Bias

It occurs to me that before talking about whether there is a God, we should see what our biases are. I’ve put my cards on the table: I obviously want the evidence to support, or at least avoid conflicting with, the notion of an infinite God. On the other side of the fence, I’ve seen atheists who don’t merely believe that there is no God: they’d prefer it that way. Richard Dawkins is one of them. In The God Delusion, he argues that the notion of a creator is demeaning to human existence.

It goes without saying that biases on either side of the divide can threaten the quality of an investigation, so it’s useful to know what they are. But there’s another reason to look at our biases: they tell us a lot about how we conceive of God.

I once had a professor who, apropos of nothing, asked why religious people often feel compelled to spread their faith. He found it offensive, and his theory was that they do it to score points with God or out of some sense of superiority: our team’s winning! I was too timid to say anything at the time, but my response was this: if you found the cure for cancer, you’d be running through the streets telling people about it. (Well, at least you’d try to get it published in a medical journal.) People of faith believe they’ve got the cure for death. That’s something you don’t keep to yourself.

I’ve met some atheists who don’t believe in God because they’re not convinced—they don’t think the evidence is there, and they’re not going to accept faith blindly. Fair enough. But as I said earlier, I’ve met others who would actually rather that there be no God. Why? I think it comes down to what you think God is, and what you think the consequences of faith may be.

I think most confirmed atheists (and a good many theists, for that matter) see God as a judge with some kind of “sin abacus” and faith as a list of rules that we all routinely break. If that’s my reference point, and if I’ve got even a modicum of self-awareness about my failings as a human being, I am going to be deeply invested in the position that there is no God. I’ve felt that way myself. When that was how I conceived of God, there were times when I thought it would have been better if he didn’t exist. (For one thing, I would have had a lot more sex a lot sooner.)

But if God is not a frowning judge in the sky, things change. If, like the people in my cure-for-cancer analogy, we see faith and God not as a series of prohibitions but as quite literally the cure for death—how could that not be attractive? Who wouldn’t want that?

I am, of course, vastly oversimplifying God and faith by describing them as “the cure for death.” So let’s expand the proposition a bit. Christians believe that God is an all-powerful being whose chief characteristic is complete and perfect love, and who for reasons unknown has decided to focus a great deal of attention on sharing that love with us. As C.S. Lewis put it, this includes the offer to “make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine”.

This is the actual Christian view of God. Whether you believe in it is another story entirely, but if that’s the reference point, it becomes very strange and deeply irrational to prefer that it not be true.

Cooking the books

I had a conversation the other day with some friends of mine who are atheists. We talked about the argument that the improbability of complex life suggests that it must have been deliberately created.

One friend countered by saying that, if complex life is statistically improbable, then an even-more-complex designer must be that much more improbable. Someone replied that this counter-argument was invalid because probability doesn't apply to God. While natural phenomena are goverened by the laws of the universe and are therefore subject to probability analysis, a supernatural God (assuming one exists) would not be. Probability is a function of time, and since our universe exists in time, probability applies. Assuming that God exists outside of time, probability doesn't apply to Him/Her/It. So the unlikelihood of life does not demonstrate the unlikelihood of God.

"That's a very convienent argument," my friend said. In a nutshell, she accused theists of weaselling out of the conversation, applying the laws of the universe when they suited their purposes (proving the improbability of uncreated life), but ignoring those same laws when they didn't.

At the time, I conceded that although I was arguing in good faith, the argument did look convenient and there was no way to prove otherwise. But I've reconsidered.

If I had retroactively defined God to exist outside of time, it would have been fair to accuse me of cooking the definition so as to avoid the scrutiny of probability theory. But that definition of God is biblical - it's at least 3,000 years old. Probability theory first arose in the 16th and 17th centuries, so it's safe to say that the concept of an eternal God predates any probabilistic arguments about His existence. So it's not a clever dodge to say that God's putative eternal nature nullifies any argument as to the improbability of His existence. The argument is either true, or it's an interesting coincidence. Either way, it seems to predate its rhetorical usefulness, so at the very least it's intellectually honest.

As a sidebar, I should note that physics, too, requires that if the universe was created, its creator must be eternal. Modern physicists seem to agree that there was no such thing as time before the big bang. St. Augustine said the same thing 1600 years ago in his analysis of Genesis 1. That's not a proof for the existence of God, but it does suggest that if there was a creator, current science agrees with 3,500-year-old theology on one of the creator's fundamental attributes. Since the science came thousands of years after the theology, you can't accuse theists of cooking the books.

So I retract my concession.

For starters

There's been a surge of late in what you might call "Evangelical Atheism" - atheism propounded with zeal and enthusiasm, and with an aim to winning new converts. Richard Dawkins is probably the best-known proponent.

The driving force seems to be the notion that reason and science are incompatible with the notion of "God" as described by conventional religion. If the two are incompatible, then they make mutually exclusive claims about the nature of the universe, and therefore scientists and people of faith are at odds with each other. You see this dynamic in the debate over teaching evolution, and in books such as Dawkins' The God Delusion. Sometimes it gets nasty.

I think this is misguided. The reason-vs.-faith debate arises when people on both sides of the divide make extravagant claims that are either unnecessary or unsupported by their source materials. Stripped of extraneous, unnecessary and unsupportable claims, the two seem perfectly compatible.

My goal here is to flesh out this argument and foster an open, respectful discussion. Books and blogs on all sides are far too concerned with scoring cheap points and indulging in cathartic rants for any of us to learn anything from them. I'm interested in an intellectually honest debate, and I hope to learn something.

I'm also interested in talking about faith and reason in broader terms. I'm not a scientist, and it would be rank folly for me to dive headfirst into a discussion that's been ongoing for thousands of years and pretend to contribute much new knowledge. But I analyze and argue for a living, so I think I can make some useful comments about the classic arguments and about how the mind has plenty of room for the spirit and vice versa.

Full-disclosure-time: I'm a Christian. I think it would have been perverse for God to outift us with curiosity and reason and then expect us not to use it: hence science. I think that science and theology look at the same things from different angles, and that the apparent differences between them are either bad science, bad theology, or just parallax.

I also think that, while science and reason likely can't prove the existence of God, neither can they disprove it. What we're left with is this: God may exist. We may believe, disbelieve, or remain unconvinced. But given the claims that people of faith make about God, we can't afford to ignore the question. And while I don't know that reason can solve the issue, open discussion can get us a lot closer than most people think.

So that's my stance. I'm looking forward to hearing from people who disagree with me. It should be fun.