Sunday 8th May, Easter 4: God doesn't exist. It's a scam
Written on a Gift Aid enveloped and left in church:
God doesn’t exist. It’s a scam.
I am literally thirteen and I know more about the world that you. God was made up by people of the olden era to cover gaps in knowledge yet to be explained. Those gaps have been filled as of today. It’s called science. There is no use for your cover up now. Yet here you are, wasting your time and energy on something that doesn’t exist. Get a life.
This was left in the pew a few weeks ago. I assume the young man or lady has been listening to a particular school teacher, or listening to Dawkins on YouTube. Since then, I have really enjoyed thinking about this note. What I love about it, is the engagement, the grappling. This is no passive indifference!
I wonder how you might respond to the questions raised here?
The note highlights the God of the gaps, which has a long history. In short, the more scientific knowledge we have, the less we need of the unexplained, including what maybe considered superstitious religious beliefs. It’s only time before science will answer all of the questions of the universe.
We live with this legacy in a profound way. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book entitled, A Secular Age. He puts the question like this: ‘Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’
He says that in the West, we have become used to operating in an ‘immanent’ world, rather than a possible ‘transcendent’ one. The immanent perspective completely closes off the very possibility of the divine. In this view, there is no transcendence or divine or spiritual dimension to life.
There are some scientists today, including our young note-writing friend, who rejects any sort of knowledge that doesn’t have an evidential, rational, material basis. It often comes with an intellectual arrogance – ‘If you were only as smart as I am, you wouldn’t bother with all this religious stuff.’
So, how might we respond to our note-writing friend?
To begin with, we shouldn’t be afraid about the scientific endeavour. On the contrary, let’s hope science will produce ever more powerful and compelling explanations of the world. Science is among humanity’s greatest achievements.
There is a however a “but”…..
The reality is that science is not the completely objective neutral observation of pure data, despite what some people think. Data is collected to explore a hunch, a hypothesis or a theory. And this very much depends on who is doing the research. To give an example, C.19 scientists believed in the Limited Energy Theory. They argued that females had only a limited supply of physical energy, much of which was needed for reproduction. Higher education would shrivel their ovaries and uteri. It may not surprise you that this research was done when the only scientists around were all white western men. What’s great about science, though, is that it is disputational, endlessly questioning its own theories and conclusions.
The other thing about scientific research is that it’s very expensive.
Early science was, in the philosopher Francis Bacon’s words, conducted for “the betterment of man’s estate”. Nowadays, it’s more likely conducted to increase shareholder value of multinational industries. It does the bidding of those paying for the research.
In short, science is not a neutral enterprise. This doesn’t devalue its achievements but I think that a bit of honesty and scientific humility is needed.
There is something profoundly wrong when the scientific method is seen as the only template for valid human knowledge. There’s a lot of non-scientific subjects that provide knowledge – the history of art, music, the literature of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy. In fact, most of what we know doesn’t come from science. We learn it from parents, siblings and friends. We learn it from experience. Although scientific inquiry is very important, there are other sources of truth than the scientific method. No amount of reading about skiing in the Swiss Alps can substitute — even in terms of knowledge — actually skiing in them.
The scientific method doesn’t have the tools to engage with questions like, Why are we here? How can we make ultimate sense of life, whether of the finality of death, or the ecstatic joy at the birth of a child, or simply the unexplainable but intense beauty of a sunlit landscape?
Huge questions of significance that science, for all its wonderful achievements, can’t begin to answer. I would like to say to our young note writing friend, part of the point of faith is to open up and to live those questions. That’s what we attempt to do in different ways at church, in our Bible study and Exploring Faith courses. Some people might be tempted to dismiss the big questions about meaning because of dissatisfaction with some answers they have heard. But failed answers don’t invalidate these deep questions. They remain on the table, as powerful as ever.
In his book, The Great Partnership, Jonathan Sacks describes how the left brain is associated largely with scientific activity, and the right brain, concerned with religious matters. The logic of one doesn’t apply to the other. The challenge of our time, he says, is to keep the two separate but integrated and in balance.
Despite the challenges to religious belief, I constantly meet people who are searching, asking questions. Many are unsatisfied with a purely immanent world, a solely materialist, consumerist existence. More and more so-called secular Brits are expressing a yearning for the divine, an unquenchable desire for some melody from ‘beyond’.
And our challenge as a church, is how can we connect with this generation? With those who are yearning for something more? And how can we value and appreciate all that science brings to our lives, alongside those questions of faith, trusting God to be in our conversations as we seek to love our world – scientists and all!
Reference
The Great Partnership, Jonathan Sacks
A Secular Age, Charles Taylor
Nick Spencer, Theos https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2022/04/01/why-trust-science