The world is an unnerving place. Here we are, these Homo sapiens in 2010, who came into our biological selves through evolutionary processes over the span of millions of years. We developed the ability to think about our condition and a yearning to make sense of it. And we responded with traditions that would help us negotiate a life we could not explain.
Religions emerged and gave us some (often loose) accounts of the origin of our world, oriented us toward a conception of the good life and instilled in us a sense of purpose. Humanistic traditions such as literature, visual aesthetics and music stirred and cultivated the feelings that led us to ask existential questions, and in so doing helped infuse life with meaning and calm our disquiet. Then reason and the empirical sciences emerged on the front to lead us in our efforts to finally conquer our condition, to scientifically answer every question that had pushed us from fact to ambiguity.
And this last tradition, according to Cambridge and Caltech Professors Steven Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, is finally bringing us to the end of our search. Science is on the brink of rendering religious traditions—those in which people ascribe purpose to phenomena they cannot explain by reference to a God—obsolete. In their recent book, “The Grand Design,” they tell us that the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing, that “reason, mathematics and experimental test” are about to deliver the final stab to faith.
Being at Stanford, where such thoughts from Hawking, Mlodinow and Richard Dawkins find a natural stronghold, inclines me to think that young people’s belief that science is finally threatening the intellectual demise of religion is a new phenomenon. But I see much to make me think otherwise. William James describes in his 1896 essay “The Will to Believe” that as soon as his Harvard students got “well imbued with the logical spirit” they rejected philosophically the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith. Fernando Pessoa, in his 1930s novel “The Book of Disquiet,” calls “the childhood of intelligence” that period “when we’re attracted to popular science and writings that attack religion.” While these trends may seem new in the life of sophisticated 20-year-olds, in the bigger scheme of things they are not.
On the one hand, it seems like a sign of progress that students are, instead of supplanting science with blind faith, supplanting the unknowable with some dogma about how we can, and perhaps already do, know it. Isn’t this, at least, a much less dangerous attitude to have than the superstitions that lead parents to refuse blood transfusions for their children, lead churches to condemn contraceptives, lead political leaders to turn to prayer in trying moments that call for action? Perhaps. But better still would be an attitude that distinguished between superstition and faith, that appreciated that faith and volition play a role in the beliefs of atheists and deists alike. As James points out, even our belief that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, is but a “passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up.” A brief dive into the actual philosophical debates on all these questions will illustrate that, for our greatest thinkers, they are far from resolved.
Our passionate desire to rationalize the world leads some students who have begun to challenge their faith to decide there is no God rather than live in a more difficult limbo. It similarly leads students to relegate the humanities and the arts, to dismiss precious responses to the human condition as meaningless because they fail to rationalize our worlds. It precludes us from developing the humility about our own beliefs that would challenge our dogmatic instincts in all spheres of life. And it makes us miss a very obvious reality check: that the being-from-nothingness doctrine is not going to convert anyone who is not already converted. It is, as The Economist put it, “physics by sound-bite.” As Carlin Romano points out in The Chronicle of Higher Education, we do not know much about the universe that is not astonishingly inferential. As time goes on, we will progress, and questions will persist.
This column is no denial of the absurdities religion can cause. Its topic is instead about the absurdities behind anti-religious dogmatism. They include the failure to grasp that religion is not going anywhere. If it will be separated from superstitions that resist science, it will do so when its critics earnestly prefer reforming doctrine to scorning faith.
We live in a world full of uncertainty, of experiences and emotions we cannot verbalize, of vanishing points of truth we will never reach. Reconciling ourselves to that reality is a difficult, often painful task. It asks us to resist wishful thinking. But doing so makes us more robust, gives us a deeper appreciation of the world, precludes logicians and scientists from becoming the next zealots in pursuit of a hopeless cause. The diversity of beliefs within each religion betrays how people fill the voids in different ways. For many, perhaps most at Stanford, a designer cannot fill them. But, Lord help us, let’s not forget they exist.
Scorn or reform, or maybe you’re torn, send Aysha your thoughts at [email protected].