In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them."
Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book.
It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's clearly an excellent writer and is knowledgeable about many subjects, as befits his status as a New York Times opinion columnist, it's almost disappointing to see him rely on trite God of the Gaps arguments. Wikipedia says:
"God of the gaps" is a theological concept that emerged in the 19th century and revolves around the idea that gaps in scientific understanding are regarded as indications of the existence of God.This perspective has its origins in the observation that some individuals, often with religious inclinations, point to areas where science falls short in explaining natural phenomena as opportunities to insert the presence of a divine creator. The term itself was coined in response to this tendency. This theological view suggests that God fills in the gaps left by scientific knowledge, and that these gaps represent moments of divine intervention or influence.
So it's a pretty lazy way to argue for a religious view of reality. All you have to do is find an area where science doesn't know something and claim, "See, that's evidence for God; science is clueless about this, while religion isn't."
Of course, that isn't true.
Religion is just as clueless as science is about how the big bang came to be, which includes where the laws of nature that guided the big bang came from. The difference is that science is open about its lack of knowledge in this area, while religion makes unverifiable claims about a creator God being behind it all.
Douthat writes:
The first blow to the idea of an indifferent cosmos was the twentieth-century realization that our universe appears to have a specific beginning, a point of origin prior to which not only space but time itself did not exist.
If Darwin's theory arguably undermined a traditional Christian understanding of human origins, then the Big Bang theory offered a striking support for the Christian understanding of cosmic origins -- offering particular vindication to Augustine of Hippo, who insisted in the fourth century AD that God created time as well as space ex nihilo and exists outside both, in contrast to pagan critics of Christianity who assumed that the universe had to be eternal.
Okay, Augustine was correct about time being created along with space. But it was science, not religion, that came up with demonstrable evidence for the big bang. Douthat does make a good argument against the view of some scientists that the universe sprang out of nothing, the laws of quantum mechanics acting upon quantum fields.
I agree with Douthat that quantum fields and laws aren't nothing. However, I have no problem envisioning that the cosmos has always existed, along with the laws of nature that allow universes to come into being within the eternal reaches of the cosmos, as this makes more sense to me than an unseen creator God having always existed.
Douthat also notes that the laws of nature are marvelously fine-tuned in a fashion that allows the universe, and life within it, to exist. I've read many science books that make the same point. He disparages the idea of the multiverse, which explains why the laws of our universe are so amenable to life: countless other universes in the cosmos aren't suitable for life, but obviously we are in one that is.
To escape the possibility of a single invisible God, it [the multiverse concept] posits an infinite number of invisible universes that we can never hope to reach or see. To avoid the mind-preceding-matter immaterialism suggested by the universe's apparent fine-tuning and the strange role of human observation in collapsing potentiality into reality, it posits an infinite system that by definition cannot ever be studied from within our material existence.
Well, neither can God. At least the multiverse concept builds on something indisputably real, our universe. Notions about God have no connection with here-and-now reality, being creations of the human mind divorced from anything that can actually be known by our usual senses.
By the way, Douthat's comment about human observation collapsing potentiality into reality at the quantum level is just one of various ways quantum theory accounts for the possible turning into the actual. It's incorrect to hold that consciousness is needed for this to happen. Other theories are popular in the area of quantum physics.
As noted before, Douthat has an annoying habit of choosing an unproven scientific hypothesis, elevating it to a scientific certainty, and then arguing how ridiculous science is for believing in it -- whereas actually science is comfortable with simply saying, "This might be true, or it might be false. More research is needed to determine which it is."
Because religions are so dogmatic, Douthat seems to believe that science is also, while the exact opposite is true. Science loves gaps in knowledge, for those mysteries are what allow science to make progress at learning more about the unknown.
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