John Lindal’s Blog

Humility

December 25, 2009 on 12:31 pm | In Deep Thoughts, Faith | No Comments

I recently read The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief because it was recommended to me by a retired pastor who is a friend of my wife. Now I recommend it, too. The science is clearly presented, and the arguments for the existence of God are worth considering.

When I went to find the book on Amazon, I discovered that there is a whole cottage industry based on writing books like this. I was a bit surprised, but I really shouldn’t be. People on both sides of the debate never cease to propound their opposing views. Why shouldn’t there be a group who tries to bridge the chasm?

The sad part is that all three groups mostly get it wrong. Regardless of the point of view — be it bible only, bible+science, or science only — they almost always fall into the trap of thinking that they actually know how the universe really works.

The fact is, we don’t.

We cannot prove that God exists. If He does not exist, we are left wondering how the universe came to exist and what our purpose is, if any. If He does exist, we are left wondering how He came to exist and, if you accept the Bible, why He behaves the way He does.

It is quite humbling to admit that we just don’t know what is really going on. It is also scary, however, which is probably why most people cling desperately to one viewpoint or another. (This applies to all religions, not just Christianity.)

However, if people would accept this dose of humility, then I think we would all find it much easier to get along.

Faith

October 12, 2009 on 8:59 am | In Deep Thoughts, Faith | No Comments

I’ve been struggling with my belief in God for the last several weeks, ever since finding Douglas Adams’ speech at Digital Biota 2. Basically, he claimed that God is a fiction that makes it easier for us to get on with our lives. If you have ever witnessed the dramatic personality changes caused by psychoactive drugs, e.g., antidepressants like Prozac, you will know how much of what a person considers to be me is actually governed by brain chemistry, not something supernatural like a soul.

Adams also brought up the issue that after we evolved to survive on this planet, we fell into the trap of thinking that the environment was designed to fit us, instead of the other way around. This was reinforced when I discovered this blog post about the purposelessness of evolution. This isn’t news to me. Intelligent Design is nonsense. Nature is neither efficient nor kind — though I can’t call it cruel either, since that would anthropomorphize it by implying that it had a concept of morality. It’s safest to say that Nature is blindly hostile. Life is an endless struggle against entropy.

If the existence of carnivores isn’t sufficient, consider the arms race in a species of beetles recently reported in Science News: a male essentially uses a spiked club to fertilize females and tear them up so they cannot mate again. This gives his genes a higher probability of continuing to the next generation. Under these conditions, females with extra tough armor have a survival advantage: they are less likely to die from coitus. When females get tougher, then only extra spiky males have an advantage. This never-ending escalation is clearly horribly painful and very inefficient!

This is tough for me, because as a scientist, I can’t simply accept the Bible on faith. Anybody can write a book and build a religion around it — just look at Scientology. So can I believe in God when there is such overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang and blind evolution? (Claiming that God is the creator of everything just pushes the question back a step. Where did He come from?) Can I believe in a loving God when nature is hostile? Can I believe in the existence of God when brain chemistry is the simplest explanation for religious experiences?

While driving home from work a couple of days ago, it struck me that even if God doesn’t exist, the fundamental advice in the New Testament is still valid. (Our pastor’s sermon on Sunday solidified this.) The human experience clearly indicates that we face a paradox: what we instinctively want is not what is really good for us.

• Self-reliance isn’t psychologically healthy. We need deep, stable relationships.
• Money, power, fame are hollow. They are just as addictive and destructive as heroin. Instead of fulfilling you, they leave you hungry for more. We need food, shelter, and recognition in moderation.
• Sex for gratification is just as hollow as money, power, and fame, and it spreads diseases. Faithfulness within a healthy marriage deepens the bond by building trust.
• Revenge may succeed, but it is guaranteed to destroy us. We need to forgive others, for our own sanity. We also need to be forgiven, or at least forgive ourselves, since guilt is crippling, too.

The Bible’s shortest summary of this is two rules (Luke 10:27):

1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.
   Translation: Don’t worship money, power, fame, sex, self-reliance, revenge, or any of your other instincts. They are all traps. Instead, focus on love, mercy, justice, etc.
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
   Translation: Treat others as you wish to be treated. Don’t murder, steal, lie, abuse, insult, etc. You don’t like it, and neither does anybody else. Instead, help others when they are in trouble, just as you would like to be helped when you have problems.

The longer summary is the Ten Commandments. Using the Talmudic method of counting, the first four are consequences of #1 above, and the rest are consequences of #2.

This, of course, doesn’t prove that God exists. It could be that some really smart psychologists wrote the Bible to tell us what we ought to do — essentially what Adams claimed — and that the Good News about forgiveness of sin was invented because (1) it’s obvious how bad we are at doing what we ought to do and (2) as noted above, we need forgiveness to avoid being crippled by guilt. But if He does exist, then it’s clear that He’s for us, not against us.

So I can’t prove that God exists. But neither can I prove that God does not exist. Thus, if I spend all my time wondering whether or not He exists, I’m wasting my life grappling with an axiom. This is analogous to parallel lines in geometry. If you decide they never cross, you get Euclidean geometry. If you prefer that they can cross, you get some variant of non-Euclidean geometry.

If I choose to believe in a loving God, how does this fit with blind evolution and hostile nature? Evidence suggesting the existence of free will is mounting. Conway and Koshen recently proved the Free Will Theorem, which states that if people are free to make choices, then elementary particles also make choices that do not depend on anything in the past. Again, it is impossible to prove, but Conway strongly believes that we do have free will, which would imply that the universe is fundamentally unconstrained. In this situation, a loving God couldn’t do better than help us go in the right direction. Otherwise, we would end up as enslaved puppets.

Of course, free will might not exist, in which case we are puppets. Though it may sound paradoxical, I choose not to believe this.

Moreover, I choose to believe that God does exist. Why? As discussed above, the advice attributed to Him in the New Testament is sound, and He offers to forgive and lift the burden of guilt for those who honestly want to change. I want Him to exist. The alternative is terrifying.