On faith
The third most popular book on the NY Times best sellers list (when I started writing this essay 18 months ago) was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, a tome that could be, judging from reviews, described as a full-scale assault on the notions of the existence of God and the institutions of organized religion. I have just now started reading it (and finishing this essay), after reading much of Rodney Stark’s Discovering God (a detailed history of religion) and Marcus Borg’s Jesus (a thinking person’s guide to the historical and scriptural figure).
The God Delusion has figured prominently in articles in Time, Wired and the New York Times among other publications. At least three other prominent thinkers have also recently published books on a similar theme. Dawkins is a well-regarded scientist, and it is he, more than any other current public figure, who defines the religion vs. secular debate as ‘faith vs. science,’ a division that first arose during the Enlightenment, that 18th century period of rapid scientific discovery. That division widened into the current deep chasm with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859.
Dawkin’s argument is that it’s time for the human race to grow up and shed this last intellectual embarrassment, a superstitious belief system that belongs in the same class as, say, worship of stone idols or the ritual sacrifice of virgins. We humans have mostly progressed from more primitive beliefs - I see few temples to Zeus or Apollo as I make my daily rounds - to monotheism and its clutch of religions, many claiming to be the one true way (and those houses of worship are many, even in my small town).
My personal short response is that I believe that our universe has more than enough room for both faith and science. I guess it could be said that I have faith in both, or, at least aspects of both.
I believe that rigorous science often leads to new understanding, and new mastery of the world we live in. From a faithful perspective, only a poor shepherd (the ‘hireling’) would not try to be a good steward of the flock that is creation. To further paraphrase the parable from the gospel of John, like the good shepherd we must always search for that lost sheep, which, in this case, is deeper knowledge, and better comprehension of that which we have.
I also believe that science does not automatically rule out God: it certainly does not rule out a choice to believe in God. Anyone, at any moment can choose to have faith in God (or almost anything else) - no laws of the universe are violated. I have performed this experiment, and can speak to the results. One can have faith or not, and the physical world remains the same. A believer and a non-believer, if dropped from a given height, will fall at the same rate (this is a likely result, though I have no personal, empirical data to back it up).
My personal belief system could perhaps be described as a kind of quantum faith: what you see depends on where, when and how you look - sometimes it’s God and sometimes it’s nature in its full. I find myself in a school with Baruch Spinoza and perhaps Einstein (though I would hardly have been valedictorian in that particular college).
Spinoza advanced the idea of pantheism, the notion of ‘God or nature’ being equal descriptors of the universe and all that it contains. He rejected the personal, human-like Abrahamic God of the Old Testament (and was ejected from the Jewish community of 17th-century Amsterdam for his views). Einstein’s infrequent references to God seem to me to result from awe arising from his ability to see deeply into the elegance and wonders of cosmic machinery.
I share that awe: that creative intelligence can rise from so much stardust, that simple laws and a handful of particular can spawn the fantastic complexity of the cosmos leaves me quaking, and wondering ‘Is this God, or is this nature?’