The Gradual Illumination of the Mind
Reconsiderations and Recapitulations on the God Question
It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
In the first edition of this book I wrote on page xv of the Preface: “Of course it is okay for people to believe in God; moreover, people will believe regardless of what I say or think.” The second part of this sentence can be verified, since God’s ratings have not slipped in the polls one iota since How We Believe was first released in October 1999. In fact, a March 2000 poll from Gallup shows that, as always, belief in God remains potent, not only in America but worldwide:
—Belief in God: Even when Gallup added the option for respondents that they “don’t believe in God, but believe in a universal spirit or higher power,” only eight percent chose that response with 86 percent saying that they believe in God. Gallup added: “In fact, only five percent of the population choose neither of these choices and thus claim a more straightforward atheist position.”
—Church Attendance: Although less than the percentage of people who believe in God, “about two-thirds of the population claim to attend services at least once a month or more often,” Gallup said, while “thirty-six percent say they attend once a week.” By contrast, only 8 percent say they never attend religious services, while 28 percent report that they “seldom” go.
—Church Membership: Matching the figures for church attendance, two-thirds of Americans say they are members of a church or some other religious institution. “Only nine percent of the public respond with ‘none’ when asked to identify a religious affiliation or preference,” Gallup concluded.
—Importance
of Religion: Americans match people in other countries in ranking religion as very or fairly important in their lives. In a joint study between Gallup International and the London-based Taylor Nelson Sofres marketing firm covering 60 countries, 87 percent said that they consider themselves to be part of some religion. In America 60 percent say that religion is “very important in their life,” with another 30 percent saying that it is “fairly important.”
—God and Politics: Since 2000 is a presidential election year, Gallup found that 52 percent of voters surveyed “would be more likely to vote for a candidate for president who has talked about his or her personal relationship with Jesus Christ during debates and news interviews.” As anyone who watched the presidential debates knows, all the candidates went on public record to extol their Christian beliefs, including the Democratic candidate Al Gore, not exactly known for his conservatively religious views. On the Republican side, George W. Bush announced that he considered Jesus to be the most influential philosophical thinker in his life.
SKEPTICISM AS A VIRTUE
Is it okay for people to believe in God? A number of atheists objected to this statement. One wrote me: “Religion is a bad idea. Belief in god is a bad idea. These ideas should be self-evident to any rationalist. That religion/belief is common is not a reason to avoid such statements. That religion/belief will perhaps always be with us is not a reason. That religion/belief is old is not a reason. That religion/belief may at times do some good is not a reason. None of these statements are reasons to avoid clearly stating the truth. Anything less is duplicitous, disingenuous, appeasing—and ultimately, helps the other side by providing approval where disapproval should instead be offered.”
“The other side.” What a revealing way to phrase a critical attitude toward religion, whose long history of dividing the world between “our side” and the “other side” is a notoriously bloody one. Should nonbelievers really ape this most nonsalubrious side of the system of belief from which they so often distance themselves? Clearly religion has no monopoly here. The very propensity to cleave nature into unambiguous yeses and noes may very well be an evolutionary by-product whose ultimate outcome could result in the extinction of the species (and a further indication that not everything in evolution can be explained by its adaptive significance).
Another friend who objected to my “okay to believe” statement spelled it out even clearer: “I won’t let anyone who believes in god in my home. I won’t sleep with them and I have none in my social circle. But I can do more.” What “more” shall we do? What more can we do? Should we evangelize against Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the other systems of religious belief? Since I am a libertarian in more ways than just political, I am disinclined to tell people what they should or should not be doing with their personal lives and beliefs. Nevertheless, I am a scientific and skeptical activist (not just a dispassionate onlooker from the intellectual sidelines), so I am forced on a daily basis to attempt to dissuade people from their less rational beliefs. How to reconcile these competing motives? Through a positive push-forward program instead of a negative push-back agenda. Evangelize for science rather than rail against religion. Don’t curse the darkness; light a candle. Charles Darwin, who renewed the science-religion debate nearly a century and a half ago, expressed this position well in the epigraph above.
Nevertheless please note that in this edition of the book I changed the phrase to read that it is okay not to believe in God. By this statement I am speaking to those atheists, nontheists, and nonbelievers of all stripes as a form of validation from a fellow free-thinker; I am also reaching out to theists and believers of all faiths who, occasionally or even frequently, doubt their faith. Doubt is good. Questioning belief is healthy. Skepticism is okay. It is more than okay, in fact. Skepticism is a virtue and science is a valuable tool that makes skepticism virtuous. Science and skepticism are the best methods of determining how strong your convictions are, regardless of the outcome of the inquiry. If you challenge your belief tenets and end up as a nonbeliever, then apparently your faith was not all that sound to begin with and you have improved your thinking in the process. If you question your religion but in the end retain your belief, you have lost nothing and gained a deeper understanding of the God Question. It is okay to be skeptical.
In light of Darwin’s wise advice, why, one may ask, do I devote an entire chapter (2) to a head-on confrontation of the alleged proofs of God’s existence? The reason is that my laissez-faire attitude toward other people’s religious beliefs ends when they use, misuse, and abuse reason and science in the service of faith and religion. As even libertarians will admit, your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Claims that religious tenets can be proved through science require a response from the scientific community. Making evidentiary claims puts religion on science’s turf, so if it wants to stay there it will have to live up to the standards of scientific proof. This is not an archaic academic or philosophical issue. As I show in Chapter 4, the scientistically based “design argument” is the most common one made. People say they believe in God because of the evidence of their senses and their understanding of how the world works. In other words, they give reasons for their beliefs. What are those reasons? If they are good reasons shouldn’t we all become believers? GOD AND THE INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED UNIVERSE
The hottest area in the search for scientific support of God’s existence can be found in the so-called “new creationism” that deals in “irreducible complexity” and especially “Intelligent Design” (ID as it is known among its adherents). Although I discuss these at length in Chapter 5, they continue to generate so much attention that it is worth expanding on it more here. It is rapidly becoming the strongest scientistic argument for believers. For example, I participated in two scientific debates on ID in 2000, a number of new books on it have been released by Christian publishers since my book came out, and an entire issue of the Christian magazine Touchstone was devoted to Intelligent Design, “a new paradigm in science that could revolutionize the way we view creation, the cosmos, and ourselves.”
Much is made of the fact that the universe is grandly complex, intricate, and apparently delicately balanced for carbon-based life forms such as ourselves. It is here where science and religion meet, say believers who wish to graft the findings of science onto 4,000-year-old religious doctrines. And they have no difficulty in finding observations from leading scientists that seemingly support their contention that the universe does not just look designed, it is designed. “It is not only man that is adapted to the universe,” John Barrow and Frank Tipler proclaim in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, “The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percents one way or the other? Man could never come into being in such a universe. That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to the principle, a life-giving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world.” For theists, of course, that life-giving factor is God.
The Templeton Foundation has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting a reconciliation between science and religion, including the grant of the single largest cash prize in history for “progress in religion.” On the day I wrote this introduction, in fact, it was announced that physicist Freeman Dyson won the prize valued at $964,000, for such works as Disturbing the Universe, one passage of which is often quoted by ID theists: “As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” Mathematical physicist Paul Davies also won the Templeton prize, and we can understand why in such passages as this from his 1999 book The Fifth Miracle:
In claiming that water means life, NASA scientists are … making—tacitly—a huge and profound assumption about the nature of nature. They are saying, in effect, that the laws of the universe are cunningly contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity, somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity. If life follows from [primordial] soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: “Make life!” And, through life, its by-products: mind, knowledge, understanding. It means that the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct.
Indeed, it would be wonderful. But not any more wonderful than if it were not correct. If life on Earth is unique, or at least exceptionally rare (and in either case certainly not inevitable, as I demonstrate in the final chapter), how special is our fleeting Mayfly-like existence; how important it is that we make the most of our lives and our loves; how critical it is that we work to preserve not only our own species, but all species and the ecosystem itself. Whether the universe is teaming with life or we are alone, whether our existence is strongly necessitated by the laws of nature or it is highly contingent, whether there is more to come or this is all there is, either way we are faced with a worldview that is equally breathtaking and majestic in its sweep across time and space.
In the Touchstone issue on Intelligent Design, Whitworth College philosopher Stephen Meyer argues that ID is not simply a “God of the gaps” argument to fill in where science has yet to give us a satisfactory answer. It is not just a matter of “we don’t understand this so God must have done it” (although to me, and to all scientists I have spoke to about ID, this is how these arguments always appear). ID theorists like Meyer and Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, and Paul Nelson (all leading IDers and contributors to this issue) say they believe in ID because the universe really does appear to be designed. “Design theorists infer a prior intelligent cause based upon present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships,” Meyer writes. “Inferences to design thus employ the standard uniformitarian method of reasoning used in all historical sciences, many of which routinely detect intelligent causes. Intelligent agents have unique causal powers that nature does not. When we observe effects that we know only agents can produce, we rightly infer the presence of a prior intelligence even if we did not observe the action of the particular agent responsible.” Even an atheist like Stephen Hawking can be found to present cosmological arguments seemingly supportive of scientistic arguments for God’s existence:
Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically accurately. If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been less by one part in 1010, the universe would have collapsed after a few million years. If it had been greater by one part in 1010, the universe would have been essentially empty after a few million years. In neither case would it have lasted long enough for life to develop. Thus one either has to appeal to the anthropic principle or find some physical explanation of why the universe is the way it is.
That explanation, at the moment, is a combination of a number of different concepts revolutionizing our understanding of evolution, life, and cosmos, including the possibility that our universe is not the only one. We may live in a multiverse in which our universe is just one of many bubble universes all with different laws of nature. Those with physical parameters like ours are more likely to generate life than others. But why should any universe generate life at all, and how could any universe do so without an intelligent designer? The answer can be found in the properties of self-organization and emergence that arise out of what are known as complex adaptive systems, or complex systems that grow and learn as they change. Water is an emergent property of a particular arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, just as consciousness is a self-organized emergent property of billions of neurons. The entire evolution of life can be explained through these principles. Complex life, for example, is an emergent property of simple life: simple prokaryote cells self-organized to become more complex units called eukaryote cells (those little organelles inside cells you had to memorize in beginning biology were once self-contained independent cells); some of these eukaryote cells self-organized into multi-cellular organisms; some of these multi-cellular organisms self-organized into such cooperative ventures as colonies and social units. And so forth. We can even think of self-organization as an emergent property, and emergence as a form of self-organization. How recursive. No Intelligent Designer made these things happen. They just happened on their own. Here’s a bumper sticker for evolutionists: Life Happens. In The Life of the Cosmos, cosmologist Lee Smolin explains how this property of emergence and self-organization out of complexity works:
It seems to me quite likely that the concept of self-organization and complexity will more and more play a role in astronomy and cosmology. I suspect that as astronomers become more familiar with these ideas, and as those who study complexity take time to think seriously about such cosmological puzzles as galaxy structure and formation, a new kind of astrophysical theory will develop, in which the universe will be seen as a network of self organized systems. Many of the people who work on complexity … imagine that the world consists of highly organized and complex systems but that the fundamental laws are simply fixed beforehand, by God or by mathematics. I used to believe this, but I no longer do. More and more, what I believe must be true is that there are mechanisms of self-organization extending from the largest scales to the smallest, and that they explain both the properties of the elementary particles and the history and structure of the whole universe.
There may even be a type of natural selection at work among many universes, with those whose parameters are like ours being most likely to survive. Those universes whose parameters are most likely to give rise to life occasionally generate complex life with brains big enough to achieve consciousness and to conceive of such concepts as God and cosmology, and to ask such questions as Why?
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Self-organization, emergence, and complexity theory form the basis of just one possible natural explanation for how the universe and life came to be the way it is. But even if this explanation turns out to be wanting, or flat-out wrong, what alternative do Intelligent Design theorists offer in its stead? If ID theory is really a science, as they claim it is, then what is the mechanism of how the Intelligent Designer operated? ID theorists speculate that four billion years ago the Intelligent Designer created the first cell with the necessary genetic information to produce all the irreducibly complex systems we see today. But then, they tell us, the laws of evolutionary change took over and natural selection drove the system, except when totally new and more complex species needed creating. Then the Intelligent Designer stepped in again. Or did He (She? It?)? They are not clear. Did the Intelligent Designer—let’s call it ID—create each genus and then evolution created the species? Or did ID create each species and evolution created the subspecies? ID theorists seem to accept natural selection as a viable explanation for microevolution—the beak of the finch, the neck of the giraffe, the varieties of subspecies found in most species on earth. If ID created these species why not the subspecies? And how did ID create the species? We are not told. Why? Because no one has any idea but you can’t just say, “God did it.”
I presented all these challenges to the leading Intelligent Design theorists at a June 2000 conference at Concordia University (Wisconsin) on “Intelligent Design and Its Critics.” Although there were some critics there, both on stage and in the audience, it was mostly populated by ID supporters. The conference was partially sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, and was clearly structured to make it appear that there is a real scientific debate ongoing about Intelligent Design. However, as I pointed out in my opening remarks, the conference was being held at a Lutheran college and just before I was introduced they announced what time chapel was the next morning and how we can obtain transportation to it. Virtually every ID supporter turns out to be a born-again Christian. Can this really be a coincidence? For these remarks I was later accused of committing the “genetic fallacy,” where one attacks the person rather than their arguments. Nevertheless, my participation at this conference was a debate in which I did address many of their points.
It is not coincidental that ID supporters are almost all Christians. It is inevitable. ID arguments are reasons to believe if you already believe. If you do not, the ID arguments are untenable. But I would go further. If you believe in God, you believe for personal and emotional reasons (as I show in Chapter 4), not out of logical deductions. But this chapter also shows that highly educated believers, especially men who were raised religious, have a strong tendency to defend their beliefs with rational arguments. And looking out over an auditorium of about 250 ID supporters at this debate it was overwhelmingly educated males.
ID theorists also attack scientists’ underlying bias of “methodological naturalism.” That is, they feel it is not fair to forbid supernaturalism from the equation as it pushes them out of the scientific arena on the basis of nothing more than a rule of the game. But if we change the rules of the game to allow them to play, what would that look like? How would that work? What would we do with supernaturalism? ID theorists do not and will not comment on the nature of ID. They wish to say only “ID did it.” This is not unlike the famous Sidney Harris cartoon with the scientists at a chalkboard filled with equations: an arrow points to a blank spot in the series and denotes “Here a miracle happens.” Although IDers eschew any such “god of the gaps” style arguments, that is precisely what it all amounts to. They have simply changed the name from GOD to ID.
Let’s assume for a moment, though, that ID theorists have suddenly become curious about how ID operates. And let’s say that we have determined that certain biological systems are indeed irreducibly complex and intelligently designed. As ID scientists who are now given entree into the scientific stadium with the new set of rules that allows supernaturalism, they call a time-out during the game to announce “Here ID caused a miracle.” What do we do with supernaturalism in the game of science? Do we halt all future experiments? Do we continue our research and say “Praise ID” every couple of hours? The whole system collapses in a risible game of semantics.
GLADLY WOLDE WE LEARNE
If there is a God, He has yet to provide incontrovertible evidence of His existence, leaving belief in Him instead to lie in the realm of faith, or emotional preference, which is the very basis of the theological position known as fideism. Because I see this as the most tenable of all theistic possibilities, I have explored it further since I first wrote this book. As Martin Gardner, a fideist and believer in God, noted in his 1983 book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener: “If ‘evidence’ means the kind of support provided by reason and science, there is no evidence for God and immortality.” Gardner rejects the flood story (“even as a myth it is hard to admire the ‘faith’ of a man capable of supposing God could be that vindictive and unforgiving”), does not believe that God asked Abraham to kill his son (“Abraham appears not as a man of faith, but as a man of insane fanaticism”), and finds wanting most of the stories in the Bible: “The Old Testament God, and many who had great ‘faith’ in him, are alike portrayed in the Bible as monsters of incredible cruelty.”
If, as I argue in Chapter 4, beliefs are based on emotion rather than evidence, personality instead of reason, upbringing more than arguments, it would seem to vindicate Gardner’s fideism as the most honest of all the reasons to believe in God. In a personal aside, Gardner confesses that he does have some faith:
Let me speak personally. By the grace of God I managed the leap when I was in my teens. For me it was then bound up with an ugly Protestant fundamentalism. I outgrew this slowly, and eventually decided I could not even call myself a Christian without using language deceptively, but faith in God and immortality remained. The original leap was not a sharp transition. For most believers there is not even a transition. They simply grow up accepting the religion of their parents, whatever it is.
Gardner is, if nothing else, refreshingly honest about his faith: “The leap of faith, in its inner nature, remains opaque. I understand it as little as I understand the essence of a photon. Any of the elements I listed earlier as possible causes of belief, along with others I failed to list, may be involved in God’s way of prompting the leap. I do not know, I do not know!”[12] We do not know either, but we ought to be able to respect this honest appraisal of how and why you believe, and especially acknowledge what Gardner, as one of the chief teachers of science and skepticism, have offered us for enlightenment on the problem. As the clerk of Oxenford in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales proclaimed: “gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”