It’s nearing the end of the year, but I’m confident that we won’t see an article more wooly-headed than this one before New Year’s Day. So I’m awarding the Most Odious Osculation of Faith (MOOF) Award to the big Atlantic article, “Why God will not die“, by Jack Miles. True, it was published in the December, 2014 issue, but eluded my attention till now, and deserves a quick look, as well as the award, for being worst piece in its genre over the last 12 months.
The subtitle (also the piece’s last sentence), “Science keeps revealing how much we don’t, perhaps can’t, know. Yet humans seek closure, which should make religious pluralists of us all,” tells the tale, and reveals its shaky thesis: we should make room for religion because a.) science doesn’t know everything; in fact, it makes us more ignorant, and b.) we want to know everything (i.e., find “closure”). Ergo: Make Room for God. Although Miles is an atheist, he seems to evince atheism’s worst facet: making bad arguments for osculating the rump of faith.
I’ll be brief, for wading through the piece—and in a venue as respected as The Atlantic—was truly a trial, equivalent to reading the part of the Bible where God tells the Jews, in minute and tedious detail, how to build the Ark of the Covenant. Just two points.
Miles does down science. Here’s his beef: science raises more questions than it answers, so our ignorance increases:
Well, the scientists did demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs won his belated Nobel Prize. And the success of CERN has indeed pointed the way to further research. At the same time, that success has increased our ignorance even more than I had imagined. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, concluded a 2013 article titled “Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know” with the following rather chastened sentences: “Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.” If science is the pinnacle of human knowing and physics the pinnacle of science, and if physics is deemed crucially limited even by the gifted few—Weinberg’s “we”—who know it best, where does that leave the rest of us?
I have begun to imagine human knowledge and ignorance as tracing a graph of asymptotic divergence, such that with every increase in knowledge, there occurs a greater increase in ignorance. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.
While admitting in passing that science does tell us stuff, here Miles makes a specious argument: that science actually increases our ignorance. That’s bogus, as it’s based on a specious definition of increased ignorance as “realizing that something is out there that we don’t fully understand.” But ignorance, according to every definition I’ve seen (one follows), means something like this: “a lack of knowledge, understanding, or education : the state of being ignorant.” So, for example, discovering that there is dark matter and dark energy doesn’t increase our ignorance, as Miles implies, but decreases it, because we’ve discovered a phenomenon that we don’t fully understand. Ignorance simply means that that we lack knowledge, and, as science gives us more knowledge, and, indeed, raises more questions, our ignorance actually decreases.
The fact is that there is in principle a finite quantity of human ignorance, comprising every fact about the universe and about other universes, and that ignorance remains ignorance whether or not we realize there are new questions we can’t answer. Ergo, everything we find out actually decreases our ignorance. Miles last paragraph above is meant to denigrate science for actually increasing our ignorance, therefore providing an increasing gap that can be filled with—guess what?—faith and religion.
Miles makes room for religion. If you can fully understand the following, you’re a better person than I (I’m counting on our resident Faith Interpreter Sastra to help out here):
Yet if a faith of some sort is inevitable, why should the NSRN not devise something that suits it? Its language may teeter at times between assumptions of superiority and professions of humility, but so does conventionally religious language. Professionally, I judge that its work complements rather than undermines the work that my colleagues and I have done on our anthology. [The Norton Anthology of World Religions.]
Am I kidding myself? No doubt, but let’s be clear: there is a component of self-kidding—a suspension of disbelief—in even the most serious human enterprises. (Does anyone really believe that all men—and women—are created equal? But recognizing the delusional premise of American democracy needn’t undermine our faith in it.) The element of play is particularly, though by no means uniquely, prominent in religion.
I think Miles doesn’t quite understand that “equal” here means “equal in rights, opportunities and respect,” not “equal in behavior, strength, and other traits”. But putting that aside, this is a weak-minded justification of faith, further undermined by adding the postmodern notion of “play” (jouer), which in fact is NOT prominent in religion. If Catholicism is playful, it sure has fooled me!
And do you get this?:
Science is immortal, but you are not. History is immortal: Earth could be vaporized, and on some unimaginably distant planet on some unimaginably remote future date, another civilization’s historians could still choose to use the terrestrial year as a unit of time measurement. But where does that leave you? You have a life to live here and now. “Tell me,” the poet Mary Oliver asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We never truly know how to reply to that challenge, do we, since more knowledge—the knowledge we do not have—could always justify holding current plans in abeyance just a little longer. But when life refuses to wait any longer and the great game begins whether you have suited up or not, then a demand arises that religion—or some expedient no more fully rational than religion—must meet. You’re going to go with something. Whatever it is, however rigorous it may claim to be as either science or religion, you’re going to know that you have no perfect warrant for it. Yet, whatever you call it, you’re going to go with it anyway, aren’t you? Pluralism at its deepest calls on you to allow others the closure that you yourself cannot avoid.
The tenets of faith might not be true, but you need something to get through life. It may be irrational (and he implies in the next sentence that science is no more rational than religion), but it gives us closure. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I don’t turn to science out of fear of mortality. I turn to science because it makes my present life much richer.
And yes, I allow people the pluralism of being religious, but I don’t allow them freedom from criticism for embracing ridiculous and unsustainable propositions. “Just believe something” is pretty crappy advice, especially coming from a nonbeliever. 