David Berlinski, in his book The Devil’s Delusion, does some nice work on the illusions of militant atheism. One of the atheists he mentions is a physicist named Victor Stenger.
As a follow-up to what I read in Berlinski, I skimmed through one of Stenger’s books. I was struck by the fact that atheists admit their arguments and “proofs” will be unconvincing to theists. After all, they say, that is what faith is – i.e., believing in the absence of evidence. Berlinski does a far better job than I could ever hope to do hoisting atheism on its own petard in the matter of faith, but I’ll touch on it a little perhaps.
Stenger relates that some of his fellow physicists are devout Christians. He mentions a couple by name and indicates that they have looked at the same phenomena, the same facts, the same evidence, yet retain their faith in a Creator. Although I did not see where Stenger explains this oddity, we can make a pretty good guess that, like his fellow atheists, he attributes the continuing faith of theists to some sort of cultural indoctrination.
On the other hand Stenger puts forth the idea that the laws of physics arose from nothing – you know, there was the universe and things were just floating around and after they floated around a while they sort of randomly formed into patterns and then physicists just superimposed the “laws” on the randomness. That may not be quite fair as I did not read in detail, and I really don’t care. What grabbed my attention is the admission by Stenger that most physicists reject his view.
So here we have an atheistic physicist holding a view in contradiction to the majority of his colleagues. Of course, that doesn’t mean he is wrong, but it does mean, in the face of inconclusive evidence -- really no evidence, he holds to his view.
Similarly, as noted above, there are physicists who are not atheists, whether Christian or of some other religion. So are the atheist physicists more intelligent than the theistic physicists? Or, are the theists more intelligent? The answer is probably neither, because it is a matter of faith – unless you want to call having faith evidence of high spiritual IQ.
In Hebrews 11 the writer says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God, for those who come to Him must believe that He is” Faith and free will are intimately related. God could certainly make people believe in Him. In fact, this is one of Stenger’s sophomoric arguments which goes something like “God does not love us because He does not make Himself blatantly known”. I suppose Stenger’s children love him because he so orders them and demands that they love him. And those are equivalent situations. Since God is perfect, and perfectly loving, omnipotent, omniscient, etc., a direct revelation of His complete presence – if a human in the physical state could survive it – would give the person no choice except to love God. The trouble is, it would be sort of spiritual rape and God doesn’t do stuff like that.
Any kind of love is only meaningful when given freely and apart from compulsion. In answer to the question of what kind of universe a loving God would create, we see that it would be one like this one. It is a universe where faith is possible and meaningful, where God can be loved freely by those who chose to trust in Him, and where those who refuse to acknowledge Him or have faith can find reasons to harden their hearts.
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2 comments:
Mushroom, Great post. I think you'll like this Reno essay [at my former blog].
A quote:
On one side, we have an educational ideal widely held. This vision wishes to deracinate. If we can live as cultural polytheists, exposed to many different perspectives and allowing no divine name to take possession of our souls, then our moral imaginations will be freed from the limiting confines of no one culture’s view of good and evil. On the other side, we have an old-fashioned ideal, one as old as culture itself. In this view, the human person must be subjected to and formed by that authority of the divine, without which he or she will live only as an animal, seeking only the base goods of pleasure, power, and survival. The conflict is fundamental and irreconcilable.
Each of us must struggle to understand how to live our lives in a pluralistic, democratic society. But to my mind, however fuzzy and uncertain we might be about any particular public policy or social project, we must at least be clear about Moses. We should want to follow his trajectory, and there can be no compromise with those who prize his multicultural youth. For he who is not a servant of a cultural authority deeply installed is merely human–which is to say, a slave to his passions and servant of his self-interest, who, when he comes to realize his base existence, is all too easily victim of thin, ideological deities who promise the immediate psychological satisfactions of a veneer of moral idealism.
That's good -- this part really grabbed me, too:
The enslaved Hebrew is no fool. World citizens are bound by no law and accept no authority other than the nebulous demands of our common humanity—a thin thread easily broken. They know neither honor nor shame, neither totem nor taboo, neither holiness nor defilement, and, without the intense psychological power of these forms, right and wrong become feeble ideals.
That is well put and actually pretty scary when you think about it.
I am reminded of one of Berlinski's points about morals where he sarcastically asks why we can't get rid of the police.
Did I tell you I used to live in Texas? Waxahachie, Alvarado, Flower Mound -- all around Dallas-Fort Worth.
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