Question Is it possible for any legitimate science to prove, if not now at least someday, that God indeed exists? Or is Richard Dawkins more intuitively right in saying that "someday we would have to understand the whole of the universe without anymore referring to a supernatural being"?

Accepted:
April 15, 2010

Comments

It's hard to give a simple yes-or-no answer to the question, not least because it's by no means clear that if there is a God, this is the sort of thing that science can establish.

Atheists such as Dawkins often treat belief in God as though it were simply on the same playing field as evolution, for example -- as though it's a sort of science-like hypothesis intended to explain something about the empirical facts. There are several problems with that view, but one important problem is this: to the extent that religious claims are meant to "explain" things, it's not clear that they're intended to do it at the same level or in the same way as scientific hypotheses. Rather, they seem to function as views about what's necessary to make sense of things at all.

A comparison may help here. Consider mathematical truths. Some philosophers think that the only way to account for them is to say that there really are such things as numbers. Other philosophers try to show that we can make sense of mathematics without having to believe in numbers as entities in their own right. Whichever side has the better of this argument, it's not one that science can settle.

Take another example. We all agree that science tells us things about causes and effects. But there is a centuries-old quarrel over what we're talking about when we talk about causes. On one view, we mean something quite weak: ultimately, talks of cause and effect is nothing more that talk about patterns among the events in the world. In particular, it's not a matter of some sort of "real" or "necessary" connections among events. Philosophers who dissent from the weak view (often associated with the 18th-century philosopher David Hume) think that it doesn't go far enough to make sense of what we know about the universe, nor of how things "hang together." But once again, this isn't a debate that science is going to settle.

The suggestion I"m making is that at least some theological claims are a lot more like the broad metaphysical claims of our examples than like scientific hypotheses. They aren't the sorts of claims that science is in the business of settling.

Three points, however. First, to say that some theological claims are more like metaphysics than like science isn't to say that all are. Sometimes, religious belief leads to head-on conflict with science. Whether that's inevitable, however, is not clear. Second, even if many theological claims are more like metaphysics than science, this doesn't mean that they can't be evaluated and discussed; it doesn't make them immune from potential criticism. But third, many believers find something tone-deaf in the way that the debate is often carried on. The metaphysical part of religion is not the whole, and for at least some religious people, not a part that they spend much time worrying about in any case. Atheists often see this as a sign of woolly-mindedness on the part of believers, and sometimes it may be. But atheists talking about sophisticated believers sometimes seem like tone-deaf people talking about Bach.

Having said all this, I would add: there's a good deal of religious belief that's maddening not just to atheists like Dawkins, but to sophisticated, thoughtful believers. And since that style of religion so often gets the megaphone, it's not hard to understand why the whole enterprise tends to get tarred with that brush.

I can only think of one thing to say in response to Allen's remarks, and that would be "Amen!"