‘We may never fully understand the reasons’
I’m reading Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? by George Cunningham, a retired geneticist. It’s an extended response to Francis Collins’s The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. It’s good stuff.
Cunningham asks some telling questions on page 65:
Collins finally gives up any claim of being a reasonable scientist when he says, “we may never fully understand the reasons” for suffering as part of God’s plan. What kind of God expects us to live according to a plan that makes no sense to us and is beyond our comprehension? What kind of God would give us a brain that can reason and follow logic then expect us to believe in and worship an irrational, unintelligible, or evil God?
Quite – that’s just about exactly what I said in my essay for 50 Voices of Disbelief. I said it at more length, because I think it’s absolutely crucial, and central.
God shouldn’t be testing our faith. If it wants to test something it should be testing our ability to detect frauds and cheats and liars – not our gormless credulity and docility and willingness to be conned. God should know the difference between good qualities and bad ones, and not be encouraging the latter at the expense of the former.
But then (we are told) “faith” would be too easy; in fact, it would be compelled, and that won’t do. Faith is a kind of heroic discipline, like yoga or playing the violin. Faith has to overcome resistance, or it doesn’t count. If God just comes right out and tells us, beyond possibility of doubt, that God exists, that’s an unworthy shortcut, like a sprinter taking steroids. No, we have to earn faith by our own efforts, which means by believing God exists despite all the evidence indicating it doesn’t and the complete lack of evidence indicating it does.
In other words, God wants us to veto all our best reasoning faculties and methods of inquiry, and to believe in God for no real reason. God wants us not to do what we do in all the rest of life when we really do want to find something out – where the food is, when the storm is going to hit, whether the water is safe to drink, what medication to take for our illness – and simply decide God exists, like tossing a coin.
I refuse. I refuse to consider a God “good” that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties. That’s a deal-breaker. That’s nothing but a nasty trick. This God is supposed to have made us, after all, so it made us with these reasoning faculties, which, when functioning properly, can detect mistakes and obvious lies – so what business would it have expecting us to contradict all that for no good reason? As a test? None. It would have no business doing that.
A God that permanently hides, and gives us no real evidence of its existence – yet considers it a virtue to have faith that it does exist despite the lack of evidence – is a God that’s just plain cheating, and I want nothing to do with it. It has no right to blame us for not believing it exists, given the evidence and our reasoning capacities, so if it did exist and did blame us, it would be a nasty piece of work.
The tone is somewhat jokey, and I do think the whole idea is funny, but I’m also dead serious. That is exactly what I think and I also think it’s a killer objection – in the sense that a decent God just can’t be rescued from that observation. The whole set-up really is a cheat, and it can’t be seen as anything else. We do have faculties that work, and it is beneficial for us that they work, yet when it comes to God we are supposed to do the opposite of what we do the rest of the time. We are supposed to veto our own cognitive abilities and just believe things for no good reason. That’s backward. A decent God shouldn’t expect that kind of reversal. It’s a cheat and it’s also an insult – which is probably why we argumentative atheists get so riled at people like Collins. He’s a scientist himself, yet he endorses this reversal – this cheat and insult.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the god worshipped by Francis Collins is morally monstrous – and you have to worry about Collins himself, insofar as he doesn’t seem to notice this.
You know, Ophelia, that’s a brilliant argument. I’d never thought of it quite like that before.
“If God just comes right out and tells us, beyond possibility of doubt, that God exists, that’s an unworthy shortcut, like a sprinter taking steroids.”
Funny, though, isn’t it, that for those chosen leaders, like Moses, Mohammed and the apostles, whom one is expected to follow blindly (or with faith, same thing, really), god thought it was necessary to come and manifest himself directly, or through an angel, or a miracle-dispensing son (who is really himself anyway). Why does god expect (demand) faith from the masses to whom he gives no sign, but none whatsoever from his own appointed representatives, for whom he seems never to stop flexing his muscles?
This phenomenon of “you must believe because I saw” reeks so much of a con-job. It’s not sufficiently used in our arsenal, I fear (despite little masterpieces like “Kissing Hank’s Ass”). I can think of few aspects of organised religion that are such a giveaway and so clearly expose the tawdry little lies that underpin the word “faith” when used in its religious sense.
“It’s not sufficiently used in our arsenal”
It is how Tom Paine starts The Age of Reason, if I remember correctly. I guess that doesn’t really make it part of our arsenal now though…
Well, you made me go and look.
He makes the concession that he believes a god exists before getting to the interesting stuff: ” It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing.”
I think a couple things are going on in people’s minds when they talk about the virtue of believing things by faith. The first is that they’re focusing on the correct result, rather than on the method used to get to it.
If you ask small children if Jack was right to trade his only cow for “magic” beans which he had no way of knowing were magic, the answer is invariably yes, he was right to do so — because the beans really were magic. Had the story been a sad moral tale of a man deceived, then the exact same decision, made for the exact same reasons, would have been judged “wrong” with the same easy lack of analysis.
This is what people seem to revert to, in religious matters. They approach their religious beliefs the way they would approach a story in their head — one being told in Third Person Omniscient, or God. They assume a given relevant background, and so consider leaps of faith as if they are analyzing after the fact, as a child would.
If you hear God Himself speaking to you, should you believe that it’s really Him? Yes, because it is. If you hear a voice in your head, should you think it’s God?
Well, only if it really is God. Otherwise, no. Faith is based on a sort of Consequentialism. It justifies itself backwards.
But how can you be aware of the end of the story, if you’re a character in it? That, I think, brings in the second hidden assumption of faith, that of method: they’re assuming a form of ESP. Extra-sensory perception of God.
When you make a leap of faith, what’s really being tested isn’t just your obedience or willingness to believe, because there are all sorts of faith-beliefs that are false: you have to get it right. And how do you get it right? Through a magical hidden sense which allows you to recognize God the way a lamb recognizes the bleat of its mother. You have to be able to discern this divinely-pointed ESP, from just “feeling as if.” That’s where the discipline comes in — in your ability to work with your god-given ESP. In your sensitivity to it.
This form of ESP is also, somehow, involved with precognition. Being right means you were right to trust the method which told you that you were going to be right.
There really isn’t a dividing line between the supernatural and the paranormal. It seems to me that, if you apply paranormal concepts like ESP and precognition to religion, you get a justified (and traditional) faith-sense. They don’t just think God can do magic — they think they can, also. We all can; we just have to try.
That’s the one, Stewart. Compelling, I think.
Sastra, Plantinga thinks there really is such a sense – the sensus divinitatus. I guess if you say it in Latin it doesn’t sound so silly, is the thinking.
Personally I think it’s all a kind of grout job. You start with what you want to protect – belief in ‘God’ – and then you work with what you have. What you have is a God that doesn’t show up; so you have to say something to explain that; so the likeliest bit of grout seems to be that this God is testing everyone. If you think about that, it becomes disgusting, but of course the goal isn’t to think about it, it’s to patch the hole.
There are two, somewhat conflicting, stories about Collins upbringing.
One, the script most often publically associated with him, is that he was an atheist physician who came to belief when forced to think about the mortality of his patients. In that scenario his conversion almost sounds like a mental illness (particularly the bit about the frozen waterfall proving that it was the Christian God who was the correct deity).
The other side to Collins is that he is the home-schooled product of evangelical parents. Considering THAT story alongside his current religious beliefs and claimed justifications my first thought is “well of course that’s what he believes! It makes perfect sense!” Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe there is a particular sect of atheism that I’m unaware of – the ‘no atheists’?
This must have been a rather exclusive group consisting of Collins, Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, Lee Strobel and Alistair McGrath.
It’s all beginning to make sense now.
You can take this a little further.
If god wants us to use faith rather than evidence, would it allow any evidence to crop up anywhere? Logically, it would seem the answer is no, since any evidence at all would remove faith as a requirement. And since our best minds have looked at all aspects of nature for quite a while now without seeing the tiniest bit of evidence, we have real world confirmation that god does not allow any evidence at all.
Being omniscient and omnipotent, designing a universe without any evidence of design should be infinitely simple trick for god. Irreducible complexity? That would be evidence. Goldilocks universe? Evidence. Three branched frozen waterfall? O. K. that’s natural, but if god really did have a hand in it then its evidence. None of this type of thing could be allowed under this faith plan of god’s.
In fact, like the Babel fish, any evidence of god’s existence would clearly show god’s non-existence. Fun stuff.
I think this is explained by the unconscious motivators described in Cialdini’s ‘Influence: Science and Practice.’ If your original reason for accepting something is taken away, the way humans work is to develop new reasons to justify the steps already taken – your sunk cost invested in the acceptance. He called this developing new supports. The whole ‘have more faith, faith is only virtuous without evidence’ line is jerry-rigged, a mere tattered bedsheet hung in front of a collapsed stable door.
There is no way to tell the difference between a false claim of god and any real claim of god, in this scenario.
The sales pitch for both would be identical. There is no method for telling the false from the true. Both salesmen (persons) would say the same thing to any questions you had, any objections you raised, and give you the same dire warnings for failure to accept their truth. They could even use the same holy books and give the deity the same name. Who would know? You’ve commanded them NOT to use the only reliable method of discernment.
This god should know the result of this ‘system’: People who believed that message would necessarily fall for the first one presented to them and then reject anything else after indoctrination.
It does explain why the human beings who actually developed the system, with no divine intervention, designed it this way.
The holes in the structure of the religious story so brilliantly dealt with by OB and others are only half of the matter. There are after all a multitude of religious stories, not all of them Abrahamic.
The other half of the story concerns the linking via the myth of present believers to their ancestry and to each other as an extended family. Religious history has complicated this still further by encrusting it all with a clerical social layer with its own political and social priorities.
Sometimes it makes life interesting, but mostly makes it bloody dreary. Which is why it is losing traction and falling apart.
That is indeed a very good argument against the type of god that values “faith” and wants you to believe in him.
(In contrast to other types of gods, usually less “sophisticated” and more “primitive,” who don’t really care if you’ve “accepted them into your heart” so long as you do the proper rituals or make the proper offerings or take care of widows/orphans/the sick/the poor/[insert pet cause here], depending on the god in question.)