David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

An ideological system whose proponents are persuaded that access to the truth is in their hands requires an equally general defense against criticism. As one might expect, it lies close at hand. The sciences, many scientists argue, require no criticism because the sciences comprise a uniquely self -critical institution, with questionable theories passing constantly before stern appellate review. Judgment is unrelenting. And impartial. Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgments are collective. Critics are unneeded, and since they are unneeded, they are not welcome.

A system so conceived always works to the satisfaction of those who have conceived it. In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, the biologist Lewis Wolpert, who is resolutely prepared to dismiss religious thought as superstition, writes that “scientific beliefs are special, and different from any other kind of thinking,” inasmuch as scientific beliefs “are not programmed into our brains.” To say that scientific beliefs are special is to suggest, of course, that only specialists may assess them. To say that religious beliefs are programmed into our brains is to say that like the gag reflex, they cannot be controlled. But if scientific beliefs are not programmed into our brains, why assume that religious beliefs are? And if they are not, why assume that “scientific beliefs are special”?

These questions are rhetorical. No one is disposed to ask them within the scientific community, and the scientific community is not disposed to acknowledge answers to questions it is not disposed to ask.

The idea that we must turn to the sciences in order to assess our religious beliefs owes much to the popular conviction that so long as we are turning, where else are we to turn to ? The proper response is a question in turn. Why turn at all? And if we must turn, why turn in the wrong direction? To ask of the physical sciences that they assess the Incarnation, or any other principle of religious belief, is rather like asking of a powerful Grand Prix racing car that it prove itself satisfactory in doing service as a New York taxicab.

The claim that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific question stands on a destructive dilemma: If by science one means the great theories of mathematical physics, then the demand is unreasonable. We cannot treat any claim in this way. There is no other intellectual activity in which theory and evidence have reached this stage of development.

If, on the other hand, the demand means merely that one should treat the existence of God as the existence of anything would be treated, then we must accept the fact that in life as it is lived beyond mathematical physics, the evidence is fragmentary, lost, partial, and inconclusive. We do what we can. We grope. We see glimmers.

At times, the light. “The very instant I heard my father’s cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition.”

At times, the darkness. “A blank was there instead of it. …Life had become curiously dead and indifferent.”

And as is always the case, someone may be found honest enough to blurt out the truth.

Is there a God who has among other things created the universe? “It is not by its conclusions,” C. F. von Weizsäcker has written in The Relevance of Science, “ but by its methodological starting point that modern science excludes direct creation. Our methodology would not be honest if this fact were denied …such is the faith in the science of our time, and which we all share” (italics added).

In science, as in so many other areas of life, faith is its own reward.

THE COSMOLOGICAL argument emerges from a simple question and its answer.

The question:

What caused the universe?

The answer:

Something.

Some form of this argument has appeared in every human culture. It is universal. For all men, this argument sometimes appears sound, and for some men, always. Is this a surprise? We are talking, after all, about the existence of God, and if the issue were easily decided, we would not be talking. The medieval Arabic argument known as the kalam is an example of the genre.

Its first premise:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

And its second:

The universe began to exist.

And its conclusion:

So the universe had a cause.

This is not by itself an argument for the existence of God. It is suggestive without being conclusive. Even so, it is an argument that in a rush covers a good deal of ground carelessly denied by atheists. It is one thing to deny that there is a God; it is quite another to deny that the universe has a cause. What remains, if the universe does have a cause, is the gap between what brought the universe into existence and traditional conceptions of the deity. This is no trivial matter. Nonetheless, the cosmological argument succeeds in displacing the burden of proof from its starting point (Is there a God?) to a place much later in the argument (Is it right and proper to think that the cause of the universe is God?).

The most powerful statement of the cosmological argument is due to Thomas Aquinas, the largest intellectual personality of the thirteenth century. A master of the high scholastic method—Latin, liturgy, and logic—Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy and the doctrines of the Catholic Church so successfully that to this day, the style of argument adopted by the Vatican represents his influence. Nonetheless, Aquinas is not an easy philosopher to read, and he is not fashionable. This is not a decisive point in his favor, but it is difficult to ignore.

Aquinas was born in 1225 in southern Italy and died fifty years later in a Cistercian monastery in northern Italy. His life coincided with a period of great brilliance in European art, architecture, law, poetry, philosophy, and theology. Commentators who today talk of the dark ages, when faith instead of reason was said ruthlessly to rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance.

Both Aquinas’s intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world. Devoted and obedient, he approached the mansion of the Catholic faith with the confidence of someone sure of his welcome at the door and of his comfort within its rooms. The natural world did not attract his attention. He was not curious. He neither conducted experiments nor imagined that it would be worthwhile to do so. His genius was organizational and logical and even, in its largest aspect, legal. His masterpiece and his monument, the Summa Theologica, contains 38 treatises, and deals with 612 separate questions, subdivided into 3,120 separate sections. In all, the work asks and answers ten thousand questions. It is a cathedral in thought, inviting admiration but not affection. Those who reject atheism still find it difficult to accept Aquinas. He is in his sensibility now alien.

On December 6, 1273, Aquinas, while attending mass, fell into a prolonged and rapturous mystical state. Thereafter, he ceased to write. When urged by officials of the Catholic Church to continue his work on the Summa, which he had left unfinished, he replied, “I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value.”

Aquinas addresses the cosmological argument in Article 3 of Question 2 of the first part of the Summa. Question 2 is called “The Existence of God,” and Article 3 asks the question whether God exists. Aquinas begins by offering a powerful and lucid defense of atheism.