The inconclusive case of scientific atheism
3
Doubt in other world-views: the case of atheism
In the previous chapter, I made an important point that needs to be explored much more thoroughly. Christians tend to think that doubt is a problem for them alone. But it’s not. It’s a problem for any world-view – whether Jewish or Islamic, atheist or religious. Appreciating this point is essential to seeing doubt in its proper perspective. As I used to be an atheist myself, I’m going to explore the place of doubt within atheism.
Most people (including, it has to be said, many atheists themselves!) have the rather simple idea that atheism is about fact, whereas Christianity is about faith. Their ideas are factual; those of Christians are unproven. But it’s not like that. Let me explain by asking a question: can I prove with certainty there is a God? The short answer is ‘no’. If you have time to study the history of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God, you’ll know they are suggestive, but not conclusive. It’s pretty much the universal consensus within philosophy that rational argument doesn’t settle the question of God’s existence, one way or the other. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen makes this point clearly when he writes, ‘To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false...All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists.’ Argument is not going to resolve this question. And that means that the outcome is uncertain for the atheist.
Now let’s pause here, because you need to appreciate something important. Christians often tend to see only one side of that statement – that nobody can rationally prove God exists. But can you see there is another side to it? That nobody can disprove God exists? The Christian who believes in God thus does so as a matter of faith. But can you see the atheist has to do the same? Her belief that there is no God is exactly that – a belief? Because she cannot prove there is no God, her atheism is also a faith.
Atheists don’t like this argument, but it is correct. The simple fact is that when anyone starts making statements about the meaning of life, the existence of God, or whether there is life after death, they are making statements of faith. You can’t prove, either by rational argument or by scientific investigation, what life is all about. Whether you are a Christian or an atheist, you share the same problem. It’s essential you appreciate it’s not just Christians who make these statements as a matter of faith. And because they make these statements as a matter of faith, they are just as vulnerable to doubt as anyone else. We’re all in the same situation.
Let’s explore this a little further, by looking at two important issues: atheist arguments for the non-existence of God, and so-called ‘scientific atheism’, which holds that science disproves God’s existence. Both, as we shall discover, are hopeless overstatements of the real situation.
Atheist arguments against the existence of God
Atheists often tell Christians their faith is infantile. It’s just fine for the minds of impressionable young children, but laughable in the case of adults. We’ve grown up now, and need to move on. Why should we believe things that can’t be scientifically proved? Faith in God, many atheists argue, is just like believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. When you grow up, you grow out of it. And if you don’t, you are either mentally retarded or intellectually dishonest.
But this is just rhetoric – the attempt to discredit a belief by heaping ridicule upon it. In fact, it is this argument itself that is childish. If this simplistic argument has any plausibility, it requires a real analogy between God and Santa Claus to exist – which it clearly doesn’t. There is no serious evidence that people regard God, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as belonging to the same category. I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy when I was about six years old. After being an atheist for some years, I discovered God when I was eighteen, and have never regarded this as some kind of infantile regression. As I noticed while researching my book The Twilight of Atheism, a large number of people come to believe in God in later life – when they are ‘grown up’. I have yet to meet anyone who came to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy late in life! So let’s leave this sort of nonsense behind, and look at a more serious argument atheists often advance.
The most sophisticated atheist arguments against God date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are found in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Although slightly different, there is a common structure to each. Here it is, set out step by step:
Atheists regularly use this kind of argument against Christians, as I have found out in university debates. But let’s look at it in more detail. On closer examination, this argument turns out to be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. We need to make three major points.
1. The argument is circular. It presupposes there is no God. Step (5) depends on step (1). If there was a God, then there would be no delusion, would there? It proves nothing, except that atheism is logically self-sufficient. And so is just about every world-view. The important question is: how well does it relate to the real world? The argument merely restates its presuppositions as its conclusions.
2. It is logically flawed. It is certainly true that nothing exists just because I want it to. I might long to have a pile of £50 notes beside me, so I could pay off some of my debts. But wanting something doesn’t make it happen! We can all agree on that, I think. But – and it is a big ‘but’ – it doesn’t follow that, because I want something, it cannot exist. Do you see this point? Imagine a man who has fallen overboard from a ship. He wants there to be a helicopter to rescue him. So helicopters can’t exist, because he wants them to? Or the specific helicopter already on its way to rescue him cannot exist, because he needs it? Or imagine you feel very thirsty. You need a drink of water. So water can’t exist, because you want it? Or the specific glass of water you are about to drink cannot exist, because you need it just then? It just doesn’t follow. As C. S. Lewis so often pointed out, it looks as if God has made us in such a way that we long for him – and then go on to find him! The desire for God originates from God – and eventually leads to God! So much for the logic of the argument against God.
3. The argument works just as well against atheism. This is a devastating point. The atheist’s argument goes like this: you want there to be a God. So you invent him. Your religious views are invented to correspond to what you want. But imagine an extermination camp commandant during the Second World War. Would there not be excellent reasons for supposing he might hope God does not exist, given what might await him on the day of judgment? And might not his atheism itself be a wish-fulfilment? And as cultural historians have pointed out for many years, based on their analysis of European history from about 1780 to 1980, people often reject the idea of God because they long for autonomy – the right to do what they please, without any interference from God. They don’t need to worry about divine judgment. They reject belief in God because it suits them. That’s what they want. But that doesn’t mean this is the way things really are.
This point was made superbly by the Polish philosopher and writer Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Parodying the old Marxist idea that religion was the ‘opium of the people’, he remarked that a new opium had taken its place – rejection of belief in God because of its implications for our ultimate accountability. ‘A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.’
Atheism thus depends on a core belief that it cannot verify. Do you see the importance of this point? Atheists live out their lives on the basis of the belief that there is no God, believing this is right, but not being able to prove it conclusively. Hardly surprisingly, atheists have tried to buttress their beliefs in other ways. One of them is to appeal to the natural sciences. These, we are told with great confidence by atheists, have disproved belief in God. But is this really the case?
The inconclusive case of scientific atheism
Modern times have seen many atheist scientists insist that science has eliminated belief in God. The Oxford zoologist and atheist propagandist Richard Dawkins is a good example of this kind of writer. His simplistic overstatements are regularly criticized by other scientists as representing a serious abuse of the scientific method. The simple truth is that the natural sciences neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. So we either have to give up this discussion as meaningless, or settle it on other grounds.
You will have no problem finding writers who talk about the ‘limitless powers of science’ to explain things, or who argue that only scientific knowledge can be taken seriously. Here is the British atheist writer Bertrand Russell on this point: ‘Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’ Yet this is a ludicrous overstatement. First, it is not actually a scientific statement, so it disqualifies itself from being true knowledge! Yet more seriously, it would mean that we can never answer questions about the meaning of life, even from an atheist perspective – something Russell seems to overlook.
Yet science has its limits. That’s no criticism of science, by the way – just a recognition of its boundaries. Within those boundaries, it is highly competent. But outside them, it cannot deliver the simple answers some have hoped for. Sir Peter Medawar, who won a Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery of acquired immunological tolerance, was well aware of the limits of science. His words deserve to be pondered:
The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as ‘How did everything begin?’; ‘What are we all here for?’; ‘What is the point of living?’
The point is clear: science is wonderful when it comes to discovering the chemical structure of planetary atmospheres, the cause of cancer, or finding a cure for blood poisoning. But can it tell us why we are here? Or whether there is a God or not? No. It has its limits. And those who insist – quite wrongly – that science demands or necessitates or proves atheism have some serious explaining to do. Let’s hear Sir Peter again:
There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and upon his profession than roundly to declare – particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for – that science knows, or soon will know, the answers to all questions worth asking, and that questions which do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or ‘pseudo-questions’ that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.
Let’s be clear about this. It is perfectly possible to interpret the natural sciences in atheistic, theistic and agnostic ways. The sciences can be ‘spun’ in ways making them support disbelief in God, belief in God, or scepticism. But the sciences demand none of these interpretations. Stephen Jay Gould, widely regarded as America’s greatest evolutionary biologist before his recent death from cancer, was no religious believer. But he was adamant that his own religious scepticism could not be derived from the sciences:
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.
Gould rightly insists science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God. And those who argue it disproves God have just lost the plot, imposing their atheism on a neutral science.
God is simply not an empirical hypothesis that can be checked out by the scientific method. As Stephen Jay Gould and others have insisted, the natural sciences are not capable of adjudicating, negatively or positively, on the God-question. It lies beyond their legitimate scope. There is simply no logically watertight means of arguing from observation of the world to the existence, or non-existence of God. This has not stopped people from doing so, as a casual survey of writings on both sides of the question indicates. But it does mean these ‘arguments’ are suggestive, and nothing more. The grand idea that atheism is the only option for a thinking person has long since passed away, being displaced by a growing awareness of the limitations placed on human knowledge, and an increased expectation of humility in the advocation of religious choices.
Two major surveys of the religious beliefs of scientists, carried out at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, bear witness to a highly significant trend. One of the most widely held beliefs within atheist circles has been that, as the beliefs and practices of the ‘scientific’ world-view became increasingly accepted within Western culture, the number of practising scientists with any form of religious beliefs would dwindle to the point of insignificance. A survey of the religious views of scientists, undertaken in 1916, showed that about 40% of scientists had some form of personal religious beliefs. At the time, this was regarded as shocking, even scandalous. The survey was repeated in 1996, and showed no significant reduction in the proportion of scientists holding such beliefs, which seriously challenges the popular notion of the relentless erosion of religious faith within the profession. The survey cuts the ground from under those who argue the natural sciences are necessarily atheistic. Of those questioned, 40% had active religious beliefs, 40% had none (and can thus legitimately be regarded as atheist), and 20% were agnostic.
The stereotype of the necessarily atheist scientist lingers in Western culture at the dawn of the third millennium. It has its uses, and continues to surface in the rehashed myths of the intellectual superiority of atheism over its rivals. The truth, as might be expected, is far more complex and considerably more interesting.
The point of these reflections is obvious. Any world-view – atheist, Islamic, Jewish, Christian or whatever – ultimately depends on assumptions that cannot be proved. Every house is built on foundations, and the foundations of world-views are not ultimately capable of being proved in every respect. Everyone who believes anything significant or worthwhile about the meaning of life does so as a matter of faith. We’re all in the same boat. And once you realize this, doubt seems a very different matter. It’s not a specifically Christian problem – it’s a universal human problem. And that helps to set it in its proper perspective.