This simple truth, fundamental to all orthodox believing Christians is under attack as perhaps never before. A new wave of anti-theistic writers have, in the last few years, peppered the best-sellers lists with bellicose and rancorous titles such as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett, Letter To A Christian Nation by Sam Harris, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. One of the challenges, both to these books and to a scientific community who seem to be closing ranks against faith in God, at least from the scientific community itself, is the Intelligent Design movement made up of scientists of whom some are Christian and Jewish believers and others who are merely skeptics of what they see has become something of a Darwinist cult in science.
I mentioned a number of months ago here a movie I had seen called, Expelled which outlines this struggle between the iron grip of Dawinist orthodoxy in the greater scientific community, and anyone who for any reason in the slightest challenges that orthodoxy. Prominent in the film is a mathematician and philosopher, trained in Princeton, now living in Paris, by the name of David Berlinski. I found Ben Stein's interview of him in his Paris apartment to be one of the most intriguing and enjoyable parts of the film, so I just read his book, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.
While The Devil's Delusion covers some pretty weighty and even overwhelming material from the standpoint of the layman, such a string theory, multiple universes, and the Anthropic Principle, Berlinski--who by the way is not a believer, but rather describes himself as "a secular Jew...my religious education did not take,"--always keeps the polysyllabic words to a minimum and the writing infused with wit and charm.
There seem to me three main arguments of the book: 1) the spokesmen of scientific orthodoxy are making claims for the settledness of Darwinism and cosmology and invalidation of God's existence and biblical accounts they have no warrant by evidence and logic to make, 2) Darwinists and cosmologists have constructed mathematical houses of cards and castles in the air, then dishonestly claimed that these fantastic inventions explain universal and human origins to the exclusion of God claims, and 3) the universal and human origin claims of orthodox science comprise a belief system just as reliant on faith and devotion to dogma as does theistic religion.
Here are some excerpts from the book that will give you a flavor of Berlinski's humor and reasoning:
(quoting Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg)
"Religion," he affirmed, "is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion" (italics added). In speaking thus, Weinberg was warmly applauded, not one member of his audience asking the question one might have thought pertinent: Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.
On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave. Standing straight, he addressed his executioner. "God is watching what you are doing," he said. And then he was shot dead. What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. As far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all the meaning of a secular society.
In his Letter to a Christian Nation, [Sam] Harris argues that "qualms" about stem-cell research are "obscene," because they are "morally indefensible." And they are morally indefensible because they represent nothing more than "faith-based irrationality." These remarks are typical; they embody a style. And they invite the obvious response. Beyond the fact that it is religiously based, just what makes the religious objection to stem-cell research irrational? Those who find these questions troubling--me, for sure--find them troubling because atheists such as Sam Harris remain so resolutely untroubled by them. His convictions are as tranquil as his face is unlined. That bat squeak of warning that so many religious believers hear when they consider stem-cell research, abortion, or euthanasia sounds at a frequency to which he is insensitive. This is very odd considering that what moral philosophers have called the slippery slope has proven in recent decades to be slippery enough to seem waxed. It is, if anything, more slippery than ever. In 1984, Holland legalized euthanasia. Critics immediately objected that Dutch doctors, having been given the right to kill their elderly patients at their request, would almost at once find reasons to kill patients at their whim. This is precisely what has happened. The Journal of Medical Ethics, in reviewing Dutch hospital practices, reported that 3 percent of Dutch deaths for 1995 were assisted suicides, and that of these, fully one-fourth were involuntary. The doctors simply knocked their patients off, no doubt assuring the family that Grootmoeder would have wanted it that way. As a result, a great many elderly Dutch carry around sanctuary certificates indicating in no uncertain terms that they do not wish their doctors to assist them to die, emerging from their coma, when they are ill, just long enough to tell these murderous pests for heaven's sake to go away. The authors of the study, Henk Jochensen and John Keown, report with some understatement that "Dutch claims of effective regulation ring hollow." Euthanasia, as Dr. Peggy Norris observed with some asperity, "cannot be controlled." If this is so, why is Harris so sure that stem-cell research can be controlled? And if it cannot be controlled, just what is irrational about religious objections to social policies that when they reach the bottom of the slippery slope are bound to embody something Dutch, degraded, and disgusting? How many scientific atheists, I wonder, propose to spend their old age in Holland?
"Everything," the philosopher Alexander Byrne has remarked, "is a natural phenomenon." Quite so. But each of those natural phenomena is, Byrne believes, simply "an aspect of the universe revealed by the natural sciences." If what is natural has been defined in terms of what the natural sciences reveal, no progress in thought has been recorded. If not, what reason is there to conclude that everything is an "aspect of the universe revealed by the natural sciences"? There is no reason at all.
Questions such as this reflect in the end a single point of intellectual incoherence. The thesis that there are no absolute truths--is it an absolute truth? If it is, then some truths are absolute after all, and if some are, why not others? If it is not, just why should we pay it any mind, since its claims on our attention will vary according to circumstances.
Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil Turok: "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws." ...Brandon Carter, Leonard Susskind, and Steven Weinberg understand the question as well. Their answer is the Landscape [their name for the system of multiple universes suggested by some string theory calculations] and the Anthropic Principle [a theory that explains the incredible fine-tuning of the universe that allows the possibility of life--in effect, if the necessities of life are necessary, they must be inevitable]. There are universes in which the electron continues to follow some law, and those in which it does not. In a Landscape in which anything is possible, nothing is necessary. In a universe in which nothing is necessary, chaos in possible. It is nothing that makes the electron follow any laws. Which, then, is it to be: God, logic, or nothing? This is the question to which all discussions of the Landscape and the Anthropic Principle are tending, and because the same question can be raised with respect to moral thought, it is a question with an immense and disturbing intellectual power. For scientific atheists, the question answers itself: Better logic than nothing, and better nothing than God.
At times, Dawkins asserts that God is an irrelevance because He has been assigned the task of constructing a universe that is improbable. If the universe is improbable, "it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable." Why an improbable universe demands an improbable god, Dawkins does not say and I do not know. The difficulty with the arguments--they form a genre--is that they endeavor to reconcile two incompatible tendencies in order to force a dimemma. On the one hand, there is the claim that the universe is improbable; on the other, the claim that God made the universe. Considered jointly, these claims form an unnatural union. Probabilities belong to the world in which things happen because they might, creation to the world in which things happen because they must. We explain creation by appealing to creators, whether deities or the inflexible laws of nature. We explain what is chancy by appealing to chance. We cannot do both. If God did make the world, it is not improbable. If it is improbable, then God did not make it. The best we could say is that God made a world that would be improbable had it been produced by chance.
It is precisely these initial conditions that popular accounts of human evolution cannot supply. We can say of those hunters and gatherers only that they hunted and gathered, and we can say this only because it seems obvious that there was nothing else for them to do. The gene pool that they embodied cannot be recovered. The largest story told by evolutionary psychology is therefore anecdotal. It has no scientific value. We might as well be honest with one another. It has no value whatsoever.
Scientific pretensions indeed.
