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Scientific Atheism

The writing of atheist manifestos has been something of a cottage industry in the last few years, and such tracts by scientists are of some interest for a column that deals with science and technology in ministry. Here I want to deal with the general character of scientifically based atheism by considering two of these books.

The one that has received more popular attention is The God Delusion by Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). God: The Failed Hypothesis by physicist Victor J. Stenger (Prometheus, 2007) has not been as widely discussed but in some ways brings out the character of modern scientific atheism more clearly than Dawkins’ book does.

By no means are all the things that Dawkins or Stenger say wrong. Religion in general has a lot to answer for, and the promotion and protection of notions that run counter to our scientific knowledge of the world are among its errors. But we do have to ask whether these authors show an adequate understanding of religious ideas with any degree of theological seriousness.

Shortfalls
Lack of understanding is apparent in both authors’ discussions of the failure of experiments to show positive effects of prayer. Some religious believers have set themselves up for such criticism by conducting such tests and sometimes claiming that they had positive results. Both atheists and believers seem to have forgotten that, at least in the biblical tradition, “Do not put the LORD your God to the test.” The idea that prayer involves faith, which cannot easily be tested in a laboratory, also makes such experiments problematic.

Appeal to experiment displays a basic feature of these books seen in Stenger’s title, the claim that God is a “failed hypothesis.” The idea of God is treated as a scientific conjecture to be tested by the methods of the natural sciences. (His subtitle is “How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.”) Dawkins is not quite that explicit, and his arguments range over a wide variety of criticisms of religion, including some that have nothing to do with science. The reason he has gotten so much publicity, however, is his stature as a scientist, and his most distinctive arguments are, or attempt to be, scientific.

If a putative God is thought of as a being in the world alongside other beings and as acting (if at all) in addition to other agents in the world, we could in principle rule out divine action by explaining everything that happens in terms of natural processes obeying rational laws. (Of course, we can’t study every event in the universe, but we can, Dawkins thinks, examine enough of them to be able to say, in his words, that “there almost certainly is no God” [The God Delusion, p. 111]). Christians often have talked about God in that way; think of the popular designation of God as “The Supreme Being.” But serious religious thinkers always have realized that there is a qualitative difference between God and other “things.” Paul Tillich insisted explicitly that God is not simply a being, even the highest being, but rather “the Ground of Being,” and Karl Barth said, less philosophically but more picturesquely, that one does not speak of God by speaking of humanity in a loud voice.

That science does an excellent job of explaining the world without appeal to any idea of God was, of course, used as an argument for atheism long before the current crop of books. Certainly evolution through natural selection and the successes of scientific cosmology in explaining features of our universe are realities that religious thought about the world has to take into account. They have required some theological struggle and new ideas. But the attempts by Dawkins and Stenger to extend those successes to explain away any role for God involve too many conjectures to be convincing.

Theology-Science Dialogue
These explanatory successes of science also have been accepted by both theologians and scientists who do not conclude from them that there is no God. The extensive dialogue that has developed over the past thirty years between scientists and theologians has given a good deal of attention to the question of how to speak of God’s action in the world in ways that take seriously our scientific understanding of that world. Even the old scholastic idea of God as the First Cause who acts through secondary causes is sufficient to show that there is no conflict between the ideas of divine action and scientific explanation in terms of natural processes — just as the claim that Lincoln was killed by a bullet does not conflict with the claim that he was killed by an assassin.

The most serious defect of these books, in addition to some simply erroneous claims, is that neither of them engages with scientists and theologians who have been carrying on that dialogue. Stenger states at the outset that he will deal only with the views of the “typical believer,” an approach that runs the risk of beating up on poorly informed opponents. (A similar attempt to refute evolution by attacking the understanding of it held by the average middle school student would rightly be condemned.)

Stenger does refer to religious believers who accept evolution but does not discuss the views of theologians who do so. The putative “God” whose existence he considers and rejects is merely a philosophical deity without the distinctive marks of the God in whom Christians believe. The philosophical arguments he cites near the end of his book to the effect that there cannot be a hidden God will not impress anyone who is familiar with such concepts as a theology of the cross or kenosis or with Isaiah 45:15. And it is the idea that the creatures through whom God works are also, in Luther’s phrase, “masks of God” that hide God from our observation that invalidates many of the atheists’ arguments.

Unnecessary Contempt
Dawkins reserves special disdain for scientists who profess religious beliefs and for the work of the Templeton Foundation, which has supported a great deal of religion-science dialogue. After describing the unfortunate case of Kurt Wise, a well-trained paleontologist who is nevertheless a six-day creationist, Dawkins says contemptuously that Wise “might be the first really sincere recipient” of the Templeton Prize for religion (The God Delusion, p. 285).

In other words, notable scientists who have won that prize such as George Ellis, John Polkinghorne, and Freeman Dyson are not only wrong, they are (or “might be”) dishonest — they don’t believe what they say they do. This is just one example of Dawkins’ incivility not just to religion but to those who disagree with him about it. (Stenger is able to express his criticisms without venom and contempt.)

The people most vehemently criticized by scientific atheists are often not, as one might expect, those who reject evolution on religious grounds. While anti-evolutionists are criticized (and rightly so), the sharpest attacks are directed at those who accept evolution, the Big Bang, and other discoveries of modern science and who understand those realities in the context of Christian faith. Significantly, those are the same people who often are the prime targets of anti-evolutionist rhetoric. For the two groups at the end of the spectrum, the suggestion that evolution and Christianity are compatible seems to be the most dangerous idea of all.

Much of the revived interest in atheistic arguments is a reaction to excesses of the religious right in the United States and to Islamist extremism. We don’t have to make a choice between bad theology and anti-theology. We do need to know about those currents of thought and, more important, about our own theological resources. One useful collection of essays is Ted Peters’s article “Christian God-Talk While Listening to Atheists, Pluralists, and Muslims” in the Summer 2007 issue of Dialog and some of the responses to it in the Winter 2007 issue.

George Murphy, an ELCA pastor and physicist living in Tallmadge, Ohio, is an adjunct faculty member at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus and a pastoral associate at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron. His e-mail address is gmurphy@raex.com.