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November 13, 2018 - January 16, 2019
two hundred years earlier. Clinton said, “Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.”
“Today,” he said, “we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”
“It’s a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”
This book aims to dispel that notion, by arguing that belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science.
In 1916, researchers asked biologists, physicists, and mathematicians whether they believed in a God who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer. About 40 percent answered in the affirmative. In 1997, the same survey was repeated verbatim—and to the surprise of the researchers, the percentage remained very nearly the same.
Richard Dawkins
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.”1
Henry Morris,
“Evolution’s lie permeates and dominates modern thought in every field. That being the case, it follows inevitably that evolutionary thought is basically responsible for the lethally ominous political developments, and the chaotic moral and social disintegrations that have been accelerating everywhere…. When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.”2
Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul—and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.
Science is the only reliable way to understand the natural world, and its tools when properly utilized can generate profound insights into material existence. But science is powerless to answer questions such as “Why did the universe come into being?” “What is the meaning of human existence?” “What happens after we die?” One of the strongest motivations of humankind is to seek answers to profound questions, and we need to bring all the power of both the scientific and spiritual perspectives to bear on understanding what is both seen and unseen.
But we humans seem to possess a deep-seated longing to find the truth,
I was raised on a dirt farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
For my budding reductionist mind, there was not nearly enough logic in it to be appealing.
In fact, my assertion of “I don’t know” was really more along the lines of “I don’t want to know.” As a young man growing up in a world full of temptations, it was convenient to ignore the need to be answerable to any higher spiritual authority. I practiced a thought and behavior pattern referred to as “willful blindness” by the noted scholar and writer C. S. Lewis.
Reading the biography of Albert Einstein, and discovering that despite his strong Zionist position after World War II, he did not believe in Yahweh, the God of the Jewish people, only reinforced my conclusion that no thinking scientist could seriously entertain the possibility of God without committing some sort of intellectual suicide.
With the advent of new methods for splicing different DNA fragments together at will (recombinant DNA), the possibility of applying all of this knowledge for human benefit seemed quite real.
An austere and somewhat unapproachable pediatrician, who taught a grand total of six hours of lectures on medical genetics to the first-year medical student class, showed me my future. He brought patients to class with sickle cell anemia, galactosemia (an often-fatal inability to tolerate milk products), and Down syndrome, all caused by glitches in the genome, some as subtle as a single letter gone awry.
Her obvious surprise brought into sharp relief a predicament that I had been running away from for nearly all of my twenty-six years: I had never really seriously considered the evidence for and against belief. That moment haunted me for several days. Did I not consider myself a scientist? Does a scientist draw conclusions without considering the data? Could there be a more important question in all of human existence than “Is there a God?” And yet there I found myself, with a combination of willful blindness and something that could only be properly described as arrogance, having avoided any
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He listened patiently to my confused (and probably blasphemous) ramblings, and then took a small book off his shelf and suggested I read it. The book was Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.
When I learned subsequently that Lewis had himself been an atheist, who had set out to disprove faith on the basis of logical argument, I recognized how he could be so insightful about my path. It had been his path as well.
Notice that in all these examples, each party attempts to appeal to an unstated higher standard. This standard is the Moral Law. It might also be called “the law of right behavior,” and its existence in each of these situations seems unquestioned. What is being debated is whether one action or another is a closer approximation to the demands of that law. Those
What we have here is very peculiar: the concept of right and wrong appears to be universal among all members of the human species (though its application may result in wildly different outcomes).
It is the awareness of right and wrong, along with the development of language, awareness of self, and the ability to imagine the future, to which scientists generally refer when trying to enumerate the special qualities of Homo sapiens.
Some have argued that cultures have such widely differing norms for behavior that any conclusion about a shared Moral Law is unfounded. Lewis, a student of many cultures, calls this “a lie, a good resounding lie. If a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the practical reason in man. From the Babylonian Hymn to Samos, from the laws of Manu, the Book of the Dead, the Analects, the Stoics, the Platonists, from Australian aborigines and Redskins, he will collect the same triumphantly monotonous
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Others will object that the Moral Law is simply a consequence of evolutionary pressures. This objection arises from the new field of sociobiology, and attempts to provide explanations for altruistic behavior on the basis of its positive value in Darwinian selection.
First, let’s be clear what we’re talking about. By altruism I do not mean the “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” kind of behavior that practices benevolence to others in direct expectation of reciprocal benefits. Altruism is more interesting: the truly selfless giving of oneself to others with absolutely no secondary motives. When we see that kind of love and generosity, we are overcome with awe and reverence. Oskar Schindler placed his life in great danger by sheltering more than a thousand Jews from Nazi extermination during World War II, and ultimately died penniless—and we feel a
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“Because it is the nature of the scorpion to sting, why should I deny my own nature to save it?”
Agape, or selfless altruism, presents a major challenge for the evolutionist. It is quite frankly a scandal to reductionist reasoning. It cannot be accounted for by the drive of individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves. Quite the contrary: it may lead humans to make sacrifices that lead to great personal suffering, injury, or death, without any evidence of benefit. And yet, if we carefully examine that inner voice we sometimes call conscience, the motivation to practice this kind of love exists within all of us, despite our frequent efforts to ignore it.
Would this be a deist God, who invented physics and mathematics and started the universe in motion about 14 billion years ago, then wandered off to deal with other, more important matters, as Einstein thought? No, this God, if I was perceiving Him at all, must be a theist God, who desires some kind of relationship with those special creatures called human beings, and has therefore instilled this special glimpse of Himself into each one of us. This might be the God of Abraham, but it was certainly not the God of Einstein.
It also became clear to me that science, despite its unquestioned powers in unraveling the mysteries of the natural world, would get me no further in resolving the question of God. If God exists, then He must be outside the natural world, and therefore the tools of science are not the right ones to learn about Him.
Doubt is an unavoidable part of belief. In the words of Paul Tillich, “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”1 If the case in favor of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the world would be full of confident practitioners of a single faith. But imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about belief was taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting would that be?
He describes the experience as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”
At fifteen, I recall a Christmas Eve where the descant on a particularly beautiful Christmas carol, rising sweet and true above the more familiar tune, left me with a sense of unexpected awe and a longing for something I could not name.
Much later, as an atheist graduate student, I surprised myself by experiencing this same sense of awe and longing, this time mixed with a particularly deep sense of grief, at the playing of the second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (the Eroica). As the world grieved the death of Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the Olympics in 1972, the Berlin Philharmonic played the powerful strains of this C-minor lament in the Olympic Stadium, mixing together nobility and tragedy, life and death. For a few moments I was lifted out of my materialist worldview into an indescribable spiritual
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Is this only, and no more than, some combination of neurotransmitters landing on precisely the right receptors, setting off an electrical discharge deep in some part of the brain? Or is this, like the Moral Law described in the preceding chapter, an inkling of what lies beyond, a signpost placed deep within the human spirit pointing toward something much grander than ourselves?
The atheist view is that such longings are not to be trusted as indications of the supernatural, and that our translation of those sensations of awe into a belief in God represent nothing more than wishful thinking, inventing an answer because we want it to be true. This particular view reached its widest audience in the writings of Sigmund Freud, who argued that wishes for God stemmed from early childhood experiences. Writing in Totem and Taboo, Freud said, “Psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us with quite special insistence that the God of each of them is formed in the
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If we are looking for benevolent coddling and indulgence, that’s not what we find there.
Again, Lewis says it well: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”5
Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void: Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy…. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism…. It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and
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The church is made up of fallen people. The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem. It is no wonder that those who assess the truth and appeal of spiritual faith by the behavior of any particular church often find it impossible to imagine themselves joining up. Expressing hostility toward the French Catholic Church at the dawning of the French Revolution, Voltaire wrote, “Is it any wonder that there are atheists in
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In fact, by denying the existence of any higher authority, atheism has the now-realized potential to free humans completely from any responsibility not to oppress one another.
Would you condemn an oak tree because its timbers had been used to build battering rams? Would you blame the air for allowing lies to be transmitted through it? Would you judge Mozart’s The Magic Flute on the basis of a poorly rehearsed performance by fifth-graders? If you had never seen a real sunset over the Pacific, would you allow a tourist brochure as a substitute? Would you evaluate the power of romantic love solely in the light of an abusive marriage next door? No. A real evaluation of the truth of faith depends upon looking at the clean, pure water, not at the rusty containers.
Should God have restrained our free will in order to prevent these kinds of evil behavior? That line of thought quickly encounters a dilemma from which there is no rational escape. Again, Lewis states this clearly: “If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can.’ Nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God.”9
Rational arguments can still be difficult to accept when an experience of terrible suffering falls on an innocent person. I know a young college student who was living alone during summer vacation while she carried out medical research in preparation for a career as a physician. Awakening in the dark of night, she found a strange man had broken into her apartment. With a knife pressed against her throat, he ignored her pleas, blindfolded her, and forced himself on her. He left her in devastation, to relive that experience over and over again for years to come. The perpetrator was never caught.
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The Anglican priest and distinguished physicist John Polkinghorne has referred to this category of event as “physical evil,” as opposed to the “moral evil” committed by humankind. How can it be justified?
Again from Lewis: “We want, in fact, not so much a father in Heaven as a grandfather in Heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘likes to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’ ”10
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
“Every event which might be claimed to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled as well as we can, the philosophical
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As Lewis has written, “God does not shake miracles into nature at random as if from a pepper-caster. They come on great occasions: they are found at the great ganglions of history—not of political or social history, but of that spiritual history which cannot be fully known by men. If your own life does not happen to be near one of those great ganglions, how should you expect to see one?”14
