The God Confusion


God, Nature and Science

Over the last four centuries, the prevailing world-view amongst ordinary people has progressively changed in accord with social evolution. We can scarcely comprehend the culture shock of Copernicus’ discovery in the sixteenth century that Earth was one of a number of planets revolving around the sun, rather than the centre of the universe. This had been the Church’s view for well over a millennium and thence the view of lay people, for the Church was regarded as the authority on all matters, both spiritual and temporal. In this sense, the world-view up to that time was a holistic unity, as it has always been for indigenous peoples and adherents of some of the eastern religious philosophies: for them, all the material world is imbued with spirituality, so there are no separate domains of matter and spirit. From the outset, Western theology distanced itself from this pagan idea of deity within the natural world and focused on a transcendent and wholly inaccessible God.

After Copernicus (1473-1543), the idea of a world ordained and maintained by God was eroded – first, by the astronomical discoveries of Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century, then by the increasingly impressive man-made structures produced by the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and finally, by what seemed to many at the time as the coup de grâce, the theories of Darwin and Wallace, Lyell and Hutton in biology and geology in the nineteenth century. The theistic vision of God immanent in the human world was replaced by the deist God as Creator and Designer of a mechanical universe operating to His laws – laws that increasingly were unfolding to the investigations of scientists. We really did seem to be uncovering the mind of God.

English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) exhorted scientists to use the resources that Nature offered for the benefit of humankind to subdue ‘Nature with all her children, to bind her to your service and make her your slave [for] the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’. Now, not only was God remote from humankind but so too was the natural world. This was where our exploitation of the environment as something other than ourselves really began: we no longer regarded ourselves as a part of Nature but rather apart from it. Up to that time, we had always worked in harmony with the seasonal cycles of Nature, knowing that by desecrating Nature we endangered ourselves. Those societies that ignored this fact, like the Easter Islanders, perished.

In its enthusiasm to destroy the pagan god within the natural world all around us, western religion had to create prophets who were either in intimate communion with or who were actually incarnations of the deity, revealing His word to the world. However, in the age of increasing rationalisation that marked the Enlightenment, it was unsurprising that many rejected these wholly subjective revelatory world-views. Some went even further in their notion of deity maintaining that there was no longer a role for God at all, as Alister McGrath pointed out in his book The Twilight of Atheism [Doubleday, 2004].

Thus, in the West, there was now confusion as to which of three world-views – theism, deism or atheism – represented the actual state of affairs in the world, that is, which of these represented reality or truth. And there was still a fourth option: the nineteenth century biologist, T.H. Huxley, described as agnostics those who maintained that we have no way of deciding between these alternatives. As deism acknowledges a more restricted role for deity than that of theistic belief, the fundamental choice was really between theism and atheism – the existence (and possible ongoing participation) or non-existence of God, with agnosticism representing the fall-back position if the evidence suggested that no choice could be made.

From the seventeenth century on, in the material world it was science that people now looked to as the authority on truth. But while scientists have discovered a vast amount of information regarding those patterns of behaviour of the natural world that we describe as physical laws, we have uncovered no information that could unequivocally be interpreted as favouring one of our three theistic options. Though we can work on hypothetical model systems, we cannot explore these options rigorously by the methodology of science. We cannot conduct experiments to re-enact the exact conditions of Creation, and we cannot say what test would disprove the hypothesis of God as Creator, Designer or immanent presence.

The fact that something has not been observed or explained does not disprove its existence. While we cannot establish the existence of God with the empirical certainty that, as scientists, we expect from our experiments, a lower degree of certainty might still be achievable. In his book, The Coherence of Theism [Oxford, 1977], the Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne has used the inductive method of science to suggest that observation of the natural world and logical reasoning do indeed imply the existence of a deity. Using the standard theological first cause, design and morality arguments, Swinburne suggests that God is as plausible a hypothesis to explain the creation and apparent design of the universe as the quarks and superstrings that are used to explain the properties of matter.

Science has told us how many natural systems operate but not why they should behave in this way: science suggests immediately preceding physical causes but not philosophical reasons. The evolutionary theory of Darwin and Wallace provides a convincing explanation of the mechanism of species development but, despite its title, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) says nothing about the origins of life. The long-standing philosophical question of ‘why there is something rather than nothing’ which, despite its antiquity, has still been debated in recent months in the pages of the Catholic magazine The Tablet, is vacuous. From a secular viewpoint, even if science could tell us the ‘how’ of creation, it is beyond its remit to tell us the ‘why’. For the theist, to know the ‘why’ of Creation would mean getting inside the mind of God.

There is another issue. We can say nothing with any certainty about how physical systems originated nearly fourteen billion years ago from our vantage point within the system – and that for only a few million years. We can speculate about how it all began, as Stephen Weinberg did in his book, The First Three Minutes [Andre Deutch, 1977], but we can know nothing. Furthermore, as Kurt Gödel said of mathematics in his Incompleteness Theorem, we cannot define the bounds or limits of a system unless we can observe it from outside, which obviously we can never do in the case of the universe. Although the Big Bang theory of an instant of creation for the universe some 14 billion years ago is the favoured theory, it is by no means settled whether this was simply the creation of our present universe from nothing (and therefore the beginning of space and time), or whether the event occurred from some pre-existing eternal and infinite state of being such that there is an oscillation between creation and annihilation of the universe, or whether ours is one of many universes, or even whether the steady-state theory of continuous creation is at all applicable. The acceleration of the expanding universe has not been explained, and Fritz Zwicky’s dark matter and dark energy ideas still have to be fitted into the picture. There is a confusing array of scientific possibilities, all of which have implications for various religious systems and, most especially, for a role for divine participation.

Medieval theologians spent much time and energy trying to reconcile the world-view presented in their respective scriptures by revelation with the rationalism of the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. From the time of the Enlightenment, scripture had to be reconciled too with the empiricism of science. Since the Enlightenment the world-view represented by a literal reading of scripture, and especially the Bible, the core text of western religion, has been generally acknowledged as incompatible with either rationalism or empiricism. It is accepted by most theologians that scripture is essentially either myth and fable conveying age-old traditions of a particular social group or the moral message of a prophet at a particular time in human history as to how we should best live our lives as individuals and as a society. It follows that religions, like scripture, are man-made social institutions: religion is the externalised communal expression of emotionally held beliefs that represent the internalised faith of each adherent.

The very nature of deity is such that its form, too, must be created out of the human imagination though its existence can be inferred using the accepted arguments of natural theology, applying reason to evidence gathered from the five senses, as suggested by Swinburne.

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The reason versus revelation controversy

The controversy of a role for God and the validity and worth of scriptural revelation continues to this day. Whatever the truth of scripture, and however God is conceived, the subject of the Divine is an emotive topic of relevance to a huge proportion of the population of the world, particularly in the West.

In recent years, two Oxford academics have come to represent the opposing views of atheism and theism, respectively, Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath, so I shall concentrate on their writings. Dawkins (b.1941) is a zoologist who, for the past decade, has held the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. McGrath (b.1953) is now Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford but he trained originally in chemistry and biophysics. There are others who have added their voices to the controversy: Peter Atkins, a chemist at Oxford, supports the Dawkins view; Keith Ward, an Oxford evangelical Christian, supports McGrath. John Polkinghorne is another physicist turned Christian evangelist. As a generalisation, it is the biologists who most ardently believe that Darwinian theory can explain the emergence of life, the most complex of natural systems, and that God is therefore unnecessary, while the physicists, like Fritjof Capra [The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House, 1975], see connections between the world-view of quantum physics and the mystical viewpoint of eastern religious philosophy.

The fact that several of the protagonists lined up against Dawkins are evangelical Christians does, however, raise another confusion. McGrath has recently published a three-volume treatise called A Scientific Theology (T & T Clark, 2001-3) and a distilled version called The Science of God (T & T Clark, 2004). In the latter (p.25) McGrath claims that ‘A scientific theology is based on traditional Christian orthodoxy’, and immediately the theological argument is both limited and undermined by being linked to Christianity. Those who reject Christianity are likely to reject the whole theology.

Any realistic theology must embrace at least Judaism and Islam and, with little extension of the concept of the Divine, Hinduism as well. One reason why Enlightenment scientists like Isaac Newton and philosophers like John Locke and J.S. Mill were anti-Trinitarians was that Christianity was considered to be the least rationally coherent of any of the major religions. Religion in general told people what to believe instead of allowing them to think for themselves. A belief in God therefore cannot logically be restricted to the Christian viewpoint. Locke and Newton were deists but in his book The Twilight of Atheism McGrath implies that they, together with Thomas Paine and the founding fathers of America were atheists. There has long been a view in mainstream Christianity that a belief in God necessarily demands belief in the divinity of Jesus.

The atheistic viewpoint has been presented by Richard Dawkins in many books over the past two decades, but most comprehensively in The God Delusion (Bantam/Transworld 2006). In this, and in two pairs of television programmes – ‘The Root of All Evil’ and ‘The Enemies of Reason’ – Dawkins presents not only the case against God and religion but a refutation of all mystical and psychic experiences on the grounds that they are individual and subjective and cannot be confirmed by others. Dawkins maintains that all such experiences are meaningful only to the subject and are totally meaningless to everyone else. Like the Enlightenment thinkers above, he supports the idea that people should be allowed to frame ideas for themselves through reason and not be given a set of rules and beliefs by an authoritarian religious system.

The idea of communal sharing of an individual’s subjective experience through claimed revelation as a basis for a system of morality is regarded by Dawkins as nonsensical at best and, at worst, as in the religious indoctrination of children, as actually evil. Many atrocities have indeed been committed in the name of religion, but many other acts of genocide have been racist obsessions, as with Hitler, or committed overtly for the acquisition of power by atheists, like Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. Evil is not the preserve of religious fanatics though they may be its most prominent contemporary exemplars. Dawkins ignores the benefits derived from religion – a guide to morality for individuals, a cohesive ethical structure for many societies and a reaching out to the ineffable that has created so many inspirational works of art. Religion has provoked great evil, but it has also provided a spiritual basis for faith for many more millions of ordinary people and for artisans, and it has continued to exist despite the passionate predictions of its demise by atheists or rationalists.

Empirical observations by the five senses made coherent by rational thought that comprises the technique of science have given us a vast amount of detail about how the world works. But this is not the only route to knowledge. All knowledge gained in other ways cannot be dismissed either as worthless superstition or delusion. We all have, to varying extents, three routes to knowledge of the world – empiricism, rationalism and intuition. These can function for each of us as individuals or we can accept the respected authority of others. One of the definitions of ‘faith’ is ‘belief in the testimony of another’. This is how most of us regard the facts of science or the theorems of mathematics. Even scientists and mathematicians must themselves have faith in the abilities of their fellow professionals in other specialist fields.

The essence of the science and religion controversy hinges on the fact that all statements in mathematics and science are amenable in principle to verification (or falsification) by others with sufficient expertise. The difficulty in assessing the truth of mystical and psychic experiences is that they are intrinsically subjective and rarely verifiable by others. There is, however, an increasing body of evidence, some of it gathered by the standard ‘double-blind’ technique of science, of the validity of the effectiveness of prayer, the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance, and even communication with the disincarnate. There is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence gathered over many centuries from around the world. The psychic ability of shamans, prophets and seers has been a fundamental component of human social evolution in both secular and religious matters.

Until the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in the twentieth century, what is now described as alternative or complementary medicine was the only available method of treatment of illness, except for dramatic intervention by surgery in extreme cases. In its earliest days herbal medicine must have developed to a large extent through ‘trial-and-error’ using the intuitive knowledge of tribal ‘medicine men’; such techniques have established many effective treatments without the use of ‘the scientific method’.

Pharmaceutical preparations have saved countless lives and reduced much suffering over the last century – but they also have their drawbacks; alternative therapies, in the right hands, are certainly not the ineffectual nonsense that Dawkins would have us believe. Using the orthodox ‘scientific’ medical practice that Dawkins champions, there were 40,000 errors in drug administration in British hospitals in 2005 alone [National Patient Agency, 10 August 2006]. In America, one report says that there are approximately 7,000 deaths each year due to medication errors [www.amcp.org], while the FDA states that there is at least one death each day and 1.3 million people injured each year due to medication errors [www.fda.org]. Adverse drug reactions remain at least the third or fourth biggest killer in the western world, and more recent studies suggest they may be the biggest killer [G. Null et al. Death by Medicine, Nutrition Institute of America, New York, 2003]. Millions of people in the West turn to alternative therapies as a last resort and secure successful treatment when orthodox drug regimens are ineffective or side effects of allopathic drugs are intolerable.

Complementary medical techniques have a long history of successful use. Eastern medical practitioners have for many generations used meridians of the energy they describe as chi to induce anaesthesia by acupuncture. Dowsers and shamans tune in to comparable energy fields or ley lines in the Earth in their practices. All attempts to describe these energy fields in terms of the four fields of energy described by western science have so far failed. This does not mean either that fields of chi do not exist or that a fifth field of nature will not one day become amenable to our methods of scientific study. For the present, what can be said with certainty is that this field is real inasmuch as it has practical applications in our everyday lives. The conclusion that we should draw from these results is that much alternative medicine that was initially based largely on intuition has been shown by traditional practice to be effective and should not be dismissed simply because it has often not been verified by scientific methodology. Alternative or complementary medicine that Dawkins decries as ‘meaningless superstition’ can in some cases be a great deal safer and more effective than synthetic drugs, provided of course it is used by qualified practitioners.

There is also reputable evidence for the validity of clairvoyance and mediumship going back to the works in the early twentieth century of Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Liverpool University, and William Crookes, F.R.S. (1832-1919), who made pioneering discoveries in both physics and chemistry. These were not gullible men and they would certainly have been conscious of the effect that involvement with psychic phenomena would have on their professional reputations.

There have been numerous books about the afterlife in recent decades but some of the more recent and academically robust include those by psychologist Gary Schwartz [The Afterlife Experiments, Atria, 2002], and by Victor Zammit, formerly a lawyer with the Supreme Court of New South Wales and High Court of Australia [A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife, Ganmell Pty, 1996] – again, a man whose profession demanded conclusions based on evidence. Psychology professor David Fontana has also presented an account of the evidence for continued disincarnate existence in Is There An Afterlife? [O Books, 2005].

These books relate accounts of information provided by mediums or clairvoyants that is claimed to come from the world of the disincarnate. Logically, such claims are in no way different from those of sages and prophets whose insights have given us the Neviim of the Judaic Tenakh, the Islamic Qur’an, the Pali Canon of The Buddha, or The Secret Doctrine of Helena Blavatsky on which theosophy is founded. All such scripture is an account of subjective but intuitive experience to which we subscribe through emotionally held beliefs.

In The Dawkins Delusion [SPCK, 2007], McGrath criticises Dawkins’ book for its hyperbole and emotional charge. Yet, even when professional theologians like McGrath write about their subject, they find it difficult to be objective because their emotionally held beliefs get in the way of their rational ideas. Dawkins is criticised for not defining what he means by ‘delusion’. Now ‘delusion’ is a common enough word in the English language, but Dawkins gives not one but two definitions on p.5 of his book. Dawkins is further taken to task for calling Thomas Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ ‘proofs’ of the existence of God. Says McGrath: ‘At no point does Aquinas speak of these as being ‘proofs’ for God’s existence’. That is simply incorrect. In Chapter 1 of the concise version of Summa Theologiae edited by Timothy McDermott [Methuen, 1991] we read the section heading: ‘That there is a God needs proof’ and, in the text, that ‘There are five ways of proving there is a God’. McGrath continues: ‘... rather they [the ‘proofs’] are to be seen as a demonstration of the inner coherence of belief in God’ – just as Swinburne demonstrated using the inductive methods of science. To describe such beliefs in mystical or psychic events as ‘delusion’ implies that they are ill-founded which, as I have explained above, is not necessarily the case. I have emphasised these points to illustrate my contention that evangelical Christians can be as biased or prejudiced in their assessments as fundamentalist atheists.

Although criticised by McGrath, Dawkins’ definition of faith as ‘blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence’ is in fact precisely how many people do accept religious scripture, with the latter part of the definition applying more perhaps to fundamentalist religion. In a talk given in Swansea last October, taking issue with Dawkins, Dr Rowan Williams said that belief in God was ‘a matter of faith and unconditional’, and that ‘religion cannot be approached scientifically’. But this makes religious faith no different from fantasy or imagination – it is just an emotional feeling. Even secular faith in our doctors or politicians is at least grounded in reason. The one feature that gives validity to any belief is reason. Beliefs that are wholly subjective and without either rational or empirical support to which others can assent are indistinguishable from imagination, fantasy or even self-delusion: intuitive insights can be validated only by practical reason. The basic argument against fundamentalist religious belief is precisely that it shows blind trust in certain ideas as truth even in the face of rational or empirical evidence to the contrary, just as Dawkins claims.

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The healing spirit

Scripture is seen by many, depending on their religious viewpoint, as the word of God. However, no scripture can logically represent an unequivocal, unilateral world-view because we are all aware now of a multitude of different religions in the world, many of which claim their own unique but mutually incompatible versions of divine wisdom. Which religion we grow up with and accept as ‘truth’ is a matter at first of the geography of our birth, the beliefs of our parents and the society in which they live. In the global context, we must accept rationally that no one religion is any truer than another: they are simply alternative paths to enlightenment that we choose emotionally to follow.

Surely the divisions that produce such hatred between different religions will never be healed, nor the seeming irreconcilability of science and religion, of reason and revelation, be resolved until reason is accepted as an integral component of faith. Scientists and theologians alike regard humankind as the highest pinnacle of the evolutionary process, and the defining characteristic of humanity is our quality of mind. A rational world-view indicates that scriptures and the religions based on them are man-made, however inspired their source. There is ample anecdotal and scientifically based evidence to indicate the existence of a universal spiritual domain. To embrace this cosmic spiritual energy would bring us all once more within the realm of the natural environment that gave us birth and of which we have always remained a part, irrespective of our religious beliefs.

Science can neither disprove nor prove, in the logical mathematical sense, the existence of God, but the grandeur of the universe that inspires the awe and wonder of humankind implies the existence of an overarching guiding force. Such beliefs suggest a way through the confusion of religions and are much more than imagination or fantasy, and certainly not delusions.

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This article appeared in The Scientific and Medical Network Review, No. 96, Spring 2008 and in The Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2009 (published in Bloomfield Connecticut, USA).