New Post: "The Catholic Two-front War against Scientism and Scriptural Literalism

Hello all:   a new post, "The Catholic Two-front War against Scientism and Scriptural Literalism".  I'd be grateful for comments, for and against.

Atheus Evangelismus--the Varieties of Evangelical Materialists*

Militant Atheism--modified from Wikimedia Commons

"Many people may be comforted by the idea of a powerful being who cares about their lives and who determines ultimate standards of right and wrong behavior.  Personally, I am not comforted by that at all;  I find it extremely off-putting."--Sean Carroll

 “[Religious] Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” ― Richard Dawkins

 "Because there are laws such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going."--Stephen Hawking

"I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without one".--Lawrence Krauss

 "When people organize their lives around these [religious] beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.” --Stephen Pinker 

Scientism, the belief that science can explain everything about the world and ourselves, is a religion, although not formally expressed as such.  By being a religion, I mean that it is founded on faith, a faith that its proponents say proceeds from rational processes, but which in fact denies many rational objections.

There are many scientists who write books, justifying their scientism;  whether they do this to gather people into the fold or just make money is a question I won't attempt to answer.    Some--I'm thinking of Richard Dawkins in particular--are so convinced of the righteousness of their belief and the evil of religious faith that they would prohibit the practice of religion.    Others--I'm thinking of Sean Carroll--take a more balanced view, conceding there are legitimate reasons for belief in God, but those reasons aren't for them.  

Now I'm more familiar with the works of Carroll, Dawkins and Hawking, but I do know something about what Krauss and Pinker have written about religion.   So, I thought it might be instructive put their quasi-religious beliefs into correspondence with some Christian sects.   So, here they are:

Carroll    <----> Unitarianism Universalism

Dawkins <----> Catholic Geocentrists 

Hawking <----> Low Church Anglican

Krauss    <----> Missouri Synod Lutheran or Southern Baptist

Pinker     <----> United Methodist

These correspondences are, I'll admit, arbitrary to an extent.   I've assigned them on the apparent willingness of proponents to argue reasonably and to acknowledge possible merit of those who do believe in God.   

What's your take?

NOTE

*My wife, my beta-reader, said on reading this, "It isn't really a  post, it's more like a comment".    I agree, and the only two legitimate correspondences are those for Sean Carroll and Richard Dawkins--the three others are sort of put in just to get some more people and denominations in the list.

Where is the Catechism of Science?

Science is not a Religion! from Wikimedia Commons

"Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish."   Pope St. John Paul II, Letter to Rev. George Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory.

"Christianity possesses the source of its justification within itself  and does not expect science to constitute its primary apologetic." ibid.

 "It can be said, in fact, that research, by exploring the greatest and the smallest, contributes to the glory of God which is reflected in every part of the universe."   Pope St. John Paul II, Address on the Jubilee of Scientists, 2000

INTRODUCTION

My latest book (department of shameless self-promotion), "Science versus the Church--'Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,'" is available on Amazon.com and leanpub.com, the latter in a pdf format.  I've decided to add a final chapter, a summing up, and I thought the best way would be to compare our Catholic Catechism (in its old familiar form, the Baltimore Catechism), with what a similar catechism might be, formed from the opinions of non-believing scientists.    

I won't claim that the answers in the science Catechism are true--indeed, there are contradictory responses--and I don't know of any of the assertions have been empirically validated.    In short, the science catechism fails the ultimate test of any scientific project; it is not and cannot be shown to hold by replicable measurements.

THE BALTIMORE CATECHISM: 

1.  Who made us?   
God made us. 

 "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth." Genesis 1:1

2. Who is God?  
God is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who made all things and keeps them in existence. 

"In him we live and move and have our being." Acts 17:28

3. Why did God make us?  
God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.

"Eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what things God has prepared for those who love him." I Corinthians 2:9

4. What must we do to gain the happiness of heaven?
To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world.

Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth; where the rust and moth consume and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven; where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Matthew 6:19-20

THE CATECHISM ACCORDING TO SCIENCE: 

1. Who made us?

Life came about by chance and we evolved from that first life.

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Its Nature

2.  What is the entity that made the universe from which this life came?
There are several answers:

"Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever."  Robert Nozick

"As scientists, we track down all promising leads, and there's reason to suspect that our universe may be one of many - a single bubble in a huge bubble bath of other universes. Brian Greene

" Thus, CCC [Cyclic Conformal Cosmology] proposes that what current cosmology refers to as “the entire history of the universe” (but without any early inflationary phase) is just one aeon of a succession of such aeons, that continues indefinitely in both temporal directions."  Roger Penrose.

"Because there is a law such a gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."  Stephen Hawking.

3, Why did the entity that made the universe make us?
Why questions, that is questions involving purpose--teleology--are outside the domain of science.

"Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public."  H.A. Krebs (he of the Krebs Cycle)

 "It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation)." Steven Pinker

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Richard Dawkins

'Why' implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.” Lawrence Kraus

4. What must we do to get the happiness of heaven?
There is no heaven.

We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.”  Lawrence Kraus

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."   Stephen Hawking

CONCLUSION

I won't bother to analyze each of the answers given for the science catechism.   They are discussed in previous chapters of my book, Science versus the Church, (for example, "the brain as a computer", and there is no universal agreement amongst scientists or philosophers.   If any of you readers would like to argue for them, I'd be glad to hear your arguments.

Added 20th August, 2016.   Several readers of this post have read the above post as my argument that this is what science is all about.   That's far from the case.   What I am trying to show, possibly ineptly, is by a literary device called "situational irony" that contrary to the claims of the scientists from whom the quotes are drawn, that science does not explain everything there is to be known about our world and life.   

In short, I have tried to expose "scientism" for the fraud it is, but my opinion of science as it should be conducted (which was not the topic for this post) is much different.    See, for example, my posts: "Peeling back the onion layers: gravitational waves detected", "Tipping the Sacred Cow of Science--Confessions of a Science Agnostic", "God, Symmetry and Beauty in Science: a Personal Perspective." to see what my idea of science is all about.

Top-down to Jesus--On bypassing the road to Damascus

“Be not afraid of faith: some are born with faith, some achieve faith, and some have faith thrust upon them.” (with apologies to William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.)

In my very first blog I promised to tell the story of my conversion—how an agnostic Jewish scientist became a Catholic in his senior years, to the horror of many colleagues, the amazement of his family, and the delight of his wife. Conversion stories interest the Catholic faithful (possibly because the missionary impulse that goes with faith is vicariously satisfied). However, in telling this story I have a different focus than auto-biographical, I propose to explore the roots of faith—revelation, grace and rational conviction. The last is not important for some and crucially important for others, but as Pascal pointed out in his wager, rational conviction can lead to grace-filled faith (see “The Pearl of Great Price—Pascal'sWager Revisited).

There is another continuation here: in my second blog, “Belief, Knowledge and Faith”, there was a promise to discuss further the difference between faith and what might be termed “scientific knowledge”. By distinguishing my belief in science from that in the dogma/doctrine of the Catholic Church, I hope to demonstrate the limits of the scientific domain and the unlimited power of rationally based faith.

So, let's begin with the minimum bit of biography. I'm not going to say much about my early religious life, other than I grew up as a secular Jew, despite having several rabbis as great-grandparents. (In the great wisdom of early adolescence, I refused to be Bar-Mitzvah'd, believing it to be a sham ceremony when there was so much misery and injustice in the world, misery and injustice ignored by those fur-coated ladies parading in Temple.) Nevertheless, there was a belief of sorts in a Creator--my teen-age passion was astronomy, visiting the local planetarium and constructing (not well) a six-inch reflecting telescope; I realized instinctively the dictum of Psalm 19A, "The Heavens declare the glory of God". Working during a college summer in the Yosemite forest service, lying underneath one of the big trees, I was filled with awe at the Creator's work here on earth. My wife is Catholic, and we were married in a Catholic church.  But I stayed my distance from the Church, only attending functions at my children's Catholic school and at baptisms (at one of these, for my oldest daughter, I was much embarrassed by being asked to serve as an altar boy for the priest--my protestations that I wasn't Catholic were to no avail).

Now into each life some rain must fall, and fall it did in mine--without going into detail and violating confidences, I'll say that in my 60's I became a member of a Twelve Step Groups--Hi, I'm Bob and I'm  a ______ (fill in the blank);  the presence of a Higher Power (uppercase obligatory), who will help to break addictive chains--alcohol, drugs, food, persons--is a guiding principle of such groups.   I was disposed to believe in the presence of such a Higher Power, but I came to realize that the phrase was doublespeak, Orwellian "sheer cloudy vagueness", a euphemism for God, so I began to search for a more satisfying way to think about the deity (at that time in lowercase).

Fortunately at this point the Holy Spirit intervened (exactly how, this old guy's memory fails), and I was prompted to read "Who Moved the Stone" by Frank Morison, a pseudonym for Albert Henry Ross, a British writer who originally set out to disprove the Resurrection, but who, on evaluating the biblical accounts, came to believe.    I won't recount the evidence (it's detailed more fully in the linked articles), but it seemed to me that an impartial jury (not composed of evangelical atheists) would give a verdict of "innocent", i.e. the arguments that the biblical account of the Resurrection were true.   What struck me even more on going from "Who Moved the Stone" to the the New Testament. was that this bunch of uneducated yahoos--fishermen, tax collectors, women--had managed to out-talk the scholars of Judaism and thereby to spread the Christian faith through the Roman world.   Surely they must have been inspired by encounters with the risen Jesus and the inner voice of the Holy Spirit.   It also occurred to me that if one does believe in the Gospel account of the Resurrection, then one should also credit other

incidents described there, in particular the words of Jesus giving the keys of the Kingdom to Peter, thus founding the Catholic Church.   Accordingly, the Christian religion to which I would convert should be Roman Catholic (this choice also eliminated a certain amount of domestic controversy).  I must emphasize that this whole process was one of rational decision making--no visions, no voices--whence "Top Down to Jesus".   I envy those  who have had visions of our Lord and heard His voice (and I have had first hand accounts of such from some of my friends), but this was not my good fortune.

Of course conversion is an ongoing process--study, service, prayer, adoration, retreats--all the tools and fertilizer to make the fig tree of faith bear ever more fruit.   To fully recount this continuing process would take a book chapter, not a blog.   Much is related or implied in my other blogs and in the biographical note below, but I'll add these brief (?) comments.   First, as a scientist, I had to struggle to believe in miracles--Fr. Mc___'s answer during my initial catechesis to my questions on  points of dogma, "If you believe in one miracle, the Resurrection, why are you having problems with others?" and "If you believe in the possibility, even if you have questions, that is enough."--helped.   As I looked at the evidence for contemporary miracles, particularly that reported by Dr. Alexis Carrell at Lourdes, and read what C.S. Lewis and Ralph McInerny had to say about the reality of miracles, my scientific skepticism waned.     Second, those few non-"Top Down", but "In the Heart" moments where I felt the presence of Deity (not well defined, not as an image or as a voice) have been evoked by music:  Gregorian chant during a retreat at St. Vincent Archabbey, certain hymns and liturgical music, and very, very infrequently, at quiet times in early morning during Adoration or other prayer, when the melody of some favorite hymn would come to mind.

Now I claim that this belief in Jesus and in the dogma/doctrine of the Catholic Church, this faith, is akin in certain respects to and also different from my belief/faith in science.   To begin with let me assert that by no means can science explain everything, that is to say, "scientism" is a false doctrine.   The books of Keith Ward, the writings of Fr. Stanley Jaki (particularly "The Limits of a Limitless Science"), and most recently an essay by the eminent biologist Austin Hughes on "The Folly of Scientism" effectively demolish the positions of the evangelical atheists, Dawkins, Atkins, and (of late) Hawking, who believe that science is the only answer.   They ignore all that science can't explain, the "why" questions;  for example,  they believe that since we can show by functional MRI where the brain is active when we pray or contemplate, we fully understand how and what the mind is doing in prayer or mystical experience.  Wrong!

Most people put the same faith in what science tells them as the Christian faithful did in the dogma of the Church.   How many people have done Galileo's inclined plane experiment to verify laws of motion (which I did in the physics lab at Caltech)...etc.    The essence of the scientific method is that theoretical predictions can be verified by repeated measurements, and this in turn implies that those things and realities that cannot be quantified and realized by an experiment cannot be deal with scientifically.   And even then science is limited in setting up idealized experiments, situations isolated from the surroundings for which the theoretical gedanken experiment may not always be possible.   And of course there is the fundamental incompatibility of the two major theories, quantum mechanics and relativity,  that are the foundation of modern science.    In desperation to avoid the act of creation that implies the Deity, theoretical physicists are putting their faith in multiverse theories, M-theories with infinite landscapes, theories that are most unlikely to be verified  experimentally (i.e. to be capable of being falsified), exercises in mathematical metaphysics, exercises which are even more removed from one's experience than that supposedly put by Medieval theologians: how many angels could stand on the point of a pin (which was, in fact, a reasonable question--how many immaterial entities could be contained in a point).    Indeed, it is clear that the lucid framework of physical science cannot even support  all the occurrences in our everyday experience--the butterfly wings beating in China to yield the tornado in Oklahoma, order springing from disorder as shown by the Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine, mathematical unknowability (the last is surprising and possibly not in everyone's everyday experience).

To sum up, and this has been a long and exhausting effort, let me assert that religious faith can be attained by a variety of roads--the vision, the voice from above, or by rational "Top Down" endeavor.   As the quote at the beginning put it, some are born with faith, some achieve faith and some have faith thrust upon them.   And the faith we have in Jesus Christ is as well founded in terms of empirical evidence and inner knowledge  as the faith we as physicists have  in what science tells us about the world.