cosmologists may be guessing but they are guessing at verifiable hypotheses for observable phenomena.  That they work up these hypotheses at a chalk board or on a computer instead of in the field is beside the point.  They may have hunches about things but they hold no belief that will not finally bow to evidence.

       Believers, on the other hand, are not looking for a verifiable explanation of what is observed, but rather for a consoling explanation for what they feel.

       Actually, this is not entirely fair.  Believers are looking for an explanation of what they observe, namely the universe.  It is just that they do not require that the explanation be verifiable; indeed, they celebrate that it is not verifiable. This is what faith is, staying with your hunch whether there is evidence or not, believing in something for which there is no proof.

       Dawkins finds no virtue in faith and, as a rule, neither does the West except in these few areas we deem sacred, where reason is oddly taboo.  The point of Dawkins’ question above was this:  Why console yourself with something made-up when you can avail yourself of the astonishing wonder of what is real?  Indeed, he might ask, how can something so irrational, contrived and egocentric in any respectable way console?

      For Dawkins, every deus is a deus ex machina, a facile abandonment of intellectual rigor.  Scientists look for causes of things and if they should ever come upon the First Cause, their instinct is not to be baptized, but to stop and ask, “All right, what’s behind this Big Guy?”

      Sophistica ted believers don’t object to the search for causes but they see it as a different act altogether than a searc h for purpose.  Here is the crux.  Believers don’t see how an existence without a God can have any purpose and Dawkins can’t see why a God is somehow necessary to have a purpose.  He would even go farther, since religion – willfully irrational and politically flammable to a tragically idiotic degree – too frequently diverts man from a higher purpose.  Ethics and morality do not require a theology, why should a well lived life?

      What makes religion attractive and indeed, almost instinctively to be wished for, is the unfortunate human capacity to foresee our own death.  Humans can face their pre-birth non-existence with a perfect equanimity but find it hard to be as sanguine when contemplating their non-existence after death.  Enter religion and the eternal life.  For believers, the wish for a life after death is sufficient evidence to believe in it.&n bsp; Desire becomes expectation; hope becomes faith.  For nonbelievers the wish is still merely a wish – the inevitable wish of sentience, perhaps – but no more to believed in than a life before birth.

      Feeling that there somehow ought to be a life after death is not evidence.  It is a just, alas, a feeling.  Religious revelation, Dawkins notes, is just a fancy word for an intense feeling about something for which there is no evidence.  He would sooner base meaning in life on the wonder of what we know by discovery than on what we might wish for based on a groundless feeling.

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