Must Try Harder

As an ex-atheist I still have some vestigial sympathy with unbelievers, but I do wish they made it easier. This week, Radio 4 is broadcasting extracts from Stephen Hawking’s final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, and on Wednesday morning the words of the late physicist concerned creation and the Creator and why there isn’t one. I know the book is ‘popular science’ and therefore watered down from the real thing, but really. Hawking relates how the ‘space’ for God has gradually shrunk as science has provided better explanations for natural phenomena: the beauty of science is that it reveals ‘the laws of nature’ behind what we observe, rather than the arbitrary fiat of a deity. All that’s left to God, says Hawking, is kicking the whole thing off, and even that loophole seems about to vanish. When we enter the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics, particles appear and disappear randomly, and this provides a model of how the universe itself, originally subatomically tiny and almost infinitely dense, might have suddenly appeared without explanation and without cause. Furthermore, says Hawking, since time itself only came into existence as the universe expanded in the Big Bang, and causation is a function of time, our natural curiosity as to what ‘explains’ its arrival is misplaced: no time, no need for explanation. The universe merely is.

Now, if the beauty of science lies in its revelation of natural laws, where the apparent randomness of the quantum world leaves it I can’t imagine. If, as one humanist contributor to my friend the Heresiarch’s former blog once commented dismissively and reductively, ‘stuff pops into existence all the time’, that means that at a fundamental level there is no ‘law’; unless there are laws that we haven’t worked out yet, which would make the randomness apparent rather than real (as Einstein insisted, so I understand). And the 'stuff' that 'pops into existence' somehow never turns out to be an infant universe: that event was, as far as we know, unique. Observable subatomic particles (appear to) 'pop into existence' within a pre-existing system rather than outside it, so the two events are not analogous. Meanwhile, disposing of the notion of causation by abolishing time is philosophical sleight-of-hand and nothing more. This is all quite apart from the jejune concept that the only reason for believing in God is that we can’t think of a better explanation for the origin of the universe, or thunder, or the existence of cats (whether or not indeterminately alive or dead). ‘There will always be believers in God, because there will always be people who want that kind of comfort’, concludes Hawking. There will always be people willing to trade their intellectual integrity for emotional security, because that’s what it’s all about. Thanks.

One of my Christmas gifts was Dr David Layton’s book The Humanism of Dr Who, which as an old Whovian caught my eye. Any attempt to draw spiritual lessons from the long-running fantasy series (‘sci-fi’ is a bit of an insult to that genre) comes up against the fact that the good Doctor’s world-view is defiantly secular-humanist, so this book must have been an easier write. I’ve only just begun it, but did scan first through the chapter on religion. And there we find the contention ‘religious “belief” requires “the leap of faith”, the trust that a statement is true apart from any evidence or reason in its support. The religious point of view is that is a belief is held strongly enough, it is true’. This kind of – forgive me – garbage is regularly trotted out by atheists who clearly have never paid attention to religion and religious people at all. Remember, I decided I believed in God on the basis of evidence. I admit gladly that my previous experience and predispositions may have played a role in that decision; that another person with different experience and predispositions might have decided entirely differently on the basis of exactly the same evidence; and that there indeed comes a point where you cannot determine the existence or otherwise of God simply on the basis of that evidence. But that’s what most of life is like: you can’t prove beyond any doubt that a chair is there but that doesn’t stop most people sitting down with a cup of tea. Faith is not exercised on the basis of no evidence at all. Anyone who claims it is isn’t paying attention to the real experience of religion and probably doesn’t want to.

The third atheist outlook I’ve dealt with over this holiday is that of Arthur C Clarke who I looked up after hearing his name and realising I didn’t know that much about him. He apparently ‘could not forgive religions for their inability to prevent atrocities and wars’. My old doctrine tutor said that the best argument for the non-existence of God was the behaviour of Christians, and that I can still absolutely go along with.