Category Archives: religion and science

Believing Bullsh**

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Philosopher Stephen Law wrote the above-titled book. Its subtitle is: “How not to get sucked into an intellectual blackhole.” In an interview, he explains some of his ideas.

Here’s part of it:

What else should we watch out for?
You should be suspicious when people pile up anecdotes in favour of their pet theory, or when they practise the art of pseudo-profundity – uttering seemingly profound statements which are in fact trite or nonsensical. They often mix in references to scientific theory to sound authoritative.

Why does it matter if we believe absurd things?
It can cause no great harm. But the dangers are obvious when people join extreme cults or use alternative medicines to treat serious diseases. I am particularly concerned by psychological manipulation. For charlatans, the difficulty with using reason to persuade is that it’s a double-edged sword: your opponent may show you are the one who is mistaken. That’s a risk many so-called “educators” aren’t prepared to take. If you try using reason to persuade adults the Earth’s core is made of cheese, you will struggle. But take a group of kids, apply isolation, control, repetition, emotional manipulation – the tools of brainwashing – and there’s a good chance many will eventually accept what you say.

He has this to say about the appeal to “mystery.” It’s often used as an out when science can’t (yet) answer a question. Often the response is something like such a question is beyond the ability of science to decide. But the problem is “the more we rely on mystery to get us out of intellectual trouble, or the more we use it as a carpet under which to sweep inconvenient facts, the more vulnerable we are to deceit, by others and by ourselves.”

Mark Vernon uses Law’s ideas to reflect on the importance of discernment in spiritual matters and to reflect on the limits of reason. He appeals to the importance of apophatic theology (the idea that the only true statements one can make about God are negations–i.e., statements about what God is not.

But he goes further and talks about another way in which reason is limited. For Vernon, there is something pre-rational that is necessary before reason comes into play, experience for example, that it is from experience, intution, hunches, perhaps the way we approach the world, that we use reason to put that experience into context, and make it palatable both to ourselves, and perhaps to others.

 

The Search for the Historical Adam

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Now that the dust has settled over universal salvation, it seems Evangelicals are going to war over “the historical Adam.” Here’s Christianity Today’s cover story on the matter. It seems faculty at Calvin College are under investigation for having publicly questioned whether Adam ever existed; scholars elsewhere have lost their jobs. For those of us on the outside, the question whether Adam and Eve once lived and were the progenitors of all of humanity may seem a bit silly. The scientific evidence is clear–the human genome is virtually identical with the genome of Chimpanzees and it seems that we are descended from a community of at least several thousand hominids, not two.

But it’s not just the historical (and scientific) accuracy of Genesis at stake. If Adam never existed then Pauline theology is in trouble, and if Pauline theology goes, then what remains of the whole Reformed edifice? If Adam never existed, then humans didn’t inherit sin from him, and our shared fallenness can’t be redeemed, needn’t be redeemed by Jesus Christ

Much of the work trying to flesh out the theological implications of contemporary science for Evangelicalism is followed on the BioLogos website, founded by Francis Collins. Their take on this controversy is here:  http://biologos.org/blog/biologos-and-the-june-2011-christianity-today-cover-story/.

We might be tempted to laugh at this controversy, just as many of us laughed at the Rapture theology of Harold Camping, but there are significant implications for traditional theology and to the extent that contemporary Christian theology, and churches, like the Episcopal Church, claim continuity with the past, there are implications for us as well.

One of the reasons I am so fascinated by scientific advances in the understanding human beings, especially neuroscience, is that it challenges traditional notions of human nature-the body/soul dichotomy, for example. It is incumbent on us to develop a robust theology that remains faithful to the tradition, but also takes into account these scientific discoveries. If we can’t make our imagery and symbolism meaningful for the twenty-first century, we will no longer be able to help people orient themselves in the world and in their own lives. We will sound like we are speaking in a foreign language, describing a fantasy world.

The Future of Christianity, Atheism, and the Origins of Civilization

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I’ve been on vacation for the past few days, getting caught up on my reading and sleeping. A number of things that caught my eye on the internet have me reflecting on my work, the work of the church, and the nature of religion.

Bishop Greg Rickel of the Diocese of Olympia (Washington) parallels much of my thinking about the future of the church:

… churches do not yet know how to measure what this means. “What denominational metrics people are asking—how many people are in church on Sunday, for example—may not be the right measure for today. The measures that contemporary churches need may be more intuitive and more spiritual in nature.”

Rickel points to a small church in his diocese that is located along the Columbia River. The population of the area is declining, and membership growth is not a realistic goal. Never­theless, the congregation is a dynamic and important part of the community, because it is a community and service center. Rickel likens it to a base camp—a place along the journey where people stop to receive nourishment, training, basic supplies and encouragement.

“We’ve only been paying attention,” Rickel said, “to the people who stay. But maybe that’s not the purpose [of the base camp]. Maybe we’ve been treating base camps as permanent residences.”

In order to operate as base camps, Rickel said, congregations need not give up their identity or cease offering a challenging “rule for living.” In fact, he said, young adults are eager for such a challenge. But churches need to be able to witness to the gospel when they have only a few chances to reach any one person.

The article by Amy Frykholm is insightful and challenging. She details the cultural changes taking place, highlighting the work of sociologists like Robert Wuthnow and Wade Clark Roof, as well as pastors who are experiencing these changes in their ministry. At the same time, she reminds us all about the importance of community, and the central NT idea of membership.

Then, thanks to  Counterlight’s Peculiars, I read this thoughtful post from an atheist who attends church regularly:

So, I remain a non-believer in the pew. I don’t make a point of it, because after all I’m choosing to be there. I’m sure most of the folks in church don’t know or notice. Those that do, may think I’m simply “earlier on the journey” than others. (I think some people think I’m Jewish, based on the occasional question. This is a frequent assumption because I’m dark and strong-featured.)

Instead, I tend to think that I’ve gone much further. I’ve gone past being religious, through my religion-bashing phase and to some extent am post-religious. Now I can find the common ground with my socially progressive instincts and faith groups who articulate it on the ground.

Besides the music is great.

I find this perspective hopeful, much more so than that of the New Atheists or even this.

There was also this article from the National Geographic yesterday. Based on excavations in Turkey, Klaus Schmidt concludes:

The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with hundreds of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

While he is open to changing his interpretation of the data, Schmidt concludes: “I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.”

More on Hawking and Science and Religion

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N.T. Wright v. Hawking: In the Washingon Post. Wright points out that the view of heaven Hawking rejects is neither biblical nor is it particularly Christian. Wright calls his view “low-grade and sub-biblical.”

From an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and oversees the vast CERN laboratories in Switzerland.

We separate knowledge from belief. Particle physics is asking the question of how did things develop? Religion or philosophy ask about why things develop. But the boundary between the two is very interesting. I call it the interface of knowledge. People start asking questions like “if there was a Big Bang, why was it there?” For us physicists, time begins with the Big Bang. But the question remains whether anything existed before that moment. And was there something even before the thing that was before the Big Bang? Those are questions where knowledge becomes exhausted and belief starts to become important.

And:

But the more we investigate the early universe, the more people are trying to connect science to philosophy. That is a good thing. Since we are struggling with the limits of knowledge, maybe philosophy or theology struggle also with our research. I think it is important that we open a constructive dialogue.

Debating the Existence of God

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Nathan Schneider’s report on a recent debate at Notre Dame between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. He also talks about it here. Perhaps more importantly, he points to an essay by John O’Callaghan of Notre Dame who reflected on the debate before it took place. I agree with his advice to Harris that he should read Augustine before going much further.

Giles Fraser reviewed Harris’ The Moral Landscape in The Guardian. It’s worth reading. Fraser gets it right when he says:

First, the atheism. On that useful quadrant – interesting and right, interesting and wrong, uninteresting and right, uninteresting and wrong – Harris is mostly in the uninteresting and right category. Uninteresting because he is concerned only with the narrowest definition of religious belief, and right because the moral and intellectual crimes he pins on this form of belief – its ignorance and prejudice – are so obvious to the western secular imagination that they do not require argument, and certainly not a PhD in neuroscience. Given his definition of religion, his attack on it is the philosophical equivalent of taking sweets from a baby. These things are wrong: “female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sacrifice”. The list goes on. With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist. An all-powerful eternal despot is still a despot.

He concludes:

For all this, it is not so much that I disagree with Harris. Rather, I am scared of him. And not his atheism, which is standard scientific materialism with the volume turned up. But scared of his complete lack of ambiguity, his absolute clarity of vision, his refusal of humour or self-criticism, his unrelenting seriousness. Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don’t. Which is why I fear Harris in just the same way I fear evangelical Christians, to whom he looks so similar. Like them, he is in no doubt about his faith. Like them, he has his devoted followers. Like them, he wants to convert the world. Well, I’m sorry. I am not a believer.

Tide goes in, tide goes out

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In the annals of those defending Christianity against the arguments of atheists, Bill O’Reilly’s is among the lamest:

“I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out,” O’Reilly said, in all seriousness. “Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You cannot explain why the tide goes in…. See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.”

Made numerous times, most recently in an interview with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O’Reilly’s brilliant argument came under fire from callous sophisticates.

His rejoinder:

“Okay, how did the Moon get there? How’d the Moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How’d the Moon get there? How’d the Sun get there? How’d it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn’t have it? Venus doesn’t have it. How come? Why not? How’d it get here?”

Well, here’s the scientific explanation for it.

H/t: The Washington Monthly.

God does not (not) exist

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Paul Wallace’s essay on negative theology and atheism offers much to ponder. He takes apart the immature atheism of Richard Dawkins by making use of negative, or apophatic theology, which begins with the notion that the only true statements one can make about God, are negative, saying what God is not. Negative theology has a long history in the Christian tradition, going back to Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite.

Wallace’s starting point is a statement by Denys Turner: “Atheists reject too little,” Turner writes, “This is why their atheisms lack theological interest. The routine principled atheist has but tinkered with religion.”

His essay put me in mind of a job candidate for a position in a department of religion some years ago, who when asked about his own religious commitments, said boldly, “I’m an atheist.” I thought at the time, and still do, that it seemed strange and immature coming out of a scholar of religion–not that I expect scholars of religion to be believers by any means, but I expect them to have developed an understanding of the complexity of religious ideas and practices which would preclude such simple, black and white statements.

 

Religion and Science: Proof for the non-existence of the soul

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One of the things I like about Andrew Sullivan’s blog is that he links to an amazing variety of material. Yesterday, for example, there were links to essays on agnosticism, the Pope’s visit to Britain, Susanna Heschel’s takedown of the same Pope’s link of atheism and Nazism, and the continuing power of confession on former Catholics, in addition to other fare. Each of these deserves close reading, reflection, and might be worthy of comment.

However, the one that takes the case is this piece from a scientist who seems to think he has found incontrovertible proof for the non-existence of the soul. He cites the case of a stroke victim who cannot recognize her own arm. He concludes:

Now consider yourself. Consider your own left arm. It feels perfect, under your control, a part of you, exactly where it should be. But this unified perception relies on neuronal machinery humming in the background, far beneath conscious awareness. Your sense of unity, only perceptible to you, is a sheen on the surface, not a deeper layer of reality.

Where does this leave the soul? Does the soul make any sense in the face of a brain and mind so easily fractured by ischemia? A soul is immaterial, eternal, a little god, impervious to injury, able to survive our deaths. Yet here we see one injured, tethered so close to the injured brain that there is no string. We see a hole, and through it we get a glimpse into the brain’s inner workings. One part is damaged; another part falsely thinks it is whole. How does the idea of a unified soul make any sense in the face of this data?

That this sophomoric argument is made by a reputable scientist and posted on what I can only assume is a reputable website, is laughable. In fact, Weisman has never bothered to engage with the philosophical literature on the nature of the soul. As a reader of Sullivan’s website commented: “Mr. Weisman’s article is a perfect example of the arrogance of those who use science to rebut philosophical and theological concepts which they can’t be bothered to actually study.”

That the soul might be divided is hardly surprising to anyone who has read a little philosophy. That the soul might not be in tune with the body is no news to Christian theology. One despairs of the future of intellectual life, and of the relationship between science and religion, if either side is carried out by people who write and publish this sort of thing.

More on Religion and Secularism

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I had just posted on the pope and Habermas, and I came across this story on madison.com about the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin giving an official welcome to the annual Freedom from Religion conference. For a sense of how problematic discourse about religion’s role in American society and politics is, check out the comments.

But it’s not just random folks who comment on newspaper articles. Here’s something by Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice University who is studying “how natural and social scientists at top research universities understand religion, ethics, and spirituality.”

Her research has found that of the scientists she’s studied, about 50% of them label themselves “religious” and 1/5 attend religious services. So far so good. She continues by pointing out that most scientists want to come questions of religion, morality, and value out of the classroom. They see university science departments as the lone holdout against the onslaught of fundamentalism in the US.

But Ecklund herself seems to have a fairly unsophisticated notion of religion or of the academic study of religion. She somewhat gratuitously points out in her opening paragraph that a third of the  prominent  research universities were founded with a Christian purpose in mind and that while some retain divinity schools, most have a department or program in Religious Studies.

Later in the essay, while discussing scientists’ efforts to keep religion out of their classrooms, she observes: “And religious viewpoints are relegated to separate, isolated departments and programs.” One wonders whether she has ever encountered a member of the Religion Department at Rice. Most of them are probably as strident in silencing fundamentalists in class as their colleagues in the sciences.

Habermas’ statement that I quoted in the previous entry is good advice for scientists and social scientists, too: “the content of religion must open itself up to the normatively grounded expectation that it should recognize for reasons of its own the neutrality of the state towards worldviews, the equal freedom of all religious communities, and the independence of the institutionalized sciences.”

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

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I finally got around to reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It was published in 2009 and consists of his Terry Lectures on Religion and Science, given at Yale University. In fact, it’s a direct attack on the arguments of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he has renamed “Ditchkins.” Eagleton is quite humorous and uses his wit effectively.

What’s perhaps most effective about the work is that he agrees with many of Ditchkins’ arguments against religion, but nevertheless takes them to task for their “faith” in rationality. Aside from the humor, which occasionally had me bursting out in laughter, there is a serious argument here. Eagleton links Christian theology to Marxism and uses both to level criticism at capitalism, postmodernism, and neoconservatism. He concludes:

The distinction between Ditchkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those like Ditchkins who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. This in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishig of humanity; but it holds that this is possible only by confronting the very worst. (pp. 168-169)

Eagleton, whose own religious convictions remain unclear throughout the work, has some powerful things to say about the New Testament idea of following Jesus:

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it apears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress…  (pp. 27-28)

The chapter on “Faith and Reason” especially deserves close attention. He works with Charles Taylor, Badiou, other philosophers, as well as Thomas Aquinas, to show that rationality itself requires certain prior commitments.