One more little thing from The Believing Brain — about the Argument from Design, which came up in our discussion of A Universe from Nothing (still waiting to be read).

Shermer discusses the results of a survey he did in which he asked people why they believe in God.  The top two reasons that people gave for why they believed in God were “the good design of the universe” and “the experience of God in everyday life.”

If we believe Shermer, of course, the belief in God came first, and the explanation for the belief came along later.  But it is interesting that the Argument from Design (as applied to the universe) is the first thing people tend to come up with.  I bet that, two hundred years ago, people would also have applied the Argument from Design to us, but evolution has made that much less plausible to people who aren’t prepared to dismiss science altogether; now religion has to accommodate itself to evolution.  But until recently, science had nothing to say about the origin of the universe, and that left religion free to claim it for a Designer.

David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion has the character Philo make some powerful arguments against the Argument from Design.  But even Philo wobbles towards the end — I imagine because, when Hume was writing in 1776, even a thoroughgoing skeptic couldn’t quite get past the miracle that is man. And it was impossible to completely dismiss the wonder of the creation.

Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great-machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.

Over time, if the new theories work out, I imagine more and more believers will leave behind “the good design of the universe” and center their belief on “the experience of God.”  But then, of course, you have the neuroscientists hard at work on that one….

Ralph Waldo Emerson sez:

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.

I thought of this quote in the context of the famous C.S. Lewis “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument, quoted in The Believing Brain:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic — on a level with a man who says He is a poached egg — or else He would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.

The language of this quote has always struck me as way over the top (without even getting into its dubious logic — are those the only possibilities on offer?).  It seems to me that not everyone is a worshipper, no matter what Emerson says.  But apparently there are lots of folks who must worship someone or something.  Francis Collins seems to be one of them; Lewis had a profound impact on his conversion.

There is much to ponder in Jeff’s recent fine comment on Liberal Religion.  Here’s one part that I’d like to ruminate on:

There’s so much we don’t know, scientifically — from the number of actual physical dimensions to perhaps the most basic question of all: Is this universe the only one there is? If it’s not, are there points of intersection between our universe and others?

Here’s a rough taxonomy of how religious people deal with science:

Some of them recognize that science (maybe broadly construed to include historical evidence) presents a problem for their beliefs.  So they attack it head-on.  They dispute the evidence; they challenge the science.  At an extreme, they discard Occam’s Razor altogether and say stuff like, “God put the fossils there to fool scientists.”  These are the folks that make liberal theologians uncomfortable, and they often claim that the New Atheists are simply aiming their fire at these easy targets.

Some folks don’t try to fight with science; they accept scientific knowledge and figure out a way to accommodate their religious beliefs with it.  If you’re a deist, that’s easy — you just say that God flipped the switch, and everything else that happened after that belongs to science.  But most folks are theists, and they believe that God plays an active role in our existence.  So they need to work harder to justify/explain how this works.  These folks may believe in evolution, but they’ll say that evolution is part of God’s plan, and maybe He breathed souls into a couple of early hominids to get His process going.  This kind of approach strikes some as sophisticated theology; for others of us, it comes across as tortuous and unnecessary (as well as fundamentally unprovable in scientific terms).  It’s more of a rear-guard action than a head-on battle.

Then there are the God of the Gaps folks. There’s so much that science hasn’t explained; at an extreme, perhaps science is in principle incapable of explaining certain things. So we can have a theological explanation of that stuff–until, alas, science gets around to explaining it.  Then the God of the Gaps folks have to retreat to accommodationism.  This, I assume, is what’s going to happen with discussions around the origins of the universe.  Used to be that theologians could say, well, OK, evolution explains a lot.  But it doesn’t explain why we’re here in the first place.  It doesn’t explain why anything is here.  There needs to be an Uncaused Cause.  But now we see science marching towards an explanation of ultimate causality.  Maybe it isn’t quite there yet.  As the New Scientist review suggests, maybe multiverses are an explanation; and I expect we’ll see sophisticated theologians making the case for how multiverses are compatible with their beliefs.  For those familiar with my oeuvre (all three or four of you),Forbidden Sanctuary explores an aspect of this, although multiverses weren’t part of the scientific discourse at the time.

And then there are the NOMA folks, who who simply assert that science and religion are about different things. Science in principle simply has nothing to say about religion (or morality or ultimate meaning).

My sense is that most religious people, to the extent that they worry about such things at all, will unsystematically use any of these approaches, depending on the state of play of a particular issue.  If they can use scientific evidence to support their faith, they will.  If not, they will try to use lack of scientific evidence.  If not, they will simply assert that scientific evidence simply doesn’t count.  They still believe.  And that’s a feature, not a bug.  Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.

And ultimately, I think, that’s the heart of the matter.

Another fine comment:

Rich, I’m surprised to see you characterize the “proof from experience” position as “a standard liberal approach to faith.”  It seems to me anything but.  It’s closer to the evangelical approach (though I hasten to add that it has nothing at all to do with commonly perceived political stances of American evangelicals). It’s the approach that says, “I have known God in a personal way,” which renders the questions of existential proof academic. Where you might justifiably point to a parallel with liberal theology is in the belief that science and faith can coexist just fine….

The question of how to know if one is hearing God right is certainly a thorny one. The smart person applies many checks and balances, including the use of one’s own brainpower.  After all, as someone said — Jesus came to take away our sins, not our minds.

I suppose I’m not experienced enough to be able to justify the word “standard.”  But it’s Karen Armstrong’s approach (and conservatives consider her scarcely different from an atheist).  And it’s the approach of the wonderful minister of the little Unitarian church I attend. And it seems to me to be the  only approach that can survive the advances of science.

Of course, it’s an approach that atheists treat with dismissive scorn.  As Hitchens put it, “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”  At least fundamentalists will engage on facts and evidence and philosophical argumentation.  You say that Krauss’s argument is barking up the wrong tree.  But what other tree should he be barking up?  Is there any such tree?

There was a thread a while back on some blogs I follow about whether there was any conceivable evidence that could come to light that would convince an atheist that God exists.  They were hard put to come up with anything, because a naturalistic explanation would always be available, and it would always be preferable (using Occam’s Razor) than a theistic explanation.  But conversely, it seems clear that no evidence or explanation or argumentation would convince someone with a personal experience of God that God doesn’t exist — that the experience was just a pattern of neuronal firings, different in outcome but not in kind from any other pattern.  So neither side has anything to say to the other….

But further, atheists would say that this approach empowers all religions, no matter how fanatical, because once you assert that religion exists in a realm outside reason and evidence, what is the standard for truth and falsity?  Armstrong seems to believe that there is one truth, and all religions are different ways of perceiving that truth.  So she gives religions a pass on the various atrocities committed in their names — these don’t represent the essential truth of religions.  But how does she know what that truth is?  How does she know which moral beliefs should be condemned and which should be supported?  You use your brain power.  But I have met many very smart Jesuits whose brain power leads them to different conclusions from yours.  Who should I believe?

Anyway, go Patriots!

One of my many fine readers comments thusly on the quote in this post:

Not an unreasonable argument, but irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. Most believers I know give a big yawn to the question of whether scientific cosmology or evolutionary biology actively support the supposition of God’s existence. Science can’t prove (or disprove) God’s existence, and to expect it to is a wrong-headed approach to both science and faith. For the people I know, the proof comes from the experience of God’s presence. Sometimes it’s a life-changing, single event that confirms the belief; sometimes it’s a slow but steady walk.

I love science, but these kinds of arguments are barking up the wrong tree.