Wanted: Science Humility

I think my problem with "new atheism" is that I am as enchanted by the story of how we came to see the world as we do as by the narrative of the world as we now see it.

I do not blame us for the wrong ladders and defective lenses we built to get closer to the stars. If we survive the quest, our best rocketry and most sophisticated telescopes will look like churches and metaphysics to our human descendants.

The question of God is a question for the future; we are not poised to ask or answer it yet. Theology has not answered it; science does not know how to ask it properly. The problem is, both have become so sure that their projects are antagonistic that the thought of collaborating in order to make the discussion more fruitful has become a risible notion. No one should expect that situation to change.

For that reason, agnosticism, which is deeply curious, but also profoundly embracing of a kind of religious humility, is the only sensible position to me.

It is the unwarranted hubris of new atheist scientists that puts me off, or more specifically that the word 'atheism' should have anything whatever to do with science.

Atheism is not a conclusion. It is not a theory in the strict sense because it is not testable within any possible range of causes of natural events.

The most we can say about God is that we do not need traditional ideas of God to explain the way things are within the range we have come to understand as the natural world and universe. We can say that such religious explanations are false, and even absurd.

But the Thomistic idea of God, when it is adequately explicated, cannot be killed off so easily. Dawkins certainly didn't do it and judging at least what he has written on the topic doesn't seem to get it. No modern scientist has done it.

I am not convinced that Anselm's ideas have been buried deep enough not to be noticed by future generations of thinkers. To ask the God question as he asks it is different from asking the question "Where do things come from?" Perhaps that is why scientists in general eshew ontology when they talk about God and pick on questions of causality bolstered by assaults on defenseless scriptural texts.

But most heinous of all is the pro-science argument that those who reject a totally naturalistic explanation of the causes of the cosmos are simply not intellectually equipped to cope with its implications for religious faith. That it pure bamboozle and sophistry. It is the modern equivalent of what the medieval Scholastics claimed about their perfectly constructed theory of a hierarchical cosmos that tuned out to be totally false.

I say beware of any collocation of experts who tell you that their doctrines are fixed and final and all the more final because they seem to be impenetrable.

To be humble and skeptical at the same time will always pay bigger dividends than pretending that there are two kinds of questions. The questions science has answered and the ones it is about to answer. It has not answered the God question. It is not about to answer it.