Monday, July 4, 2016

From No God to God


The Believing Skeptic is back!  For the last few months I've been rather preoccupied with personal issues, and also been working hard to draft a Book Proposal (to send to a publisher) for my (hopefully forthcoming) work, Mormonism for Skeptics.  But at least for the forseeable future I'm hopeful that I will be able to post to the blog at least once every few weeks.  Let me remind readers to subscribe with their email address in the box at the top of this page, if you haven't already done so, so that you will receive a notification when I post.  A few people have reported difficulties with the "submit" button when trying to subscribe.  If you have had this difficulty, please leave a comment so that I can find out if this is a widespread problem.

Herewith, my latest musings:

We often hear accounts of believers in God (theists) who lose their faith.  The loss of faith is a common theme in fiction, in movies, and real-life news.  On the other hand, when was the last time you heard a story of an atheist who lost his or her faith in atheism and became a believer?

Probably the most famous example is C.S. Lewis, who was raised as a Christian but declared himself an atheist at age 15.  Later in life he (re-) converted to Christianity and became the most famous Christian apologist in the 20th century, penning such classics as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters.  Another more recent example is Peter Hitchens, the brother of the notorious atheist Christopher Hitchens, who told his story in the recent book The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (2011). 

Another very striking example is Anthony Flew.  Flew was the world’s most notorious and well-published atheist philosopher in the latter half of the 20th century.  Unlike the current lightweights like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Flew was a legitimate philosopher who wrote many formal works in which he defending atheism for 50 years.  Then, in 2004, at the age of 81, he announced that he had changed his mind.  He certainly had not become a born-again evangelical Christian, but he did reach the conclusion that rationally, based on the evidence, God does indeed exist. 

In There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007), he relates his intellectual journey to belief in God.  Like C.S. Lewis, Flew declared himself an atheist at age 15.  His father was an Anglican minister, and he did not tell his parents about his “conversion” for years.  He describes his recent “pilgrimage” back to belief in God as one of reason, not faith.

As a philosopher, he always believed in going wherever the evidence and the argument led him.  And he was not embarrassed to change his mind, which he did several times in his life about various philosophical issues.  He identifies three areas of scientific inquiry as key to his change of thinking:

-                              How did the laws of nature come to be?
-                              How did life originate from nonlife?
-                              How did the universe, by which we mean all that is physical, come into existence?

The existence of the laws of nature – not merely regularities in nature, but regularities that are universal and directly linked to mathematical reasoning (mathematics being, of course, an invention of the human mind) – have been cited by many as direct evidence of a mind behind nature.    Einstein once wrote, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."  He later went on to explain: 

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery.  Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way … The kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the 'miracle' which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

Einstein, like Flew now, was a deist.  He did not believe in a God that spoke to mankind and interacted directly with them, but a great Divine Mind and Creator that could best be worshipped through the study of his handiwork.  Paul Davies is another outstanding proponent of such a view.  Davies is a physics professor at the University of Arizona and a prolific author of some of the best books on the “new physics” for non-scientists.  And John D. Barrow, a physicist and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, has remarked on how, remarkably, the universe is so orderly that “we find that there are mathematical equations, little squiggles on pieces of paper, that tell us how whole Universes behave.” 

Flew’s second question was, where did life come from?  How did it emerge in the midst of non-living matter?  This is a mystery that has in no way been solved by science. 

You will sometimes hear the argument that the origin of life from non-life, though it may be extraordinarily unlikely, is not impossible given enough time.  It is even possible, they say, that a group of monkeys by hammering at a keyboard for a long time could eventually write a sonnet – by purely random chance.  This proposal was actually put to the test.  An experiment was conducted with six monkeys in a cage with a computer.  After one month, they produced 50 typed pages, but not a single actual word.  Not even the word “a” (with a space on either side of it) could be identified!  What is the probability that a sonnet (with, say, 450 words) could be reproduced by random banging on a keyboard?  According to one calculation, it would amount to10690 – 1 with 690 zeroes following it!

But it is not merely a matter of probabilities.  Flew notes that there is a fundamental problem (he calls it a “deep conceptual challenge”) with the very idea of obtaining life from non-life, given what we know today about DNA.  This problem, he says, “relates to the origin of the coding and information processing that is central to all life-forms.”  He quotes Paul Davies, among several other scientists, who notes that life is more than simply a series of chemical reactions, though that is how it is frequently addressed.  The cell is also a complex system of information storing, processing and replicating.”   The presence of “information” strongly suggest the presence of intelligence or mind.   He quotes the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Wald:

How is it that, with so many other apparent options, we are in a universe that possesses just that peculiar nexus of properties that breeds life?  It has occurred to me lately – I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities – that both questions might be brought into some degree of congruence.  This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality – that the stuff of which physical reality is constructed is mind-stuff.  It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making creatures.

Flew’s discussion of his third question, how did the universe come into existence, is a little too subtle and too complex, philosophically speaking, to summarize here.  One point he mentions is the discovery of the “big bang,” which he acknowledged (while still an atheist) made it much easier to believe in God.  If there was indeed a beginning of the cosmos, scientifically speaking, that provided support for the claim in the first chapter of Genesis, that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Prior to the Big Bang theory, the ruling theory was the “steady-state theory,” which claimed that the universe had no beginning and will have no end. 

This is an interesting little book about the views of an honest man.  Most of us become so committed to a certain viewpoint that it becomes difficult to admit that we were wrong.  Flew defends his change of view on the grounds that he always adhered to the belief in going wherever the evidence led.  This is an admirable and a healthy attitude, one that many of us would do good to emulate. 

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that while “evidence” is important, it is never controlling over our minds.  As far as any of the really big questions are concerned (e.g., the existence of God, the purpose of life), we will never have enough evidence to prove things one way or another.  It would be nice if we could – then we could abdicate the responsibility for making our own decisions and put all the responsibility on the external evidence.  The famous atheist Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would say if he found himself before God after his death and God asked why Russell hadn’t believed in Him.  Russell replied that he would say, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”

When it comes to questions like God, it is good to study the evidence, but I’m quite certain that saying the evidence is inconclusive will not get us out of hot water.  Faith in God (which begins, but does not end, with mere belief in God’s existence) ultimately comes down to a matter of personal choice.  In other words, there will never be enough evidence for God to get us out of the responsibility of choosing.  If we choose to exercise faith and commit to a particular lifestyle, we will have to do it in spite of the absence of absolute proof.