How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Most scientists would join the Pope in voicing their concerns for the decay of knowledge and truth standards, and the attacks from postmodern deconstructionists who claim that science is nothing more than a socially constructed myth. But these same scientists would soon part company with John Paul II when he turns, not to more rigorous philosophical standards for reason or empirical guidelines for science, but to faith: “Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the ‘fullness of grace and truth’ (cf. John 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ.” John Paul II, of course, is not proffering a radical new epistemology. According to the First Vatican Council, which he cites: “There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regard their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known.” Thus, John Paul II concludes: “The truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive.”

  But what does it mean to attain truth through revelation? Here the argument becomes circular. Once you have decided that there is a God, it follows that “by the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals. By faith, men and women give their assent to this divine testimony. This means that they acknowledge fully and integrally the truth of what is revealed because it is God himself who is the guarantor of that truth.” In other words, God’s revelations are true because they come from God. What we are to do, then, is apply reason as far as it will go, then take the leap of faith. Why? Because that is the only way to truly understand these divine truths: “Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them.” The self-evident truth of God’s existence leads to the inevitable conclusion that His revelations are true by definition. Reason cannot reveal the nature of these truths or of God, therefore we must have faith. Yet it is with faith that we come to believe in God in the first place, thus closing the circle of this circular argument. If there is no God, of course, or if God is not the omniscient, omnipotent, or omnibenevolent god of Abraham, then faith goes out the window as a viable epistemological system.

  In reading Fides et Ratio, one fluctuates between awesome respect for the deep learning and wisdom of John Paul II, and befuddlement as to how so great a mind can so contradict himself in one document. On the one hand, he reflects modernity and liberalism when he writes that “inseparable as they are from people and their history, cultures share the dynamics which the human experience of life reveals,” that “cultural context permeates the living of Christian faith,” and when he warns missionaries that the cultures of other peoples should be respected and preserved because “no one culture can ever become the criterion of judgment, much less the ultimate criterion of truth with regard to God’s Revelation.” On the other hand, in arguing for “the Magisterium’s interventions in philosophical matters,” he continues to get himself entangled in logical knots, such as when he says “how inseparable and at the same time how distinct were faith and reason.” Either faith and reason are inseparable or they are distinct. They cannot be both. Yet that is precisely what John Paul II wants: “Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way. There is thus no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith: each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action.”

  One problem of trying to have both faith and reason within the same sphere is in using the language of reason to describe the process of faith. When John Paul II wants to have it both ways, his language is not only circular but fuzzy as well: “Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence.” If we are going to mix reason and faith, then it is reasonable to ask what it can possibly mean to have an “inner eye” that opens the mind. St. Augustine, to whom John Paul II turns for clarification, is no help in his equally tautological and woolly reasoning: “To believe is nothing other than to think with assent … . Believers are also thinkers: in believing, they think and in thinking, they believe … . If faith does not think, it is nothing. If there is no assent, there is no faith, for without assent one does not really believe.”

  Another problem in wedding religion and science is in dealing with subjects appropriate in one sphere but not in the other. This forces one into the uncomfortable position of simultaneously embracing and rejecting science. For example, John Paul II eloquently expresses “my admiration and in offering encouragement to these brave pioneers of scientific research, to whom humanity owes so much of its current development, I would urge them to continue their efforts without ever abandoning the sapiential horizon within which scientific and technological achievements are wedded to the philosophical and ethical values which are the distinctive and indelible mark of the human person.” Yet shortly before this praise, he noted with distress that “Scientism is the philosophical notion which refuses to admit the validity of forms of knowledge other than those of the positive sciences; and it relegates religious, theological, ethical and aesthetic knowledge to the realm of mere fantasy.” Only those in the conflicting-worlds or same-worlds tiers would so categorize these forms of knowledge. As we saw, science cannot solve such problems, so in holding the same-worlds model the Pope is forced to lay siege to science because it “consigns all that has to do with the question of the meaning of life to the realm of the irrational or imaginary.” Such questions can only be “irrational” when inappropriately treated as subjects of rational analysis. When kept in their appropriately separate worlds such questions cannot produce conflict or paradox.

  At the beginning of Fides et Ratio, John Paul II references I Corinthians 13:12, to make the point that reason without faith leaves one’s perception and comprehension faint and fragmentary: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.” That vision and understanding, as we have seen, can only be achieved when these two different methods are employed in these two different worlds.

  MORAL COURAGE AND NOBILITY OF SPIRIT

  I witnessed a poignant example of the power of religion in the second mode (a moral guide to human life and an institution for social bonding) while on a trip to the South in late 1998 to visit a close friend on the eve of his campaign for election to the United States Senate. Michael Coles was running on the Democratic ticket, and on the Sunday morning before the election I joined him and the other Democratic candidates as they visited six different black Baptist churches in and around the Atlanta area. (Since 85 percent of the black vote goes to the Democratic party, these visits were to answer the question asked by a brochure being distributed at one of the churches, entitled “The Black Church Vote: Will God hold us accountable for who governs?”) Among the churches we attended were the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, the Ray of Hope Christian Church, and, most movingly, the late Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The statue of a father holding his newborn child to the sky, adjacent to the church and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, is emblematic of this second mode of religion captured in the epigram beneath the statue: “Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for his moral courage and nobility of spirit.”

  I had always heard (but never witnessed first-hand) that the black religious experience is qualitatively different from that of the white. I cannot speak for all white churches, of course, but having attended a wide variety of services throughout my life, I have seen nothing quite like the elan expressed
in these houses of worship. These services go far beyond mere Hosannas and Amens, with the fellowship’s vocal repartee to the songs, hymns, prayers, and sermons every bit as much a part of the service as anything planned for the day. “Say it preacher” … “Oh yeah brother” … “That’s right sister” … and hundreds of other rejoinders came bursting forth from around a room filled with energy and anima. You would have to be made of wood not to feel a spiritual presence there; thus only the tiniest amount of faith, and only a modicum of the willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to “get into the spirit” of the experience. The specific content of the services was not necessary to understand the power of religion on this most foundational level—the human experience of moral courage and nobility of spirit.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and the monument to his moral courage and nobility of spirit.

  At one of the churches that morning, during a rare quiet moment between modes of spiritual expression, Michael leaned over and whispered to me: “You know, the church is the only social institution in the last four centuries that has not let these people down.” Although religion has played its own ugly role in the ghastly history of slavery, and anything can and has been justified in the name of God and religion, including murder, war, rape, and slavery, Coles is right. Through centuries of slavery, decades of corrupt reconstruction, years of Jim Crow American apartheid, and overt and covert racism at all levels of our society, religion has remained steadfast by the side of African Americans, providing a safe haven where they might enjoy (however fleeting) a sense of freedom from the physical or psychological chains that bound (and, in many ways, still bind) them.

  The anthropologist Anthony Wallace estimates that over the course of the past 10,000 years humans have constructed no less than 100,000 religions. God is alive and well, not only in the past, but in the present. Most people believe in a god of some kind, and if the historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists are right, almost everyone who ever lived believed in one god or another. Religion evolved for the two modes of myth making and social bonding. To those scientists, skeptics, and humanists who believe that science and humanism will one day replace these two functions of religion, E. O. Wilson wrote the following reality check in his Pulitzer prize-winning book, On Human Nature:

  Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions … . Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.

  Skeptic magazine, with its circulation of 40,000, would probably fit into this category when compared to various religious publications whose circulation numbers run well into the hundreds of thousands or even millions. We might answer Wilson by explaining that we only take on Christian fundamentalists and their related brethren when they cross over into our turf by trying to use science to prove articles of faith which, by definition, cannot be proved. Indeed, some of this book is aimed at just this sort of invasion. But sometimes we go beyond what our science can really say about some of the great and enduring questions traditionally addressed by religion, particularly the big three addressed by the Pope: “Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What is there after this life?”

  Cosmology and evolutionary biology provide a good answer to the first question and a partial answer to the second—we are star stuff and biomass, we evolved by descent with modification from our ancestors, but no one knows where we are going. About the third question, science knows a lot about the process of dying, has adequate explanations for phenomena such as near-death experiences, struggles when it comes to defining death, but can say nothing about what happens after we die, other than “No one knows.”

  As for the second mode of religion’s purpose in the moral and social realm, humanists have worked to present viable secular alternatives. But as Wilson observed, we are small in number and, compared to religion, largely impotent as a social force. Studies show, for example, that following the 1992 Los Angeles riots it was religion that helped rebuild the looted and torched neighborhoods, not business, not government, and certainly not the humanists. Perhaps it is because religion has a 10,000-year head start on these other social institutions, or perhaps it is because that is what religion does best. Only time will tell. But the notion that religion will soon fall into disuse would seem to be belied by the data of both science and anecdotal observation. In this sense, at least for now, the separate-worlds model emerges as the only possible description of the relationship of religion and science. While scientists may manifest commendable moral traits, or act with admirable social consciousness, they do so as an expression of their humanity, not their science. Science has never trafficked, and likely never will, in the business of moral courage and nobility of spirit.

  Chapter 7

  THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL

  Myth, Morality, and the Evolution of Religion

  I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

  —Charles Darwin, The final paragraph of The Descent of Man, Vol. II, p. 405, 1871

  During the broadcast of the 1997 Cable ACE awards on VH-1, the rock star Madonna was called upon to present an award. After slinking her way down a flight of stairs in a tightly wrapped full-length skirt and stiletto heels, she approached the podium and announced that she did not wish to talk about Princess Di, or the paparazzi who hounded her, or the tabloids that exploited her, or the public who worshiped her to death. After adroitly making her point, while simultaneously denying she wanted to make it, Madonna instead suggested that we look for the deeper cause of Princess Di’s tragic death—our fascination with gossip and other people’s personal lives, especially when it is none of our business. Ignoring the simple and obvious fact that both Diana and Madonna, like most celebrities, depend and thrive upon the very obsession they pretend to hate, Madonna was asking that humans, who are by nature storytelling animals, quit telling stories about their favorite subject—other humans. Why does no one ever discuss the true cause of Diana’s death—just one more case of speeding and drunk driving? Because that would make her just another boring statistic—over 25,000 people are killed every year in America alone due to drunk driving. Nothing interesting about that fact—no juicy gossip, no web of sex and deceit, no assassination cabals, and, most of all, no evil villains. Every story needs a hero and a villain. Princess Diana died an ignoble death, and that does not make for a very interesting story.

  What does make for an interesting story? Why do we tell stories and so enjoy hearing them? Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, in his book The Mind’s Past, argues that we are all storytellers, in the sense that we take the facts of our everyday experience and weave them into a narrative, from which we spin doctor our self-image. “The spin doctoring that goes on keeps us believing we are good people, that we are in control and mean to do good.” Gazzaniga calls the brain mechanism that carries out this task the interpreter, “probably the most amazing mechanism the human being possesses.” Dreams serve as another example, since at least some appear to be random firings of neural impulses that are hung together by our internal storyteller—recall dreams you have had that include disparate elements and people never found together in reality, yet make perfect sense in a dream narrative. This is
the power of the pattern-seeking, storytelling animal.

  What has this to do with religion and the belief in God? We have recognized two primary purposes of religion: (1) The creation of stories and myths that address the deepest questions we can ask ourselves: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What does our ultimate future hold?; (2) The production of moral systems to provide social cohesion for the most social of all the social primates. God(s) figures prominently in both these modes as the ultimate subject of mythmaking and the final arbiter of moral dilemmas and enforcer of ethical precepts. Why did this capacity to tell stories, create myths, construct morality, develop religion, and believe in God evolve?

  THE HOW AND THE WHY: IN SEARCH OF DEEPER ANSWERS

  In the seventh century B.C.E. the Greek philosopher Archilochus penned one of the pithiest yet most thoughtful epigrams when he observed: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing.” Twenty-two centuries later the nineteenth-century British philosopher William Whewell described science as employing a foxlike method to arrive at a hedgehoglike conclusion, that he called a consilience of inductions, or what might also be called a convergence of evidence. Bringing into focus numerous theories, models, and data from disparate and unconnected fields, each one of which converges to a similar conclusion, together allows us to increase the confidence in our theory. We know, for example, that evolution happened not by any one fossil or organism, but by tens of thousands of bits of data from unrelated fields, all of which converge to a single conclusion; paleontology, geology, comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, molecular genetics, population genetics, zoology, botany, biochemistry all independently point to an evolutionary history of life on Earth. Together they converge to an inescapable focal point of scientific truth.