When it comes to the perennial divide that separates science and religion in America, three things occur to me. First, our culture worships science. Second, we worship science because, try as we might, we have not suppressed the desire within us to seek out God and devote our worship to him. Finally, miracles, the supernatural events Christianity is built on, can be shown to have a rational place in our discourse. This last is an offering to all my rationally-minded friends who like to argue so passionately and at such length about the impossibility of the miracle. Are these three things claims? You bet. Now, in the spirit of reason and rational discourse, I have to offer you proof for all of them. One note: as with all my blog posts, this one is America-focused. While what I’m saying is probably applicable to Europe and to other parts of the world,, this is my country, this is my culture and this is the only one I’m qualified to talk about at length. Still, if C.S. Lewis’s cultural examples were mainly British and he could talk about these issues half a century ago, I think I can still pull it off today in the good old U S of A. How often have you ever watched a conversation like this happen, or perhaps taken part in it yourself on one side or the other?
First Man: “Haven’t you heard about those new green widgets made by X-corp? They’re made of that new metal.”
Second Man: “Yeah, so?”
First Man: “Well, believe it or not, they can change shape on their own. It’s cool.”
Second Man: “Oh come on. That’s crap! Nothing just changes shape. Not even green metal widgets. You know that as well as I do.”
First man: “These widgets do though. There was a study where scientists proved they could change shape on their own. Without help! They could become anything! Something about the chemicals in green metal widgets or some stuff like that.”
Second man: “Really?
First Man: “Yep. It was on the news. These Harvard scientists figured it out.”
Second man: “I’ll be damned. Green widgets. … Never would’ve thought it.”
Substitute green widgets for just about any discovery (real or fake) and you’ve got a conversation that happens every day, all the time. I’ve noticed that there’s no quicker way to legitimize your own position about something than to claim that there exists “scientific” proof of it. Science and truth have become linked in many American minds, and the reason, I believe, is that many people have been taught—and so they now believe on one level or another—that science not only presents us with what is true by evidence or observation, but that science itself is that truth. We, and by we I mean the everyday American, not just the educated elite or just the very poor or just the very wealthy, but everyday Joes, we accept scientific claims as though they were gospel truths. Indeed, to many they are gospel truths.
This has been coming for a while. Truth be told, it’s nothing new. Rather, it’s a situation that has worsened as the twentieth century gave way to the present one. When the holy name of science is invoked, all questions stop. On the one hand, this is understandable. The everyday Joe doesn’t know how to question the claims of science because he’s rarely taught how to. In part this has to do with training. Not everyone is trained in the scientific method. Present most people with a study about a given thing, and most people simply won’t know how to ask about the particulars of the experimental design or the reproducibility of the experiment or what the researcher’s colleagues in the field published about it a year later. This is well enough. I’d never claim that all people should be versed enough in the scientific method to be able to critique a research article the way another academic or scientist can.
Yet I’m disconcerted at how the notion of science can put a stop to discussion on a given thing. Claim that X has been proved by science, and X is thenceforth accepted as rock solid. It may not matter that subsequent science has proven X to be wrong or that the author who came out with X was a hoaxer, science’s name has already been invoked. Ergo, X will remain fast in the minds of many people for a very long time. It’s a conversation stopper in the sense that it shuts down opposition in daily conversation.
America has come to the point where it worships science. The word ‘worship’ brings to mind a certain awe and reverence for the worshiped, and it is this increasingly reverential attitude for and awe of the sciences that leads me to the concept of worship. The hypothetical conversation above is a template that showcases that worship even though people wouldn’t use the word ‘worship’ to characterize it.
In that way, then, science has taken on the worst aspects of many purveyors of church doctrine. That is, there are some in the church who question your faith if you ask probing and difficult questions quite apart from any answers they might be able to help you find or how sincere you may be in seeking out the truth. Likewise, questioning science’s findings can lead to a perception that you’re a know-it-all, a show-off, or should you question scientific endeavors from a religious or ethical standpoint, you’re considered closed-minded, bigoted or possibly even downright irrational. Substitute ‘irrational’ for ‘heretic’ in the minds of many decently educated folks, and you can perhaps see the worth of the parallel I’m drawing.
It’s not a perfect parallel, I admit. There is no scientific inquisition set up to test you for rationality the way the inquisition once sought to test people’s orthodoxy. Though if people like Sam Harris have their way, there would be. The twentieth century was the greatest single century for scientific progress in the history of mankind on many a front. If anything can be said about the twenty-first century as yet, it may prove to be the century that sees the greatest rationally-based rejection of theism in general and Christianity in particular that’s been seen to date. I won’t be alive at the end of the century to verify any of this. So I’ll say here and now I could easily be wrong about this century. But my intuition suggests otherwise.
For most of the twentieth century, if you rejected religion, you kept your rejection to yourself. It wasn’t popular to trot that out. You could find yourself being shunned by your local community, failing to get reelected or enduring any number of other negative consequences. To an extent that’s still true. I doubt America today would elect an openly atheist president, though it well might. One interesting thing about the last decade has been the publication of books by men like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Victor Stenger, and so on. What they’re saying is really nothing new. SO in that sense the term ‘new atheism’ that’s been applied to them and their writings is unwarranted. What is noteworthy is that they’ve popularized the atheist or, as they like to call it, the antitheist position.
It’s becoming increasingly acceptable to criticize religion in general and Christianity in particular in the strongest possible terms, taking no prisoners and making no concessions. Whereas before now, your open atheist was probably an academic or a scientist or a philosopher whose views were known to a comparatively small number of people, books like The God Delusion and The End of Faith have hit the bestseller lists and many people have picked them up and read them. Young students are leaving Christian homes, coming to universities and being exposed not only to the liberality and relativism that pervade our institutions of higher learning, but they’re coming across these highly readable and very popular publications. That is, atheism is no longer the purview of college profs. You might find these books on any dorm room shelf.
Many Christians deplore this state of affairs. I consider it a blessing. In the emergent climate of honest or even openly hostile atheism, you are far likelier to find out who believes what. If a person doesn’t profess their disbelief in God because they’re afraid of social censure, that doesn’t mean they really believe in God. Indeed, with atheism now on the ascent in acceptance, it means you’re far likelier to get an honest answer if you find yourself conversing with someone about their beliefs. There’s something to be said for honesty.
Well enough, you might say. We live in a society that turns more and more to rationalism as defined and advocated by the scientist for our every answer: biological, physical, ethical, moral etc. If that constitutes a worship of science, then we do indeed worship science. So what’s this about us worshiping science out of a misplaced desire to worship God? This isn’t something that many scientifically-minded people are going to agree with. Not, mind you, that many of them would have agreed with some things I’ve already said. To illustrate this point, I draw your attention to a certain 2008 project in Berkeley California.
The philosopher Jonathan Keats wondered what a temple to science would look like: http://io9.com/5049671/call-to-worship-at-the-temple-of-science. If stained glass windows depicted patterns of microwave radiation rather than nativity scenes, and if you could form a liturgy out of cosmic sound effects that represent the big bang, what kind of service and space would you get? The project was overseen by the Judah L. Magnes Museum. At first I thought that an actual building had been constructed, but when I called in search of more info, museum director Alla Efimova told me that that was not the case. Keats’s temple was a thought experiment. The project ran for four months from September 2008 to early 2009. Now, Keats himself isn’t a “militant atheist,” as biologist Richard Dawkins styles himself, though his views align mostly with the scientific notions of rationalism. Nivair Gabriel’s brief article (whose url is reprinted here for you) quotes the mission statement from the project’s now defunct web site. The mission of the Atheon, as the project was called, was to create an alternative to god-based religion. Most interesting of all is the statement, “our credo is to make faith rational.”
Now that, my friends, is an extremely interesting statement with implications well beyond what Keats intended. First, the statement itself. In reply, I would argue that faith is rational to a certain degree. If you believe in a God who made the universe and you arrive at that belief via evidence within Mankind or the universe itself, whatever that evidence may be, then you could argue that faith is a form of inductive logic, if admittedly a larger inductive leap than logicians will allow for. But I’m not here to shape an ontological argument. Not this time. The more interesting thing to note is that the statement was made at all. The Atheon’s proponents weren’t, as Dawkins in the God Delusion freely admits to doing, trying to abolish notions of faith altogether. Nowhere do they say that. Rather, they wish to redefine the terms on which faith exists. That’s a far cry from claiming that there is or ought to be no such thing as faith and/or worship.
Rather, the supporters of the Atheon tacitly admit to what C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain calls the experience of the numinous. That is, there is a certain reverent awe, a feeling of inadequacy of self when you contemplate yourself compared with the object of your reverence, be it the universe or God and so on. Richard Dawkins would tell you that the notion of numinous anything is bunk. Yet, “our credo is to make faith rational.” It surely sounds to me like they’re admitting to faith. “What ought we to have faith in,” seems to be the Atheon supporters’ question. Their answer is science.
We regard a collider or the human genome or a cosmic string with a certain degree of numinous awe. One scientist, let's say the biologist Stephen J. Gould, looks at a human DNA molecule and sees a complex chain of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine, and perhaps he is amazed at the systemic complexity that has evolved. He can’t fully explain it, but it amazes him, this handiwork of nature. Another scientist, perhaps Francis Collins, the man who headed the human genome project, looks at the same strand of DNA, sees the same four elements and sees there the fingerprints of God. Both scientists have encountered the numinous to a degree. It’s only a question of what each scientist regards as the right and proper object of his reverence. Yet, even this sort of reverence for the DNA molecule or the zero-point of the universe is encouraging. When scientists like Steven Weinberg ask how science can best fill the needs that religion satisfies in so many, they tacitly admit to the existence of those needs and they tacitly admit, too, that science is inadequate to fill them. I’m sure Richard Dawkins would love to argue his way out of that one, but it remains a fair point.
The truth is there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the numinous, with awe or with feeling that there’s something greater than yourself. Every culture throughout history has had a god concept, after all. As I’ve said before in another blog post, there are no exceptions. No culture has ever been godless, and the communist regimes of the twentieth century don’t count, because their atheism was forced on the people from above and not a natural outgrowth of those peoples’ intellectual history. The type of rationalism that spawned the scientific method and the types of atheistic thinking that are considered only natural by many thinkers today is, indeed and in truth, a jonnie-come-lately in human cultural and intellectual history. C.S. Lewis’s consideration of this point in Mere Christianity is telling. Though I had this thought before I ever read his book, I choose to credit him with it. If you are a Christian, one thing you do not have to believe is that all the major religions of the world are wrong. You believe that all of them contain some element of the truth, a glimpse of it. Some contain more truth than others, and, being a Christian, you do believe that where your faith differs from theirs, yours is correct and there’s isn’t. Though some may come much closer to the truth than others. If you are an atheist, you must believe that all cultures and people who believe in or who have ever believed in and worshiped a god of any sort are ipso facto mistaken, misguided, willfully ignorant or in any and every case, wrong all round on this point, whatever their reasons for being wrong happen to be.
To conclude these first two points, we Americans worship science, because it fills our need to encounter the numinous, to have the experience of encountering something beyond our own ken. When we scratch the infinity symbol on our doors or sit there staring at our cosmic phenomenon screensavers--for any of you who might do either of these things—we touch upon the numinous experience. My only complaint about it is that we reverence the created. We reverence finite things and finite concepts: cosmic strings, DNA molecules, statistical significance and falsifiability. The cure for our misplaced reverences isn’t far to seek. We reverence these various things or others because every human being is created, as St. Augustine put it, with a god-shaped void inside us that only God can fill.
I close with a brief consideration of miracles, a topic I was going to leave out altogether when I started writing this post. There are books upon books written by theologians, philosophers and skeptics alike on the subject of miracles. I’ve never had a problem with them. Still, it seems like almost every time the subject of God comes up, someone always holds up miracles as being impossibilities. Higher critics object to miracles as being textual embellishments to lend the bible’s stories plausibility or authority to more “primitive” minds and cultures. Scientists argue, as though no one before ever figured it out, that we now know how the laws of mechanics and biophysics and astrophysics ad infinitum work, and that in such an ordered place as our understood cosmos, miracles just can’t be, but since no one “back then” understood the running of the cosmos, miracles were all those people had to go on. Finally, there are those in popular science who like to talk about man-made miracles as if there were such things. I once had someone ask me if Man’s walks on the moon weren’t technological miracles. Strictly speaking, no.
The first problem with miracles is a linguistic one. Originally, the word ‘miracle’ as it came into English from ecclesiastical Latin and old French meant something distinctly supernatural, something that you marveled at and that amazed you because it was completely beyond human capability. So, yes, the virgin birth would be a miracle in this oldest sense. So too would the plagues visited upon Egypt before the exodus. Humans couldn’t have contrived them. They’re not natural. They were instigated by a being beyond the physical and natural laws that frame our day to day actions. Clear, indisputable miracles. But then something happened to the word. At some point in the history of English, people began to say that other great events, ships surviving gales at sea, wars being averted or won, or wild fires being contained, were also marvelous, wondrous, miraculous even. When describing this latter type of event, people used this word ‘miracle’ reverently, joyfully,, anything but usefully. Now a miracle can be anything, any event the speaker happens to think is significant enough. Presidential elections can be miracles. We have stripped the word of all of its meanings. So any attempt to deal with miracles has to include somewhere an explanation of what a miracle was and is supposed to be.
Scientists and philosophers who argue that miracles are impossible because they contravene the natural laws of the universe miss the point entirely. They are supposed to break those laws. If a miracle was entirely explicable through natural physical laws, then by definition it would not be a miracle. It might be a great and wondrous thing, but it would not meet this most fundamental criterion for miraclehood. In short, nothing less than an event that, in the ordinary course of things is always utterly impossible in our physical universe, can ever qualify as a miraculous occurrence. My passing my prelims, no matter how impossible I felt that feat to be, was not a miracle. This fact about the quality of miracles also negates any attempts to ‘prove’ that they happened or that they did not happen. They’re not replicable. They are events that are totally beyond the scientific method of inquiry.
Thus, studies like the 2001 Mayo Clinic experiment or the 2005 Duke University study, both of which attempted to determine the effectiveness of prayer in medical settings, are cosmically laughable. Generally speaking, studies like these have had every appearance of scientific rigor. The 2006 Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) that was published in the American Heart Journal is a great example. The team, which was led by a guy from, surprise surprise, Harvard, decided to study the power of prayer in 1802 cases of coronary artery bypass surgery. These people went all out: double blind treatment protocols, balanced groups of patient participants, and even a specific expression the prayer teams were to use, “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” Just as an aside, how often do surgeries like that actually have speedy recoveries with no complications at all? Hmmm. Care to guess what the results were? In the experiment, two groups of patients were told they might or might not receive prayers. So a guy wouldn’t know which group he belonged to, the patient group that was getting prayed for or the bunch that wasn’t. A third group of patients was explicitly told they were definitely being prayed for. In the first two groups, there wasn’t any significant difference in the death rates. In the third group—the patients who knew they were being prayed for, mind you—a significantly higher number of them died. The leader of the study, Dr. Herbert Benson, said after the failure of his experiment that the project wasn’t the last word on intercessory prayer and that they needed additional answers. God is the last word on intercessory prayer as I recall. You can’t prove a miracle and God is not subject to experimentation.
The only plausible course for denying miracles in human history that is really left to the skeptic is to deny those portions of human history where miracles have occurred or to question the veracity of the written accounts. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume once asked which was more probable, the resurrection of Christ or a lying witness. Hume is right enough when he argues that miracles are by their nature improbable. Improbable, however, does not mean impossible. The only impossibility I see where true miracles are concerned is the impossibility of making them ourselves. As I said before, if we could, they wouldn’t be miracles. Miracles are, in the final analysis, probably the most potent example of the numinous. They point the way not to science, but to the one who made the scientists.
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