Science, faith and the raging debate
The debate over religion versus science has raged for centuries, and last week two experts debated the topic at a public event hosted by Chapman University in Orange.
The conversation featured Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer and Oxford theologian and philosopher Keith Ward, in a lively — but friendly — conversation that touched on God, physicist Stephen Hawking, consciousness, the multiverse and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Shermer, a former born-again Christian who now describes himself as “something of a militant agnostic,” presented his case by comparing the “God hypothesis” and the “science hypothesis.”
“The God hypothesis rests on a supernatural explanation for these problems to be solved,” he said of natural disasters, war, conflict, life and death. “Science deals with natural explanations for all phenomenon, and if we can’t explain it, then it’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know, let’s keep working on it.’”
Modern science has replaced supernatural thinking, he added, and will continue to in the future.
“If you believe that storms, diseases, accidents, fires, plagues and things like that are caused by women cavorting in the night with demons, you’re either insane or you lived 500 years ago when everyone believed this,” said Shermer, also author of “The Moral Arc.” “What happened to this witch theory of causality? It was displaced. Nobody believes that anymore. They believe science explains it.”
“We have meteorology and climatology to explain why weather exists. We have actuarial tables to explain why accidents happen and why chance events play a strong role in our lives. We have the germ theory of disease. So you no longer have to invoke witches, demons and so forth.”
In addition, Shermer said, the lack of any scientific evidence for God should give believers pause.
He related the “dragon in my garage” story told by the famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan in his 1995 book “The Demon-Haunted World.” A person claims to have a dragon in his garage, but when someone asks to see it, he says it’s invisible. When someone asks to see its footprints, he says it floats above the ground. When someone asks to use infrared detectors to track its body heat, he says it’s cold.
“At some point, you have to have some way of testing, some way of detecting this supernatural thing you say exists,” Shermer said. “If you don’t, what’s the difference between an invisible, floating, heatless dragon and no dragon at all? And that I would apply to God.”
But Keith Ward, who is an Anglican priest, said it was Shermer’s assumptions about God and religiosity that were incorrect.
“The real question here is hasn’t Michael just totally missed something about God?” he said.
Instead, he explained that God is “a being who is conscious, a being we can relate to in worship and devotion, whom we can revere, admire and seek unity with. Religion is about contemplation, prayer and meditation. If you’re a religious person, you’re a person who practices a discipline that leads you to consciousness of the mind of the universe.”
He added: “It doesn’t have anything directly to do with science at all.”
Plus, not everything that is real can be measured scientifically, Ward insisted.
“What about art, music, beauty, morality and the personal experience of other people?” he said. “If you have Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on a CD, you can explain through scientific explanation how you got the music onto binary code and how you got this onto a machine that would turn it back to music.… You can do that, but you haven’t begun to appreciate music. I would say religion is more like appreciating the true nature of reality than it is giving the true theory of an unknown fact.”
Even physicists do not believe reality is constrained to space and time, Ward contended. Many now posit the existence of a multiverse, or many universes with their own spaces, times and natural laws.
“I think Michael has much more faith than he lets on,” Ward said. “There’s a lot of faith in saying the scientific explanation is the only explanation.”
