As unlikely as it sounds, I am both a theologically orthodox Christian and a fan of yours, which is why, before getting into my disagreements with your statements in the interview by Salon, I’d like to talk about where we agree.
You say that “evolution is a fact”, and that resistance to evolution:
comes, I’m sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won’t find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.
I am not a theologian, sophisticated or otherwise, but you won’t find any opposition to evolution from me and the millions of like-minded Christians. In fact, I find the denial of evolution to be almost blasphemous in that it is a denial of part of God’s creation, and a particularly beautiful and elegant part at that. To deny evolution or the Big Bang is to tell God what you will allow him to have done instead of celebrating what he has done in fact.
I also agree with you that belief in God doesn’t solve the mystery of creation, the question of “why there is something rather than nothing”, as Hawkings put it. It doesn’t make any difference if that “something” is the known universe, or is instead the known universe plus God, it still shouldn’t exist, and the fact that it does is inexplicable. For many Christians, the identification of God as our creator isn’t a statement of the origin of the cosmos as much a statement regarding God’s relationship to us, which is a far more important revelation.
I take exception, though, when you blame religion for
Terrorism in the Middle East, militant Zionism, 9/11, the Northern Ireland “troubles,” genocide, which turns out to be “credicide” in Yugoslavia, the subversion of American science education, oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Roman Catholic Church, which thinks you can’t be a valid priest without testicles.
You subsequently undercut your own argument when you say:
I don’t wish to suggest it is doctrinal disputes that are motivating the individual soldiers who are doing the killing. What I do suggest is that in places like Northern Ireland, religion was the only available label by which people could indulge in the human weakness for us-or-them wars. When a Protestant murders a Catholic or a Catholic murders a Protestant, they’re not playing out doctrinal disagreements about transubstantiation.
If there were no religion in northern Ireland, the fighting would still go on between the “Celtics” and the “Anglo-Saxons”, or the “Republicans” and the “Unionists”, and would be every bit as fierce. Christ teaches us to love our enemy, to turn the other cheek, so violence in his name is clearly of human, and not divine origin. We fight because we are human, and delude ourselves that God is on our side, even when he has given us no reason to think so. We can’t blame God when we are too stubborn to listen to his counsel for peace. Violence is evidence of the desperate need for religion, not the fault of religion. Similarly with environmental destruction — the fact that some Christians are using religion to deny our moral duty as stewards of the Earth calls for us to be more obedient to God’s will, not to deny God altogether.
You over-generalize when you describe religion as a virus, transmitted from parent to child, from preacher to congregation. I won’t deny that, in some cultures and with some individuals the religion meme propagates itself this way, but you argue that this is the sole reason that religion still exists. This ignores those raised outside the church that convert as adults, and those raised inside the church that go through their own spiritual journey, their forty years in the desert, before returning to God of their own accord. C. S. Lewis, an atheist until his conversion in middle-age, was no unthinking lump of clay, passively absorbing the religion meme from a charismatic preacher. So how to explain the sophisticated, educated theologians you speak of? Many Christians have arrived at their faith through thoughtful and careful exploration inspite of their upbringing, not because of it. To dismiss us as victims of a passive parent-to-child imprinting is rather condescending.
You also miss the point when you say that
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the “imaginary friend” and the bogeyman under the bed.
If by “lack of evidence”, you mean lack of scientific evidence, then you are correct. That doesn’t mean there is no evidence at all, and I am not speaking of the Virgin Mary appearing on a grilled cheese sandwich. As I’ve written on this blog before:
Science only concerns itself with explaining scientific phenomena. The scientific method is based on the observation of repeatable, measurable events. Any event that is neither repeatable nor measurable is of no interest to science since theories can not be developed nor validated for events that can’t be duplicated, predicted or measured.
For the “brights”, this distinction is valid but irrelevant, since there are no miracles, no events that, if we look closely enough, can’t be explained via the scientific method. If this is the case, then science is not only true, but complete. There is nothing else to consider.
On the other hand, if we find a single event, just one occurrence that violates the rules of cause and effect, that can’t be repeated or measured, but that has undeniably occurred, then we know that science is not complete. We will then know that science is true, but only within its limited scope, and that there are things beyond which science can not go.
Of course, the hard part is finding and observing such an event, this miracle, in a way that conforms to the scientific method. By definition, miracles are non-repeatable events. They don’t seem to occur when we have the cameras, spectrometers and particle detectors ready to observe them. The existence of miracles, or just one miracle, will never be proven by the scientific method.
The nature of these events called miracles is very personal. If it happens to you, it is a miracle; if it happens to someone else, it is neatly resolved by assuming that if you spent long enough looking for a natural cause, you would find one.
I believe that this is the way God intended it. God’s existence can not be proven, because then we would no longer have faith, only fact, and faith is clearly very important to God’s plan. Some Christians I know have spoken movingly of a personal miracle that convinced them that God exists, and that he loves us. For them, this is the single event, an effect without any possible cause, that demonstrates that science is true but incomplete, that there are phenomena that lie outside of science, that there are events that are neither repeatable nor measurable but still very real. They are lucky indeed, but as Jesus said, “Even better blessings are in store for those who believe without seeing.”
Of course, for Christians, we all have one miracle that is very personal and very universal at the same time: the risen Christ. This too, is unconvincing as scientific evidence, and has been explained away countless times. But for those of us who have experienced this truth personally, if no other miracle ever occurred, it is all the proof that we need.
