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| Image from True Belief Comics |
This was the title of an event organised
by Church Central and Oasis Church. I’d been invited by my friend who was the
main speaker of the night, Jonny Mellor. The format was to listen to short talks
on whether faith is reasonable, eat some food and ask questions. It was a very
good event and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Jonny is a charismatic guy in both senses of the word and I’ll try to
put down some of his arguments here with some of my ideas.
Apologies to Jonny if I miss out or misrepresent some of his points, I’m
working from scraps of paper I borrowed on the night and scrawled rough
thoughts upon. But I’ll point him in the way of this post and he can always
comment. To be fair to him, he was covering a wide range of ideas in a very
short time so he couldn’t be as nuanced as I know he can be. He expressed these
ideas much more fully than I am allowing for here. Hopefully the two of us will
be recording a discussion for the currently dormant Birmingham Skeptics Podcast
sometime in July. The nub of his main points are in bold italics.
There
are aspects of science that can’t be proven but scientists continue as if they
are true and base their work around them. There are then at least some elements of science that are comparable to faith and are therefore not superior in terms
of being more reasonable.
His examples of this are the proposed
existence of dark matter and the Higgs Boson particle. He states that both of
these phenomena are required by scientists to make sense of the universe, but
neither of them can be proven or observed, like God. This argument totally misrepresents the scientific view.
The examples might be considered by many
scientists to be the best current explanation of observable phenomena but they
aren’t sitting back and writing them down in sacred text books that can never
be altered. The Large Hadron Collider isn’t a vast technological temple to the
glory of an immutable scientific deity. It is an experiment that might, amongst
the mass of data it produces, indicate the existence of the Higgs and place
that piece into the jigsaw of the standard model. But what if they don’t find
it, what if they find indications of a totally different explanation for mass
and matter? Well then we will be living through a scientific paradigm change
and most scientists will be thrilled and not dismayed at this. The same holds
true for the existence or not of dark matter, it is the best current
explanation that a large number of scientists accept at this point in time, but that might
well change.
If you think of science as being similar to religion then you might think that
it imposes its laws upon the world. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. So-called scientific
laws have been tested and tend to get called that because we know that trial
after trial they will give us the same result. That’s why your aeroplane tends
to lift off the ground and your house doesn’t drift off into outer space.
Science doesn’t demand that you accept these laws; you are welcome to test them
yourself. In fact we all do and we live with them every second
of every day. Some of the experiments require a bit of extra equipment, we
can’t all have our own rockets or colliders, and at this point science can
leave a lot of us behind. But no matter what one scientist is doing, there are
a host of others trying to copy them or reading their reports looking for the
mistakes. Science doesn’t work on blind acceptance and unquestioning orthodoxy it works on peer review and
evidence.
You can take any so-called scientific law or theory and you can devise some
process by which you can prove it isn’t true. You can define some set of criteria that
if fulfilled or unfulfilled will show that the theory fails. If faith is the
same as science, what are the experiments that we can use, how shall we falsify
God?
Our
experience shows us that all things have an origin and a cause and therefore the
universe and humankind must have a cause. The simplest and most logical
explanation for the first cause is God.
This is a reiteration of the cosmological argument and cosmology is a good
arena for Jonny as many of the scientific edges are blurred. Like most, if not
all, arguments in this sphere it has been echoed again and again. Jonny is a
clever man with a background in philosophy and theology, he knows his stuff
here.
The first standard counter is to ask who caused God? This doesn’t work if you’ve
accepted as true the initial term of the argument “first cause”; as by
definition it is then first and therefore needs no cause in itself. But I don’t
really see why you need to accept that as it is a philosophical construct and
not based on any observation of reality. As far as I am concerned asking who
created God is a totally valid question.
There is also the problem that it is too simplistic to compare the circumstances
of the origin of the universe with those in the present. To say that because
our universe behaves in this way now it must have done so back then, and infer
from that the existence of a deity is not in itself logical or reasonable.
Jonny points out that the scientific “belief” in the big bang doesn’t make sense
as there is no explanation of what caused it and scientists therefore have
faith in their explanations. As with the
initial argument, scientists don’t have to have faith and do what they can to
test their theories, to gather evidence. They can't explain the
origin of the universe as science has limits, but that doesn’t mean we need to
create a metaphysical entity that has no cause in itself to be the ultimate cause
and then call that the most logical argument.
There are many more variations to the cosmological argument, all with counters
and counters to the counters. For me it’s not an argument likely to change
minds as there is nothing tangible on either side that will convince people away from their starting
point. It’s an interesting philosophical diversion though and a quick search on
Google will throw up lots more information on it.
Without
an absolute deity there can be no objective morality. If we have made up the
rules that we live by, why do we need to obey them, why can’t we just do what
we want including rape and murder?
This is the argument from morality and is the one that Jonny puts forward with
the most passion. It is also the one that gets me the closest to feeling angry. He
doesn’t deny that it is possible for atheists to live what appears to be a
moral life, but he fails to understand why they should, where the “ought”
imperative comes from.
He cites the Nuremberg Trials where the appeal to a higher law was used to
overcome the defence that the accused had been following the legal mandates in
effect during the rule of Hitler. This apparently shows that we acknowledge in
our being a divine law and sense of justice that must come from an external
deity. It can’t have evolved as evolution is about the survival of the fittest
and taking what you want whereas morality is protecting others and being just.
Where to begin? Evolution is not about survival of the fittest it is about the
eventual survival of some random mutations that give a benefit to the
possessor and are therefore continued and spread. This can and does often involve traits that promote cooperation and
mutual protection; at a cellular level let alone amongst complex organisms such as
ourselves. Human beings as a species are much more successful as a society and societies are
much more successful when they have rules. Those rules form over long periods
of time and in the days of magic and superstition how much better if those rules
were backed up by an invisible being that would punish transgression?
I find much of the language of religion to be dishonest in this sphere.
Christians talk of their God as loving and just, but these words don’t mean the
same as we understand them. Morality for them can’t be about how we act as
actions are nothing in themselves. An atheist can live a selfless life helping
their fellow human being and it will ultimately mean nothing to certain types
of Christians, for without faith God will still damn them to eternal punishment
come judgment time. How is that just, how is that loving?
There is no need for an objective morality, we live and are formed as part of a
society that instils in us a code of conduct, a sense of right and wrong. We
don’t need the threat of hell to know that rape is wrong. If we were raised in
a different society where rape and murder were considered fine we would think
that way. Look hard enough through time and across the globe and you will find
societal variations of moral codes and imperatives. It is unlikely that you
will find many that outright condone murder and rape, but perhaps that proves
how poor a survival trait for any society that would be. I might be replacing
the moral impositions of a deity with the programming of a society here but so
what, does that make it less valid? I can think about my actions, I can understand
why I act this way, I know that it works and I don’t need God to tell me it is
right.
There is a stark contrast between the harsh moral legislature of the Old
Testament and that of the New. The change in religious tone is the change in a society reflected in its God, not the other way round. The codification of
these moral injunctions may once have served a purpose for binding a people together but it surely now acts to separate us and to tether us to ideals that
were set down hundreds if not thousands of years ago when the experiences and
needs were very different to ours.
I don’t want to give the idea that this, or any other of the arguments used are
simplistic and stupid. They’ve exercised theologians, philosophers and people
in pubs for centuries and will continue to do so. This is
already an overly long blog post but I could easily have stretched any of these
points on for another few thousand words. I doubt that anything that I’ve said
here has changed anybody’s minds and that tends to be the case with this kind
of argument.
I’m not sure if the initial question should have been “Is Faith Rational?” rather than
reasonable. It’s a semantic point perhaps but worth a thought. I can reasonably
expect people from certain backgrounds and circumstances to have faith, but
that doesn’t make it rational. I have as much respect, perhaps more in some
ways, for those that don’t bother to try and justify their faith in rational
terms. Faith is that which requires no proof, something that bypasses logic
and mundane experience. It’s a step into the supernatural and if you take it,
for whatever reason, you relinquish in part any claim to full rationality.
This blog post was written by Patrick Redmond (@paddyrex).
