Will Salon’s string of atheist-bashing pieces ever stop? This week’s is an excerpt of a new book by Amir D. Aczel, Why Science Doesn’t Disprove God—a book that’s gotten a fair amount of press on the Internet.
Aczel is an Israeli-born writer and lecturer on science and mathematics who, now living in Boston, has written a lot of popular science books. You can hear Ira Flatow interviewing Aczel on NPR’s Science Friday here, where it appears that he’s a believer. Be sure to hear Aczel’s waffle-y logic that the existence of a multiverse, supposedly disarming the “fine-tuning” argument, actually strengthens the argument for God.
As Aczel notes in the interview, he was inspired to write his book by hearing Richard Dawkins’s response to a question from his daughter. And so the title of his excerpt is “Science doesn’t disprove God: where Richard Dawkins and new atheists go wrong.”
While you might think that the book’s contents could consist of one line: “Science doesn’t disprove all deities absolutely”—Aczel’s excerpt is basically a God-of-the-gaps argument based on the existence of consciousness. So his piece boils down to the the six-word argument recently made by David Bentley Hart in his book The Experience of God: “Science can’t explain consciousness; ergo God.”
What is it with this revival of God-of-the-gaps arguments? Truly sophisticated theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer decried such arguments as being bad for religion, for when the gaps are filled, God shrinks. If you’re going to find your God in the gaps in human understanding, you’re putting yourself at severe risk. (Of course, religious people can always recover: recall that Darwin’s 1859 book was the greatest gap-plugger of all time, but didn’t severely weaken religion.) Given the remarkable success of science in understanding previously puzzling phenomena, and of neuroscience in unravelling how the brain works, one would think that Aczel would be a bit reluctant to proclaim that consciousness will never be explicable by naturalistic science, and therefore is evidence for God. But he wades right in.
Here are a few excerpts from his piece:
- “We don’t know how from the chaos and fuzziness and unworldly behavior of the quantum, the structured universe of macro objects we see around us came about, with its causality, locality, and definiteness—none of which are characteristics of the quantum realm. We don’t know how self-replicating life emerged from inanimate objects. And we don’t know how and why and at exactly what point in evolution human consciousness became a reality. The inexplicability of such emergent phenomena is the reason why we cannot disprove the idea of some creative power behind everything we experience around us—at least not at our present state of knowledge.”
Well, if that’s his argument, every unsolved puzzle becomes a way to keep the idea of God alive. Isn’t it enough, in the absence of evidence for a divine creative power, to simply say, “We don’t know the answer”? After all, the “inexplicability “of such phenomena also means we can’t disprove the idea that the “creative power”, if there was one, was an elf, a space alien, or, indeed, Fred Postlethwaite in Poughkeepsie, New York, who looks like a man but is really a Creative Power in disguise. Such possibilities, however, give no solace to adherents of the Abrahamic faiths.
- “Dawkins does make an interesting point: to whom do we accord “humanness”? But he skirts the main issue: To what extent can evolutionary theory answer this question? Evolutionary science cannot indicate to us the location of the point on the continuous evolutionary scale, which Dawkins believes is there, at which human consciousness arises. Evolutionary theory is unable to tell us how life began, how eukaryotic cells evolved, how intelligence came about, or how consciousness arose in living things.”
This is misguided because it all depends on the subjective criterion for “humanness”. If by that you mean a certain level of consciousness, then that almost certainly emerged gradually in evolution, and drawing a line between “prehuman” and “human” consciousness is arbitrary. If you mean the advent of symbolic language, there’s another arbitrary line to be drawn.
But who cares, anyway? We evolved from ancestors probably more similar to modern chimpanzees than to modern humans, and our diagnostic genetic traits emerged gradually. The question of “when did we become human?” is not only profoundly boring, but meaningless.
And, of course, evolutionary theory can’t tell us how anything happened, for the ambit of theory is to make suggestions: to see what is theoretically plausible and what is not. But theory can never tell us how things happened. Here Aczel, despite his background in popular science, simply misuses the term “evolutionary theory.” To know what really happened, we need empirical observations.
I’ll give just two more quotes showing Aczel reprising Alfred Russel Wallace’s old argument (also reprised by D. B. Hart) that the ability of humans to create powerful works of art, as well as refined achievements like calculus, could never have been the mere product of evolution, and hence provides still more evidence for the divine:
- “We have not created even a shadow of consciousness in any machine thus far. Consciousness, symbolic thinking, self-awareness, a sense of beauty, art, and music, and the ability to invent language and pursue science and mathematics—these are all qualities that transcend simple evolution: they may not be absolutely necessary for survival. These attributes of the human mind may well be described as divine: they belong to what is way above the ordinary or the compulsory for survival. The origins and purpose of consciousness and artistic and musical and literary and scientific creativity remain mysterious. Why would evolution alone bring about such developments that appear to have little to do with the survival of an individual or a species?”
Building submarines and skyscrapers aren’t absolutely necessary for survival, either. Are those things evidence for God?
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“Dennett and his collaborators consider the human mind from two problematic viewpoints: looking at the brain as a kind of computer, and looking at the brain as the result of animal evolution. The human brain is far more than a computer: computers have no consciousness. And to think of the brain as simply something that has evolved out of animal ganglia and primitive brains is also a mistake: there is a giant leap from the brain of a monkey or a dog to the brain of a human being.
Neither approach explains Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Picasso’s Guernica, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the palaces on Venice’s Grand Canal. Neither do they explain Einstein’s general theory of relativity or Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis. Both the mechanistic and animalistic views of the brain fall flat in their attempts to explain any of these great historic achievements of the human mind. We are not machines, and we are not simple animals, either.”
Mona Lisa: ergo Jesus. That should be known as The Argument from Fine Arts.
We are in the early days of neuroscience, and the brain, much less its subjective sensations, are among science’s toughest nuts to crack. But we’ve cracked tough nuts before—ones thought uncrackable. So what makes Aczel so sure that 1) consciousness could not have been a product of evolution, either selected for directly or piggybacking on some other adaptations; 2) consciousness will never be explained mechanistically, much less evolutionarily; and 3) when the brain reaches a certain level of complexity, phenomena like art and music (an ability to create things that please our evolved senses)—and even chess—will emerge as mental spandrels? After all, even chimpanzees and macaques have a kind of cultural evolution, though it doesn’t involve symbolic language.
I wish people like Aczel would be content to admit ignorance instead of fobbing off on God. (I recall Robert G. Ingersoll’s quote, “ Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”)
I think one of the reasons for this is that scientists, and those who truly love science, are not only content with doubt, but happy with it. Give us a big, juicy unsolved problem, and we’re like a dog with a meaty bone. Once the problem’s solved, it’s on to some other problem. We’re happy only as long as we don’t know something.
As H. L. Mencken observed, the scientific researcher is like a dog sniffing at an infinite series of rat holes. Once we get a rat, it’s onto sniffing those other holes. In contrast, believers aren’t content with ignorance; it bothers and discomfits them, and they spend a lot of mental effort to explain it away. That is, after all, what apologetics is all about. And the biggest Apologetic is the use of an imaginary God to plug the gaps in our understanding.
