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“You know, Richard Dawkins may be a great academic and argue with intelligence and authority on some topics,” she said, “but tonight, every time he reasoned for something by logically eliminating all other possibilities, he didn’t do it logically at all. He just made assumptions about what ‘reality’ is, and left out all but the most extreme choices. Among the three explanations he gave for the miracle at Fatima, for instance, he didn’t choose to include the option that it really happened, but in a less ridiculous way than the sun crashing down. If you believe in God or miracles, then it’s just as probable that the saint appeared to the crowd in a beautiful, magnificent way—so what did he actually prove? You can’t claim you’ve eliminated a choice you never presented.”
She had a point. In the way that humble, rational people experience their faith, it doesn’t threaten our collective pursuit of scientific truth, it encourages it. As my mother pointed out, Dawkins only described and deconstructed the easiest types of beliefs and believers to denounce as antiscientific.
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In a recent essay for Salon.com, “Does God Exist?,” Alan explores a question that’s probably familiar to God and Nature readers. Subtitled, “The case for reconciling the scientific with the divine—and against the anti-religion of Richard Dawkins,” Alan’s essay was published the day before we posted “Clearing the Middle Path.” Both pieces explore what it means to successfully reconcile science with religion, and why it’s important and even practical to do so.
Alan isn’t a Christian, Jew, Agnostic, Buddhist, Transcendentalist or any other kind of religious believer. He doesn’t have a dog in the fight, so to speak. As a scientist and atheist, Alan is not a defender of faith in God nor of religion, itself—yet he is a defender of respect for the people who practice religion and believe in something beyond what we can explain using the scientific method. Alan writes,
I believe there are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.”Whether or not we think about it every day, our shared reality is an almost unbelievable balance of space and time, mass and matter, energy and gravity. A few faint measures nearer the sun and we’d all be up in a blaze of heat. A few tweaks in the laws of physics and the universe as we know it simply wouldn’t work at all.
We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but, in the end, we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.
The magic of reality is that this dance of atoms and space in such careful balance actually exists. Obviously, it’s up for debate who or what is responsible for initiating all of it, and when, and how. Somehow Earth ended up having not too much and not too little of any one thing. Maybe other planets are like that, too.
Whether or not you believe that it’s all very intentional and that there’s a loving God somewhere watching over it, no human consensus will actually change reality, whatever that happens to be. No matter what brand of consensus we subscribe to and would like other people to subscribe to, as well—we can’t help anyone, anywhere, change anything they trust and believe while simultaneously engaged in shredding their intelligence in front of them.
If each one of us could value human dignity as much as we value our personal brand of truth, we’d not only be as wise as we are intelligent, we might also get our adversaries to see things from a different point of view. At the very least, they might consider it, which would be a giant leap in the right direction. Times seven billion.
- Emily Ruppel
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