God Without Religion

by Michael Arnheim

  Francis Collins lists the six premises of theistic evolution in his book The Language of God:

  The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.

  Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

  While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.

  Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.

  Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.

  But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout our history.53

  This is an attempt to reconcile evolution with a belief in a theistic God. Let us look at the propositions one by one:

  This statement is equally compatible with divine creation of the universe and with the “Big Bang” theory, which was even accepted by Pope Pius XII. The 14-billion-year timespan is not a problem except for “Young Earth Creationists” who take the Genesis account literally.

  As we have already seen, the origin of life is a serious problem for science. There is a welter of theories with very little evidence to back them up. Evolution starts only after life has begun, so cannot help here. So God can easily step into the breach as the creator of life.

  This is the biggest distinction between “Theistic Evolution” and ID, as the latter does not accept evolution by natural selection but instead posits repeated deliberate miraculous interventions by the Designer in nature.

  This is another major concession to evolutionists, who of course hold that natural selection is, in Dawkins’s words, a “blind, unconscious, automatic process”.54

  This too is a concession to the theory of evolution, which actually goes even further, tracing all life, whether man, mouse, mollusc or mango, from a common ancestor.

  This last premise amounts to a huge leap from evidence-based propositions to one based purely on faith. The result is that the six premises do not form a united whole.

  Francis Collins makes an even greater leap of faith in what may be regarded as his seventh premise:

  Miracles do not pose an irreconcilable conflict for the believer who trusts in science as a means to investigate the natural world, and who sees that the natural world is ruled by laws. If, like me, you admit that there might exist something or someone outside of nature, then there’s no logical reason why that force could not on rare occasions stage an invasion. On the other hand, in order for the world to avoid descending into chaos, miracles must be very uncommon.55

  Belief in miracles is not only unscientific but in a real sense anti-scientific, because there has never been any reliable evidence of them. (See more on this in Chapter 3.)

  When interviewed by Nigel Bovey, after positing God’s creation of “the moral law” Francis Collins admitted yet another leap of faith:

  God also knew that these creatures [i.e. human beings] would ultimately choose to disobey the moral law, and thus the fall would occur. His provision for this would be to send his Son, Jesus, to live, die and be raised for our salvation.56

  But Francis Collins does not stop there:

  Jesus claimed not only to know God but also to be God and to forgive sins, and he died on the cross in a way that took me a long time to understand.57

  This goes further even than the Christian scriptures, from which Jesus does not appear to have claimed that he was God: that is a claim made well over a century after his death. The New Testament nowhere mentions the word “Trinity” nor explicitly teaches belief in a three-in-one God. The earliest defence of the doctrine of the Trinity is to be found in the writings of the church father Tertullian (160–c.225).

  In view of all these points, it is clear that “Theistic Evolution” is completely untenable as a theory, let alone in terms of evidence. Evolution and theism (i.e. belief in a personal God) simply do not gel.

  Deistic Evolution

  However, as we have already seen, an alternative to “Theistic Evolution” that is quite feasible and, I would suggest, greatly preferable to atheism and theism alike, is Deistic Evolution, or a belief in a combination of evolution with an impersonal God.

  The combination of deism with evolution also neatly fits in with the divide between the three main stages of the earth’s development:

  The coming into existence of the universe, including the earth: as we have seen, science now favours the “Big Bang” theory, which fits in very well with belief in an impersonal deistic God.

  The origin of life: this is a major problem for science, which to date has no adequate explanation for it. Postulating life as the creation of God is no harder to accept than the weird and wonderful theories science has come up with. No satisfactory step-by-step explanation has been offered by science, and yet the development from inanimate matter to a single cell is a major leap. An impersonal God is preferable to a personal God chiefly because of stage three:

  Change and variation in living organisms: the God who created life also put in place a whole framework of “fixed laws” or “designed laws”, as Darwin called them, to regulate the universe, including evolution by natural selection as a mechanism for guiding the development of living organisms. To postulate a theistic personal God in this role would make no sense, because there is too much of a disconnect between evidence-based evolution and totally unproven beliefs about God, and we would also have to decide which of the different religions’ Gods this was, with the necessary implication of the supremacy of that particular religion — which just does not blend with the idea of natural selection.

  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

  Sacks’s Argument

  Lord Sacks, the former British chief rabbi, has often been invited by the media to be the voice of religion in debates with assorted atheist scientists. Sacks takes the view that religion and science are complementary, in the sense that each needs the other. In his book The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning, Sacks claims to have put forward an argument to show that “we need both religion and science… Both are necessary, but they are very different.”58 But this argument will not stand up to scrutiny.

  Here’s a summary of some of Sacks’s main positions.

  Sacks’s Mantra

  Sacks believes that religion and science need each other: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”59 This oft-repeated mantra has a good ring to it, but that ring is pretty hollow. For one thing, different religions believe in different meanings. Is this mantra intended to apply to all religions? Yet the amount of agreement about “meaning” (whatever that means) between the different religions — or even between different branches of the same religion — is not very great.

  Sacks’s “Three Great Questions”

  Another of Sacks’s repeated claims is that religion “answers the three great questions that any reflective human being will ask: Who am I? (the question of identity), Why am I here? (the question of purpose), and, How then shall I live? (the question of ethics and meaning)”.60

  Sacks does not provide answers to these “great questions”. To take just the last of these questions, why should anyone allow their religion to dictate to them how to live? And orthodox Judaism identifies no fewer than 613 laws in the Torah (the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses) alone, including a lot of less than rational rules governing the Jewish Sabbath and ritual. (See Chapter 5.)

  Sacks’s “Noblest Hypothesis”

  Under the heading “I Believe”, here is what Sacks calls his “credo”: “I believe that the idea that the universe was created in love by the God of love who asks us to create in l
ove is the noblest hypothesis ever to have lifted the human mind.”61 But why should we accept this “noblest hypothesis”? As there is no evidence for it, the answer must be purely by a leap of faith. It’s not even at all clear what “love” is supposed to mean in this context. At the very least one would expect it to include religious toleration. Yet, orthodox Judaism has proved less than tolerant even of certain other Jewish denominations. (See Chapter 5.)

  “The Bible isn’t interested in how the universe came into being”

  In an article in The Times of 3 September 2010 Sacks opined: “The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the universe came into being. It devotes a mere 34 verses to the subject. It takes fifteen times as much space to describing how the Israelites constructed a sanctuary in the desert.”62 A mere 34 verses, indeed — but what verses! They are among the best-known and most quoted Biblical verses. Above all, these 34 verses contain some remarkable parallels with the scientific account — which would have given Sacks an opportunity to build a bridge between science and religion, which he claims to be keen to do.63

  The account of creation in Genesis provides a much better link between religion and science than anything that Sacks has to offer on the subject. The order of creation according to Genesis is: the universe, the earth, the seas, plants, fishes, birds, terrestrial animals, and finally man — very much the same order as that proposed by science. Of course, Genesis compresses the whole operation into seven days, but that must surely be taken as poetic licence. One day might as well be equivalent to 2 billion years, thus providing the 14 billion years posited by Dawkins and other scientists for the emergence of man! But that is not the point. The point is that the creation story in Genesis can easily be reconciled with the latest scientific theory of a Big Bang followed by the existence of life and then evolution by natural selection.

  This convergence is all the more remarkable because until recently the scientific orthodoxy was that the universe had no beginning because it had always existed. This comes out clearly from a 1959 survey of leading American scientists, one of the questions in which was: “What is your estimate of the age of the universe?” Two-thirds of the scientists surveyed replied “there is no age — the universe is eternal”.

  Even Albert Einstein, whose own theories indicated that the universe should be expanding, was reluctant to believe the universe was not eternal and static. Finally, American astronomer Edwin Hubble convinced Einstein to travel to Pasadena and examine the proof directly, following which Einstein admitted that Hubble’s observations ‘made it appear likely that the general structure of the universe is not static’.64

  Sacks’s Alternative Interpretation

  Sacks does not discuss any of the striking similarities between Genesis and evolution. Instead, he makes a less than persuasive point about evolution based on a far-fetched interpretation of one word in Genesis 2:3. The word occurs right at the end of the Biblical account of creation. A literal translation of the Hebrew reads as follows: “And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it God rested from all the work that he created to do.” The words “that he created to do” read rather awkwardly. The word la’asot, meaning “to do” or “to make” seems superfluous. Sacks quotes two medieval Jewish commentators who suggested that the last words of the verse mean “[he had created it] in such a way that it would continue to create itself”.65

  This is pretty far-fetched, but Sacks’s suggested translation stretches the text even further: “Without stretching the text too far”, suggests Sacks, “we might say that la’asot means, quite simply, ‘to evolve’. Evolution would then be hinted at in the very last word of the Genesis creation story.”66

  On the basis of this translation, suggests Sacks, evolution would be hinted at in Genesis. But why is it necessary to clutch at a “hint” of evolution from one word when there is a loud shout of evolution from 34 magnificent verses? This kind of reasoning can hardly serve the purposes of either science or religion, or of any reconciliation between them.

  Sacks’s Reliance on Brain Hemisphere Theory

  Science, opines Sacks, “is a predominantly left-brain activity”, while religion “is associated with the right hemisphere”.67 In support of this formulation, Sacks relies quite heavily on the book by Dr Iain McGilchrist titled The Master and his Emissary.68 McGilchrist portrays western history as a battle between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the left brain being more “rational” and the right brain more “intuitive”. This view of history goes well beyond the evidence and even beyond the theory on which it is based. As a reviewer in The Economist put it, McGilchrist’s application of his theory to the whole sweep of western culture “has plainly become untethered from its moorings in brain science”.69

  Rabbi Sacks uses this less than secure theoretical foundation to construct a hypothesis that simply collapses under the weight of its own improbability. In brief, he claims that religion, and particularly Judaism, is the product of right-brain thinking, which is “integrative and holistic”, while science arises out of left-brain thinking, which is “linear, analytical, atomistic and mechanical”.70 Besides the fact that the validity of this left–right dichotomy has largely been rejected by neuroscience, Sacks’s hypothesis is further weakened by a less than impressive argument.

  Right-brain vs. Left-brain

  Sacks’s argument goes something like this (with Sacks’s points paraphrased in italics):

  Sacks: The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels, only consonants, so individual words are difficult to read in isolation.71

  Sacks: Because they have no vowels, Hebrew words can’t be read in isolation but only in context — a right-brain function. So the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish religion look at the broad picture (a right-brain approach) rather than the literal minutiae (which would be a left-brain approach).72

  To prove his point Sacks gives the example of the opening words of the Tractate Berakhot of the Mishnah, a rabbinic Jewish code of laws. The book opens with the question: “From what time does one recite the Shema [a central Jewish prayer] in the evening?”73

  Three rabbis each give a different answer. Sacks cites the absence of any general principles about prayer or any law as proof that this is right-brain thinking. But doesn’t it actually prove exactly the opposite? What we have here are three rabbinic views on a trivial subject, namely at what time a particular prayer must be recited. The true right-brain approach (by Sacks’s own definition of right-brain thinking as “integrative” or “holistic”) would surely put the whole thing in perspective and ask the bigger question, “Why is it necessary to have a ruling at all on the precise time when a particular prayer has to be said?” Unfortunately, the narrow, pedantic approach evidenced in Sacks’s selected text is all too typical of rabbinic law in general. (See Chapter 5.)

  Sacks: As the left brain needs the right brain, so science and religion complement each other and each needs the other.74 I agree that science and religion are not incompatible — though not for any of the reasons advanced by Sacks. (See above on the convergence between Genesis and evolution.) But the fact that science and religion can coexist quite peacefully does not mean that they must. Here one has to agree with Dawkins when he dismisses Sacks’s repeated claim that religion answers what Sacks calls “The question of purpose, Why am I here?”75 If there is no God, says Dawkins, the question of purpose is “illegitimate”: it simply falls away.76

  One cannot just take it for granted that the presence of life on earth or even human life does have a purpose.

  Review of Chapter One

  It’s wrong to blame religion for all the evils in the world, as Christopher Hitchens does in his remark, “Religion kills”.

  Political or economic conflicts may use religious labels, but that doesn’t necessarily make them religious conflicts. The Northern Ireland “troubles” are a case in point. On the conflict with “Islam” see Chapter 7, and see Chapter 8 for my general conclusion on this important issue.

  The
prevailing scientific model has identified three main stages (condensed from seven) in the development of the universe: (i) The coming into existence of the universe; (ii) The origin of life on earth; and (iii) Evolution by natural selection.

  It’s important not to lump these three stages together, as appears to be done in the subtitle of Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.

  Life is needed to kick-start natural selection. So, no life, no natural selection.

  But how did life on earth begin? None of the rival theories of the origin of life has much to commend it.

  The simplest explanation for the origin of life is to attribute it to a super-intelligent Designer, an impersonal deistic God, as distinct from the personal theistic God of conventional religion.

  But, if God (even an impersonal God) made life, who made God? This is a constant atheist jibe. But the alternative explanations for the origin of life are equally question-begging.