The scientific community is generally quite atheistic, at
least that is a common self-appraisal.
Yet scratch the surface and a relatively empty cauldron seems to
appear. Contemporary atheism sometimes takes
the form of snarky snipes at organized religion in general, easy targets due to
outlandish positions apparently derived from political exigencies, especially
in Christianity and Islam in recent years.
Authors who seek to be taken seriously, such as Christopher Hitchens,
Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, although raising serious and important issues,
in the end look a bit like comedian Bill Maher in his humorous, but in the end
cowardly film “Religulous.” As Terry Eagleton has noted, those of us who have
been politically engaged with opposition to US military intervention or struggles
of the poor world-wide frequently find ourselves marching side by side with
nuns and priests, rarely with evangelical atheists. As an atheist myself , this is troubling.
If the
contemporary scientist is serious about atheism, some reflection and study
would seem to be in order. Newton, for
example, was not in any respect an atheist, and probably the vast majority of
men and women who lived prior to the writings of T. H. Huxley were similarly
non-atheists. Is it that Newton and his
compatriots perhaps did not have at their disposal the deep thinking of
atheists like Dawkins, Hitchins and Harris? Certainly not. What they did seem to have that many
contemporary scientists seem to lack, is a commitment to examine the issue
seriously. Atheists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were proposing an
idea that yet today is challenging and should, in my view, be taken
seriously. If the atheist position
(which I embrace) is to be more than throwing darts at human beings thought to
be intellectually inferior, it needs to be examined as carefully as scientists
examine the results of their scientific experiments.
It is first
necessary to carefully distinguish among Theism, Deism, and Atheism, not as
easy as it may seem. The
Theistic/Atheistic dichotomy is a red herring today, even though it may have
been extremely important in the seventeenth century. The debates in those days, incuding among
Newton and his contemporaries, was between Theism and Deism, the latter perhaps
identified in later writings with what is today called Atheism. The Theism/Deism dichotomy basically refers
to the current activities of God. True
theists have it that the omniscient being that created heaven and earth
continues his activities and could, if he wished, at any time simply change the
rules. The reality of miracles made the
utility of prayer evident. If God really
could make the wheat grow taller, it made sense to do whatever needed to be
done to get him to do so, whether conducting strange rituals or simply
requesting he do so (prayer).
Theism was
in the end not convenient for political power.
If God could be persuaded to simply change the rules, how could the king
or queen claim sovereignty? If that
sovereignty was not absolute, which it could not be if a serendipitous God
could cancel it at will, could not the rabble all get together and pray very
very hard for a change in the rules of sovereignty? Indeed, in the seventeenth century there were
mystical challenges emerging constantly with claims of authority not convenient
to power. An alternative was needed.
Deism was
indeed that alternative. Yes God created
all of the universe, including the rules by which it ran. However, once his creation was complete, he
stepped out of the way. The “God
hypothesis” is still there, but the supernaturalistic ideas of miracles and
response to prayer were dramatically diminished, if not eliminated almost
entirely. Newton and contemporaries were
Deists. Indeed, Newton’s continual claim
to seek an understanding of the mind of God was not in any sense metaphor, but
rather an abiding faith in the Christian God who indeed did create not only the
physical world but the laws of physics that governed it.
It is worth
reflecting on how philosophical principles were developing at this time. Thinking deeply about the difference between
Theism and Deism it becomes evident that science is difficult, perhaps
pointless, under Theism. What scientific
laws are we trying to discover? The way God has decided to have them work
today, but perhaps not tomorrow. And if
we figure out that objects are attracted to one another according to the square
of their mass, will they be so attracted
according to the cube tomorrow?
In order for the scientific project to proceed at all, Theism needed to
be superseded, which is precisely what Deism did. But let us not confuse the need to reject
Theism with Atheism itself.
Many
self-proclaimed Atheists today are in fact Deists in disguise. Hitchens cannot really claim without doubt
that the attack of the US on Iraq was justifiable, except as a truly religious
commitment to some sort of belief that the current (and quite temporary) discourse
of the West is clearly superior to that of the Middle East. And Harris’ condemnation of Chomsky’s careful
analytical critique of the Israeli treatment of the occupied territories can
come only from a religious commitment to some sort of Zionist dream, even as he
rejects Judaism as formal religion. The
list can go on with the most famous contemporary spokespersons for Atheism. Hoisted on their own petard, they’re analysis
is not wrong in its critique of organized religion, but naïve in its suggestion
that it is true Atheism.
More
difficult to criticize is the more recently evolved “nature” religion. E. O. Wilson gives us a naïve deterministic
version (Pleistocene people who loved nature were competitively superior to
those who didn’t and thus “biophilia” arises as a consequence of natural
selection), which in the end excuses him for shallow thought about
conservation. Yet who can deny the
feeling some of us get from the natural world, vast expanses of landscapes
either directly experienced or filtered through the lenses of romantic
painters, the elegance of relativity theory, even, for some, Godel’s theorem
(Wiles was brought to tears when he recalled the moment he had the insight that
allowed him to prove Fermat’s last theorem).
It is, as Karen Armstrong notes in her “The Case for God,” as
imponderable as the almost physiological reaction one feels upon hearing a fine
piece of music. Can my ecstatic feeling
upon hearing a Paul Desmond saxophone solo or seeing for the first time a silky
anteater, be understood materialistically?
When, as a youth, I “accepted Jesus Christ as my savior” I had similar
feelings.
The sense
of wonder and ecstasy that is part of the human experience may in the end be so
enigmatic that the Atheists’ dream of making it all make sense without resort
to religious-like principles may fail. Indeed
we seem much like naïve Europeans. In
eighteenth century Amsterdam Picart and Bernard produced “The Religious
Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World,” nothing really more
than an anthropologist’s treatment of the world’s religious beliefs. Yet given the times, it was profoundly
seditious. It suggested that religious beliefs were somehow equal to one
another and that neither Christianity nor Judaism were anything particularly
exceptional. Understandably, those who wielded power were not pleased, yet the
faith of Christians and Jews never regained hegemony.
Are those
who today unquestionably elevate science or nature not similar in their
arrogance to the Europeans who could not see alternatives to Judeo-Christian
traditions? It is true that ignorant
rejection of science by anti-evolutionists or climate science deniers suggests
that all we scientists circle the wagons.
It is also true that assuming the natural world needs to be decimated
for the needs of capitalism seems to compel us to defend the utility, if not
beauty, of the natural world. But philosophically, is our assumption tenable that
Science and/or the Natural World should be defended without question? And if it
is, how is that different from Yahweh or, for that matter, your favorite poltergeist?
