Gunning for God (6 page)

For instance, Professor John Polkinghorne, an eminent theoretical physicist himself, rejects the multiverse concept:

Let us recognise these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us. A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability — and to my mind greater economy and elegance — would be that this one world is the way it is, because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so.
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I am tempted to add that belief in God seems an infinitely more rational option, if the alternative is to believe that every other universe that possibly can exist does exist, including one in which Richard Dawkins is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Christopher Hitchens the Pope, and Billy Graham has just been voted atheist of the year!

Hawking’s ultimate theory, to explain why the laws of physics are as they are, is called M-theory: a theory of supersymmetric gravity that involves very sophisticated concepts, such as vibrating strings in eleven dimensions. Hawking confidently calls it “the unified theory that Einstein was expecting to find”. However, Paul Davies (cited above), who is not a theist, says of M-theory: “It is not testable, not even in any foreseeable future.”
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Oxford physicist Frank Close goes further: “M-theory is not even defined… we are even told ‘No one seems to know what the M stands for.’ Perhaps it is ‘myth’.” Close concludes: “I don’t see that M-theory adds one iota to the God debate, either pro or con.”
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Jon Butterworth, who works at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, states that “M-theory is highly speculative and certainly not in the zone of science that we have got any evidence for.” Butterworth argues, however, that although M-theory could not be tested, it did not require faith in the religious sense, but was more of a scientific hunch.
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Half a minute! Don’t scientific hunches require faith to pursue the research that may establish them? Doesn’t Hawking have faith in M-theory — even if it is faith without much evidence to back it up?

Clearly, we need to do some hard thinking about faith. But before we do, we might just sum up the discussion about Hawking as follows:

We are presented with the following argument in the form of a syllogism:

If M-theory is true, then there is no

God; M-theory is true;

Therefore there is no God.

We have seen that the first premise is false, whether or not the second is true. The second premise has not been established; some think it not even well defined, let alone testable. The conclusion is therefore invalid. The Grand Design still points unwaveringly to the Grand Designer.
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Now to the all-important question of faith.

WHAT IS FAITH?

There is widespread confusion about the nature of faith — especially among atheists. This confusion arises from the fact that the term “faith” has developed a range of meanings and is often used without making clear which meaning is intended. Let’s start with the dictionary. According to the OED, the word “faith” derives from the Latin
fides
(from which we get “fidelity”), so its basic meaning is “trust”, “reliance”. “The Latin
fides
like its Greek etymological cognate
pistes
, which it renders in the New Testament, had the following principal senses: 1. belief, trust; 2. that which produces belief, evidence, token, pledge, engagement; 3. trust in its objective aspect, troth, observance of trust, fidelity.”

So, according to the OED, the main meanings given to the word “faith” are: belief, trust, confidence, reliance, and belief proceeding from reliance on testimony or authority. Thus, the statements “I believe in science”; “I trust in science”, and “1 have faith in science” all mean essentially the same — and we should note that such faith/belief/trust is regarded by most people as warranted.

This all seems plain sailing until we begin to read the New Atheists. On the one hand, they say that they
believe
that God does not exist. On the other, they say that they have no
faith
. Richard Dawkins claims that: “Atheists do not have faith; and reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything does not exist.”
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He thinks that: “a case can be made that
faith
is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.”
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“Scientific belief” according to him “is based upon publicly checkable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence; its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.”
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Michel Onfray accuses religious believers of “unbelievable credulity because they do not want to see the evidence”.
²⁶

These statements bring us to the heart of the matter. Dawkins here contrasts “scientific
belief
” with “religious
faith
”. This shows that he thinks that “faith” is not the same as “belief” but means a special kind of belief: belief where there is no evidence. This idiosyncratic view seems to be shared by many atheists, Julian Baggini among them. He asks the question: is atheism a faith position? His answer is no:

The atheist position is based on evidence and arguments to best explanation. The atheist believes in what she has good reason to believe in and doesn’t believe in supernatural entities that there are few reasons to believe in, none of them strong. If this is a faith position then the amount of faith required is very small. Contrast this with believers in the supernatural and we can see what a true faith position is. Belief in the supernatural is belief in what there is a lack of strong evidence to believe in.

Baggini deduces from this: “The status of atheist and religious belief are thus quite different. Only religious belief requires faith because only
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religious belief postulates the existence of entities which we have no good evidence to believe exist.”
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For Baggini, therefore, a “faith-position” is, by definition, belief without evidence. In other words, for the New Atheists, “belief” would seem to be the neutral term (it may or may not be warranted by evidence), whereas they use “faith” as a special term for belief without warrant.

Furthermore, Baggini confuses two very different things: 1) the terms “faith”, “belief”, or “trust” and 2) the grounds for such “faith”, “belief”, or “trust”. The point is that, contrary to what Baggini thinks, according to the OED, the normal use of the word “faith” does not contain within it implications for the strength or weakness of the evidence that might justify that faith. From that perspective, it would be much more accurate to say that atheism, agnosticism, and theism are all “faith positions”, and we can ask of each of them: What evidence supports them and what speaks against them? What warrant do they have? The confusion arises from an idiosyncratic, implicit, re-definition of “faith” as a peculiarly religious term (which it isn’t) and that it only means a special kind of believing, that is, believing without evidence (which it doesn’t).

If, for instance, instead of the OED, we consult the popular Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary we find the following entry under “faith”:

1. a: allegiance to duty or a person: loyalty; b (1): fidelity to one’s promises (2): sincerity of intentions. 2. a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion;
b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof
[italics mine] (2): complete trust.

According to Webster’s, then, firm belief in something for which there is no proof is an allowable use of the word “faith”. Perhaps the most famous example of such use is Mark Twain who said that faith is “believing what you know ain’t true”. The New Atheists all follow him. A leading atheist website (that quotes Mark Twain) says it all: “Simply put, faith means belief or trust. Faith is a particular kind of belief. It is strong, it is often unwavering and it does not require proof or evidence. Most would agree that belief is faith when it is quite strong and does not involve evidence or practical reasoning.”
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However, faith conceived as belief that lacks warrant is very different from faith conceived as belief that has warrant. To avoid confusion, therefore, it will be helpful to use the much more common and unambiguous term “blind faith” when referring to belief without warrant. Use of the adjective “blind” to describe “faith” indicates that faith is not necessarily, or always, or indeed normally, blind. Nevertheless, Baggini seems to think that it is: “When such grounds for belief are available we have no need for faith. It is not faith that justifies my belief that drinking fresh, clean water is good for me, but evidence. It is not faith that tells me it is not a good idea to jump out of the windows of tall buildings, but experience.”
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In the first sentence here “faith” is contrasted with “grounds for belief”; in the second it is contrasted with “evidence”; and in the third with “experience”. This is pure Mark Twain, and for someone who takes the OED seriously, it sounds absurd since, in ordinary language, saying that “it is not faith that justifies my belief” is like saying that belief doesn’t justify belief or, equivalently, that faith doesn’t justify faith. This simply makes no sense.

In normal language, what Baggini presumably means is that he puts his faith in drinking fresh, clean water on the basis of such and such evidence, and that he trusts (or puts faith in) his experience to tell him that it is not a good idea to jump from tall buildings. Far from him not exercising faith at all, he is exercising it on both occasions.

It follows from this that the
validity,
or
warrant
, of faith or belief depends on the strength of the evidence on which the belief is based. Indeed, for most people that is the common sense view. Asked to believe something, they will want to know what the supporting evidence is, especially if the matter is of some importance to them. A bank manager will not have faith in (trust, believe) a potential borrower who asks for a substantial loan unless the bank manager can see sufficient evidence on which to base that trust.

Think of the financial crisis of 2009. Before it happened many had faith in the banking system, because they believed in the integrity of most bank officials. Then it was discovered that ethically responsible risk management was not a strongpoint for some senior bankers who, out of sheer greed, gambled our money away on risky ventures. Any basis for trust in them was eroded to such an extent, therefore, that the economy was paralysed, and the banks had to be bailed out. Public faith in the bankers was shown to be blind. Indeed, even the bankers’ faith in their own ability also turned out to be blind. As a result the banks were faced with the very difficult task of recovering the faith, the confidence, of the public. The system could not get moving again until a basis for trust (faith) was restored.

What is this telling us? We all know how to distinguish between blind faith and evidence-based faith. We are well aware that faith is only justified if there is evidence to back it up. When buying a car, we don’t just throw our hard-earned money at any vehicle. We check out the reliability ratings of the manufacturer; we check with friends who own similar cars. In other words, we look for reasons — we look for evidence — to justify our decision to have faith in buying a particular vehicle.

We also know that blind faith can be dangerous — even in the everyday matter of buying a car, to say nothing of the kind of blind fanaticism that fuels terrorism. Most of us would surely agree with Richard Dawkins when he says: “If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtues of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.”
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FAITH IN PEOPLE

In our everyday usage of the words “faith” and “belief”, we tend to distinguish between “belief that something”, and “belief in someone”. Here once more, it is surely obvious that trust in other human beings is based on evidence, unless we happen to be gullible. I made this point in my first debate with Richard Dawkins in response to his assertion that faith is blind. I asked him about his faith in his wife. His instinctive, positive reaction confirmed to me that he understands very well that faith is normally evidence-based. In fact, Dawkins explains this in some detail in a letter written to his daughter:

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like “My wife loves me.” But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation.
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There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favours and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.