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Does Science Invalidate Religious Belief? The Epistemology of the New Atheism In recent years a rather hostile form of atheism has emerged onto the literary scene, seeking to expose the irrationality of religious belief and to criticize devotees for the perceived failure to base their beliefs on appropriate forms of evidence and observation. Central to this New Atheism is an implicit appeal to the reliability and authority of modern science, coupled with the firm conviction that religion has only flourished because of widespread superstition and baffling inconsistency regarding the merits of scientific research. To put it simply, religious belief is irrational precisely because the related doctrines and creeds are woefully unscientific in nature, and therefore necessarily fail to conform to canonical standards of reason and common sense. Of course, these critical themes are familiar to the typical philosopher and scientist, particularly given the amount of coverage the New Atheism has received in the mainstream media. The various arguments and accusations of these intellectuals have inspired a legion of critical responses and counterarguments.1 And one might reasonably wonder if anything novel or interesting remains to be articulated on behalf of religious belief. While I find much of the literature insightful and penetrating in its analysis of the New Atheism, it seems that most of these writings have targeted the more inflammatory aspects of this anti-religious rhetoric, without paying much attention to the underlying epistemological commitments which serve as their ultimate justification.
1
For a general summary and analysis, see John Haught, God and the New Atheism (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2007).
2 The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to highlight and evaluate the nature of these commitments, and to challenge the assumption that religious belief is made invalid by the conclusions of modern science. I will begin this analysis by clarifying the criticism leveled against religious belief,2 and then utilize that discussion as a starting point for considering whether the God hypothesis is inherently unscientific. It will then be argued that answering that question correctly will lead to a certain understanding of the nature and scope of evidence—one which makes religious belief immune from the particular condemnation of the New Atheism. I. So what exactly is the problem with religious belief? At the very least, the criticism is that such belief is unjustified at some profound level. It seems that for any belief to be justified, in the epistemic sense, it must be supported by adequate reasons and evidence. According to the New Atheists, however, such support is clearly lacking when it comes to religious belief, which commonly leads to the following sort of evaluation: And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are‌This leaves billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.3 While such criticism appears rather harsh and caustic in nature, Sam Harris and others feel warranted in employing this tone, especially given the practical consequences of irrational belief. What the New Atheists find deeply troubling about religious belief is not exclusively its irrational and unscientific character, but rather the undeniable fact that, 2
While I would prefer to highlight all of the major writings, for the sake of expediency I will focus my attention on the arguments of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. 3 Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 72.
3 at least in some cases, such belief will manifest itself in acts of horrific violence and brutality. And perhaps these negative practical effects of religion are sufficient to demonstrate the utter irrationality of belief in the supernatural. The difficulty, at least in most corners of modern society, is that it’s considered politically incorrect to explicitly disparage religious belief. But according to the New Atheists, it is precisely this spirit of tolerance and open-mindedness that prevents helpful dialogue from taking place. And so we must be willing to subject all traditional forms of religious belief to careful scrutiny and examination, if only because doing so represents the only path to achieving true global peace. Along similar lines, Richard Dawkins writes that: As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith.4 The fundamental principle here is that all propositional beliefs, regardless of their content, must be subject to reason and critical analysis. This is a fairly natural and commonsense intuition, and there is no compelling reason to think that religious belief represents an exception to the rule. In fact, there is a further insight which makes this intuition, a fortiori, rather difficult to reject: the connection between belief and action. The simple fact is that what we believe—concerning God, the world, and ourselves— directly influences the values we hold. These values, in turn, affect how we lead our lives, for better or worse. And so the New Atheists are quite eager, for obvious reasons, 4
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
4 to dismantle the current pluralistic mindset: “Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.”5 There is certainly much in the writings of the New Atheists that strains credibility and reveals a biased anti-religious sentiment. Nevertheless, their criticisms of religious pluralism are right on target, and they should be commended for their defense of an objectivist view of truth.6 Indeed, Christians of various stripes should find solace in this perspective, even if the New Atheists do not employ their epistemological realism in the service of the gospel. Setting aside such pleasant ecumenical notions, however, it is important to state clearly the nature of the frustration with religious belief. As Sam Harris articulates in rather unequivocal terms, “every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable.”7 The attentive reader will immediately inquire into what kind of evidence the New Atheists have in mind, and the answer seems to be relatively clear. Richard Dawkins, for example, has demonstrated utter transparency when discussing the most putatively reliable methodology for examining belief in God and the related miracle stories: “There is an answer to every such question…and it is a strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods.”8 No doubt the point could hardly be made with more clarity, and so we are left to consider the following 5
Harris, The End of Faith, p. 46. For a good introductory treatment of the connection between truth and religious belief, see Mortimer Adler, Truth in Religion (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1990). 7 Harris, The End of Faith, p. 23. 8 Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 59. 6
5 proposal—that religious belief is irrational precisely because it is unscientific. Or to phrase it somewhat differently, the conclusions of modern science have effectively invalidated religious belief.9 II. Before this claim can be properly evaluated, however, I must specify the nature of what is being proposed. To be sure, the notion of science invalidating religious belief is rather ambiguous. So for starters, what kind of religious belief do the New Atheists have in mind? As a first approximation, one might distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic religious belief. And the idea here is rather straightforward: a belief is intrinsically religious if it necessarily involves a certain doxastic commitment to a supernatural being or force; whereas a belief is extrinsically religious if it only contingently involves such a commitment to a supernatural being or force. As such, while belief in God is intrinsically religious, belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ or the virgin birth, for example, is only extrinsically religious. This is because one could affirm these doctrines as historical facts, without that doxastic commitment requiring a belief in the existence of God. Assuming this distinction is plausible, which type of religious belief is targeted by the New Atheism? The answer is not simple to discern, as both Harris and Dawkins frequently transition between these two emphases. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that the New Atheists consider both kinds of religious belief problematic from the epistemic standpoint. One might argue that what partly contributes to the irrationality of intrinsically religious belief is the fact that it often leads to a commitment to various extrinsically religious beliefs. And insofar as these extrinsically religious beliefs are 9
To be sure, the notion of invalidity is being improperly utilized here, for the New Atheists are not claiming that religious belief is logically problematic. Nevertheless, I think the term represents a good rhetorical device for representing the general spirit of their criticism.
6 thought to be unverifiable or contrary to the laws of biology, then the intrinsically religious beliefs which serve as their conceptual foundation might thereby be called into question. Of course, this would entail that intrinsically religious belief is only contingently irrational, as one could believe in God or Allah without holding a doxastic commitment to the above doctrines. At any rate, the New Atheists don’t obviously employ such a distinction, and this proves to be an essential flaw in their criticism of religious belief. The next question that demands clarification is more complicated: what does it mean for science to invalidate religious belief? It seems there are at least two possible interpretations of this claim. On the one hand, the New Atheist might simply mean that religious themes aren’t necessary for discovering certain truths about reality. Whereas on the other hand, he could mean that religious themes aren’t sufficient for discovering truths about reality. The first option represents a more modest claim, as it doesn’t require the view that religion is incapable of providing answers to fundamental questions. On the contrary, it merely entails that science is equally capable of addressing such matters, albeit from a very different perspective. For example, the New Atheist might plausibly hold that the physical sciences are capable of explaining the biological origin of religious belief. Indeed, this very possibility seems to motivate Daniel Dennett’s project, in which he asserts the following: “Notice that it could be true that God exists, that God is indeed the intelligent, conscious, loving creator of us all, and yet still religion itself, as a complex set of phenomena, is a perfectly natural phenomenon…In assuming that religion is a natural phenomenon, I am not prejudging its value to human life, one way or the
7 other.”10 But there is nothing in this proposal which requires an inherently anti-religious mindset, as it merely equates with the view that religious themes are unnecessary for discovering certain truths about reality. The second option is either modest or immodest, depending on the kinds of propositions in question. For example, it is obviously true that religious themes are not sufficient for discovering a cure for Parkinson’s Disease or for solving complicated mathematical algorithms. But it is equally obvious that the New Atheists are not making this rather trivial claim. On the contrary, the central idea is that religious themes are not sufficient for answering fundamental metaphysical questions, such as those concerning existence of God, morality, and so on. And this would represent the immodest claim being leveled against religious belief. In other words, modern science invalidates religious belief quite simply because such belief is unscientific and therefore unreasonable or irrational. Such a conviction obviously equates with a commitment to scientism, and there is good reason to question this radical empiricist dogma: The theorist who maintains that science is the be-all and end-all—that what is not in science textbooks is not worth knowing—is an ideologist with a peculiar and distorted doctrine of his own. For him, science is no longer a sector of the cognitive enterprise but an all-inclusive worldview. This is the doctrine not of science but of scientism. To take this stance is not to celebrate science but to distort it.11 There are different forms of scientism, which entail various claims regarding the epistemic authority of scientific conclusions. Setting aside such differences, the 10
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Viking Press, 2006), p. 25. Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), p. 247. 11
8 proponent of scientism is, generally speaking, committed to an ideology that is incapable of satisfying its own requirements for rationality. In short, “strong scientism is not itself a proposition of science, but a second-order proposition of philosophy about science to the effect that only scientific propositions are true and rational to believe.”12 Of course, the New Atheists are convinced that their peculiar ideology is entirely rational to believe, and this fact points to a fundamental inconsistency in this extreme and radical mindset. And it should leave the reader wondering if the New Atheists are merely question begging when it comes to the God hypothesis. III. To show this is really the case, I will now transition into a discussion of some key problems and concerns. First, is religious belief, in the intrinsic sense, really unscientific in nature? Presumably for that claim to be reasonable, it must be the case that religious belief falls under the purview of scientific method. It would be natural to think that belief in God, for example, is not directly subject to the lights of modern science. But Dawkins has insisted, perhaps contrary to commonsense, that “God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice.”13 It is not uncommon for practicing scientists to endorse a form of methodological naturalism, in which the object of scientific inquiry is limited to natural causes and phenomena. To be clear, such a methodology is not incompatible with a theistic commitment, for one could certainly believe in God while insisting that the resources of science are not relevant for demonstrating his existence. But it would be very tempting, as a practicing scientist, to allow the endorsement of methodological naturalism to slip into a full-fledged 12
J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 347. 13 Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 50.
9 commitment to metaphysical naturalism. To wit, the reason why modern science can only investigate natural causes and phenomena is the simple fact that such entities and states of affairs are all that exist in reality. Though the New Atheists don’t explicitly articulate or defend a naturalistic metaphysic, the careful reader will form the distinct impression that there is such a philosophical commitment hiding beneath the surface. And if this were true, it would prove especially troubling for their critique of religious belief, at least insofar as their negative evaluation is directly based on the claim that religious belief cannot be supported by scientific evidence. In some sense, it would follow trivially from the conviction that only natural entities exist that scientific inquiry must be limited to the analysis of such entities. But it would hardly be fair to criticize religious belief for being unscientific, when the real starting point for this claim is the philosophical assumption that only natural entities exist. For this would be, quite obviously, to beg the question against religious belief. It would be akin to claiming that religious belief is irrational precisely because it posits the existence of a supernatural entity. But how does that conclusion follow from the original premise? It is certainly true that most forms of religious belief involve a doxastic commitment to a supernatural being or force, but that is not a sufficient reason for concluding that such a commitment is unscientific. For the sake of argument, let’s try to extend the New Atheists some intellectual charity, and merely depict them as holding to a form of methodological naturalism. Would it be altogether reasonable, even in the context of this rather modest mindset, for Harris or Dawkins to argue that religious belief is incompatible with the scientific evidence? If the kind of belief in question is
10 intrinsically religious, and if the object of this belief is supernatural, then even this observation would strain credibility. Consider the following insight by C.S. Lewis, in which he suggests what kind of evidence is incapable of demonstrating God’s existence: We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it…Or to put it another way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house.14 The point is rather obvious and hardly needs explaining: If God is essentially an immaterial being, and is the creative source of all that is material, then this realm will be unavoidably lacking in direct evidence for his existence. But if the New Atheists are suggesting that science invalidates religious belief in the immodest sense, they are essentially holding the content of religious belief to an epistemic standard which it cannot possibly satisfy. This is precisely why it seems unfair to appeal to the “unscientific” nature of religious belief to claim that it is irrational or contrary to commonsense. Indeed, perhaps instead of asserting that religious belief is unscientific in nature, the New Atheists would be more reasonable to label it “non-scientific.” In this case there would be the possibility of such belief being rational and commonsensical, albeit through an appeal to a different set of criteria.
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C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 1952), p. 24.
11 The underlying point here is that empirical evidence cannot be relied upon to demonstrate the truth of intrinsic religious belief. If one is a metaphysical naturalist, the de facto response will be that any such evidence will always be consistent with a material explanation. For example, if someone claimed to hear an audible voice from the heavens, commanding him to resign from his job and move his family to a foreign country, it would always be more reasonable to blame this experience on psychological hallucinations, rather than attribute it to the creator of the universe. But as already suggested, metaphysical naturalism represents a tricky philosophical commitment, as it can easily spiral into question begging concerning the God hypothesis. On the other hand, if one is a metaphysical dualist, the possibility of evidence emerges, but it still cannot be empirical in nature. This is because such evidence will never conclusively settle the debate, particularly if God is thought to be an immaterial being. And for that matter, to insist on empirical evidence is to implicitly endorse scientism, which is a most unreasonable methodological commitment. Of course, the issue then becomes whether non-scientific beliefs, such as religious beliefs concerning the existence and nature of God, can be considered even modestly reasonable. According to Daniel Dennett, the correct answer is quite transparent, as he claims that “much of the traditional lore about God is no more worthy of belief than the lore about Santa Claus or Wonder Woman.�15 But the religious devotee can surely endorse some of the philosophical assumptions that motivate the project of New Atheism without also agreeing with its ultimate assessment of religious belief. For example, one could endorse a correspondence theory of truth and agree with Sam Harris that belief, in
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Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 210.
12 general, should be intended to represent the way the world really is.16 One could agree further that relativism and pluralism are false, and therefore there are objective facts about reality, waiting to be discovered by scientists and philosophers.17 Finally, one could easily concur with Dawkins that religious belief, if it should be taken seriously, ought to be subject to falsification. But none of these modest admissions have any direct connection to the alleged irrationality of religious belief. If religious belief is irrational, the question begs to be asked: irrational according to what standard or principle? Suppose that Sam Harris is correct when he depicts a belief as a mental representation of the way the world really is.18 The question emerges: to what degree does Harris equate the world with the physical world? If this is exactly what he has in mind, then he is just begging the question against religious belief. This is simply because many of the details of religious belief don’t include a representation of the physical world—quite obviously because the object of this sort of belief is non-physical in nature. And once again, if the New Atheists insist on limiting the available evidence to empirical sources, then this betrays a commitment to either metaphysical or methodological naturalism, each of which is unreasonable at face value. If religious belief is to be considered fully rational, and if its rationality should be based upon the adequacy of the available evidence, then what form must this evidence take? The answer to that question will depend, of course, on the object of belief. If the belief in question is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then empirical sources are relevant, 16
For an excellent treatment of this subject, see Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 17 On this important subject, see Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 18 See Harris, The End of Faith, p. 51-63.
13 in which case observation, in the generic sense, is appropriate for determining its rationality. But if the belief in question is the existence or nature of God, then empirical sources are not relevant, in which case observation plays no proper role in determining the rationality of such belief. And so it seems the only kind of evidence available to the religious devotee, when it comes to intrinsic religious belief, is philosophical in nature. That is, an argument for God’s existence must consist of premises whose truth or rationality does not depend on the observation of any natural phenomena. This is because most empirically-based arguments, such as the Design Argument, are inherently vulnerable to refutation from future scientific discoveries. It seems that a natural explanation is nearly always forthcoming to explain some complicated feature of the physical realm—whereas a purely philosophical argument suffers from no such limitation. Such an argument, at least in principle, must be falsifiable, but it should not be subject to falsification from the observation of any empirical data. But what about those beliefs which are not based upon empirical observation, but which don’t seem particularly subject to the lights of philosophical argumentation? The Christian doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine of the Eucharist are thought to literally become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, seems like an appropriate example of this sort of belief. There is obviously no physical or empirical evidence for this teaching, and yet it also seems implausible that a philosophical argument on its behalf is forthcoming. Nevertheless, there might be a way of accounting for this belief’s status as weakly rational, and in the following sense: the evidence for the transubstantiation could be derived from the evidence for other beliefs. Suppose that there is good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ or for the historical reliability
14 of the Scriptures.19 In principle, these beliefs could be empirically verified, even if there is no way to empirically verify the doctrine of transubstantiation. And it could be on the basis of the rationality of these beliefs that belief in the transubstantiation derives its rationality. While I’m not motivated to defend this particular Christian doctrine, this does strike me as a plausible strategy for justifying a number of such extrinsically religious beliefs. One of the failures of the New Atheism is its apparent reliance on an atomistic view of evidence. To wit, for any particular belief to be rational or justified, it must obtain its positive epistemic status directly from the probabilistic or causal factors that make it likely to be true. At some level, this is an understandable requirement, but it ignores the important role that background beliefs can play in contributing to the rationality of one’s noetic structure. If these background beliefs are sufficiently justified, and they form the conceptual basis for a host of other beliefs, then these subsequent beliefs could be justified as well, even if they are lacking in the same kind of direct empirical evidence. Rather than blaming individuals for developing beliefs in this manner, shouldn’t we admire them for their attempts to achieve a sound and coherent noetic system? IV. In the end, the criticisms of the New Atheism have compelled religious devotees to question and clarify the epistemic merit of their beliefs. And these intellectuals should be commended for endorsing some important principles, particularly those concerning the objectivity of truth and the significance of reason and evidence. Nevertheless, at the
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See F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 6th ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003).
15 heart of their condemnation of religious belief is an unusual set of assumptions and perspectives. It seems that the God hypothesis, despite arguments to the contrary, does not fall within the purview of scientific inquiry. To suggest otherwise and then insist that such belief is unscientific and therefore irrational, equates with either illicit question begging or methodological extremism. On the contrary, because of the nature of religious belief, it is inherently immune from these sorts of criticisms. Whether it is rational or irrational depends, not on the scientific evidence, but rather on the available philosophical evidence. Or to put it differently, although science can certainly complement religious themes, and provide alternative explanations of various sorts of phenomena, science completely lacks the resources to invalidate religious belief, at least in the immodest sense explained above. One of the primary reasons the New Atheists make these conceptual mistakes is because they lack the philosophical sophistication to effectively adjudicate between the relevant issues. Underlying many of their critiques of religious belief is a host of questionable epistemological assumptions, all of which have been hotly contested by contemporary theorists of knowledge. For instance, a common problem in epistemology concerns whether evidence must be internal or external to the cognitive agent.20 The “internalist” argues that everything which contributes to epistemic justification must be directly accessible to the agent; whereas the “externalist” insists there are at least some factors which need not be directly accessible. The fundamental question is fairly straightforward: for my belief to be justified, in the epistemic sense, to what degree must I know or understand that this is the case? The New Atheists clearly assume an internalist stance on this question, one that indeed 20
See Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa, Epistemic Justification (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
16 betrays a rather extreme form of evidentialism.21 And yet contemporary epistemology abounds with refutations of this doctrine. Suppose that externalism is a more correct theory of epistemic justification. Are my religious beliefs rational? If these beliefs are appropriately connected to the relevant causal and probabilistic facts, then the conditions for rationality or justification are easily satisfied. And this is true even if, from my firstperson perspective, I have no good reason for thinking my beliefs are true or likely to be true. The point here is not to defend a particular theory of epistemic justification, but rather to emphasize just one central epistemological issue that is relevant to these criticisms of religious belief, but which is completely ignored by these New Atheists. This insight should suggest, quite obviously, that the question of whether religious belief is rational, indeed the question of whether science invalidates religious belief, is inherently philosophical in nature. No doubt the New Atheists would do well to keep this fact in mind, and thereby demonstrate the kind of intellectual virtue that they often accuse religious devotees of lacking.
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The central theme of evidentialism is that a belief is justified only if it is made probable by the available evidence. The difficulty is that there are many putatively justified beliefs that are completely lacking in such probabilistic evidence.