Uh, maybe we do need God after all. Dawkins won’t like this.
Does God have a place in a rational world?
New Scientist
Michael Reilly, La Jolla, California
WE’RE on the Pacific coast, miles from southern California’s still-
raging wildfires, but talk of conflagration fills the air. Some of the
best minds in science are gathered here at the seaside resort of La
Jolla, together with some of the world’s most insistent non-believers,
to take a fresh look at the existence or otherwise of God. And one
thing is clear: the edifice of “new atheism” is burning.
The first firebrand is lobbed into the audience by Edward Slingerland,
an expert on ancient Chinese thought and human cognition at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Religion is not
going away,” he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves
rationalists and scientists, he said, rely on moral values – a set of
distinctly unscientific beliefs.
Where, for instance, does our conviction that human rights are
universal come from? “Humans’ rights to me are as mysterious as the
holy trinity,” he told the audience at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies. “You can’t do a CT scan to show where humans’
rights are, you can’t cut someone open and show us their human
rights,” he pointed out. “It’s not an empirical thing, it’s just
something we strongly believe. It’s a purely metaphysical entity.”
This is a far cry from the first “Beyond Belief” symposium a year ago,
at which many militant non-believers, including evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins and author Sam Harris, came together to hammer home
the virtues of atheism (New Scientist, 18 November 2006, p 8). That
gathering made much of the idea that humans can be moral without
believing in God, and that science should do away with religion
altogether.
The mood at this follow-up conference was different. Last year’s event
was something of an “atheist love fest” said some, who urged a more
wide-ranging discourse this time round. While all present agreed that
rational, evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we
live our lives, it was also conceded that people are irrational by
nature, and that faith, religion, culture and emotion must also be
recognised as part of the human condition. Even the title of this
year’s meeting, “Beyond Belief II: Enlightenment 2.0″, suggested the
need for revision, reform and a little more tolerance.
Such was the message from evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of
Binghamton University, New York. He suggested that humans’ religious
beliefs may have evolved over time, thanks to the advantages they
conferred as a sort of social glue holding together groups that
developed them.
Wilson was not saying religion is good or bad, simply that it has
evolved to be hard-wired into our brains, and therefore cannot be
ignored. “Adaptation is the gold standard against which reality must
be judged,” he said. “The unpredictability and unknown nature of our
environment may mean that factual knowledge isn’t as useful as the
behaviours we have evolved to deal with this world.”
Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Canada, an expert in
complex systems and the origin of life, took that argument and ran
with it. No matter how far science advances, there will be aspects of
nature that remain unknowable, he said. As an example, he cited
Darwinian pre-adaptations – in which organisms evolve traits that end
up having beneficial side effects – which are so random as to be
completely unforeseeable.
Fact-based knowledge can never provide all the answers, he concluded.
“If we don’t know what’s going happen, we have to live our lives
anyway… We live our lives largely not knowing. That means reason is
an insufficient guide.”
Though Kauffman declared himself an atheist, he argued from this that
it may be apt to invoke the concept of God as a proxy for such gaps in
our knowledge. “I’d say that it’s wise to use the word ‘God’”, he
continued. “I know it’s very freighted, but it also carries with it
awe and reverence. I want to use the God word on purpose, to reinvent
creativity in the natural universe. The natural universe, nothing
supernatural.”
“I want to use the God word on purpose, to reinvent creativity in the
natural universe – nothing supernatural”
Chemist Peter Atkins of the University of Oxford, one of the more hard-
line atheists in the room, did not let this go unchallenged. He chided
fellow participants for not being sufficiently proud about what
science can accomplish. Given time and persistence, science will
conquer all of nature’s mysteries, he said. He even proposed that
atheist scientists signal their intent to do just that by adopting a
flag with a Mandelbrot set as its emblem.
So can scientific and religious world views ever be reconciled?
Harris, author of The End of Faith, declared that they could not, and
provided an uncompromising exposition on the evils of religion.
Away from the meeting, philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University
in Medford, Massachusetts, told New Scientist that as irrational as
human minds may be, calm, firm introduction of reason into the world’s
classrooms could over time purge them of religion.
For all its fiery rhetoric, this year’s Beyond Belief conference razed
neither the new atheist movement nor, of course, religion itself. But
it certainly lit the touch paper.
Wow. New Scientist is normally so against religion as to be humorous! What do you make of it?
In August I 
Today I discovered 
