Does God Exist?
Stephen Hawking, Physicist:
“Because there are laws such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”
“What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.”
Werner Heisenberg, Physicist:
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”
Belief & Action in the Modern World
“What does it matter what we believe,” you might ask, “isn’t what we do the important thing?” That actual question came up in my previous post. Put that way most of us, I included, have to answer “yes”: Actions do matter more than words; how we actually live matters more than the doctrines we espouse.
But on another level, this is the wrong question. It’s not that simple. Belief and action do not make an either/or dichotomy. We are human beings, after all: we gave up relying on instinct. We act—we can only act—according to what we believe. Of course, what we say we believe, even what we may think we believe, may not be what we truly believe. What we really believe, the beliefs that we inscribe in actions and attitudes, and even words, may differ from any formal belief system that we claim in public.
I remember one time volunteering with a group of men to do grounds maintenance work at a Protestant church I attended. The priest, who is deeply knowledgeable, made Christ’s teachings on love and compassion come alive in today’s world in ways I hadn’t experienced before. So when we put down our clippers and mowers and rakes and took a coffee break, I found myself scratching my head as the men I was working with, all of whom I like, agreed with each other that “we should bomb the hell out of them” (whoever “them” was—one of the middle eastern countries we’ve been having conflicts with). When I finally spoke up and disagreed, it broke the spell of “group-think”—but didn’t change anyone’s mind or habits of thought, I’m sure.
Would Christ say, “let’s bomb the hell out of them”? I don’t think so. So how do so many people who say they’d like to bomb someone else call themselves Christians—and even say it out loud in their church hall? That experience stays with me as one example of how complicated belief in our time has become. It illustrates that “believing in God” or “believing in Christ” in some abstract sense, and faithfully going to church on Sunday, do not by themselves make a person a Christian—at least not if you define “a Christian” as someone who actually tries, in this world, to base their actions and thoughts consistently on Christ’s teachings.
But, yet again, it’s not that simple. I don’t think that my friends were being hypocritical; they’re sincere in their faith. They all live good Christian lives in their families and church community. They would agree in principle with biblical Christian teachings: (“Love thy neighbor….” “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone.” And so on). At the same time, they’re eager to throw the first missile and bomb the hell out of their neighbors on our small planet.
What underlying beliefs, perhaps less readily expressed, give rise to such attitudes and ideas that obviously contradict, and evidently trump in practice, their Christian teachings? What do we, as we harbour such violent impulses, really believe? Basically, I suspect, many of us believe that Christian teachings run against the grain of real human nature. As desirable as they may be in principle, they’re impossibly impractical in the real world. Such belief, acted on, becomes self-fulfilling prophecy (briefly discussed earlier here and here.
We live in a world full of such contradictions and compartmentalizations: Church over here, real-world politics and economics over there. (Could that be partly why church membership is declining across the board? More on that in a later post).
“Actions Speak Louder Than Words” [?]
Actions speak louder than words. Take that old adage out of its usual either/or framework, and it makes more sense. It can be an invitation to question our stated beliefs in light of our actions; and then to question further whether those beliefs our actions betray are what we want to believe, what we should believe.
The “should” here carries a scientific as well as a moral sense: there are now good scientific reasons not to believe the everyday, man-on-the-street, pessimistic, disparaging view of human nature. Does that mean, then, that now we have scientific license to believe in religion in deeper, more practical ways? Maybe so.
“Don’t believe everything you think”—a bumper sticker, seen and remembered.
Religion & Science in Perspective
So, what is faith? What is belief? We humans almost instinctively, it seems, get curious about beginnings. We seek the origins of things. Understanding how something began helps us know it better. What are the beginnings of religious belief? We’re now able to make some good educated guesses.
The Beginnings of Belief
The most ancient arts—cave paintings, beads, little carved statues of stone or bone, and religion as indicated by ceremonial burials accompanied by grave goods—signal the beginnings of symbolic life, of reflexive conscious awareness, of human culture. With reflexivity, self-awareness, come questions about the self. The self-aware being wonders about itself. Where did I come from? Why am I here? It must have been about this same time—around 50,000 years ago—just as our human ancestors became fully human, that they began to believe in God or Gods.
Belief in a God(s) answers those questions about the hows and whys of existence—questions that only a self-reflective, self-conscious being could trouble itself with. When our hominid ancestors developed symbolic language and began to think about their own existence, they naturally wondered how and why we are here. The answer? Well, clearly there must be a supernatural Creator and Law-Giver who made us, put us here, and tells us how to live.
Only a being who transcends us could have made us. Only a being who is all-knowing, all-powerful—so goes the argument—could have designed and made the world, put the stars in the heavens, separated the light from the dark, created the sun and moon, and laid down the laws and commandments we must follow.
Religious institutions take on lives of their own, while the beliefs that underlie them retain varying degrees of conscious and unconscious hold on their members. Sometimes the institutions persist, while their foundational belief systems reduce or even lose much of their hold on people’s minds. In such circumstances, an institution that was central to, even largely defined, a culture may persist only as marginalized splinters of its former identity.
That is true of The Christian Church in our time—which may help account for disjunctions between stated beliefs and actions, as illustrated above. Churches may still be powerful institutions in their own ways and contexts; but The Church is no longer so central in Western culture as it once was.
What happened? Well, for one, science happened.
Another Kind of Choice: Religious Belief and (or vs.?) Science
Belief in a supernatural Creator, we have just seen, coincides with our becoming fully human. The earliest cave paintings, figurines of stone or bone, grave offerings, and other evidence of the beginnings of symbolic life mark this event in the archeological record.
Belief in God or gods in some form or other has been a unique and defining human characteristic for at least 40,000 to 50,000 years.
That has always been the answer. But now, for the first time, we have an alternative answer. Only in the last few hundred years—our own brief moment of archeological time, the age of what we call modernity—have people found a real alternative, a convincing challenge or complement to belief in a supernatural origin of the natural world. (No wonder there’s controversy!)
Science, in only our own final 1% (at most) of human history, offers another kind of explanation—a credible natural rather than a supernatural or religious explanation for the natural world, and for our own existence in it. Even if science can’t explain everything, it became so successful in its ever-enlarging sphere of knowledge that people could at least dream that it might eventually succeed in its quest for (to borrow the title of the movie about Stephen Hawking) “A Theory Of Everything.”
(Actually, we now know that such a universal, reductionist final theory of everything is impossible in principle. Scientists in different fields recently are finding that uncertainty is built into the foundations of existence. Indeterminacy is a necessity. But that too is another story for a different time.)
I hinted above that science might have a direct, practical, and even positive bearing on religious belief. How so? How does today’s science bear on the ancient questions of religion? A huge topic, obviously, but an important question nonetheless, and not one to leave for the experts. We shouldn’t be afraid to discuss science’s bearing on religion, even if academics and scholars are even now writing weighty volumes on the topic. Public discussion helps bring both science and religion down to Earth, where they belong.
To begin with, a few points stand out. An important one is that we have come to understand that humans fundamentally are cultural beings. This effectively wipes out any supposedly scientific basis for thinking that religious values, however desirable in principle, are unrealistic in practice because they run against the grain of base human nature. That reductionist view of human nature has become scientifically passé—as has the whole notion of science that supported it.
Beyond that, science can help us discern what is universal in human spirituality, shaving the multiplicity of belief down to a common core. That common core, as progressive religious thinkers like Gretta Vosper, (mentioned in my previous post) are concluding, may not hinge on belief in a supernatural God at all. The universal core of spiritual thought rather seems to be best expressed in precisely what so many of those who call themselves Christians regularly ignore (as illustrated above).
That is, the core of human spirituality comes alive in Christ’s practical teachings rather than in Christian theology. In essence Christ’s teaching parallels the practical teaching of Islam, Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Confucianism, and all the other great religious traditions. It boils down to the Golden Rule, to living simply, more consciously, with compassion for oneself and others. These values are universal.
As religious scholar, Karen Armstrong, says in her book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2011, p. 11), the immense world-wide veneration in our own time of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, “shows that people are hungry for a more compassionate and principled form of leadership.” People want real spiritual values to guide our public lives. And, as I said, there is no longer any supposedly scientifically believable reason why they can’t do so.
This line of thinking shifts belief in God to a possibly more empowering belief in ourselves, and in our own inherent goodness as human beings—our own intuitive and evolving knowledge of what best furthers life and carries evolution to its next levels. In this view, developments in human goodness and advancing knowledge are converging to form new cutting edges of human evolution, and open up new horizons of human possibility.