God debates

December 12, 2007

The so-called new atheism is little more than a step backwards to the old-fashioned atheism

John Habgood

Tina Beattie THE NEW ATHEISTS

John C. Lennox GOD'S UNDERTAKER

Hans Küng THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS

John Polkinghorne FROM PHYSICIST TO PRIEST, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The so-called new atheism turns out to be little more than a step backwards to the old-fashioned atheism, which used to make great play with the idea of an unbridgeable gulf between religion and science. Supporting this claim was, and to some extent still is, a simplistic appeal to the contrast between faith and reason, as if they had no need of each other. The main difference between the old and the new is a drastic change of tone. The new version has a sharper tongue, is gleefully aggressive rather than solemnly regretful, and makes much use of ridicule. It might be argued that the contempt shown towards religion and religious sensibilities is a necessary part of the impact the authors want to make, and no doubt it also helps to sell their books. The downside of this strategy is that people are not likely to be converted by being ridiculed, nor by point-scoring which does not touch their real concerns. Minds are changed only when those criticized are convinced that their concerns have been judged fairly - a less entertaining and much more demanding exercise.

Intolerance is not restricted to new atheism. The same might be said of various forms of fundamentalist religion, and there is a sense in which the two extremes deserve each other. The consequences of this mutual contempt and abuse are tragic, because there is much to be learnt from the creative encounter between an evolutionary science, conscious of its own limits, and a self-critical theology, rooted in an awareness of the ultimate mystery of its subject matter.

In The New Atheists, her wide-ranging survey of this scene, Tina Beattie appeals for a rediscovery of the forgotten art of conversation, the quiet and courteous voice of wisdom, and the value of kindness in our dealings with one another". It is clear that this is not where the protagonists are at present, but Beattie's book provides a useful guide towards mutual understanding.

Religious extremism in our time has much to answer for, but it would be helpful, as she points out, if there were an acknowledgement that atheist regimes have been equally, if not more, guilty. The murderous excesses of the twentieth century were for the most part not religiously inspired, though it is shamefully true that some of them were. Furthermore, while it is easy to blame particular beliefs or regimes for violence and other forms of evil, the roots of evil, as Christianity makes clear, lie in human nature, which is why it is both futile and dangerous to try to externalize it by projecting the blame onto religion or science as such. Richard Dawkins, says Beattie, would be better employed discussing the role of science in public life instead of pursuing his obsession with religion. Circular arguments, like the claim that God could not have been responsible for design "because a designer would have to be even more complex", thus raising the question of who designed God, can be quickly dismissed because as little is known about the true nature of creativity as about the true nature of God. All it is possible to claim is that God, as the ultimate ground of existence, is defined in terms of creativity.

As the debate about God has become more vicious, Beattie has found herself more and more exasperated by its shallowness, and by the danger that it will only succeed in further stoking the fires of religious extremism. She is convinced that Christianity needs the insights of secularism, and needs to recognize what lies at the heart of the present obsession with postmodernism. "The hidden face of postmodern culture", she writes,

"is a form of despair, for our multicultural jamboree conceals an abyss of meanings and values. In the twentieth century, faith in God became an impossibility for many people, not because science or reason had provided answers to the mystery of life, but because the scale of humanity's suffering and capacity for violence had outstripped any possibility of believing in a just and loving God. If postmodernism challenges the thoroughly modern scientific faith of the new atheists, it also provides a nurturing habitat for other more profound forms of atheism."

Nevertheless, she adds, there remains a hunger for God, and it is in literature and art and music that we may have to look for the hunger to be satisfied. "At its most profound, faith is not an answer to life's questions but a willingness to inhabit the darkness of knowing that there are some things we cannot know." Beattie's passionate survey of this complex scene entails a constant plea for mutual understanding and for an end to cheap point-scoring. She is a good guide and well worth reading.

John Lennox, is an Oxford mathematician, and sets out to tackle the new atheists head on. My guess is that he would find Beattie too ready to understand her opponents, and not forceful enough in proposing counter-arguments. Far from agreeing that science might ever be God's undertaker, he begins from a presupposition, hitherto ignored, concerning the monotheistic basis for science itself. The reality of God, he claims, is the ground of all explanation, not just to be called in aid when scientists are faced with phenomena which they cannot at present explain. It is in this context that one needs to read his subsequent rather surprising move in the direction of Intelligent Design.

The real conflict, as he sees it, is between naturalism and theism, naturalism being defined as a closed system of cause and effect with nothing "outside" it or transcending it, while theism claims that this very coherence of nature as a single whole is evidence of its creation by a single mind. Thus, far from antagonizing science, belief in the rational order of the material world and belief in a creator God are mutually supportive. Lennox goes on to identify areas of knowledge where science is not philosophically neutral, and in particular where it tries to address questions which seem to relate to some ultimate purpose. The fine-tuning of the fundamental constants of nature, for instance, is such that a difference of one part in 1016 in the ratio between two fundamental forces could have meant that no stars were formed. He cites this as one example among many of the immense improbability of the universe's being just right to sustain our world. It is a familar point, much discussed and contested by different cosmologists, but it is interesting to have a mathematician's appraisal of its significance.

His main example of mathematically incredible odds focuses on the origin of life itself. The probability that all the right constituents could have come together in the right way is so infinitesimal that he claims it as a prime example of the "irreducible complexity" which advocates of Intelligent Design depend on to support their case. A living cell, for instance, contains some 100 million proteins of 20,000 different types. The genome of a simple bacterium has a genetic code some 4 million letters long, and the mechanism needed to translate this into a living organism is "so complex, so universal and so essential, that it is hard to see how it could have come into existence".

The standard rejoinder to this kind of argument is that, given enough time and enough material, natural selection would ensure that even the most complex replicating mechanism would eventually be formed. But Lennox, as a mathematician, is not satisfied that this is a realistic explanation. The idea that anything as complex as the genome, plus the mechanisms which read its instructions, could have come into being through a process of random variation and selection, overlooks the special character of the code as conveying information. The essential point to be borne in mind about information is that it has to be the right information if it is to be of any use. Faulty information is not merely wrong, but potentially harmful. Furthermore, information can only be generated by the input of prior information. Given a target phrase which type-writing monkeys are set to produce by randomly hitting the keys, it is not hard to see how they might eventually be successful if letters which fit the target were somehow to be identified and retained. But if the monkeys are set the task of producing something meaningful by random typing without any designated target, the odds against their doing so become astronomical. Natural selection, in short, has only a limited chance of producing something from nothing, and is even less likely to do so when the "something" to be produced is information.

It is a complex and well-argued criticism which upholders of current evolutionary theories about the origin of life are going to have to take seriously. Unfortunately, by using it as an argument, not just against natural selection, but in favour of Intelligent Design, Lennox raises a host of further problems. Most scientists would see any move in this direction as threatening the integrity of science, but the same might be said of any act which claimed to be providential or not in some way the result of physical causality. Similar problems lurk within the concept of free will, but few would wish to deny that in some sense it is a reality. From a theological perspective this is a very murky area, but it seems sensible to acknowledge that there may be happenings which are not within the explanatory power of science, among them the fact of existence itself, with the origin of life as a supremely difficult borderline case.

The suspicion that there might be other gaping holes in Darwinian theory continued to haunt its advocates for almost a century, and it was not until the comparatively recent development of an adequate theory of genetics, that a plausible account could be given of how natural selection actually works.

In the early years of Darwinism one of the many problems facing Christian believers concerned the nature and origin of the soul. Much of the traditional language about souls seems to imply that they are implanted in bodies by God at a specific prenatal stage in human development, and current disputes about embryos and abortion still revolve around this assumption. Darwinism obviously posed difficult questions about if, when, and how this could happen. A less Platonic and more plausible theory might interpret soul language as referring, not to a discrete entity, but to a relationship, both human and divine, subject to gradual development. From this standpoint it is easy to accommodate evolutionary theory, and it is also possible to give a more convincing meaning to original sin in terms of failed relationships, exacerbated by self-seeking.

It is also possible, as Lennox points out, to subsume the scientifically questionable notion of particular design within a broader understanding of the design of the universe as a whole. I was given a vivid illustration of the strength of the desire to do whis when, in 1959, I was privileged to take part, as a representative clergyman, in a primitive kind of television discussion to mark the centenary of The Origin of Species. Sir Julian Huxley was one of the four participants, and arrived full of enthusiasm about the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose book The Phenomenon of Man had just been published, and for which he himself had written the Introduction. Darwin would have hated it. The book was about as un-Darwinian as any book on evolution could be, but the brief cult which sprang from it, and the publication of a bevy of similar works by Teilhard which followed, revealed the longing for a less bleak interpretation of evolutionary theory than was then on offer. That the author of Evolution: The modern synthesis should be so enthusiastic about it was striking evidence that questions about the origin and meaning of human life, as seen through Darwinian eyes, do not easily go away.

They cry out to be set in a larger, more meaningful, context. Perhaps, as has recently been suggested, an open-ended form of evolution was the only way God could create beings with free will, the element of chance thus forming part of a larger purpose. No doubt also some of the many questions about chance and design in nature will be easier to answer if and when life is found on other planets where evolution may have taken place in totally different circumstances from our own.

A universe favouring open-ended creativity rather than detailed design has the further merit, as Beattie points out, of favouring risk and participation, the latter only knowledge and power:

"Design seeks to eliminate risk, because it is concerned with efficiency, function and purpose. Creativity is measured by the risk it is willing to take, for the greater the creative endeavour, the greater the risk of failure. That is why there is ultimately no great creative work which does not involve suffering . . . . Yet Christianity suggests a creative process in which God does what no human author can do, for God steps inside the story . . ."

Hans Küng, the eminent Roman Catholic theologian, has written what he describes as "a short book on the meaning of the universe", and much of what he writes echoes the views just described, albeit from a somewhat different perspective. He also draws an interesting parallel between cosmology and Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem. The latter is a mathematical proof that no system of axioms can prove itself as being free from contradiction. Nor, says Küng, can a theory of the universe. The point was originally made by Stephen Hawking, who admitted that he had given up his quest for a "grand unified theory of everything" on the grounds that we are part of it. Any explanation which tries to include the observer doing the explaining must necessarily be incomplete. Add to this Popper's dictum about the tentativeness of all scientific statements as being falsifiable but not ultimately provable, and the limitations of our knowledge become all too apparent. Both scientists and theologians, in other words, and even popes, need to accept their fallibility.

Apart from a passing reference, this is a Richard Dawkins-free book. It also provides a useful reminder that there was a scientifically and theologically based tradition of atheism in European culture long before Darwin. Küng comments, "Beyond question, the critique of religion offered by these 'new materialists' has not remotely reached the depth of their classical predecessors". Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, where are you now?

"Science", Küng continues, "does not have to 'prove' the existence or superfluity of God. Rather, it has to advance the explicability of our universe by physics as far as possible and at the same time leave room for what in principle cannot be explained by physics."

I am not sure this is a wise way of putting things, being all too redolent of the "God of the gaps". Nevertheless, like all of Küng's work, this is a learned book, full of interesting insights, drawing heavily on European philosophy and theology, and frequently critical of his own Church. To those who know his other works, it may seem strange to suggest that this one would have been better if it had been longer. Too much is assumed too quickly. In the section "How Did Life Arise?", for instance, he slides over all the scientific difficulties to which Lennox draws attention, and implies that all the theological problems are solved simply by interpreting evolution as creation. John Polkinghorne is a safer guide. His autobiography, From Physicist to Priest, is as charming and humble as the man himself. A scholarship in mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge, set him on course; a post-doctoral fellowship took him to California, where he was a member of the team working on particle physics at a crucial stage in the development of the so-called Standard Model of the physical structure of matter; and at the age of thirty-eight he was back in Cambridge as the first holder of the newly established chair of Mathematical Physics. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of forty-four, and, three years later, offered himself for ordination in the Church of England. After training for the ministry in Cambridge, he was ordained in 1981, served as a curate in Bristol, and for a few years was a country vicar in Kent. The call to return to Cambridge as Dean of Trinity Hall, and eventually as President of Queens' College, gave him the leisure to write, since when he has been a prolific author, at times producing several books a year on various aspects of science and religion. He is better placed than most people to write about the nature of created reality and its relation to the human (mathematical) mind, but this book is purely about his own remarkable life.

Evolution is not his primary concern, yet his profound mathematical insights into the nature of created reality endorse Tina Beattie's distinction between creativity and design. In his book Science and Creation he writes that

". . . the order and disorder which intertwine in the process of the world show that the universe upheld by the divine Word is not a clear cold cosmos whose history is the inevitable unfolding of an invulnerable plan. It is a world kept in being by the divine Juggler rather than by the divine Structural Engineer, a world whose precarious process speaks of the free gift of Love. We are accustomed to think of the vulnerability accepted by the Word in the incarnation, a vulnerability potentially present in the baby lying in the manger and realized to the full in the man hanging on the cross. What is there revealed of the divine in the human life of Jesus is also to be discerned in the cosmic story of creation."

The fact that there are those who go to great lengths to resist this interpretation is a back-handed tribute to the divine gift of freedom which it presupposes.

John Habgood was formerly Archbishop of York. His books include Church and Nation in a Secular Age, 1983, Being a Person: Where faith and science meet, 1998, Varieties of Unbelief, 2000, and The Concept of Nature, 2002.

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