6. The legitimacy of faith: proof, justification and intelligibility
The legitimacy of faith: proof, justification and intelligibility
Is it reasonable to believe in God? What reasons might be given for holding that Christianity offers a reliable way of looking at things? These are important questions in their own right, which have grown more significant recently on account of the strident attacks on the rationality of faith made by leading representatives of the New Atheism, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. These writers often appeal to science as an exemplary case of rigorous evidence-based thinking, which is contrasted with an intellectually flaky and evidentially underdetermined religious faith.1
Yet in science, the criterion of a justified or motivated belief is not whether it conforms to rational preconceptions of what things ought to be like but whether this is what the evidence requires. At times that evidence may be compelling; at others it may be ambivalent, pointing in a number of possible directions. In this chapter, we shall explore some of the questions that arise about the intellectual legitimacy of beliefs in science and theology.
Evidence and rationality
One of the reasons why science is so successful is that it is based on evidence. The first question a scientist will ask about any theory or hypothesis is not going to be whether this is reasonable but whether the evidence requires it. What reasons could be given for thinking that this is right? Science is about trying to work out the rationality of the universe, not about forcing the universe to fit in to our own way of thinking. The rationality of the universe is something that needs to be investigated and discovered empirically, not invented by armchair philosophers.
One of the greatest barriers to scientific progress is that people have predetermined ideas about what reality should be like – as in the case of Aristotle’s influential idea that heavier bodies fell to earth more quickly than lighter ones.2 The first great enemy of science is not religion but a dogmatic rationalism, which limits reality to what reason determines to be acceptable. This simply locks us into the very narrow world of what reason is able to prove. And the universe seems to have a rationality that we can investigate, describe and represent – even though it sometimes seems to bear little relation to what human common sense is inclined to believe.
I began to study quantum theory at Oxford University in 1971. It was a specialist option within Oxford’s chemistry curriculum. To put it mildly, it was very challenging. Part of the difficulty was that molecular quantum mechanics made very significant mathematical demands of me. But the main issue was that it was very counterintuitive. It was as if this level of reality had its own rationality, which bore little relation to the everyday world I inhabited.3 I soon learned what any good scientist takes for granted: that our knowledge of the world ought to arise from our encounter with reality, not our preconceived ideas about what reality ought to be like. We have to accommodate our reasoning to the way the world is, rather than use our reasoning to lay down in advance what the world ought to be like.
So what is the role of evidence in this? In his influential essay ‘The Ethics of Belief’, the English mathematician William K. Clifford (1845–79) argued that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’.4 Nobody was justified in believing anything that was argumentatively or evidentially underdetermined. It’s a fair point and he has my sympathy. But just what does Clifford mean by ‘insufficient evidence’? Who decides when there is enough evidence to justify a belief?
Clifford seems to think there is some natural criterion of acceptability built into the fabric of the universe. Yet every criterion we use in evaluating evidence is simply a human convention, a rule of thumb that has been adopted because it seems to work well enough. As the philosopher of science Joseph Rouse points out, there are ‘no generally applicable standards of rational acceptability in science’. Rather, there is a ‘roughly shared understanding’ of certain procedures, which ultimately reflects ‘the judgments of a community concerning what is credible and reliable in the context of their ongoing work’.5
It’s significant that Clifford’s essay is regularly included in published collections of texts that are critical of religion but never in books about the scientific method. It’s not hard to work out why. Clifford’s ideas are aspirational – but they are difficult to apply to the real world, in that they fail to reflect the realities of scientific practice. It’s a naïve and hopelessly outdated form of verificationism that holds that science proves its beliefs by overwhelming evidence. Curiously, given its obvious failings, Richard Dawkins takes a similar view:
[Faith] is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn’t matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence, then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway.6
It seems so neat and simple. And it’s clearly what lots of people would like to be true. But things turn out to be much more complicated than this.
I used to think this way myself. It seemed obvious to me that science proved its beliefs; and once they were proved to be true there was no going back. Once a belief had been scientifically authenticated it became a fact – such as ‘the chemical formula for water is H2O’. Now there’s some truth in this. But only some. There’s a limit to what science can prove. All too often observations are open to multiple interpretations and there’s not enough evidence to decide which is right.
Dawkins seems to think that religious faith is something that arises in ‘the total absence of supporting evidence’, whereas science is all about accepting something as true because of compelling evidence. Or to put it another way, religious faith is based on 0 per cent evidential support whereas science is based on 100 per cent. Yet every scientist knows that reality is much more messy and fuzzy than Dawkins allows. What about the situations in which we have to make a decision in ‘the total absence of supporting evidence’; in other words, where the evidence might be 53 per cent – assuming of course that we can quantify this reliably – not 100 per cent? Time after time, scientists have to make judgements about which is the best among a number of possible interpretations of evidence.
Let’s look at a classic case study: Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, first set out in his On the Origin of Species (1859). The phenomenon of biological evolution had, of course, already gained acceptance in many quarters. Darwin’s distinct contribution was to offer a theory of how evolution took place – a theory we now know as ‘natural selection’. Darwin was convinced that his theory was right. He was, however, also quite clear that the evidence was less than compelling and that there were lots of loose ends and unresolved problems that needed to be sorted out (a matter to which we shall return in a later chapter).
A crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader. Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered; but, to the best of my judgement, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to my theory.7
Yet if Dawkins and Clifford were right, Darwin had made his judgement on the basis of ‘insufficient’ evidence. Darwin himself believed that the evidence was supportive of his theory but that it would not compel his readers to believe it. We’ll look at Darwin in more detail later (see pp. 135–43), as this point merits closer discussion and expansion. But Darwin believed – and, I suggest, believed rightly – that he was entitled to trust and accept his theory, despite its problems.
Clifford’s approach was criticized by the psychologist William James (1842–1910) in his famous 1897 essay ‘The Will to Believe’. We all, James argues, need what he terms ‘working hypotheses’ to make sense of our experience of the world.8 These working hypotheses often lie beyond total proof yet are accepted and acted upon because they are found to offer reliable and satisfying standpoints from which to engage the real world. For James, faith is a particular form of belief that is pervasive in everyday life. Everyone, whether religious or otherwise, has to make judgements that go beyond the available evidence – for example, in deciding which of several rival theories is the most likely to be right.
Let’s look more closely at the question of how scientists judge between rival theories. At present, the dominant theory of how we decide which theory is best is known as ‘inference to the best explanation’.9 Basically, this theory lines up the observational evidence and asks how this stacks up in the light of the various ways of explaining it. A number of criteria are generally used to assess these rival theories, including simplicity, degree of fit, fruitfulness and comprehensiveness. Often scientists are forced to make probability judgements – this theory is ‘probably’ the best. Yet there is no agreement on the weighting or priority of the various criteria to be used in choosing the best theory. The language of faith makes perfect sense in science: a scientist believes that a certain theory is right, for good reasons – but, like Darwin, can’t prove it. This is not about being irrational or believing whatever you like. It is a recognition that a principled engagement with evidence often leaves us unable to decide on its best explanation with total conviction.
Evidence and theory
When confronted with a mass of observations, the scientist’s fundamental instinct is to try and work out what big picture, or theory, makes the most sense of them. This way of thinking is often referred to as ‘induction’. Once evidence has been accumulated, the search begins for a hypothesis that might explain these observations. Induction is a method that is fundamentally about comparing theories with observations and privileging those theories that appear to afford a significant degree of empirical fit. The real test of whether a theory is to be taken seriously is its elegance, simplicity and coherence in the face of the many observations it must show are somehow connected together as integral parts of a big picture.
The American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914) described the process of searching for an explanation of observations as ‘abduction’.10 Sometimes this search for a way of seeing things that fitted in observations naturally and persuasively arose from intense rational reflection; sometimes by what I can only describe as creative imaginative leaps.
A classic example of such an approach lies behind August Kekulé’s bold and original idea that the chemical benzene possessed a cyclical structure, first set out in a French article of 1865 and then a German one of 1866. Kekulé did not explain the ‘logic of discovery’ lying behind this idea at that time, although his subsequent work provided an extensive ‘logic of justification’ for the ring structure of benzene.
Yet in 1890, at a celebration marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of this by then widely accepted suggestion, Kekulé spoke of how this idea came to him. Perhaps because his reputation was by then beyond reproach, he was able to tell his astonished audience of the unorthodox manner by which he developed the idea in the first place.11 He had a dream of a snake chasing its own tail, which suggested to him, in what appears to have been a series of intuitive leaps, that benzene essentially consisted of a core ring of six interconnected carbon atoms. But while the origins of Kekulé’s theory of the structure of benzene might indeed be somewhat speculative, the fact remains that when it was checked out against the evidence, it seemed to work. The manner of its derivation might seem somewhat unorthodox; the manner of its verification, however, was perfectly clear – and ultimately persuasive.
Theories can be assessed in two ways. First, we might ask what reasons might be offered for suggesting they are true. Second, we might ask how successful they are in interpreting the world around us and what we experience within it. These are two quite different approaches. The first considers the evidence that leads us to develop a theory; the second considers how well the theory makes sense of reality – in effect, inviting us to imagine what the world would look like if the theory was right, and comparing this with what we actually see. Ideally, a theory is both evidenced and evidencing – that is, combining both approaches.
But not all scientific theories have this kind of evidential foundation. The classic example is string theory, which is often criticized for lacking any evidential foundation.12 Its supporters would generally concede this point but argue in response that the theory’s capacity to explain the structuring of the universe points towards its truth. In other words, its claims to truth rest on its capacity to make sense of things, not on evidence that leads to its derivation in the first place.
There’s another point here. What really matters is the ability of a theory as a whole to make sense of the world. This point was stressed by the philosopher W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), who argued that all of our beliefs are linked in an interconnected web that relates to sensory experience at its boundaries, not at its core. The only valid test of a belief, Quine argued, is whether it fits into a web of connected beliefs that accords with our experience on the whole.13 As we shall see (see p. 112), G. K. Chesterton made much the same point when he pointed out that it was not any individual aspect of Christianity that was persuasive but the overall big picture of reality that it offered.
Going beyond evidence
Let’s develop an issue that has been important in recent debates between Christians and atheists. Is it rational to believe in something that lies beyond our experience? Why not just limit ourselves to what we experience and encounter in the world? It’s a great question. Science is all about observing the world. The movement known as Logical Positivism took the view that this was all that could be done. Science was basically about accumulating uninterpreted observations of the world and developing general summaries of these observations. The philosopher Otto Neurath (1882–1945) argued that science took the form of ‘protocol statements’ that set out, as precisely as possible, what had been observed. This proved to be much more difficult than anticipated. Here’s one: ‘the sun rose at Oxford at 6.25 a.m. on Tuesday, October 13, 1953’. This is factually correct. But it is not strictly an observation statement, as it implicitly assumes that the sun revolves around the earth. Since Copernicus, we would really need to restate this as ‘the sun appeared to rise above the horizon at 6.25 a.m. to an observer in Oxford on Tuesday, October 13, 1953’.
The real problem, however, is this. What happens if our observations suggest the existence of certain entities that we cannot see? Physics may have begun with a naïve realism; it has, however, achieved its greatest triumphs by going beyond the observable, in a leap of imagination that goes beyond what can be seen. Isaac Newton, for example, found himself compelled to believe in the notion of gravity – something that could not be detected through any human sensory capacity. Why? Because his observations of the patterns of behaviour of falling objects on earth and the motion of the planets around the sun could all be explained if there existed some intrinsic capacity on the part of one object to attract another (‘gravitational attraction’). Although he was deeply uneasy about this notion, it seemed to work well in calculating planetary orbits.14 Others, however, such as the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), were critical of such an unevidenced and counterintuitive notion.
A related issue arises in connection with ‘dark matter’. The problem here is that theoretical calculations of the mass of the universe don’t match those that arise from observation. For this reason, the notion of dark matter was proposed. Basically, it is material that is believed really to be there (indeed, it would make up the vast bulk of the universe); it’s just that it can’t be seen. Again we see the same pattern: something that cannot be observed is proposed on the basis of an interpretation of what is observed. This is not irrational; it’s simply an expanded view of the universe, driven partly by the theoretical framework we use to interpret that universe – a framework, of course, that emerges in the process of encountering and interpreting our world. It’s a scientific commonplace that we ‘see’ the world through theoretical spectacles.
For Christians, God is the best explanation of the world we see around us and what we experience within us. We don’t believe in God because we have abandoned rationality but because we see God as both the source and the ultimate goal of human reason. Most of the great writers of the patristic age – including Athanasius of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo – made this point. God created us with reason in order that our reason might lead us to God, just as following a stream eventually leads us to its source.
Yet most Christians would want to supplement this analysis, arguing that this God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ; that God became observable in history – and those observations and their interpretations are passed down to us through the New Testament writers.15 The empirical basis of both New Testament Christology and indeed the Christian faith could be summarized like this:
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it.
(1 John 1.1–2)
That’s why so many Christians believe in God because of Jesus of Nazareth.16 There is a tangible and observable connection between God and the world – a theme often developed in terms of ‘natural theology’, to which we shall return in Chapter 10.
The provisionality of scientific knowledge
One of the things I love about science is its willingness to change its mind. Sometimes it gets things wrong and it corrects itself in the light of the evidence. It sets out to find the best way of seeing things, free from any kind of ideological pressure. The scientific method rests on a willingness to compare what we observe and experience with multiple alternative theories – not just the one we already accept but others that might turn out to be better. This means that what one generation firmly believed to be right a later one may reject as wrong (even if it was wrong for understandable reasons). Science is on a journey and has not yet reached its final destination. That means that things are in a state of flux. It’s an unsettling thought, especially for those who prefer to think of science in terms of a fixed set of ‘scientific’ results, rather than as a method whose application leads to ideas that change over time.
There are lots of examples from the history of science – some of them quite recent – that help us appreciate this point. Scientists used to think that the universe always existed, and would have dismissed the idea of its having an origin as some kind of weird religious notion. Now it’s easy to dismiss them as fools. Yet before about 1800 there was no evidence available that would have made anyone think otherwise. In 1890, the great British physicist Lord Kelvin (1820–1907) calculated the age of the earth, based on his estimates on heat transfer within the earth itself and from the sun to the earth. His conclusion was dramatic and controversial. The earth, he declared, was about 100 million years old.17 Kelvin’s ideas were taken up enthusiastically by some of the celebrities of his day, such as Mark Twain, as science’s latest discovery. Such was his reputation that other scientists felt they had to fall into line with his ideas.
Yet Kelvin was wrong. His estimates were only as good as the mathematical models on which they were based. He made assumptions about the rate of cooling of the earth and its internal structures that are now known to be wrong. He didn’t know about things like plate tectonics, radioactivity or the process of nuclear fusion that generates the heat of the sun.
Most scientists consider the biggest theory-change in science to be the recognition that the universe had an origin. Before the First World War, the scientific consensus was that the universe had always existed. In 1908, the great Swedish physicist Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927), winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry, wrote a bestseller arguing for a self-perpetuating universe without a beginning or an end: ‘The Universe in its essence has always been what it is now. Matter, energy, and life have only varied as to shape and position in space.’18
This is no longer the scientific consensus. A steady body of evidence built up from the 1920s onwards, pointing to the universe being in a state of expansion resulting from some primordial cosmic fireball that we call the Big Bang.19 This now represents the scientific consensus. Within one hundred years, the scientific understanding of the universe thus altered radically. In 1918, the consensus was that it was eternal; now the consensus is that it came into being. That’s a massive change. It met with resistance from many scientists, for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, some resisted the idea because it sounded ‘religious’. The theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, for example, once supported the ‘steady state’ model of the universe, as he found it easy to reconcile with his atheism. In 1967, he remarked that ‘the steady state theory is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis’. He then reluctantly added a cautionary comment: ‘It is a pity that the steady state theory is contradicted by experiment.’20
The key point is that science offers a method for investigating reality, not a permanent fixed body of doctrines about the world. As the astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–96) pointed out, science ‘counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts’.21 It’s a constant process of reflection and revision, sometimes based on new evidence, sometimes on finding better ways of explaining what is already known. But it’s never static. That’s why ‘radical theory change’ is hardwired into the scientific enterprise.
Yet scientific provisionality is a deeply unsettling idea, especially for naïve observers of science who think it’s all about establishing eternally valid truths that can never be contradicted or challenged. The Hungarian chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) wrote his landmark work Personal Knowledge to explain how he could commit himself to what he believed scientifically to be true, while knowing that it might well turn out to be wrong. Richard Dawkins, who regards Darwinism as central to his atheist faith and outreach, is nevertheless clear that this theory is provisional, something that may be subject to radical change: ‘We must acknowledge the possibility that new facts may come to light that will force our successors of the twenty-first century to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.’22
So does this mean that science is locked into some kind of relativism? Is it condemned to offer us insights we cannot trust? The best answer to these important yet troubling questions is that science is committed to finding the best way of understanding and explaining our universe in an ongoing process of research and reflection. As time progresses, new evidence is uncovered and new ways of making sense of it emerge. Yet a good new theory always includes what is best from older theories.
The entanglement of theory and observation
For New Atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, rational human beings just think, where religious people think in the light of their religious commitments – and so are locked inside a religious world view that is impervious to criticism. Both these writers are firmly grounded in the core beliefs of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which held that it was possible to think without any encumbrances or hidden influences and saw religion as a form of intellectual servitude. The New Atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling argued that theological reasoning was unacceptable to a rational person because it was undertaken within ‘the premises and parameters’ of a system.23
It’s an interesting point and gives us a helpful insight into the thoroughly outdated assumptions of the New Atheism. Most of us – especially scientists – would argue that all human thinking is elaborated within ‘the premises and parameters’ of some system or other, including mathematics and logic. Observation and interpretation intertwine in an inescapable circularity. We see this in science: a theory interprets experiments; yet experiments confirm or disconfirm a theory. Grayling is a wonderful witness to a bygone vision of rationality that was plausible in the eighteenth century but seems hopelessly out of place today. We’ve moved on and we now know things aren’t that simple.
Let’s ask Grayling a question: How old is the universe? I assume he would respond with the conventional answer – roughly 14 billion years. But how do we know this? If Grayling were to give me that answer, why is it believed to be right? After all, it’s not as if someone started a stopwatch the moment that Big Bang happened, so that we can just read off the age of the universe directly. Rather, we observe certain parameters – such as the speeds and distances of galaxies – that are then interpreted within ‘the premises and parameters’ of contemporary physical theories to yield the age of the universe.
Scientists see this as a classic example of the entanglement of observation and theory. To make things even more complicated, the speeds and distances of those galaxies are not observed directly but are inferred on the basis of ‘the premises and parameters’ of additional physical theories – such as the correlation between velocity and the Doppler red-shift.24 Grayling’s account of scientific knowledge seems to be trapped in the eighteenth century, when people thought things were much simpler.
A much more reliable and informed account of the situation is found in the writings of John Polkinghorne, who has clearly grasped the predicament in which we as human beings find ourselves, and the limited extent to which we can resolve this dilemma: ‘Experience and interpretation intertwine in an inescapable circularity. Even science cannot wholly escape this dilemma (theory interprets experiments; experiments confirm or disconfirm theories).’25
The rationality of faith
Up to this point we have focused on scientific rationality, noting how simple popular stereotypes of scientific knowledge are severely inadequate. So in what sense is Christianity rational? The whole issue of making sense of reality is deeply embedded within both the natural sciences and the Christian faith. Indeed, if I might offer a personal perspective, one factor that led me decisively away from my youthful atheism to Christianity was my growing realization that the Christian faith made far more sense of what I saw around me and experienced within me than its atheist alternatives. Christian faith may, like its moral and political counterparts, go beyond what is logically demonstrable; nevertheless, it is clearly capable of rational motivation.
Yet there is more to Christianity than making sense of things. We can hardly overlook its emphasis on the existentially transformative nature of salvation, nor the rich experience of beauty and awe so often evoked in Christian worship. However, the intellectual capaciousness of faith cannot be overlooked, not least because it is so important to any attempt to make sense of the world. Earlier we noted how the Harvard psychologist William James suggested that we all end up making judgements on the basis of faith when the evidence is not compelling. James saw religious faith as fitting into this general pattern. For James, this was to be seen as a ‘faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained’.26
A similar approach is developed by Michael Polanyi, who offered one of the most penetrating accounts of the philosophical implications and consequences of the scientific method. Polanyi argued that the scientist’s pursuit of discovery was guided by ‘sensing the presence of a hidden reality toward which our clues are pointing’.27 Polanyi’s insight is borne out in the history of science. We have already noted Isaac Newton’s conviction that there was a common ‘hidden reality’ lying behind the motions of bodies on earth and the movement of the planets round the sun. Newton called this invisible, intangible, hidden reality ‘gravity’.
Now we need to be clear that the rational aspects of Christianity can be overemphasized. Like Dorothy L. Sayers, unquestionably one of the finest lay theologians of the twentieth century, I have come to the view that Christianity offers ‘the only explanation of the universe that is intellectually satisfactory’.28 Yet Sayers sometimes wondered if she had simply ‘fallen in love with an intellectual pattern’.29 Looking back on my own exploration of my faith, I can see a worrying trend towards an overintellectualization of faith in my own early thinking. Yet as I grew in faith I began to appreciate the imaginative and aesthetic dimensions of Christianity, without losing sight of the importance of its intellectual capaciousness.
Christian theologians regularly speak about faith in terms of casting light on the landscape of the world, and being able to help us make sense of the enigmas and riddles of our experience. Christianity lights up the landscape of reality, allowing us to see things as they really are. The French religious philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43) made this point using a helpful analogy:
If I light an electric torch at night out of doors, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world.30
The ability to illuminate reality is an important measure of the reliability of a theory and an indicator of its truth. The best theory is likely to be the one that is able to fit in observations and experiences most elegantly, most simply, most comprehensively and most fruitfully.31
C. S. Lewis was an atheist as a young man, taking the view that modern science – by which he meant the science of the 1910s – had discredited faith.32 So what were his reasons for returning to faith after his atheist experimentations? In an unpublished manuscript, dating from around 1930, that records his musings about his conversion, Lewis remarks that ‘I am an empirical theist. I arrived at God by induction.’33 This fits in well, not simply with the general trajectory of Lewis’s intellectual development but with his apologetic writings of the early 1940s, in which the rationality of faith is treated as a matter of supreme importance.34 Lewis makes an implicit appeal to a characteristically empirical mode of reflection in explaining the rational basis of his conversion. His faith is able to fit in the observation that many people long for something that seems to lie beyond the empirical world, as well as our deep suspicion that there is some fundamental moral order to the universe.35
Yet Lewis may well have found this way of thinking already expressed in the writings of his great hero, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). After his initial agnosticism, Chesterton’s spiritual journey took a decisive new turn in 1903. He published a newspaper article explaining why he and many others now regarded Christianity with intense intellectual seriousness: ‘We have returned to it because it is an intelligible picture of the world.’ Chesterton realized that testing a theory meant checking it out against observation: ‘The best way to see if a coat fits a man is not to measure both of them but to try it on.’ Chesterton expanded his point as follows.
Numbers of us have returned to this belief; and we have returned to it, not because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere; because the coat, when it is tried on, fits in every crease … We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass.36
Chesterton’s argument is that it is the Christian vision of reality as a whole – rather than any of its individual components – that proves so compelling. Individual observations of nature do not ‘prove’ Christianity to be true; rather, Christianity validates itself by its ability to make sense of those observations. This point is made particularly clearly in this statement, which is both beautifully phrased and full of inductive insight: ‘The phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.’ For Chesterton, a good theory – whether scientific or religious – is to be judged by the amount of illumination it offers and its capacity to accommodate what we see in the world around us and experience within us: ‘With this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them.’37
The great English philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866) used a rich visual image to communicate the capacity of a good theory to weave together observations, showing how they were an integral part of a bigger picture: ‘The facts are known but they are insulated and unconnected … The pearls are there but they will not hang together until someone provides the string.’38 The ‘pearls’ are the observations and the ‘string’ is a grand vision of reality – a world view – that connects and unifies the data. A grand theory, Whewell asserted, allows the ‘colligation of facts’, establishing a new system of relations with one another, unifying what might have otherwise been considered to be disconnected and isolated observations.
Darwin used much the same line of argument in his On the Origin of Species. Knowing that his new and controversial theory of natural selection could not be proved, he argued that it made so much sense of his observations of the natural world that there were good reasons for thinking it was true for that very reason.
It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers.39
While recognizing that his theory lacked rigorous proof (see pp. 135–43), Darwin believed that its explanatory capacity was directly related to its truth. ‘The doctrine [of natural selection] must sink or swim according as it groups and explains phenomena,’ he once remarked.40
So where do these reflections leave us? Perhaps the most important point to realize is that the scientific positivism underlying the New Atheism represents a severely inadequate account of the scientific method, which fails to do justice to the ambiguity of nature, the provisionality of scientific theories and the fallibility of human judgement. We have to make judgements about what we believe to be right on the basis of a close and realistic assessment of the evidence. And that means we have to make fiduciary judgements – that is, decisions about what we believe to be right in the light of the evidence. Christianity, like science, is about motivated belief.
In real life, as in science, we often have to make decisions on the basis of a less than total understanding of the situation. That’s just the way things are. As Terry Eagleton observed, ‘We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.’41 The epistemic dilemma of humanity is such that we cannot prove the things that matter most to us – at best, we can prove shallow truths. It’s not a comfortable situation but we have to get used to it, and not seek refuge in the illusory utopian world of the New Atheism, which holds that we can prove all our valid core beliefs.
I cannot prove that rape is wrong; that it is better to love than to hate; that democracy is better than fascism; that there is a God. Neither can anyone else. But I believe that I am right in taking these positions and can give good reasons for asserting that they are properly motivated and justified. That’s just the nature of things. We are caught up in a firefight between those who defy reason and those who deify it. Reason, when all is said and done, is an excellent critical tool but an inadequate foundation for securing reliable human knowledge. To be rational is not to be limited to the severely truncated and inadequate world of what human reason can allegedly prove; it is to recognize the limits of reason and work within them, while at the same time trying to work out ways of transcending them.