Is Religion Vs Science A Red Herring - Road to the Middle Class

WHILE WE BATTLE in the public square about whether religious belief can coexist with faith in scientific method, some scientists just go ahead and believe in God anyway. In The New York Times Cornelia Dean looks at the books of three scientists who came to faith. For instance,

In “The Language of God,” Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician.

Of course, Dean also gives us the latest from the religion-and-science-don’t-mix crowd, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon).

Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist. Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be universal among Homo sapiens.

And, as Dean writes, these authors advance their ideas with something like “religious fervor.”

Of course, ever since Kant, we have been in the position where we can’t prove the existence, or non-existence of God. In fact, we can’t even prove the existence of reality. Anyway, they are two different problems.

The problem of reality is the problem of the “is.” How can we know reality, and how reliable is our knowledge? Since Kant we have gradually come to grasp that all we can have is a view of reality that is good until updated.

The problem of God is the problem of the “ought.” What is our purpose; what should we do; what is the meaning of the universe?

To understand the problem of the “ought” we should go to the man who was both a Catholic priest and a top twentieth century physicist: Georges Lemaītre. He was the guy who invented the Big Bang Theory of Creation. It is worth reading what John Farrell writes about him.

Back in the early 1930s, the Nobel Laureate Paul Michael Dirac had a chance to discuss the expanding universe with Lemaītre. Dirac was an atheist, and yet later he recalled, "When I was talking with Lemaītre about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaītre did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion."

Now this is a very disturbing idea, and it cuts across the grain of the usual science vs. religion controversy represented by the books discussed by Cornelia Dean.

What is Lemaītre saying? I would argue that he is saying that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, what it means to be a human. Science and creation are really secondary issues. The big issue is: how should I live my life? That applies both at the immanent level of how to treat the other people in your life, and at the transcendent level of what’s it all about?

In other words, forget arguing about the “is.” Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is a blind alley. The big questions are about the “ought.” And whether God exists or not, each one of us acts and lives our life based upon some faith, conscious or unconscious, in the meaning and the purpose of life.

Very often we act against our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. But that is another story.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Grańa, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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