The Comment Factory

It is not merely a defensive or evasive tactic for modern theists to assert that science and philosophy deal with fundamentally different kinds of knowledge, and that scientific discoveries about the workings of matter do not in the slightest threaten faith in the divine.

Like so many comforting myths, the history of the supposed antagonism between religion and science is filled with half-truths in the service of ideology. Professional historical scholarship has debunked, discredited, or at least cast doubt upon every popular notion of what occurred between religion and science from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and beyond (see books such as Aristotle’s Children by Richard E. Rubenstein).

Even so, many people in the advanced industrial countries North America, Europe, and elsewhere today are scratching their heads, wondering, “How, in the 21st century, can there still be so many people professing belief in supernatural phenomena and adhering to religions?” The premise is that the development of scientific knowledge over the course of the last few centuries has made religious belief intellectually unjustifiable.

Outspoken atheists have decided that religious beliefs were, at best, ways for primitive man, before the dawn of science, to make sense of the world around him. Now that science has made sense of it, or so it claims, we no longer need religion, or faith in God. What in a previous era could only have been attributed to God is now easily attributable to the blind and thoughtless mechanics of the universe.

As a rejoinder to this short-sighted narrative, I would point out that philosophical materialists have never been able to explain away the challenges to the mechanistic, deterministic universe raised by discoveries in quantum physics in the 20th century. But this is not why millions of people continue to hold to their religious beliefs. They do so, quite simply, because they choose not to accept another set of fantastic tales told by some of the very people who claim to have disproved and rejected all fantastic tales: that moral truth can exist without God.

The wasteland of postmodern philosophy and moral relativism, which seeks to undermine both religious and objective scientific truth, was born in the realization that, as Sartre once quipped, “If God is dead, everything is permissible”. The professional atheist, ever defensive about the claim that atheists can’t possibly be moral individuals, quickly leaps at this point to a dozen or so non-theistic moral philosophies after he or she has finished pointing out all of the supposedly immoral acts committed by religious people.

But that is not the point of the quip. Every religious person should immediately concede that, first of all, atheists are fully capable of living moral lives, and secondly that religious people have committed moral atrocities in history – though I would sharply disagree on some of the specifics that are part of an utterly false and ideologically-motivated historiography. Whether one professes belief in God or not is irrelevant, for it is not the issue. Theists believe that God created everything and everyone, including atheists – to deny that atheists are capable of morality would be as absurd to deny that they are capable of eating or breathing. Morality is an essential part of our humanity.

Morality does exist outside of religion, in a way. But it exists as an absurdity and a farce. Moral truths cannot arise from matter, nor can they possibly be reduced to it. There is no physical process in the universe capable of working out a human right. In a purely mechanistic universe that consists of nothing but matter-in-motion, to suggest that an anyone has an obligation to do anything is to promote blind faith in an eternally unverifiable hypothesis. We might call it “The Secular Delusion”, a nice story that millions of intelligent adults tell themselves so they can get on with their day without having to worry about the horrifying truth: that their reality is nihilism.

These intelligent men and women, every day, may engage in acts of kindness, generosity, and even love, and for that no one should ever begrudge them. It is always wonderful when faith – in abstract “humanity“, in some unverifiable ideal of goodness, even in one’s self – motivates people to do what is right and good, even if that faith is unreasonable. I for one greatly prefer any good done, for any reason, even a silly one that isn’t based in reality, than evil done for any reason. After all, no one but a psychopath (distinct, I hope everyone understands, from one who is psychotic) gets excited about the notion that “everything is permissible”. In spite of the contempt that many atheists may show for traditional religious morality, they still usually believe there has to be some kind of morality, whether it is derived from a “will to power”, a hollowed-out liberalism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, Marxism, fascism, or Randian “Objectivism“. But it is in that “has to be” that they are lost. Nothing “has to be” – we want it to be, we are sure in our heads that it should be, but only when we acknowledge God and a whole realm of existence beyond matter, an eternal existence where we are called to account for who and what we are, can we be confident that it must be.

Those atheists who find themselves unable to avoid the implications of their worldview, moral nihilism, are on the first step towards understanding at the very least the rationality of theism. Like the gravity which pulls us back down to Earth, the existential angst we feel when we are resolved to no longer entertain baseless theories of morality draws us back to the only possible source of objective, universal, timeless morality: a God who created us as an act of selfless love, endowing us with free will so that we may share in eternal life and happiness.

That we long for this so deeply, when we really empty all of the useless junk out of our minds and simply contemplate existence as human beings, strongly suggests to me that it must exist somewhere, as surely as we know there is a fire when we see smoke hanging in the air. In the end belief in a moral truth demands a leap of faith no different than that of belief in God. And if one is courageous enough to assert that there is such a thing as a moral truth, then accepting the reality of God is not so great a step as it may seem at first.