Gunning for God (8 page)

I am well aware, of course, that the New Atheists claim that faith is not only a delusion; it is a pernicious delusion that has led to horrific violence and acts of terror like 9/11, an event that helped spark off the New Atheist protest. We shall look at this accusation in detail in Chapter 2. First, however, we need to think about the relationship of faith to science.

FAITH AND SCIENCE

As we have seen, the New Atheists regard faith as a peculiarly religious term (which it isn’t) and they define it to be belief without evidence (which it isn’t). This inevitably leads them to another serious error — thinking that neither atheism nor science involves faith. Yet the irony is that atheism is a “faith position”, and science itself cannot do without faith. Dawkins’ statement, quoted earlier, that “atheists have no faith”,
⁵⁶
seems doubly silly since, in common with all other scientists, he could not engage in science without
believing in (having faith in)
the rational intelligibility of the universe. Nor could he do science without
believing
in the evidence presented to him. He even says so himself, as we pointed out earlier: “Scientific
belief
[italics mine] is based upon publicly checkable evidence.”
⁵⁷
Faith, then, lies at the heart of science.

After all, the goal of science, as most scientists see it, is not to impose on the matter and workings of the universe our human sense of order; but to unveil and discover the universe’s own order and intelligibility. That means, of course, that scientists have always had to
assume
, before they started their investigations, that the universe does have an inherent order and intelligibility. If they didn’t believe that such order and intelligibility existed, scientific research would never discover them, and their work would be fruitless and pointless.

Physicist Paul Davies, though not a theist, says that the right scientific attitude is essentially theological: “Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.” He points out that “even the most atheistic scientist accepts
as an act of faith
[italics mine] the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us”.
⁵⁸
Albert Einstein famously said:

Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason.
I cannot imagine a scientist without that profound faith
[italics mine]. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
⁵⁹

Richard Dawkins is allergic to believers in God citing Einstein, as if Einstein belonged to them. He makes a great fuss about it near the beginning of
The God Delusion
, saying that Einstein “was repeatedly indignant at being called a theist”. Dawkins, although he classifies Einstein as an atheistic scientist,
⁶⁰
appears to come down on the side of Einstein being a pantheist, because of his sympathy with Spinoza. Yet the very book that Dawkins cites as his source gives a very different impression.
⁶¹
Einstein himself explicitly stated: “I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist.”
⁶²
Therefore, though it is true that Einstein said that he did not believe in a personal God, Dawkins is clearly not entitled to claim him as an atheist.

Furthermore, we certainly don’t find Dawkins urging us, as Einstein did, to recognize that:

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe — a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve.
⁶³

The main point I wish to gain from citing Einstein, however, is that he evidently did not suffer from the New Atheist delusion that all faith is blind faith. Einstein speaks of the “profound faith” of the scientist in the rational intelligibility of the universe. He could not imagine a scientist without it. So, while Dawkins may not classify Einstein as a theist, he (Dawkins) must share in that profound faith that Einstein had — otherwise Einstein would probably not classify him (Dawkins) as a scientist.

This talk of faith in a scientific context jars with the New Atheists, since it just does not fit in with their idiosyncratic concept of faith. They are determined to keep the concept of faith out of science, with disastrous results. One example of this is an article by philosopher A. C. Grayling (whose misreading of the “doubting Thomas” story is, incidentally, a worthy companion to Baggini’s). Grayling chose the title “No, science does not ‘rest on faith’”
⁶⁴
for his first article as a columnist in the
New Scientist
. Grayling does not seem to have read Einstein, let alone to have understood him. He rather appears to have swallowed the New Atheists’ blind-faith-meme, hook, line, and sinker. He contrasts the scientific method with faith, as he understands it: “Making well-motivated evidence-based assumptions that are in turn supported by their efficacy in testing predictions is the very opposite of faith. Faith is commitment to belief in something either in the absence of evidence or in the face of countervailing evidence.”

This sounds like Baggini all over again. Grayling’s first assertion is correct, provided only that he begs the question by defining faith as he does in his second assertion. However, it is easy to think of a series of scenarios where the terms “belief” and “faith” are used in a positive sense. Scientists believe (have faith in) in Newton’s laws
⁶⁵
or the genetic basis for heredity, because they are backed by evidence based on observation and experimentation. And that faith in turn springs from their faith in the scientific method, one aspect of which Grayling, in complete self-contradiction, has just described as being the “opposite of faith”. After all, as we saw earlier, making well-motivated, evidence-based
assumptions
is just how faith is normally exercised — think of how you get your bank manager to trust you; or the basis for your decision to board an aircraft.

Faith, therefore, is essential to science. Indeed, even after all their successes, if scientific research is thought to be still worth pursuing, scientists have to
believe in
the rational intelligibility of the universe as their fundamental
article of faith
or
basic assumption
. Scientists are all people of faith, in the sense that they
believe
that the universe is accessible to the human mind. And, as my teacher of quantum mechanics at Cambridge, Professor Sir John Polkinghorne, points out: “physics is powerless to explain its faith [note his explicit use of the word] in the mathematical intelligibility of the universe”, for the simple reason that you cannot begin to do physics without believing in that intelligibility.

Furthermore, the behaviour of elementary particles presents us with quantum phenomena that, for the moment, outstrip our reason, intuition, and powers of imagination. Various theories are proposed; none is universally accepted. The same is true of human consciousness: no one yet understands it and no theory has produced general agreement. In this situation, for research to continue, it requires faith not only in the order and intelligibility of nature, but faith that nature’s intelligibility will not peter out into unintelligible chaos (though, for all we know, a level of intelligibility might be involved that is higher than any we can grasp at present). Thus, faith in something that has not yet been proved still is, as it has always been, a prerequisite for scientific investigation of the universe. Shall we therefore accuse science of irrationality? Of course not!

FAITH, EVIDENCE, AND PROOF

The reader will have noticed that the word “proof” has not been used in this chapter until now. One reason for this is the confusion that exists about the meaning of proof. In my own field of pure mathematics, “proof” has a rigorous meaning, so that when one mathematician says to another “Prove it”, they expect to be presented with a watertight argument proceeding from accepted axioms via accepted rules of logic to a conclusion that she can expect also to be accepted by all mathematicians. There is no degree of tentativeness — if you cannot prove the result rigorously, you do not publish.
⁶⁶

This does not mean, of course, that mistakes are never made; but these are usually weeded out very rapidly, especially if the result is of considerable interest. There are also problematic areas in certain extreme special cases as to what, precisely, constitutes a proof — can we, for instance, accept as valid a proof that involves 10,000 pages of argument and is only understood by a handful of experts?
⁶⁷

What is important for us here is that such mathematically rigorous proof is not available in any other discipline or area of experience, not even in the so-called “hard” sciences. There we find another, less formal use of the word “proof” akin to the use of the term by lawyers when they speak of “proof beyond reasonable doubt”, by which they mean that there is evidence strong enough to convince a reasonable person that a certain claim is true. I shall try here not to use the word “proof” to avoid such ambiguities and will speak rather of the strength of evidence that warrants a given conclusion.

This does not mean, however, that everything is equally tentative, that we can be certain of nothing, or that we can come to no conclusions. On the contrary, although we cannot speak of absolute certainty, there are many situations in which we think that there is sufficient evidence for us to trust even our lives to other people — pilots and surgeons, for instance. I cannot mathematically “prove” to you that my wife loves me. However, with the cumulative evidence of over forty years of marriage, I would stake my life on it. There are things, then, in all of our lives that we regard as beyond reasonable doubt and we confidently place our faith in them.

FAITH IN GOD, AND THE HUMAN COGNITIVE FACULTY

In light of our analysis of the nature of faith, Michel Onfray’s view seems as patronizing as it is false: “Better the faith that brings peace of mind than the rationality that brings worry — even at the price of perpetual mental infantilism.”
⁶⁸
It is a classic example of the universalized false antithesis that abounds in New Atheist literature. It is also an insult to some of the greatest (scientific) minds in the world. Are we really to think that Francis Collins, Director of the US National Institute of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project, is locked into a “perpetual mental infantilism”; that American Nobel prize-winning physicist William Phillips is somehow cerebrally challenged; that Sir John Houghton FRS, who was in succession Professor of Physics at Oxford, Director of the British Meteorological Office, and Head of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), is a deluded faith-head? According to the New Atheists they must be, for they are convinced Christians.

In the same vein as Onfray, Dawkins opines that scientists who believe in God are “the subject of amused bafflement to their peers in the academic community”.
⁶⁹
I must say that this is far from my experience; and in any case it is a strange way for a member of the scientific academy to talk about his fellows. There does not seem to be any realization on the part of the academics among the New Atheists that, by the same token, they also might be candidates for the amused bafflement of at least some of their colleagues, who may just be tempted to think that atheism sits ill with their professed scientific rationality. One of the great ironies is that it is not faith in God in general and Christianity in particular that sit ill with rationality and science; it is the New Atheism that ought to feel uncomfortable in their presence. By its reductionist explanation of all aspects of the universe in terms of unguided natural processes, the New Atheism cuts off at its root the very rationality on which science rests, and in which scientists must trust to come to their conclusions. To see this, let us ask the following question.

ON WHAT EVIDENCE DO SCIENTISTS BASE THEIR FAITH IN THE RATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE UNIVERSE?

The first thing to notice is that human reason did not create the universe (unless we are extreme idealists — a position that has not endeared itself to many scientists). This point is so obvious that at first it might seem trivial; but actually it is of fundamental importance when we come to assess the validity of our cognitive faculties. Not only did human beings not create the universe, but we did not create our own powers of reason either. By using our rational faculties we can develop them; but we did not originate them. How can it be, then, that what goes on in our tiny heads can give us anything near to a true account of reality? How can it be that a mathematical equation, thought up in the human mind of a mathematician, can correspond to the workings of the universe out there? It was reflection on this idea that led Einstein to say: “The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Similar reflection stimulated physics Nobel Prizewinner Eugene Wigner to write a famous paper entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”
⁷⁰