|
PINKER v. PHILLIPS
Yes, if by...
"science" we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.
Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral?
Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend: the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in God.
Start with the origin of the world. Today no honest and informed person can maintain that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago and assumed its current form in six days (to say nothing of absurdities like day and night existing before the sun was created). Nor is there a more abstract role for God to play as the ultimate first cause. This trick simply replaces the puzzle of "Where did the universe come from?" with the equivalent puzzle "Where did God come from?"
What about the fantastic diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design? At one time it was understandable to appeal to a divine designer to explain it all. No longer. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how the complexity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection among replicators, and then Watson and Crick showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms. Notwithstanding creationist propaganda, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, including our DNA, the fossil record, the distribution of life on earth, and our own anatomy and physiology (such as the goose bumps that try to fluff up long-vanished fur).
For many people the human soul feels like a divine spark within us. But neuroscience has shown that our intelligence and emotions consist of intricate patterns of activity in the trillions of connections in our brain. True, scholars disagree on how to explain the existence of inner experience—some say it's a pseudo-problem, others believe it's just an open scientific problem, while still others think that it shows a limitation of human cognition (like our inability to visualize four-dimensional space-time). But even here, relabeling the problem with the word "soul" adds nothing to our understanding.
People used to think that biology could not explain why we have a conscience. But the human moral sense can be studied like any other mental faculty, such as thirst, color vision, or fear of heights. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.
This leaves morality itself—the benchmarks that allow us to criticize and improve our moral intuitions. It is true that science in the narrow sense cannot show what is right or wrong. But neither can appeals to God. It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
Those reasons are not to be found in empirical science, but they are to be found in the nature of rationality as it is exercised by any intelligent social species. The essence of morality is the interchangeability of perspectives: the fact that as soon as I appeal to you to treat me in a certain way (to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason), I have to be willing to apply the same standards to how I treat you, if I want you to take me seriously. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and leaves both of us better off. And God plays no role in it.
For all these reasons, it's no coincidence that Western democracies have experienced three sweeping trends during the past few centuries: barbaric practices (such as slavery, sadistic criminal punishment, and the mistreatment of children) have decreased significantly; scientific and scholarly understanding has increased exponentially; and belief in God has waned. Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.
Close Essay
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
Absolutely not!
Now that we have scientific explanations for the natural phenomena that mystified our ancestors, many scientists and non-scientists believe that we no longer need to appeal to a supernatural God for explanations of anything, thereby making God obsolete. As for people of faith, many of them believe that science, by offering such explanations, opposes their understanding that the universe is the loving and purposeful creation of God. Because science denies this fundamental belief, they conclude that science is mistaken. These very different points of view share a common conviction: that science and religion are irreconcilable enemies. They are not.
I am a physicist. I do mainstream research; I publish in peer-reviewed journals; I present my research at professional meetings; I train students and postdoctoral researchers; I try to learn from nature how nature works. In other words, I am an ordinary scientist. I am also a person of religious faith. I attend church; I sing in the gospel choir; I go to Sunday school; I pray regularly; I try to "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God." In other words, I am an ordinary person of faith. To many people, this makes me a contradiction—a serious scientist who seriously believes in God. But to many more people, I am someone just like them. While most of the media's attention goes to the strident atheists who claim that religion is foolish superstition, and to the equally clamorous religious creationists who deny the clear evidence for cosmic and biological evolution, a majority of the people I know have no difficulty accepting scientific knowledge and holding to religious faith.
As an experimental physicist, I require hard evidence, reproducible experiments, and rigorous logic to support any scientific hypothesis. How can such a person base belief on faith? In fact there are two questions: "How can I believe in God?" and "Why do I believe in God?"
On the first question: a scientist can believe in God because such belief is not a scientific matter. Scientific statements must be "falsifiable." That is, there must be some outcome that at least in principle could show that the statement is false. I might say, "Einstein's theory of relativity correctly describes the behavior of visible objects in our solar system." So far, extremely careful measurements have failed to prove that statement false, but they could (and some people have invested careers in trying to see if they will). By contrast, religious statements are not necessarily falsifiable. I might say, "God loves us and wants us to love one another." I cannot think of anything that could prove that statement false. Some might argue that if I were more explicit about what I mean by God and the other concepts in my statement, it would become falsifiable. But such an argument misses the point. It is an attempt to turn a religious statement into a scientific one. There is no requirement that every statement be a scientific statement. Nor are non-scientific statements worthless or irrational simply because they are not scientific. "She sings beautifully." "He is a good man." "I love you." These are all non-scientific statements that can be of great value. Science is not the only useful way of looking at life.
What about the second question: why do I believe in God? As a physicist, I look at nature from a particular perspective. I see an orderly, beautiful universe in which nearly all physical phenomena can be understood from a few simple mathematical equations. I see a universe that, had it been constructed slightly differently, would never have given birth to stars and planets, let alone bacteria and people. And there is no good scientific reason for why the universe should not have been different. Many good scientists have concluded from these observations that an intelligent God must have chosen to create the universe with such beautiful, simple, and life-giving properties. Many other equally good scientists are nevertheless atheists. Both conclusions are positions of faith. Recently, the philosopher and long-time atheist Anthony Flew changed his mind and decided that, based on such evidence, he should believe in God. I find these arguments suggestive and supportive of belief in God, but not conclusive. I believe in God because I can feel God's presence in my life, because I can see the evidence of God's goodness in the world, because I believe in Love and because I believe that God is Love.
Does this belief make me a better person or a better physicist than others? Hardly. I know plenty of atheists who are both better people and better scientists than I. I do think that this belief makes me better than I would be if I did not believe. Am I free of doubts about God? Hardly. Questions about the presence of evil in the world, the suffering of innocent children, the variety of religious thought, and other imponderables often leave me wondering if I have it right, and always leave me conscious of my ignorance. Nevertheless, I do believe, more because of science than in spite of it, but ultimately just because I believe. As the author of Hebrews put it: "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Close Essay
William D. Phillips, a Nobel Laureate in physics, is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Pinker:
It is a privilege to exchange ideas with a scientist whose accomplishments are as stunning as those of William Phillips, especially by responding to such a clear and thoughtful essay.
I agree that not all valuable statements are scientific statements. Nonetheless, before we believe any statement that is not inherently subjective–that is not exclusively about our inner lives–I think we should have reasons for the belief. "I love you" is subjective, so we need no reason to believe it other than the underlying feeling. "She sings beautifully" is largely subjective. Even "I believe in God" is subjective and needs no justification beyond that of other subjective beliefs, such as "I feel God's presence in my life."
But the statement "There is a God" is not subjective. It is about the nature of the world, and as soon as it is put forward as a proposition for other people to consider, they are entitled to ask whether or not there are good reasons to believe it. Science is basically an extension of that standard. I don’t think a sharp line can be drawn between scientific and philosophical statements about the world on the one hand and religious statements about the world on the other.
Nor do I think that Dr. Phillips's belief in God is exclusively subjective. He offers us grounds for his belief, grounds that we–and he–can evaluate, just as we do scientific hypotheses. Dr. Phillips takes the orderly and elegant nature of the universe as evidence for God–which means that if the universe had been chaotic and messy, he would have concluded that God does not exist (or at least that God is very different from the way most people imagine him to be). Dr. Phillips takes the apparent fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe–the fact that these parameters have exactly the values they must have for complex, stable things like us to evolve–as a sign that the universe was created with a purpose in mind. This, too, is scientific thinking. If a radical new theory convinced us that those constants had to have the values they do because of some deep physical principle, and thus that there is nothing to fine-tune, presumably Dr. Phillips would either abandon his belief in God or base his belief on other considerations. The same would happen if the most convincing cosmological theory turns out to posit multiple universes with different physical constants, implying that there is no tuning of our universe at all; we simply find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of the rare universes that does allow stability.
As a good scientist, Dr. Phillips is incapable of banishing doubt from his mind. And his doubts, like his grounds for belief, are inspired by empirical facts–by the existence of suffering, by the existence of evil, by the multiplicity of religious beliefs (with the uncomfortable implication that each of us irrationally adopts the faith of the community we happen to be born into). If every toddler teetering on the edge of a swimming pool were blown to safety by a gust of wind; if Hitler had been killed by a truck in 1933; if pathogens and parasites and predators and other causes of misery had never evolved–then he would not harbor those doubts. As a fellow scientist, I would allow this evidence to overturn my even stronger doubts, and join him in believing in a loving and purposeful God.
The belief that the earth was the center of the universe was once taken as evidence for the centrality of humanity in a purposeful universe (that's why Galileo got into trouble for challenging it). Are we not entitled to ponder the implications of our earth being just one planet revolving around the sun, or of our solar system being one of billions in the universe, or of terrestrial life being obliterated when the sun turns up its radiation in a billion years, or of the universe itself expanding into oblivion with the passage of time? Does this look like a universe created with a purpose that includes us?
It seems to me that all reflections on the existence of God or a divine purpose, other than purely subjective expressions of faith, are rooted in empirical assumptions about the world, and can be evaluated by looking at what the world is like. That would make them not so different from scientific hypotheses. And the evidence seems to speak against the hypothesis that the universe was created for a moral purpose by a loving God.
Phillips:
In his own essay, Professor Pinker gives an excellent account of why a certain kind of belief in God has indeed been made obsolete by science. If my concept of God were tied to a literal reading of the book of Genesis as a description of the sequence of events of creation, then science would have made that God obsolete. If my belief in God were tied to the failure of the science of an earlier era to explain natural phenomena, then science would have made my belief obsolete. A "God of the gaps," invoked to fill holes in the body of scientific knowledge and to explain certain features of our universe, is a tenuous foundation for faith, as Pinker makes clear. Science constantly advances. Today's inability to explain adequately the emergence of consciousness from physics, the nature of most of the matter and energy in the universe, or even the reason that our universe seems so well-designed for the existence of life may be wiped out by the brilliance of future researchers.
If my belief in God depended on the existence of such current mysteries, I might very well expect my belief to be made obsolete by future progress in science, just as the belief claims from earlier generations that Pinker describes have been made obsolete by today’s science. But my belief in God does not depend on such gaps in scientific knowledge, nor does the belief of most of the people who, like me, take both science and religion seriously. Rather, our belief depends on a rational choice to accept certain truths as a matter of faith. It depends on our understanding that science is not the only standard of truth. For many of us, our belief depends on the personal experience of having been touched by God's spirit. And that belief leads us to a commitment to live in accordance with the same moral principle enunciated by Pinker (and by Jesus and any number of other religious figures)–to behave toward others as we would have them behave toward us.
Pinker observes that some terrible things have been done in the name of religion, contributing to his conclusion that we are better off without religious belief. Though I can understand that point of view, and certainly people have committed many evil acts in the name of religion over the millennia, I do not agree that society would be improved if religion disappeared. Much societal good has come from religious thought. The elimination of slavery in the West and the civil-rights movement in the United States were largely driven by people responding to their religious principles. Furthermore, atheistic, non-religious, and anti-religious societies have also perpetrated incredible horrors. Religion isn't responsible for all our ills, and it has promoted much of the societal progress that Pinker applauds. Humankind's practice of religion has been far from perfect, but I believe that it makes me and many of my fellow believers better equipped to achieve the kind of society that both Pinker and I would like to see.
Pinker:
I certainly agree that religion is not responsible for all our ills! Nor, of course, is an absence of religion a sufficient barrier to the horrors of humanity, since the absence of a questionable belief is just the absence of a questionable belief. To have a humane society, one needs a defensible moral and political system, which I would argue consists of secular moral philosophy and liberal democracy.
I don't agree, however, that religion deserves credit for the elimination of slavery or the civil-rights movement. Slavery is sanctioned in the Bible and coexisted with religion for millennia. The defenders of slavery and of legalized segregation were strongly religious people. The rise of abolitionism in the 19th century followed on the heels not of any revelation or religious reorganization but of the Enlightenment. It is true that Martin Luther King effectively used religious imagery in his rhetoric–and one certainly must credit religion with evocative words and images–but the arguments of King's that stirred the country's conscience were not religious commandments but secular Enlightenment ideals of individual rights: living out the true meaning of the creed that "all men are created equal"; ensuring that people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Phillips:
This stimulating conversation has moved from the question of whether science has made belief in God obsolete to the question of whether, on balance, society would be better off with or without religious faith. This latter question, like the former, will have no clear answer upon which all will agree. For good or ill, the study of history (or, for that matter, of theology) is not like the study of science. In science, observation and experiment are the final arbiters of truth. If a conclusion is inconsistent with clear observations, or with repeated, consistent experiments, it is simply wrong. Not so with history, theology, or a myriad of other non-scientific pursuits.
I agree that many of the 19th-century abolitionists were motivated by the secular legacy of the Enlightenment. Many others, like the courageous Quakers who sheltered runaway slaves, were motivated by their religious faith. In fact, it is not so easy to separate the two. The Enlightenment ideal that "all men are created equal" is followed, in the Declaration of Independence, by the assertion that their "inalienable rights" are "endowed by their Creator." My own experience of the civil-rights movement is that churches, both black and white, were central to much of the motivation and the organization of that struggle. But many in the movement were wholly secular. Even in the churches, many used religious arguments to resist the movement, just as in earlier times some people had supported slavery with the same type of arguments. Religious thinking is neither uniform nor static. People in churches can no more lay claim to absolute truth than can those in academia.
The church I attend today was born in the 1960s from a fusion of black and white churches, and I can attest to the fact that not all, on either side, were in favor of the merger. But today we worship together and revere and respect one another's history, perspective, and experience. I consider our church to be one of the strongest forces promoting good interpersonal relationships in our community and in my own life. My church experience is one of the most valuable I have ever had, and I feel very strongly that I, and some small part of the society around me, are better off because it exists.
I believe, Steven, that you and I want that same things. We want people of religious faith and without religious faith to act with genuine concern for the well-being of others. In the end, I think we should agree with Charles Darwin that in matters of faith all of us must make our own decisions.
Return to essays | Back to top
|
