Finely-Tuned For Love

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Science, philosophy and faith are each interesting subjects in themselves and even more interesting when considered together. In this piece, we take a quick look at the philosophical principles of determinism, necessity and chance, springboard to consideration of the observations of Stephen Hawking on the subject of determinism and free will, and finish with  some observations about faith and love.

We start with determinism, defined as “the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs.” Many modern scientists and philosophers alike believe we live in a world that is deterministic. Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Kraus, Daniel Dennet and others ascribe to this view.

In his show Genius, in which Stephen Hawking walks three “average” people through a series of exercises that lead them to understand great, nuanced principles of science, he agrees that the universe, including people, are determined by the laws of physics. He asserts that, if we could know where every cog in the machine of the universe is at any one moment, the laws of physics would allow us to know what would happen at any point in time. Therefore, Hawking  says, free will is an illusion.

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Science, Faith and Semantics

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Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist and author, debated John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science, in 2010.  This was the first of the Dawkins Lennox debates. Both men were both well-spoken and well-suited for the task.

Aside from the usual issues and points that are made in these sorts of debates about faith and science, some nuances emerge that I thought were interesting to consider. I highlight one particular interchange in particular.

Dawkins asserted, like an axiom, that faith is belief with no evidence (implying that faith is the antithesis of reason). Not surprisingly, Lennox disagreed. With a such a fundamental disagreement on the definition of faith, it seems to me, the focus should have been on the definition of “faith” – but it wasn’t.

Dawkins claimed that faith would not be faith if it was rational and evidence-based. In other words, Dawkins defined faith, in its very essence, as the absence of reason and evidence.

Lennox, on the other hand, described faith as the willingness to repose belief, trust and commitment in something for which there is evidence, but no “proof” (as in mathematical proof). In other words, Lennox describes faith as confidence in reason and evidence.

The way Dawkins defines faith it is the opposite of reason, while Lennox harmonizes them so that one (faith) emerges from the other (reason). Who is right? Continue reading →

Understanding in the Gaps

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Science and religion, depending on the perspective, enjoy a beautiful (or contentious) marriage or have been the victors (or victims) of a bitter divorce in the modern world.  Debates on science and religion dot the Internet, providing plenty of food for fodder no matter which side of the family one might identify with.

One such debate involves Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist and author from Oxford and his Oxford fellow, John Lennox, the mathematician and philosopher of science. Both men are marvelously well spoken and present their competing views eloquently and  convincingly, though they cannot both be right in their ultimate positions.

The debate, which uses Dawkin’s book, the God Delusion, as the subject matter,  is quite long, not the usual fare in the MTV age of tweets and soundbites, but well worth taking the time to listen and watch. They begin with biographical information and early influences that inform their worldviews. The meat of the debate uses statements from Dawkins’ book as the outline.

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Love, Hate and Disagreement through the Tears for Orlando

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Two days after the Orlando shooting, the initial shock and horror has turned into residual anger and sadness.  A determined resilience begins to take over that is the best of the American spirit, but the inevitable finger pointing and pontificating are in full swing, even as the tears for Orlando are still flowing.

It is hard to resist the urge to say something. Some should try harder. I hope I am not in that category, but a tragedy the size of the Orlando shooting cries for response. The various headlines I read two days later were the trigger for me.

The first headline was “ACLU Blames Conservative Christians for Orlando Terror Attack”. To be fair, the headline was wrong; the statements were made by two ACLU attorneys who were not necessarily speaking for the ACLU. These attorneys have accused “Christian conservatives” for cultivating a social and political environment that led to the Orlando shooting. They call for solidarity between Muslims and the LGBT community.

Whether one ascribes to the views of “Christian conservatives” (whatever that broad category may really include), the environment in which they operate is the same social and political environment in which the ACLU operates and the ACLU seeks to protect – the one that is the bedrock of the freedoms we have in this country – the foundation of freedom of speech, freedom of association and the freedom to practice (and talk about) the faith of one’s choice.

The same freedoms protect Muslims, gays and queers who advocate for their causes and express their beliefs.

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The Big Bang, Quantum Theory and God

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19th Century science assumed a universe that always existed. That model gave way in the 20th Century to the concession that the universe had a beginning and time, space and matter sprang into existence in an instant that has come to be known as the “Big Bang”.

Scientists who succeeded in the line of the materialists of the 19th century, who embraced Darwinism as they gladly shed the shackles of religion and faith, feared that the Big Bang might reopen the old doubt that God may exist after all. From the beginning, the idea of a Big Bang that began the universe was met with caution and reluctance.

Albert Einstein’s response to the consequences of his own general theory of relativity may be reasonably interpreted to reflect a possible concern about the peril of a confrontation with the Creator. Through the equations of general relativity, we can trace the origin of the universe backward in time to some sort of a beginning. However, to evade this seemingly inevitable cosmological conclusion, Einstein introduced a cosmological constant, a “fudge factor,” to yield a static model for the universe. He longed for a universe that was infinitely old. In fairness, Einstein later considered this to be one of the few serious mistakes of his scientific career. However, even this concession must have been painful, as Einstein had a strong conviction that all physical phenomena ultimately should be accounted for in terms of continuous fields everywhere (see Max Jammer’s 1999 book Einstein and Religion).[1]

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Atheism, Free Thinking and Common Sense

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Badlands by Tianna Messier

Photo by Tianna Messier

“The late Christopher Hitchens, when asked does he believe in free will, replied, ‘I have no choice.’ It’s a question I dread, actually, because I don’t have a very well thought out view about it. I have a materialist view of the world. I think that things are determined in a rational way by antecedent events. And so, that commits me to the view that when I think that I have free will, and I think that I am exercising free choice, I am deluding myself. My brain states are determined by physical events, and yet that seems to contradict, to go against, the very powerful subjective impression that we all have that we do have free will.”

Richard Dawkins (from FREE WILL – Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins)

I am reminded of the statements of atheists committed (dogmatically) to an evolutionary theory of the origins of life who admit, in moments of candor, that the world looks as if it were designed. Still, the obvious, natural explanation is discarded for complex, highly nuanced explanations of origins of the world we know. Not that the truth is always simple. It isn’t.

But, we have a tendency to subscribe to the esoteric explanations of scholars because scholars are esoteric and, well, scholarly. Not that evolution is esoteric, at least not anymore. But, we tend to take scholarly, and particularly scientific analyses, on face value as a objective findings of objective people (because we tend to think that scientists are necessarily objective).

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