(This is Post 3 in a series of 3. See also the first post and second post.).
In response to the Michael Reiss affair, Harold Kroto has claimed that his sacking was necessary since Reiss (along with all religious people) show their lack of intellectual honesty by claiming religious knowledge.
Is religious knowledge possible? Surely, it is in principle. If an all-powerful God exists, there must be something that he could do to demonstrate to a reasonable person that he exists. If, before our eyes, all the stars in the heavens collected above Richard Dawkins house and spelled out: “That’s enough, Richard” …
With this in mind, how can Kroto claim that the science / religion interface is characterised by “fundamentally unresolvable conflict”? Suppose, for a moment, that the following scenario is true. There is a God, roughly Judeo-Christian. He is a necessary being, who can exist without the universe. He freely decides to create a world. He decides that “the ordinary course of nature in the whole of creation [will have] certain natural laws … determining for each thing what it can do or not do” (St Augustine, 408 A.D.). These laws will be chosen to allow for the development of intelligent beings. The universe is “set off” with certain initial conditions. The intelligent beings, in turn, use their intellect to study the natural universe, and through empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning, discover the laws of nature. They call the enterprise, “science”.
In such a universe, it is clear that science would have ultimate, unchallenged authority in investigating the physical world. There would not be a necessary conflict between science and at least some religions. Religion would ask questions like:
- Why does science work?
- Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective in describing our physical world?
- How is it that we can, with exquisite accuracy, predict the behaviour of the physical world by writing things on a sheet of paper?
- What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? (S.Hawking)
- Why are there the same scientific laws today as yesterday?
- Why are there scientific laws at all?
- Why does the universe exist at all?
- Why are the laws of nature, constants of nature and initial conditions of the universe fine-tuned for intelligent life?
- What are mathematical truths, and why do they preside over all possible universes?
- What are the laws of logic, and why do they preside over all meaningful truths?”
These are not scientific questions, but they are undoubtedly meaningful. And, in such a universe, their answer would be found in God. Science, in such a universe would (in the words of C.S.Lewis) “explain everything except what we should call everything. The only thing they omit is – the whole universe”. Atheists in such a universe would simply be mistaken in any attempt to argue that these questions are meaningless, and even the lesser claim that God is not a good answer to these questions would be false. An intelligent being in such a universe who considered these questions meaningful would rightly be lead to infer the existence of an entity who deserved the name “God”. Such a belief would certainly not be an “unfound dogma” or “irrational” or “unsubstantiated”. In such a universe, some kind of religion (but not all imaginable religions, obviously) would not only be allowed but correct, all the while being outside the legitimate realm of the methods of science. Further, the existence of a “plethora of more-or-less incompatible religious concepts that mankind has invented” (including creationism) would do nothing to undermine correct religious beliefs.
Thus, Kroto is in a bind. If he is to establish his claim that religious belief is necessarily irrational, that there is an unresolvable conflict between science and religion, he must show that the scenario I imagined above is impossible, that our universe cannot be like that. Further, if he still accepts his “lemma”, he must do this using the methods of science. He must propose an experiment, an observation, a way of producing data to support this assertion. This data must somehow show that the “religious questions” we asked above are meaningless – not just that we do not now know the answer but that they are non-questions, cleverly disguised gobbledigook.
Kroto thinks he can resolve the science / religion debate by taking some construction paper, redrawing the boundaries of knowledge to place all his opponents on the outside, and then pointing and shouting “LIAR!”. Such a blatant smear campaign against all scientists who are believers is frankly inexcusable from a man who claims to put such a high price on “integrity”. The sacking of Michael Reiss remains a disgrace.
What you’re doing here is trying to redefine religion as philosophy or metaphysics. This is common amongst more thoughtful religious folk who cannot handle the cognitive dissonance caused by the fact that they and other good people around them have dedicated so much of their time to nonsense.
The questions that you ask are mostly interesting (I think there’s a couple where I disagree with the premise), but it is quite bizarre to suppose that the old religions have anything whatsoever to do with the correct answers. Any other mythology is likely to have just as many fragments of validity, and also just as much cruft, distractions and plain error.
Cognitive dissonance: a theory of human motivation that asserts that it is psychologically uncomfortable to hold contradictory cognitions. Dissonance, being unpleasant, motivates a person to change his cognition, attitude, or behavior.
“Cognitive Dissonance” is one of those phrases that, having lost contact with its original, precise meaning, has dispersed into a mere swearword, an insulting label for those who disagree with you. Other examples include “fascist”, “socialist”, “communist”, “fundamentalist”, “Nazi”, “misogynist”, “homophobe”, “capitalist”, and after the KFC ad debacle last week, “racist” almost makes the list, alongside “anti-Semite”.
(“Cruft”, on the other hand, is an outstanding word.)
That warning aside, am I redefining religion as philosophy/metaphysics? Possibly. If I believed that an immensely powerful, personal creator brought our universe (and its laws) into being, Kroto would have no hesitation in labeling me “religious”. This belief is one of the foundational tenets of Judaism/Christianity/Islam. If one were to axiomatize Christianity, this would perhaps be the first axiom.
It seems that its the “other” bits that are the problem. The weird bits: miracles willy-nilly, all those rules and sacrifices in the old testament, Israelite wars, angels and demons, talking snakes and donkeys, the exclusivism, hell, souls and spirits …
We’d want very good reasons for believing all that stuff. But some of them are quite peripheral to the axioms of Christianity. One could still believe that God created the universe, raised Jesus from the dead and that we should respond in faith for the forgiveness of our sins, all the while believing that the bible is not inerrant, the Israelites got carried away with nationalistic fervour in their wars, that all miracle claims are naturalistically explainable (except for the big one – Jesus’ resurrection), that angels/demons/hell/spirits are useful prescientific metaphors etc.
I’m most interested in the big claims of religion. The minor stuff can wait.
Here’s Dwight D. Eisenhower, reinforcing my “mere swearword” warning:
“How can we appraise a proposal if the terms hurled at our ears can mean anything or nothing, and change their significance with the inflection of the voice? Welfare state, national socialism, radical, liberal, conservative, reactionary and a regiment of others … these terms in today’s usage, are generally compounds of confusion and prejudice. If our attitudes are muddled, our language is often to blame. A good tonic for clearer thinking is a dose of precise, legal definition.”
[...] in the lake. Materialism may be true, but it logically cannot be a deduction from science. As I have argued elsewhere, science can be placed in a theistic universe. Ultimately, we do not want to know if [...]
Luke,
I just came across this (and your blog). I think it is an amazing piece of open-minded thinking and writing and I take my hat off to you. I wish I had written it.
Best wishes.