I've been wrestling with this post for several weeks - an eternity in the blogosphere - putting it on the shelf, thinking about it, writing a little more, waiting for some stunning insight to arrive. Insights have come, but I can't say that any have been of the 'stunning' variety. Thus I throw it open for consideration in this admittedly incomplete form.
I've been thinking about how to respond to a particular article by Daniel Gilber entitled "The Vagaries of Religious Experience". Gilber is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab there. What he expresses isn't entirely new, riffing off work pioneered by better-known researchers such as MIT's Steven Pinker ("The Blank Slate"). It poses some vexing challenges to those of religious faith, even though Gilber - by virtue of his frame of reference - fails to make any definitive case one way or the other.
The most fundamental principle of science is that beliefs must be predicated on empirical evidence — things that everyone can see, touch, taste, and measure — and in more than two thousand years of recorded history, no one has yet produced a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of God. That hasn't kept most people from believing. For as long as pollsters have been asking the question, roughly 90% of Americans have been claiming to believe in God, and a sizeable majority believes that God takes a personal interest in their lives and intervenes to help them.
This
start of his appeal seems fairly reasonable: science has rules of evidence. Those rules cannot be set aside at our individual or collective whim, however much we might like to do so. OK, insofar as it goes - which isn't as far as Gilber thinks it goes or would like it to.
There are several problems with his 'framing'. First is Gilber's pre-emptive refusal to admit into evidence anything pointing to the existence of God who, being unknowable, is not meant to be pointed to scientifically in any case. Take for example the appearance - to dozens, and then hundreds of people, in living, bodily form - of two formerly dead guys (Lazarus and Jesus) roughly two thousand years ago. That the witnesses were not Harvard scientists (begging the question of whether psychology - Gilber's field - is as much a science as say, physics) does not obviate the fact that these things
were seen, touched, measured - and even
smelled.
Nor does the failure to replicate the 'experiment' of resurrection since Biblical times obviate its success or its promise. By analogy, were we to present my goldfish with plans for a scanning electron microscope, they would have no more ability to comprehend or to build it than we have to understand the miraculous process that led to these men coming back from the dead.
This line of reasoning is at best a draw for Gilber - and a disingenous one at that. He is subtly racheting up the rules of scientific admissability in one area to suit his prevailing world view. He doesn't specifically address it here, but it is frequently the same scientific establishment that insists on empiricism in religious matters that leaves those rules relatively lax in others (e.g., historical evolution, astronomy, sub-atomic physics, etc.) For a superb if somewhat oblique view on this, I recommend
'Contact' (the movie of Carl Sagan's book, starring Jodie Foster) - a hit with high schoolers and adults alike in my Sunday School class last year.
Another flaw in Gilber's basic frame is that the body of accepted scientific knowledge at any point in history (including the present) is inherently limited. Science as a
method has been an amazing thing - helping to deliver shelter, warmth, clean water, mobility, communication, power (e.g., atomic weapons) insight (e.g., a view from the moon) and a
temporary reprieve from illness and death. But science is not omnipotent. By necessity it is constrained by the same thing that scientists are contrained by: our humanity... our limited view. Our very existence and feeling of
increasing mastery of a sea of phenomena that we are incapable of understanding, much less mastering (life and death, the flow of time, the nature of matter, etc.) is merely that: a feeling. It cannot be known for certain, only surmised. It is and never will be complete.
We also don't know what we don't know. Furthermore, we
can't know (and might never) know what we aren't able to run through a definitive scientific process. The past is one such arena. The
process of evolution can be (and has been) demonstrated to operate in real time. That is not open to scientific debate and should not be open to religious debate either (a sensible view I hear all too seldom in that polarized debate.)
As a former student of paleontology however, I can attest that the fossil record is as spotty, incomplete and tantalizingly contradictory as any set of papyrus documents ever un-earthed in the Middle East. That the process of evolution is purported to be
all that there ever was guiding life on this planet - i.e., excluding all other possible mechanisms since the very beginning of time - is not something that is scientifically demonstrable. It can be inferred as theory provided several other theories are correct (e.g., sub-atomic physics). It cannot be demonstrated.
Which is all to say that Gilber frames the question of the existence and nature of God within a context created and pursued by man - science. Thus is it not surprising that the charge he levels at his critics - circular reasoning - is essentially what he falls victim to himself.
Is God nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."
That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins. [emphasis added]
Gilber appears to believe that he has triumphed. By pointing out that coincidence and a positive outlook are common human experiences with organic roots (
read the whole article for some fascinating examples), he does not preclude their being called by another name: The Holy Spirit.
Why is it not plausible, for example - as C.S. Lewis notes in his book,
'Miracles' - that God set up rules for the physical world that to primitive peoples were best understood by other names? I find the neurological phenomena Gilber cites absolutely fascinating. And because we
cannot know their origin, I choose to call their existence miraculous.
Outside of time, what appears to us as happy coincidence from the perspective of a locked and linear flow of time may be simply the brushstroke of the master painter who simply...
is.
Outside of time, scientific rules for the behavior of the universe may simply be the rules by which God chooses to use color and line and shading.
Inside time - inside our three dimensional box, flowing through a multi-dimensional universe, our explanations (scientific or otherwise) will always be found wanting. There will be miracles and there will be science. I see room for both - so long as we recognize our limitations and the resulting limits on what we can definitively conclude. More later. This post is too long already.
