Salaam o alaikum,
Peace,
This is an article I was intending on linking here earlier but was unable to. This thread reminded me to do so. Possibly not in tone with the discussion Im afraid, in which case I apologize.
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The God debate
EVOLUTION | A pair of eminent scientists squares off in separate attempts to show why a supreme being — God — can or cannot exist within the boundaries of science; Patricia Pearson listens in and ponders why we're here
Oct. 15, 2006. 02:53 AM
If you want to really add some spice to the white wine in your book club this fall, may I suggest the raging debate amongst scientists about whether or not God exists.
A number of scholars — geneticists, astronomers, biologists — have come out of the closet of late by declaring their faith. Even the famed atheist philosopher Anthony Flew switched to "deism" in 2004.
At the same time, a cadre of Darwinists have been shouldering past the newly faithful in the opposite direction, convinced that natural selection disproves God.
All of them have written books directed at a general audience to try and press their points. In today's head-to-head grudge match, we present a two-book bout between two of the better-known men of science, Richard Dawkins and Francis S. Collins.
The most vehement champion of atheism is Dawkins, Oxford's chair in the "Public Understanding of Science." Since his 1977 breakthrough book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has shifted from eloquent explanatory science to increasingly emotional attacks on religion. What motivates him is unclear, since his own justifications for despising belief appear irrational.
Consider the first page of his new book, The God Delusion, in which he fantasizes about a world without faith. "Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no crusades, no witch-hunts, no Inquisition ..."
Okay. Got my eyes closed, I'm imagining. Oh, I know! How about a world with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and The Shining Path of Peru?
It is baffling that a man of Dawkin's stature could assert that religion is the root of all evil, and blow himself up on page one.
Yet such is his investment in atheism that he barges through history like an irate drunk with a two-by-four, taking broad swings at humanity's subtlest minds, dismissing Thomas Aquinas as "infantile," other theologians as "fatuous," and suggesting that Jesus Christ was "honestly mistaken" when he claimed to be the Son of God.
Sir Isaac Newton only declared faith, Dawkins hints, because, like 19th century homosexuals, he couldn't admit his preferences. Of the great biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote that "we simply can't comment on (God's existence) as scientists," Dawkins says: "I simply don't believe that Gould could sincerely have meant" that.
Good evidentiary points. Next?
Dawkins proceeds to offer startlingly amateurish examples of how religion doesn't make people more moral. He cites a police strike in Montreal in 1969, in which a whole number of crimes was committed. "The majority of the population of Montreal presumably believed in God. Why didn't the fear of God restrain them when earthly policemen were temporarily removed from the scene?"
Who does Dawkins imagine committed these crimes? Parishioners from Notre-Dame?
This kind of sloppy rhetoric takes place in every chapter of The God Delusion. While I am not, myself, a churchgoer, I'm astonished that one of the world's leading atheists would be firing such weak ammunition.
Dawkins's explanation for how religiosity in humans came about, as an accidental "by-product" of genetic evolution, is merely a wild guess. "Natural selection builds child brains with a natural tendency to believe whatever their parents and elders tell them," he declares. This keeps them safe from crocodiles, but you can also announce there is a God, and they will believe you.
To illustrate his theory, Dawkins recalls a sermon he was made to sit through at the age of 9, how he believed every word, and how vehemently he now resents what he was told.
Evolutionary psychology is a very new field, with no proven theorems. So I feel comfortable as a layperson speculating that natural selection would have favoured the wilful and curious child — for instance, the one that most parents encounter, who is about as obedient as a Jack Russell terrier on amphetamines — because mortality in early hominids was extremely high. The child who relied upon the wisdom of elders was a goner if those elders died. Children who survived, like hatchlings who can fly from the nest, were able at a very young age to deploy their own resourcefulness.
Just a thought?
Who knows? And of course, that's the point. Who knows? Dawkins insists upon proof, and then offers absolutely nothing but guesses.
Dawkins's fury with religion reminds me, from my days as a crime journalist, of a psychopath's contempt for love. Because they cannot experience it, or empathize with those who do experience it, they have no way to accept its existence. Talk of it exasperates them. They want proof. But you cannot confirm, scientifically, that you love your father, or your best friend. Like faith, love is subjectively experienced.
Stephen Jay Gould was right: science cannot comment on God.
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Yet scientists continue to try. Among those on God's side is Francis S. Collins, head of the international Human Genome Project, a former atheist whose immensely sophisticated understanding of DNA has done nothing to undermine his faith.
In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins explains his belief in Theistic Evolution, or what he chooses to call BioLogos (God's word as revealed through biology). He is as Darwinian as Dawkins, in that he fully accepts natural selection, only he views it as the mechanism by which God chose to set life in motion.
Collins perceives a deity "outside time and space" who created several governing laws when He set the universe off with a bang, including not just the law of gravity but also that of Moral Law.
I can't possibly do justice to this concept of Moral Law (first articulated for Collins by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity) here. But it pertains to humanity's capacity to observe a law of right and wrong. At its simplest level, it has to do with altruism, which is a yearning that defies evolutionary explanation. Why did my 6-year-old feel compelled to rescue a dying tent caterpillar whose nest I destroyed this summer?
Obviously, I didn't teach her to rescue the leaf-gobbling pest, and she gains no genetic advantage in this act of cross-species empathy. There is nothing in evolution that would favour the genes of a child who pitied a bug. Indeed, pity would have been disadvantageous — just as it would be for a lion that felt empathy for a zebra.
What she is responding to, according to Collins, is the Moral Law, and he thinks that human beings evolved to perceive it just as surely as they evolved to discover the law of gravity. God intended one of his creatures to witness Him, and to act as His steward. It could have been the dinosaurs, Collins writes, but for that meteor hurtling down on the Yucatan. As it happens, it was homo sapiens who became receptive to spiritual truth.
I'm providing an embarrassingly cursory summary of a complex idea. Suffice to say that this is thought-provoking stuff, to which Dawkins has his own response. It's been a long while since I've read a pair of books that made me want to call up my friends — for the sole purpose of inviting them over to hash out life's most abiding question.
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Patricia Pearson is a Toronto author, novelist and freelance writer.
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Peace,
Alaikum Salaam