HAS SCIENCE MADE RELIGION MEANINGLESS?

octoBER 13, 2007

In last week’s column I addressed the challenge to religious faith posed by recent atheistic writings like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I showed that his attack on religion as being responsible for most of the human suffering and evil throughout history is not substantiated by the facts. Clearly, anyone who is truly religious abides by the moral prohibitions against prejudice, hatred, greed, and murder, and treats others with respect and charity. This is certainly true of those who would profess to be Christian. Regrettably, many do not live up to the moral demands of their religion: in those cases religion is not the root of the problem, but the failure to live religiously.

The central argument of Dawkins’ book -- the one to which I now want to respond – has to do with religious faith, not the behavior of persons claiming to be religious. For Dawkins, religious faith is unreasonable in light of the development of modern science, and it is harmful to mental health because it imprisons its adherents in a make-believe world that keeps them from facing up to reality. For Dawkins, reality is creation with a creator, and moral laws without an original law giver.

The key to understanding Dawkins’ own delusion about God, namely, his conviction that God does not exist, is to understand that Dawkins thinks the question of God’s existence can be subjected to scientific inquiry, and that science can resolve the question. Science, however, is the study of the natural world in order to describe, explain, and predict it. What is beyond nature is beyond science’s reach.

One of science’s operating principles is what is called methodological doubt. The idea is not to make any claim for which one does not have scientifically verified proof. That is, one cannot as a good scientist claim as real anything that one has not in some way observed. Since no one has seen God or detected his activity with any scientific instrument, the scientific conclusion, for Dawkins, can only be that he does not exist.

There are two things wrong with this. First, science sometimes does propose the existence of things it has never seen, heard or touched, as a way of explaining what it has seen, heard, or touched. There are many examples of this, but I’ll select only one. No scientist ever saw, heard, or touched gravity, yet scientists in Isaac Newton’s time had already come to the conviction that something like gravity had to exist in order to explain the movement of celestial bodies. What they lacked – until Newton provided it – was a mathematical way to describe, measure, and predict the force of gravity as a law.

By the same token, reason and logic enable us – in fact, force us -- to see that everything that happens in the world has a cause, and that the world itself, that is, the universe, cannot be ultimately explained by reason, except by positing a first, uncaused cause. That uncaused cause is what we call God. That God is, we can know by reason; the knowledge of who or what God is requires his revelation.

For Dawkins, atheists have nothing to prove. He wants us to believe that God’s existence should be methodologically denied until scientifically verified proofs are forthcoming. Until then, in his view, atheism is the only scientifically proper and reasonable position to take. The question is an open one, and those who want to deny the existence of a first, uncaused cause have to argue and defend their position, and explain how there could be anything without a creator. To say, “Well, it’s just always been there” is quite unscientific and unreasonable.

Dawkins book is recent, but the arguments he presents against God’s existence are old and unoriginal. His failure at logic reminds me of the story of the college professor who had a well-known reputation on campus for being an atheist. One day in class a student asked why he didn’t believe in God’s existence. The professor asked the class, “Has anyone here ever seen God?” Silence. “Has anyone here ever heard God make a sound?” Silence. “Has anyone here ever reached out and touched God?” Silence. “The reason is obvious,” said the professor. “There is no God.” He then invited anyone in the class who so desired to try to defeat his argument.

One student stood up and addressed the class: “Has anyone here ever seen the professor’s brain?” Silence. “Has anyone here ever heard the professor’s brain make a sound?” Silence. “Has anyone here ever reached out and touched the professor’s brain?” Silence. “The reason is obvious,” said the student. “The professor has no brain.”

Next week I’ll write about the relation of faith to reason and of science to religion.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap