Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Has Science Made Belief in God Obsolete?


This article, an excerpt from The Big Questions in Science and Religion, By Keith Ward, was posted at The Global Spiral.

There is a picture of human intellectual progress made popular by Auguste Comte (it originated with Robert Turgot and Henri de Saint-Simon) that sees humanity as moving from the earliest stage of religion through a stage of metaphysics to the final maturity of science. Each stage supplants and renders obsolete the stage before it. The age of religion is the infancy of the human race, when humans formed animistic ideas of spirits in trees and storms, which could be influenced by magical techniques. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Fraser subdivides this first stage into one of magic, when the earliest humans tried to influence natural forces by magical rituals, followed by religion, when it was realized that magic did not work, and instead humans submitted in fear and imprecation to the mysterious gods who caused thunderstorms and earthquakes.

But prayer did not work either, so the more sophisticated humans began to do metaphysics, to think rationally about the nature of the universe. They were, however, armchair thinkers, like Plato, who never actually did experiments but just thought what things ought to be like (the planets, for instance, must move in circular orbits because circles are the most perfect Forms).

Only later, in sixteenth-century Europe, did experimental science get going, and at last humans came to know the real causal factors that made things happen, finally exorcising the ghosts of magic and religion from reality. Science shows us that supernatural spirits are both unnecessary and misleading fantasies. So, at last, we can face a vast impersonal universe with heroic stoicism, refusing to be deluded by fantasies of ghosts above the sky, seeing things as they are—blind, compassionless, unconscious, and indifferent to all things human.

That is part of a popular modern myth of human progress. Science will deliver us from superstition and infantile fear of the gods. By the cold clear light of reason, we will be able to devise a more humane, less authoritarian morality and plan the human future calmly and wisely, without bowing before unseen forces that demand human sacrifice—of the intellect, if not of actual flesh.

That myth was devised in the eighteenth century, when the cultured elite celebrated its emancipation from the brute passions of the working classes and more primitive races of the world—that is, from virtually everyone who did not own a country estate, run by those same inferior brutish lower orders.

The myth was destroyed in the twentieth century, the century in which scientific technology, applied to constructing weapons of war, led to more violent deaths than in the whole of previous human history. Science, the great liberator, had made it possible to kill more human beings in more terrible ways than had ever been imagined. The pitiless indifference of nature had taken root in the hearts of humans, and, from the most cultured civilizations in the world, the brightest and fittest members of a whole generation slaughtered one another in the greatest ritual of human sacrifice ever known on earth.

The evils of religious intolerance and warfare pale into insignificance by comparison with the record of emancipated twentieth-century Europe. That may lead us to think again about the alleged primitiveness of early humanity, as opposed to the rational thought of modern humans. Yet, from an evolutionary point of view, the intellectual capacities of prehominids, millions of years ago, must have been less developed than those of modern humans. There is no doubt that human knowledge has grown with the development of writing and mathematics, and it has grown more rapidly in the last few decades than ever before. We know that before the sixteenth century many human beliefs about the natural world were incorrect. And we can see in the recorded history of religion a development from belief in many gods and spirits of mixed moral character to belief in one God of supreme goodness.

That there has been a development in intellectual understanding is not in doubt. It is hard to exaggerate the revolution in moral and scientific thinking that has occurred in recent years. A universal charter of human rights has been drawn up, slavery has been officially abolished by most nations, equality of the sexes has come to be thought generally desirable, and care for animals has come onto the moral agenda. In science, the cosmos is seen as an intelligible realm of universal laws, evolution is established, and genetics and quantum physics have given us a dramatically new understanding of and control over human and physical nature.

All that is true. It would be odd if, in religion, there had not been a concomitant development in understanding. And there has been. The rise of biblical criticism, an increased awareness of the global diversity of faiths, the acceptance of new scientific understandings of the cosmos, the acceptance of freedom of religion and belief, and a clearer vision of the importance of universal human welfare as a religious goal have been hallmarks of a new understanding of religious faith as essentially concerned with universal human welfare and worship of a God who encourages personal creativity and compassion for all sentient beings.

The twenty-first-century world is one in which there have been enormous developments of understanding in science, morality, and religion. But these have been accompanied by relapses into the crudest barbarism. Human rights are routinely violated, slavery still exists in new and hidden forms, women are oppressed in much of the world, and animals are treated with extreme cruelty. New scientific understanding is widely used to create ever more terrifying means of destruction, including nuclear and biological weapons. The spread of global technology, despite its many benefits, threatens to render the world uninhabitable. New biological experimentation could release destructive organisms that could wipe out human life. In religion, fundamentalist views that insist on the literal truth of one scripture and encourage the use of violence to wipe out all competitors constitute a major threat to peace. The turn to antiscientific forms of religious belief and to forms of faith untouched by rational reflection and based on unquestioned authority is a major intellectual setback for the alleged progress of humanity.

The picture does not seem to be one of linear progress from religion through metaphysics to science. It is more like a picture of an undoubted growth in knowledge and understanding, in religion, morality, and science alike, alongside a misuse of that knowledge in the name of the naked will to power and world domination.

Science has enormously increased our understanding of nature, but it is not our liberator from hatred and greed. It can be used either for good or evil. It can increase human health and welfare, or it can destroy the world. So it is, one would think, with religion. It can be, and has been, used for evil, to oppress and destroy. Or it can be, and has been, used for good, to found orphanages, schools, hospitals, and hospices, to sponsor great works of art, and to motivate humans to excellence in science and philosophy.

Was there then, as the Comtean myth asserted, an “age of magic or religion” that was founded on false views of causality and false beliefs in supernatural spirit and that was rendered obsolete by science?

A study of human history suggests that religious beliefs, like scientific beliefs, were much more naive and mistaken in very early human history than they are now. And they probably shared the moral ambiguity of all human activities, being used both to bolster the authority of religious charlatans and to motivate heroically virtuous action in tribal societies. It is, however, prejudice to assert that religion properly belonged to that era, whereas science did not. A more reasonable view is that both religion (reverence for the spiritual world) and science (understanding of the natural world) were in a undeveloped state in prehistory and in need of much further development.

Read the rest of this article.

This is a pretty good essay, with many points to recommend it, not least of which is this passage:

To say there is a Spiritual Reality is to say that, underlying the world of things perceived by the senses, there is a reality that is not bound by space and time and that has the nature of consciousness and value. That reality will be conceived in terms of the concepts available in specific societies—in that sense, it will be socially constructed—used in a metaphorical or symbolic way to evoke a sense of what cannot be straightforwardly described.

We know that many early societies worshipped many gods and that the gods were associated with natural phenomena, with significant historical events, and with human values and desirable or feared possibilities. But we do not know that the god of thunder, for example, was invented to explain why it thundered and so that he could be propitiated in order to control the weather. This is to see early religion as primitive (and useless) technology. An alternative account is that thunder might be perceived as a metaphor for the destructive power of God, rather than God being a quasiscientific inference from the occurrence of thunder.

Perhaps some evolutionary biologists simply lack a sense of poetry and metaphor and, therefore, cannot understand what it would be for thunder to be taken as a “sign” of God—not evidence for God but a sensory image of a reality that cannot be physically sensed but whose nature is expressed in some way in everything that is. Some symbols can be taken as especially appropriate and revelatory signs of that reality. For instance, the abode of the gods will be “above”—physical height is a natural sensory image for spiritual superiority. Thunder from the sky can be a sensory image for the fearful power of the source of all being.

On such an account, the “religious sense” would lie in a disposition to take finite things or events as signs, communications, or disclosures of an unseen deeper reality. It may be mistaken, but the mistake is not that of thinking the cause of thunder is an invisible man pushing the clouds together.

It's easy for science (or scientism) to reject the idea of God as irrational and primitive -- not to mention lacking proof. It's much more difficult to reject the idea of a spiritual reality in the same way. Further, it's even harder to disprove or reject symbolic (metaphoric) interpretations as revelatory of that deeper spiritual reality.

The human mind loves metaphors. When we enter the realm of metaphor, science can longer pertain -- we are now talking metaphysics and philosophy. Metaphors are one of the ways -- maybe one of the most basic ways -- that our minds make associations and meaning about our world.

From Wikipedia:
According to Nietzsche, we are in metaphor or we are metaphor: our being is not derived from a Platonic, eternal essence or from a Cartesian thinking substance but (in as much as there is a way of being we can call ours) is emergent from tensional interactions between competing drives or perspectives (Nietzsche 2000). We customarily hold truth to be a relation of correspondence between knowledge and reality but, Nietzsche declares, it is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus to retinal image (first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor) (Nietzsche 2000, p. 55). Our categories, and the judgments we form with them, can never correspond to things in themselves because they are formed through a series of transformations which ensures that ‘there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression’ connecting the first stage (the stimulus) with the last (the concept) (Nietzsche 2000, p. 58).

For Ricoeur, metaphor is also ‘living’ – hence the title of his book, La Métaphore vive (Ricoeur 1975) (translated into English as The Rule of Metaphor (Ricoeur 1977)) – but in a different sense from Nietzsche . Metaphor is living, Ricoeur claims, in that it is the principle which revives our perception of the world and through which we become aware of our creative capacity for seeing the world anew. This process, he thinks, is both paradoxical and Kantian in nature: paradoxical in that the creative combination of terms in a metaphor nevertheless produces meaning which has the character of a discovery (how can something be both a creation and a discovery?), and Kantian because the paradox mirrors Kant’s theory of experience in which the subjective application of concepts nevertheless yields perception of an objective world. The tension between the subjective, creative and the objective, discovery aspects of a metaphor, Ricoeur argues, proceeds ‘from the very structures of the mind, which it is the task of [Kant’s] transcendental philosophy to articulate’ (Ricoeur 1977, p. 300).
While I support Ward's recourse to metaphor as a vehicle of meaning, I have issues with other parts of his thesis.

He misunderstands memetics as a pseudoscience:

Some writers have talked of “memes,” which are supposed to be units of thought or belief that are successful replicators in human culture. It is difficult to think of any analogy that a thought has to the chemical structure of a gene—a piece of a DNA molecule—and equally difficult to think of a principle of natural selection that could select favored memes. For that reason, I regard “memetics” as a pseudoscience. It implies that beliefs get selected because they are easily replicated or psychologically memorable, rather than because they are thought to be true.

When a “memetic” account is given of why early humans believed that 2 + 2 = 4, the account is not that the sum is correct but that those who believed it survived better than those who thought that 2 + 2 = 22. But the reason they survived better is that 2 plus 2 really does equal 4. That is a piece of knowledge that is useful because it is true.

Memetics would argue that the meme that best makes sense of the world (survival being a crucial part of that), and has the best built-in virus protection (in this case, that 2 + 2 = 4 is the truth), is the meme that will survive. It's not an either/or but a both/and situation. But this is minor point.

Overall, his argument would work better if he could frame it in the notion of worldviews. He attributes modern ideas to pre-modern people in a way that is not fair to either. For example, in looking at the origins of religion:
Religion has survived from the earliest recorded human history, but it has changed, just as a scientific attempt to understand the world has done. Local tribal cults widened and developed into four main streams of religious understanding. Bearing in mind that there are many overlaps between and variations within these streams of thought, they may be termed: theism, idealism, dualism, and monism. The first, the theistic, tradition was developed by the Hebrew prophets, in which the many gods, spirits, and ancestors who were symbols of transcendence were unified into the idea of one creator God of moral purpose. Within the Bible, this development can be seen particularly clearly, and it reaches a culminating point in the eighth to the sixth centuries bCe, with the idea of one ineffable God who interacts with humans as a morally commanding and supremely good personal reality.
Based on nearly everything we know of pre-modern peoples, they believed in a literal God, not a metaphoric God who represents that highest values of reason and compassion -- a "symbol of transcendence."

Understanding that the idea of God has evolved over the centuries would add strength and depth to his argument. The fact that we have evolved from a literal understanding of God as a human-like being with omniscient powers to a indefinable God who is at once embedded in and beyond the physical world is testament to the power of this metaphor in human lives -- to its power to define our meaning and purpose.

Ward takes his argument all the way through the other three forms (
idealism, dualism, and monism), into the Enlightenment, through the post-Enlightenment and into the multiverse view of God. This really is a fascinating article, and I am tempted to read the book.


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