Amy has a link up to a debate between Richard Dawkins, atheist author of The God Delusion (yes, I know, he is also a biologist author of many excellent books about evolutionary science, including one that I like very much, but when you write a book called The God Delusion, you must be speaking either as an atheist or as a psychologist), and David Quinn, an Irish Catholic journalist.
I finished The Ancestor’s Tale last month feeling that I had learned a great deal about the history of life on earth, and also a great deal more than I wanted to about Dawkins’s peculiar obsession with taking jabs at religious people. In the middle of an otherwise stellar work of popular science, his reflexive and out-of-context insult-spitting was distracting. The man desperately needs an editor. The podcast linked above is further evidence that he should stick to commenting on fields that he actually understands.
At one point, Dawkins was reduced to stuttering indignantly, “But free will is a very difficult question! It has nothing to do with religion!” (Later he says that free will doesn’t interest him anyway, a statement that raises some questions as to the man’s grasp of metaphysics.)
This brings me to one of my pet peeves. Why is it that whenever someone wants to compare religious belief to some academic discipline, “science” is always chosen? Is science compatible with faith? How do the methods of arriving at scientific orthodoxy compare to the methods of arriving at religious orthodoxy? Is there an overlap in the spheres of science and faith or are they totally separate? Can religious people do good scientific research? Can scientists be devout? Etc. etc. etc. You hear this as often from people of faith as from experts in various fields of the natural sciences, and you certainly hear it from people who happen to be both.
After all (taking Christianity as a specific example), the body of Christian belief and Christian methods of inquiry does not exist primarily to answer the question it happens to share with the natural sciences, i.e., “Where did all this stuff come from?” (N.B. Science doesn’t exist primarily to answer this question either.)
Rather, Christianity, as a body of belief and as a set of methods of inquiry (thank you Thomas Aquinas), exists primarily to tell a story and to convince people of its truth and of the course of action recommended by that truth.
Because of this, a better comparison is to the field of history.
When Christian experts marshall evidence to support their claims, it’s rarely evidence in the sense that scientists are using the word. Experiments are not performed. Quantities are not measured. Samples are not collected.
It’s more like evidence in the sense that historians use the word. There are documents. There are eyewitness accounts, and second-hand accounts, and accounts that vouch for the integrity of the eyewitnesses. There are artifacts. There are letters. There are testimonies. That sort of thing.
Now, experiments and measurements and samples can be taken of the preserved documents in order to judge their age, their authenticity, the degree to which scribes’ errors have corrupted the texts, that sort of thing. There’s a place for the natural sciences even in historical inquiry. But ultimately, Christian evidence comes down to us in the form of texts and oral traditions, the voices and handwriting of people who are trying to tell someone something.
It’s the same kind of evidence that all our historical inquiry draws upon, at least until photography and audio recordings appeared on the scene in the last few centuries.
This evidence is not the same kind as scientific evidence. It is a kind of evidence that can provide conclusive, incontrovertible answers to only the most narrowly tailored of questions. To the answers of most other questions, uncertainty remains. Was this passage really written by the man who signed his name, or by someone else? Did the author of this diary really see what he thought he saw, or was he mistaken? Did the writer of this letter really perform this exploit, or was he exaggerating in order to impress the letter’s recipient? All the surviving contemporaneous accounts of this event agree on its cause; but how do we know that there were not accounts that dispute it, only they have not survived?
Yet this doesn’t stop us from making historical assertions without fear of being called “delusional.”
Dawkins claims that faith —presumably including Christianity — is evil because it involves believing things without any evidence. Well. If he restricts “evidence” to mean “that which is directly demonstrable,” then history is equally evil. If he includes documentary evidence, then he makes his statement from a point of ignorance, because there is plenty of documentary evidence for Christian claims about the resurrection, indeed, better evidence than we have for almost anything else that happened so long ago. If his quibble is with the quality of the documentary evidence, then I’m rather curious to hear his arguments. I mean, does he believe that Homer existed? Will he go out on a limb to say who killed Julius Caesar? In fourteen hundred and ninety two, did Columbus sail the ocean blue? And so on.
I don’t know about you, but I “believe” these things because someone told me, not because someone produced a proof for me. If that’s a delusion, so’s all of human culture and philosophy. But then, perhaps Dawkins, not being so interested in philosophy, would agree.
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