timeimmortal

“Somehow, one can never manage to be an atheist.”

I never really understood what Chesterton meant when he observed thusly, and for the longest time have supposed that he meant to discuss his own faith and reasons for belief. Certainly this is reflected in other writings of his, including his detailing of his conversion from atheism in the wake of reading the likes of Ingersoll. But I think, after reading something like this, that perhaps Chesterton was getting at something else, something deeper.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

…

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

I wonder if any of the atheistic commentators at this site have truly understood that, as a Catholic Christian, I take no issue at all with the discoveries that science has made over the centuries, and that I accept all the same scientific findings and principles that most of my atheistic correspondents likely do as well. Be it evolution, the scale and shape of the Universe, the heliocentric Solar System, or the age of the Earth and the cosmos, I accept more or less completely what is considered to be “common knowledge” about scientific subjects. Humanity evolved from lesser primates, the Universe is vast, the Earth orbits the Sun, and that same Earth is very old. All this is well and good.

And none of it shakes my faith in God, nor does any of it constitute an actual (let alone effective) argument against the probable existence of God. Yes, the Bible would seem to imply (if one is hopelessly literal) that creation was quick, complete, and recent — but to me, I read Genesis and take out of it the message that God is the ultimate creator of all things*. The exact methodology of God’s creative genius, and the duration of time required for the artistry to yield His most beloved humanity, is not the subject of Scripture, nor was it ever meant to be. Revelation comes by two vectors — textual and natural, from the Book of God’s Words and the Book of God’s Works (as Francis Bacon once put it).

(* This also neatly addresses the Euthyphro dilemma, by the way. The dilemma originates from Plato, if memory serves, and as such takes a view of divinity akin to that of the Greek Pantheon. That’s all well and good, but one notable thing about the Pantheon is that none of its members was a participant in the creation of the universe. The Euthyphro dilemma is not an effective argument against Christianity because in the Christian view, God is the creator of everything, of all things. So when the question is posed as to whether something is moral because God commands it, or whether God commands something because it is moral, the Christian can very easily answer with a pithy “yes”, because both realities are true. That which is moral is moral because God commands it, and inherent in God’s commanding us to morality is the fact that God has structured the order of the universe, and the human being more specifically, in such manner that those things which are moral are…well…moral. Inherent in God’s commandments is a reflection of God’s design of the larger world, and vice versa.)

I’ve both joked and been dead serious in the past when I’ve observed that atheism is a religion…and it is at least true that atheism/naturalism/freethought are, at a base minimum, faith claims…even if the tenets of that faith are simply that the human brain, which atheists insist arose due to random selection pressures and to confer a survival advantage upon one primate form over another (’survival’ here meaning the continued ability to find food, shelter, and mates), is nevertheless capable of higher forms of reason and rational thought.

And most atheists/naturalists/freethinkers also put a measure of faith in science as well, in their self-satisfied confidence that science can, does, and/or will one day explain everything adequately. Of course, as we see above, science is incapable of this. There will always be, in the scientific realm, a series of base assumptions that must be accepted sans evidence as being concrete laws of reality.

And I think that may have been what Chesterton recognized: that atheism, naturalism, freethought (and, more generally, science, although science is not inherently atheistic), are not free from faith at all, but instead place their faiths in different things, in different ideas. And so, in a sense, one really can never manage to be an atheist, because one can never manage to shake oneself free of a faith-based assumption about something.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)

~ by Kenneth on November 26, 2007.