What did apologists do when the Genesis story was so thoroughly trounced? They made its refutation a virtue, arguing that it was notably better for God to have created through evolution than by poofing life into existence like a magician. Evolution is, after all, supposedly contingent and unpredictable, allowing God a form of creativity unavailable if organisms were created from nothing.
Both scientists and theologians have offered this rationalization, including the evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, formerly a Dominican priest:
A world of life with evolution is more much exciting; it is a creative world where new species arise, complex ecosystems come about, and humans have evolved.
The geneticist and physician Francis Collins admires God’s ingenuity at using evolution to produce our own species:
Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.
It’s obvious that if you can justify every scientific advance as comporting perfectly with God’s will, then science can never refute the claims of your faith. And claims that can’t be refuted can’t be confirmed.
Fabricating Answers to Hard or Insoluble Questions
One can’t read a great deal of theology without appreciating the mental dexterity of its practitioners when faced with hard problems. And as a scientist, I regret how much more we’d understand about nature had that dexterity been applied to science instead, or to any field involved in studying what’s real.
Take, for instance, the question of why God is hidden. Even if you see the Bible as largely allegorical, God’s presence—revealed by miracles, resurrections, and the like—was far more evident two millennia ago than today. And despite the “miracles” of Lourdes and Fatima, more sophisticated believers must deal with the issue of the Deus absconditus, the hidden God. The most parsimonious hypothesis is to simply claim that there are no gods, so their absence is expected. But that’s unacceptable to the religious, who are then obliged to respond. Here’s one answer from John Polkinghorne and his collaborator, the social philosopher Nicholas Beale:
The presence of God is veiled because, when you think about it, the naked presence of divinity would overwhelm finite creatures, depriving them of truly being themselves and freely accepting God.
But does that really make sense? Would you find the naked presence of God so overwhelming that you’d reject him? That certainly wasn’t the case when he appeared to Moses as a burning bush or to Job as a whirlwind. One would think that “finite creatures” would be delighted with tangible evidence for their beliefs.
The theologian John Haught has a different answer:
It is essential to religious experience, after all, that ultimate reality be beyond our grasp. If we could grasp it, it would not be ultimate.
This wordplay not only misuses the term “ultimate,” but is deeply tautological, giving no answer at all.
Some liberal believers will reluctantly admit that God’s absence makes them uncomfortable. Surprisingly, one of them is Justin Welby, the current archbishop of Canterbury, who acknowledged his doubts about whether God existed at all. In an interview with the BBC at Bristol Cathedral, he confessed, “The other day I was praying over something as I was running and I ended up saying to God: ‘Look, this is all very well but isn’t it about time you did something—if you’re there’—which is probably not what the archbishop of Canterbury should say.” But he hastened to add that those doubts didn’t extend to Jesus, whose existence, Welby claimed, was a dead certainty: “We know about Jesus, we can’t explain all the questions in the world, we can’t explain about suffering, we can’t explain loads of things but we know about Jesus.” How one can be certain about the divinity of Jesus but not about God’s existence escapes me. It’s like saying, “I’m not so sure about Santa Claus, but I’ve no doubts about his reindeer.” (Indeed, Anglicans accept the Holy Trinity—the “Unity of the Godhead”—so Jesus and God are part of the same entity.) And so the liberal religious mind treats claims differently, even if there is equally little evidence supporting them.
In science, if there should be evidence for a phenomenon but that evidence is consistently missing, one is justified in concluding that the phenomenon doesn’t exist. Examples are the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, as well as paranormal phenomena like ESP and telekinesis. Seeking evidence for such things, the skeptics always come up dry. It is the same with God, though theologians will object to comparing God to Bigfoot. The philosopher Delos McKown had a more parsimonious answer for God’s absence: “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
What about immortality in an afterlife? Many ardently wish for it, but the evidence is annoyingly scarce. Given that nobody has returned from the dead, and that anecdotes involving reincarnation or near-death visits to heaven are either dubious or conflicted, or have mundane physiological explanations, how do we reassure ourselves of eternal life? One way is to simply reject the need for evidence, as does John Haught:
In any case, were I to try to elicit scientific evidence of immortality I would just be capitulating to the narrower empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief. What I will say, though, is that the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust in the desire to know. . . . Such a hope is reasonable if it provides, as I believe it can, a climate that encourages the desire to know to remain restless until it encounters the fullness of being, truth, goodness and beauty.
Note the cavalier dismissal of “narrow empiricism”—that is, real evidence. But either immortality exists or it doesn’t, and surely such an important matter must rest on more than “hope for some form of subjective survival.” How else can one satisfy the “desire to know” without knowledge itself?
If apologetics is to be a satisfying system of explanation, it has to deal with the “hard problem” of theology: natural evil. While moral evils, like thefts and murders, are often justified as the unavoidable by-product of God’s gift of free will, there is no obvious explanation for those tragedies, like childhood cancers and deadly earthquakes, that inflict suffering on the innocent and undeserving. This is not the place to rehash the diverse and creative theological explanations for how natural evil comports with a loving and all-powerful God, though I find none of them remotely convincing (was the Holocaust really necessary to preserve the free will of Germans?). But science does better, for such evils are precisely what one expects in a purely naturalistic world. Tumors in children? The result of random mutations. Tsunamis and earthquakes? The endless churning of the Earth’s crust produced by plate tectonics. The horrible suffering inherent in evolution by natural selection? The inevitable result of competition among genes that control the bodies of living creatures.
It was in fact the suffering produced by natural selection—and the death of his beloved ten-year-old daughter Annie—that helped wean Darwin from religion. In a letter to the American botanist Asa Gray written only six months after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin pondered the disparity between traditional theism and the suffering of animals:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.—I am bewildered.—I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Although Darwin was usually
silent on the conflict between his theories and religion (his wife, Emma, was quite devout), I see in this letter a feeling that his own theory supersedes any religious explanation for suffering.
Applying Different Standards to One’s Own Religious Beliefs Than to Those of Other Faiths
Here are some truth claims of different religions, taken from their theology:
Seventy-five million years ago, Xenu, the dictator of a galactic confederation, brought billions of humanlike beings to Earth in a giant spaceship that resembled a Douglas DC-8. Paralyzed and then preserved in antifreeze, their bodies were piled up around the bases of volcanoes and destroyed by exploding hydrogen bombs within the craters. Their escaped souls, called “thetans,” were captured, taken to a giant cinema, and forced to watch movies for about a month, implanting in the thetans bad ideas like Catholicism. The thetans then escaped, affixing themselves to the bodies of those who survived the explosions. Humans afflicted with thetans can be diagnosed only with special devices that measure skin conductance.
You don’t believe that, right? But that is official doctrine of the Church of Scientology, concocted by the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and seen as gospel by his church and its adherents, many of them paying thousands of dollars to learn these “truths.” If you don’t accept that story, why not?
How about this one?
In 1827, New Yorker Joseph Smith, guided by an angel named Moroni, unearthed a binder of golden plates written in strange characters. With the help of his hat and a “seer stone,” Smith translated the plates into English. This transcription, the Book of Mormon, claims that Jesus visited North America and that Native Americans are the descendants of people from the Middle East who migrated to North America.
If that doesn’t seem credible—and it does to the faith’s fifteen million adherents—remember that the Book of Mormon begins with the sworn testimony of eleven witnesses who claimed to have seen the plates. These were actual, living people—giving the Book of Mormon far more historical credibility than the Bible or the Quran.
Here’s another:
Illness and deaths are illusions—purely the result of faulty thinking—and even “diseases” like diabetes and cancer can be overcome by proper belief.
That’s the doctrine of the Christian Science church, founded in 1879. As we’ll see, hundreds of people have died relying on this theology rather than receiving proper medical care.
Most of the world’s believers reject these claims as blatantly false. But that’s only because these three religions are fairly new. They were founded in the last two centuries, and we see their origin not as divine but as obvious fabrications of humans—in the case of Joseph Smith, of a con man. But if you look with equally critical eyes at the doctrines of older faiths, their tenets seem equally bizarre. Islam, for instance, claims that Muhammad was accosted by two angels who split open his breast, extracted his heart, and purified it with snow, rendering him suitable to be God’s prophet. The angel Gabriel then commanded him to recite, which he did for twenty-three years, producing the Quran. And, of course, the Christian mythology includes stories of talking serpents, worldwide floods, virgin births, and a divine prophet who, after resurrecting the dead and healing the blind, was resurrected himself. The obvious question is this: why are believers in mainstream religions, like Islam and Christianity, less critical of their own faiths than of others?
One reason is that most mainstream faiths have been around for millennia. Because we weren’t there when they were founded, we can’t dismiss their divine origins as readily as we can for Scientology or Mormonism. Their persistence has given them an aura of credibility, somehow making their claims seem less contrived.
But the main reason people turn a blind eye toward implausible beliefs is that they get their faith not through reason or deliberation, but through indoctrination from their family and friends. Religion has hijacked the evolved tendency of humans to accept authority when they’re young, something that would have enhanced the survival of our ancestors (learning is a good way to avoid the dangers of experience). And so if you’re born in Saudi Arabia, in all likelihood you’ll be brought up Muslim, accepting its doctrines as true. If born in Utah, the chances of your becoming a Mormon are high (around 60 percent), and in Brazil you’re likely to become a Catholic. To a very large extent, which religion you accept and which you reject are accidents of birth. And after you’ve been religious for years, and surrounded by those who believe likewise, you become emotionally invested in your faith’s truth. This makes you more susceptible to confirmation bias and less likely to be skeptical about your beliefs.
But none of these are good reasons for deeming your religion true and others false. Granted, some people argue that all religions are true, claiming that at bottom we all worship the same God. But that’s simply not the case. The foundational claims of different religions are not only disparate, but conflicting. Many Christians think that the only route to salvation is accepting Jesus as one’s savior. If you’re a Muslim, that doctrine will send you straight to hell. The Quran also claims that Jesus was slain but not crucified, with an impostor dying on the cross. Jews, of course, don’t see Jesus as the Messiah at all.
Unlike monotheistic faiths, Hinduism has many gods. Jehovah’s Witnesses think that precisely 144,000 of them will make it to heaven, while the others who are saved will inhabit a paradise on Earth. In contrast, Laestadianism, a conservative branch of Lutheranism, considers itself the only true faith: only its roughly sixty thousand adherents are eligible for salvation, with the billions of others on Earth doomed to eternal torment. Catholics believe in transubstantiation: that the wine and wafer consumed during the Eucharist actually become the physical substance of Jesus’s body and blood. In contrast, some Eastern Orthodox and Protestant sects hold to consubstantiation, the notion that the wine and wafer coexist as regular food and drink along with Jesus’s blood and body. How could one possibly distinguish between these claims? We’ll never know who gets saved, and chemical or DNA tests will show that bread and wine remain bread and wine during all Eucharists. What basis, then, for these beliefs? (Remember that the Eucharist involves not a metaphorical and spiritual transformation, but an actual physical transformation.)
Even more bizarrely, Black Muslims believe that whites are a race of devils, created less than seven thousand years ago from selective breeding by a mad black scientist named Yakub. And, of course, there is Xenu and his hydrogen bombs. Add to these all the conflicting doctrines and equally conflicting moral codes that differ in how one should treat women, gays, sex before or outside of marriage, criminals, animals, and so on. They can’t all be right.
How many different religions are there? The number is uncountable. While there are about a dozen “major” religions, they’re fractured into different branches with different beliefs and practices. In fact, the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary estimates that there are forty-four thousand sects of Christianity alone!
The different claims among these faiths have consequences, for they’ve produced endless misery over the course of history. Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who regularly kill each other, originally diverged only in whom they saw as the proper person to head the faith: those related to Muhammad or those who, regardless of ancestry, were most qualified. “Heretical” Christian sects like the Donatists and Cathars were ruthlessly extirpated over differences in doctrine. And even today, 16 percent of the world’s 198 countries penalize blasphemy, while 20 prohibit apostasy (abandoning one’s faith). All of the latter are nations that are largely Muslim.
Clearly, religions aren’t incompatible only with science: they’re incompatible with one another. And this incompatibility wasn’t inevitable: if the particulars of belief and dogma were somehow bestowed on humans by a god, there’s no obvious reason why there should be more than one brand of faith. These schisms and conflicts are further evidence that religion is not only a human construct, but is about
more than sociality or community. Beliefs matter.
But suppose that there is a “correct” religion—one whose conception of God, and the practices and moral codes God decrees, is accurate. How do you discover it? Given that most religious people acquire their faith through accidents of birth, and those faiths are conflicting, it’s very likely that the tenets of a randomly specified religion are wrong. How can you tell if yours is right? As we’ve seen, this question should be of the greatest importance to believers, for its answer involves the all-important issues of morality and, if you believe in an afterlife, where you’ll spend eternity.
The only rational solution is to apply the same degree of skepticism toward the claims of your own faith as you do toward the ones you reject. This rational and quasi-scientific approach is promoted by the ex-preacher John Lotfus, who lays it out briefly:
It is highly likely that any given religious faith is false and quite possible that they could all be false. At best there can only be one religious faith that is true. At worst, they could all be false. . . .
So I propose that: . . . The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use to examine the other religious faiths they reject. This expresses the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF).
Given that beliefs matter, the wisdom of this approach is unquestionable. But if it’s used honestly, its outcome is inevitable. If you’re a Christian, for instance, you probably reject the beliefs of Islam because you see them not only as misguided, but also as lacking in evidence. If that’s the case, then you must abandon your own faith on the same grounds. In the end, the inconsistencies between faiths, combined with the reasonable doubt that believers apply to other faiths, means that no faiths are privileged, none should be trusted, and all should be discarded. This is what the philosopher Philip Kitcher calls the core challenge of secularism toward religion: the “argument from symmetry.”
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 12
