Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe

Can you apply a skeptical empiricism to religious beliefs? The author answers yes, and religion comes up short. In place of theism he offers what Einstein called a cosmic religious feeling.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Albert Einstein

I used to have a colleague I shall call Robin. He is a bright guy and a good scientist, and I think highly of him. He is also a member of a small Baptist sect and a biblical literalist. Once, Robin owed me a favor, so I said, in essence, "Sit down. I would like to know why you hold your religious belief without evidence or, if you have evidence, what that evidence is.

We talked for the better part of an hour. Robin told anecdotes, talked about reports of "miracles" from all over the world, and spoke of his inner conviction, his inner feelings. I asked why he thought the religion of his parents was right and all others were (therefore) wrong. I asked if he would be a Koranic literalist if he had been born in Islamabad instead of Cleveland. He called this my "accident of birth" argument, but had no real answer to it.

Early on, I asked whether his belief was allegorical, that is, an approximation to the truth, or simply his way of getting at God and no better or worse than someone else's. Was his belief a hypothesis that he would employ as long as it worked, or was it absolutely true?

No, he answered, it is absolutely true.

At the end of the hour, he said, as best I can recall, "Look, what you said earlier, about being a hypothesis. [Pause.] I guess it is sort of a hypothesis." Saying so made him feel threatened. You could see it in his body language, hear it in his voice, see it in his eyes. So I quickly stopped the conversation.

The discussion with Robin kicked off what has become a four- or five-year investigation into religion and the basis for religious beliefs. Specifically, I set out to demonstrate, first, that empiricism is the only way to establish reliable knowledge about the physical world and, further, to show why it is appropriate to examine the claims of religion empirically. Accordingly, I applied a scientific approach to claims made by religious believers and apologists. Whether or not the universe has a purposeful creator, after all, is a matter of fact. It is therefore inappropriate for people who generally support their beliefs with evidence to believe without evidence in God. What, then, is the evidence?

My investigation brought me from science and philosophy of science to religion and philosophy, Biblical criticism, evolution and cosmology, mathematical physics, and the science of the brain. I do not have first-hand knowledge of many of these fields, so I have gone to the literature for my information. Except for a handful of books and articles on physics and one statistics paper, every one is accessible to the diligent layperson; that is, anyone could read the same material as I read and draw his or her own conclusion. I present mine here.

Contrary to postmodernist assertion, there is objective reality or, if you prefer, objective truth that exists independently of the observer and the belief system of the observer. I argue further that the only way to get at that truth-more precisely, the only way to approximate it, as a map approximates a continent-is through empirical observation. That observation must not be casual, however; observation must be supplemented with reason and care, or else you fall into related traps of believing what is agreeable to you and of relying on selectively chosen anecdotes or vague and unprovable hypotheses as supporting evidence.

The hypotheses of religion must be treated the same way as any other hypotheses: They must be examined critically and tested. That is, we must ask-we have an intellectual obligation to ask-are the hypotheses supported by the available evidence? In my book, No Sense of Obligation, I have tried to show that they are not. I will give an all too brief summary of my conclusions here.

Hypotheses and Evidence

I have dismissed what I called "popular" beliefs such as the belief in signs or miracles on several grounds. First, most presumed miracles can be explained or accounted for without invoking divine intervention. Storms and other natural disasters are just those: natural disasters and not acts of God. We may therefore reject the arguments of those who give God credit for all that is good and ignore all that is bad; they are using evidence selectively in order to bolster a belief that they must intend to hold onto come hell or high water.

Similarly, we cannot accept the kind of wishful thinking that there must be a God because otherwise there would be no purpose to our existence, no fixed values, no universal code of morality. You cannot arbitrarily hypothesize, for example, a universal code of morality and then use the presumed existence of that code to "prove" that there must be a God. This hypothesis is not obviously true and requires evidence to support it. Basing one unsupported hypothesis on another, equally unsupported hypothesis is not progress.