David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

If moral imperatives are not commanded by God’s will, and if they are not in some sense absolute, then what ought to be is a matter simply of what men and women decide should be. There is no other source of judgment.

What is this if not another way of saying that if God does not exist, everything is permitted ?

These conclusions suggest quite justifiably that in failing to discover the source of value in the world at large, we must in the end retreat to a form of moral relativism, the philosophy of the fraternity house or the faculty dining room—similar environments, after all—whence the familiar declaration that just as there are no absolute truths, there are no moral absolutes.

Of these positions, no one believes the first, and no one is prepared to live with the second.

This is precisely the dilemma in which we find ourselves.

DESPITE THE immense ideological power that it wields, the American scientific establishment has never trusted in its victory over organized religion (or anything else, for that matter). And for obvious reasons. On crucial matters of faith and morals, their margin of victory often seems paper-thin. Members of the National Academy of Sciences are by a large majority persuaded that there is no God, men and women in their millions that there is. Thou, O king, sawest, and beheld a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Those who are religious contemplate this great image and see its head of gold; those who are not see its feet of clay. No division cuts deeper in the United States—or the world—or provokes a greater sense of mutual unease.

Looking thus toward those feet of clay, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens observe that many religious claims do not by the light of contemporary science appear to be true. Did Muhammad fly to Jerusalem on a horse named Borak? What an idea, Hitchens writes, observing alertly that “horses cannot and do not fly.”

Addressing an audience of his Christian readers, Sam Harris asks them to consider the Moslem faith. He is quite certain that if they can find no reason to accept another man’s beliefs, they will be moved at once to reject their own:

“Can you prove that Allah is not the one true God?”

“Can you prove that the Archangel Gabriel did not visit Muhammad in his cave?”

Richard Dawkins is less concerned to reject biblical miracles than to condemn the Deity for his hurtful insensitivity. “The God of the Old Testament,” he writes, “is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

These are, to my way of thinking, striking points in God’s favor, but opinions, I suppose, will vary.

It hardly matters. What is at issue is not so much the character of the Deity but his existence.

And the question I am asking is not whether he exists but whether science has shown that he does not.

Faith, it is said in Hebrews 11.1, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This is an interesting assertion, chaining as it does the concepts of faith, hope, evidence, and appearance. But in a sense, Hebrews 11.1 ratifies a triviality. We can make no sense either of daily life or the physical sciences in terms of things that are seen. The past has gone to the place where the past goes; the future has not arrived. We remember the one; we count on the other. If this is not faith, what, then, is it?

If religious belief places the human heart in the service of an unseen world, the serious sciences have since the great revolution of the seventeenth century done precisely the same thing. Mathematical physics has the narrative shape of a quest; physicists have placed their faith in the idea that deep down the universe is coordinated by a great plan, a rational system of organization, a hidden but accessible scheme, one that when finally seen in all its limpid but austere elegance, will flood the soul with gratitude. “All we [physicists] wish to do,” Gerard ’t Hooft has remarked, “is marvel at Nature’s beauty and simplicity. We have seen and tasted the beauty, simplicity and universality of our latest theories…. We are now trying to uncover more of that. It is our belief that there is more.” Our belief—meaning our faith.

Every scientist since Newton has placed his allegiance in the world beyond the world. In his remarkable treatise The Road to Reality, Roger Penrose quotes a letter from the mathematician Richard Thomas of the Imperial College in London. What is one to make, Penrose asks, of the remarkable, strange, and baffling mathematical results that have appeared in theoretical physics over the past twenty years or so? Thomas’s reply is instructive and it is quite moving. “To a mathematician,” he writes, “these things cannot be coincidence, they must come from a higher reason. And that reason is the assumption that this big mathematical theory describes nature ” (italics added).

Western science is above all the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Curiously enough, while Western science is saturated in faith, Western scientists remain incapable of seeing that faith itself, whether religious or scientific, is inherently vulnerable to doubt. Writing on his blog, the physicist Clifford Johnson observed that “failure is a possibility in any worth-while endeavor.” True enough. It is. He went on to conclude that “this is an important distinction between scientific truth-searching and religious truth-searching where failure is not an option.”

What a universe of careless contempt is expressed by these words. Failure not an option? And in the search for God? The world of sin and suffering is filled with those who have lost their religious faith, or given it up, or found the search impossible to sustain, or seen in pleasure a substitute for prayer, or as the hands of the clock crawled through the dark hours of the night, thought with a certain despair that it would be better not to search, and so not to doubt, and so not to be?

When Kierkegaard wrote about the sickness unto death, he was not remarking on a bronchial infection.

It is wrong, the nineteenth-century British mathematician W. K. Clifford affirmed, “always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” I am guessing that Clifford believed what he wrote, but what evidence he had for his belief, he did not say.

Something like Clifford’s injunction functions as the premise in a popular argument for the inexistence of God. If God exists, then his existence is a scientific claim, no different in kind from the claim that there is tungsten to be found in Bermuda. We cannot have one set of standards for tungsten and another for the Deity. If after scouring Bermuda for tungsten, we cannot find any of the stuff, then we give up on the claim. By parity of reasoning, if it is wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence, and if there is insufficient evidence for the existence of God, then it must be wrong to believe in his existence.