Matching Tracksuits

A priest in a local parish recently included in his homily a quote that appears to be a variant of something Thomas Aquinas said. The priest phrased it thusly: “For those who don’t believe, no miracle is enough; for those who believe, no miracle is necessary.” Aquinas’s quote is a little different: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The order is different, but the idea is the same.

The quote has a certain rhetorical symmetry to it, a certain parallel structure that makes it resonate in believers’ minds. That symmetry makes it more memorable, and that memorableness combined with its emotional resonance means it will stick.

The quote will seem clever as well. In believers’ view, it encapsulates both the weakness of the skeptic’s position and the strength of the believer’s. It creates a simple juxtaposition that both validates their own position and invalidates the position of opponents. In short, it’s the perfect rhetorical flourish believers can take home with them and use when talking to or about skeptics.

Like many rhetorical constructions, however, this one ultimately fails because of its oversimplification of both sides of the structure. From the skeptic’s point of view, it represents neither the skeptic’s position nor the believer’s position accurately. It is filled with generalizations and question-begging most believers would not notice.

The first part of this quote deals with skeptics. The assertion is that no miraculous event could convince the skeptic. There is some degree of truth to that. Were someone to rise from the dead, for example, the skeptic’s first response would not be, “Oh, this is possible proof of God’s existence.” Rather, she would begin looking for natural explanations. Even if no natural explanation were obvious, the skeptic would not default to a supernatural explanation. Rather, the skeptic would simply say, “We don’t know.” So in that sense, the assertion is correct: it’s doubtful that anything so puzzling could happen that a skeptic would move beyond a simple “I don’t know” into a theistic explanation based on the supernatural suspension of natural laws.

Believers, though, already primed for belief, eagerly accept as miraculous anything they can’t understand. It’s the argument from incredulity, which could be framed thusly: “I don’t understand how this could happen, therefore God must have done it.” Much creationist theorizing that attempts to refute the clear evidence of evolution lies along these lines.

This is no to say theists are not willing to admit ignorance. Indeed, when pressed on contradictions in their faith, the fall-back position is often simple: “God is a mystery.”

“Why would a loving god allow such suffering among children who can gain nothing from it and who simply suffer?” the skeptic asks.

“I don’t really know. I just know God has a plan, and that this is somehow part of that plan,” the believer responds.

The second element of the quote in question that we need to examine is the nature of miracles: A miracle is the suspension of natural laws. Yet because it is is it a suspension of natural laws, there’s no way to test a miracle to prove that it is a miracle. All of our knowledge is bound up in the natural laws that govern the universe. The suspension of those laws in order to create a miracle would be indistinguishable from a new law or principle we have yet to discover, and as miracles are one-time events, there’s no way we could test it to prove that it was not, in fact, some bizarre quantum event but instead a miracle. So in that sense, this assertion is correct: because skeptics generally deny the possibility of miracles, it would not even be an option.

Yet if the purpose of miracles was to convince skeptics, an omniscient god would know exactly what it would take to convince a skeptic. The Christian god’s very characteristics make this merely a question of will: if this god exists and it wants a skeptic to believe, it knows what it would take and would merely need to do this. The fact that it doesn’t suggests — again, if it exists — that it chooses not to, that it doesn’t want to.

The quote from the believer’s side is quite disingenuous, but it’s not immediately obvious. It states that “for those who believe, no miracle is necessary.” This suggests that miracles are secondary to some other method of conviction. But if we’re discussing Christianity (as the priest obviously was and as Aquinas was), the entire religion is based on faith in a central miracle: the resurrection of an executed first-century Jew. So in fact, the quote has it exactly backward: the central tenant of the Christian belief system is a miracle.

When discussing why they believe in this miracle, Christians point to accounts of the event in the New Testament and to personal experiences they claim to have had with “the risen Christ.” In order to accept the accounts in the New Testament, one has to have a certain degree of confidence in the accuracy of the New Testament’s accounts, and given the fact that there is not a single eye-witness account in the whole collection of books but instead multiple second- and third-hand accounts decades after the event, most skeptics find the Biblical evidence weak at best.  On the other hand, to accept the authenticity of a believer’s accounts of personal inner experiences with Jesus, skeptics must necessarily accept that believer’s interpretation of that inner event. No one would doubt that the believer had that moment of clarity, that experience of warmth and love that they claim. However, just because a believer had that experience doesn’t mean that experience came from some god or other. Believers are often looking for reasons to believe: they’re looking for miracles large and small. They’re seeking these quasi-mystical experiences with their god. Since they’re looking for them, they often find them. As Augustine of Hippo said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

Yet a believer is likely to protest that such an analysis is going too far. “It’s about skeptics’ calls for miracles to aid in belief now. ‘God, give me a miracle so I believe!’ skeptics proclaim, but this quote is suggesting that’s not necessary for believers.” Skeptics are skeptical, though, not because there are no miracles today; we’re skeptical because we find the evidence for the source of any potential miracles lacking. To look at an event, proclaim it a miracle, then use that as evidence for a god is question-begging: it assumes the god exists in the first place. It works backward to an unwarranted assumption. Skeptics see things that believers proclaim to be miracles and say, “Now hold on — there’s probably another way to explain that phenomenon.” And if there’s not, skeptics will simply say, “We don’t know how to explain it.”

In the end, the quote is just as much an indictment of believers’ question-begging as it is of skeptics’ lack of faith.

The pastor of K’s parish tweeted a link to “Has quantum physics smashed the Enlightenment deception?” by John Moran with the comment, “Reality is Rubbery.” I clicked through thinking, “Great — another ‘God of the Gaps’ article,” but hoping that I might be wrong. I wasn’t.

The article begins,

Forget Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker and the other high-profile God-denying “clever” boys. It is time for the broader implications of the 20th-century physics revolution, often described as quantum mechanics, to again be debated seriously and out in the “town square,” not just the backrooms of academia or in “deferring to the expert” interviews and documentaries.

The critical word there is “implications.” I’m not sure what Moran is suggesting here. At its heart, it’s simple: “Quantum mechanics is so weirdly different from the physics of our everyday reality that there must be implications for the nature of our everyday reality.” But must there be? There must be if we’ve already nurtured for millennia a belief in the supernatural, but all “quantum mechanics is weird” implies is “quantum mechanics is weird.”

Whatever these implications are in Moran’s mind, though, should be “debated seriously and out in the ‘town square,’ not just the backrooms of academia or in ‘deferring to the expert’ interviews and documentaries.” Part of the reason we “defer to experts” is because they are just that: they’ve forgotten more about their specialization than we laypeople even begin to understand. So when the people who actually work in quantum mechanics say, “No sorry — your implications that you want to discuss are based on misunderstandings of the quantum world,” as they do, we can just dismiss them. Who wants to defer to experts? After all, we’re seeing the benefits of not deferring to experts in the way covid is ravaging the conservative Christian anti-vaxers.

What does Moran say these implications are, though? To introduce them, he begins with a quote from a video by Leonard Susskind

It is hard to understand. Our neural wiring was not built for quantum mechanics. It was not built for higher dimensions. It was not built for thinking about curved space-time. It was built for classical physics. It was built for rocks and stones and all the ordinary objects and it was built for three-dimensional space. And that’s not quite good enough for us to be able to visualize and internalize the ideas of quantum mechanics and general relativity and so forth. …that can be extremely frustrating when trying to explain to the outside world. The outside world, by and large, has not had that experience of going through the rewiring process of converting their minds into something that can deal with five dimensions, 10 dimensions, or the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle or whatever it happens to be. And so the best we can do is to use analogies, metaphors.

Moran jumps on this:

Metaphor? So quantum physics has brought science full circle, back to the world of religion and the story telling methods of Jesus Christ and other religious figures.

Where quantum physics challenges everything, including those who arrogantly dismiss things like spirituality, is that it basically tells us two things:

1. There might not be such a thing as an objective material object; and
2. Consciousness has to be fundamental.

Now, let’s be clear. This new science does not prove the existence of God or anything else of that nature. But, it does shatter the arrogant certainty of those who think science is all you need and has killed off the spiritual. Through quantum physics we were again reminded of just how much we don’t know, especially about the mystery of the universe and the atomic world. In fact, we were not even close. This new quantum world was nothing like what scientists had envisaged prior to its discovery.

Why Moran gets so excited about Susskind using the word “metaphor” is confusing: does he not think that we use metaphor for anything other than religious ideas? After all, when we’re examining the quantum world, we’re looking at something so different from what we’re used to that we have to ground it in something we are used to — that’s what metaphor does. The use of metaphors does not equate scientists with theologians. This is an important distinction because scientists study the thing they study; theologians, unable to study gods directly, only study what other theologians have said. Scientists base their ideas on evidence; theologians’ try to do that, but their only evidence is ancient and anonymous manuscripts — again, studying what others have said about gods rather than studying the gods themselves. If, of course, we could study the gods themselves, there would be fewer atheists. Theologians would reply, “If we could study God, he wouldn’t be God,” but for one thing, that doesn’t necessarily follow. It’s based on the presupposition that gods must be so far beyond us that we can’t interact on their plane of existence. That very conveniently explains why there is no evidence for gods. For another, any god worth its salt could easily manifest itself regularly for study and confirmation of its existence. I do that with my own children daily; it’s too bad gods don’t do that with their children.

From there, Moran goes into a layman’s analysis of quantum theory brought about by this quote from Andrew Klavan’s article “Can We Believe?” subtitled “A personal reflection on why we shouldn’t abandon the faith that has nourished Western civilization.”

And is science still moving away from that Christian outlook, or has its trajectory begun to change? It may have once seemed reasonable to assume that the clockwork world uncovered by Isaac Newton would inexorably lead us to atheism, but those clockwork certainties have themselves dissolved as science advanced. Quantum physics has raised mind-boggling questions about the role of consciousness in the creation of reality. And the virtual impossibility of an accidental universe precisely fine-tuned to the maintenance of life has scientists scrambling for “reasonable” explanations.

Like Pinker, some try to explain these mysteries away. For example, they’ve concocted a wholly unprovable theory that we are in a multiverse. There are infinite universes, they say, and this one just happens to be the one that acts as if it were spoken into being by a gigantic invisible Jew! Others bruit about the idea that we live in a computer simulation—a tacit admission of faith, though it may be faith in a god who looks like the nerd you beat up in high school.

In any case, scientists used to accuse religious people of inventing a “God of the Gaps”—that is, using religion to explain away what science had not yet uncovered. But multiverses and simulations seem very much like a Science of the Gaps, jerry-rigged nothings designed to circumvent the simplest explanation for the reality we know.

The problem with Klavan’s thinking here is simple: he doesn’t realize that these conjectures are just that. No one is making dogmatic proclamations about multiverses or computer simulations. Why? Because there is no evidence or at least not enough evidence. Science is free to do what religion can never do: reject ideas it itself has created when evidence to the contrary appears. Indeed that is what science is all about.

It might seem ironic, though, that Klavan himself brings up the “God of the Gaps” fallacy in this article that amounts, in short, to the latest installment in the “God of the Gaps” theory since his whole idea here is nothing more than that. “Quantum theory is spooky and weird, and it’s outside our understanding now: therefore, God.” But irony is when the unexpected happens, and I’ve come to expect “God of the Gaps” theorizing in any apologetic piece, so far from being ironic, it is instead expected.

It is the Enlightenment Narrative that creates this worship of reason, not reason itself. In fact, most of the scientific arguments against the existence of God are circular and self-proving. They pit advanced scientific thinkers against simple, literalist religious believers. They dismiss error and mischief committed in the name of science—the Holocaust, atom bombs, climate change—but amberize error and mischief committed in the name of faith—“the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion,” as Pinker has it.

By assuming that the spiritual realm is a fantasy, they irrationally dismiss our experience of it. Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real. But when the same brain perceives the immaterial—morality, the self, or God—it is presumed to be spinning fantasies. Coming from those who worship reason, this is lousy reasoning.

There are just so many issues with this line of thinking here that I don’t even know where to start: with the false equivocation, with the question-begging, or with the general lack of experience this short passage exhibits.

To begin with, equating “the Holocaust, atom bombs, [and] climate change” is a curious mix. Certainly, some Nazis promoted pseudo-scientific reasoning for their antisemitism, but a far amount of it was good old-fashioned Christian antisemitism: the Jews reject the Christ, and so that is at the heart of their malevolence. The atom bomb is an unquestionably evil application of science so I’ll give him that. Climate change, though? I’m not even sure what he’s suggesting here. Is he saying that climate change was brought about by science? Well, it certainly was enabled by it, but our voracious appetites for convenience that science facilitated seem more responsible for climate change than the science itself. On the other hand, is he suggesting that climate change is a hoax that science is perpetuating on the world? That would seem more in line with the article’s source, City Journal, which is an unabashedly right/nearly-hard-right publication.

Klavan then equates, for all intents and purposes, the smell of coffee with God. “Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real,” he writes, and I just scratch my head on that one. When my brain perceives the smell of coffee, I assume that there is coffee somewhere around because in my own experience, that odor has always been associated with coffee. However, if it’s terribly important to me to prove that there’s coffee, I can search for it. I can find evidence that the smell I’m encountering is indeed coming from coffee. It’s worth noting, however, that just because my brain perceives the smell of coffee there is coffee somewhere. I want to scream at Klavan, “Good grief, man, have you never encountered Scratch-And-Sniff stickers?!” We can fool our brain into thinking there’s coffee when in fact it’s not there. That’s why we investigate and examine and confirm. The smell of coffee is a bad example, though: we do this all the time when we think we smell something burning.

Klavan then equates smelling coffee with perceiving “the immaterial” such as “morality, the self, of God” in a perfect example of question-begging. No one suggests that people who say they are perceiving “the immaterial” are not having some sort of cognitive experience. Instead, skeptics are simply pointing out that what we think might be an experience of God isn’t necessarily that. We can fool people into thinking they smell coffee; atheists simply suggest that the mind is fooling itself into thinking it’s experiencing God.

It’s important to point out here that attaching the label “God” to any such experience depends on prior exposure to the idea that a god exists. If no one believed in a god, would we deduce it exists simply from these experiences? Scientifically illiterate people might; scientifically literate people probably wouldn’t. So this is a strange kind of cultural question-begging: the idea of a god was already in place; these experiences simply provide another hook on which to hang it.

Klavan concludes his article thusly:

Pinker credits Kant with naming the Enlightenment Age, but ironically, it is Kant who provided a plausible foundation for the faith that he believed was the only guarantor of morality. His Critique of Pure Reason proposed an update of Plato’s form theory, suggesting that the phenomenal world we see and understand is but the emanation of a noumenal world of things-as-they-are, an immaterial plane we cannot fully know.

In this scenario, we can think of all material being as a sort of language that imperfectly expresses an idea. Every aspect of language is physical: the brain sparks, the tongue speaks, the air is stirred, the ear hears. But the idea expressed by that language has no physical existence whatsoever. It simply is. And whether the idea is “two plus two equal four” or “I love you” or “slavery is wrong,” it is true or false, regardless of whether we perceive the truth or falsehood of it.

This, as I see it, is the very essence of Christianity. It is the religion of the Word. For Christians, the model, of course, is Jesus, the perfect Word that is the thing itself. But each of us is made in that image, continually expressing in flesh some aspect of the maker’s mind. This is why Jesus speaks in parables—not just to communicate their meaning but also to assert the validity of their mechanism. In the act of understanding a parable, we are forced to acknowledge that physical interactions—the welcoming home of a prodigal son, say—speak to us about immaterial things like love and forgiveness.

To acknowledge that our lives are parables for spiritual truths may entail a belief in the extraordinary, but it is how we all live, whether we confess that belief or not. We all know that the words “two plus two” express the human version of a truth both immaterial and universal. We likewise know that we are not just flesh-bags of chemicals but that our bodies imperfectly express the idea of ourselves. We know that whether we strangle a child or give a beggar bread, we take physical actions that convey moral meaning. We know that this morality does not change when we don’t perceive it. In ancient civilizations, where everyone, including slaves, considered slavery moral, it was immoral still. They simply hadn’t discovered that truth yet, just as they hadn’t figured out how to make an automobile, though all the materials and principles were there.

To begin with, the suggestion that an idea doesn’t have a physical correspondence only works with abstract things like morality and love. Two plus two equal four is simple: take two items; set two more beside them; count them. There. I don’t even know what Klavan is suggesting using that idea. “I love you” is harder to prove physically: we can’t scan brains and say, “Look — see that? That’s love.” Yet. All evidence points to the fact that our consciousness is bound in our brain, so it’s not unreasonable to think that we will indeed be able to do something similar in the future. It’s more “God of the Gaps” in action. “Slavery is wrong” is tricky because morality is tricky. Yet morality is very fluid at the same time. The Bible itself endorses slavery, and nowhere in scripture does Jesus or anyone else condemn the owning of other people. Indeed, it seems to suggest the opposite: in 1 Peter, we see an appalling command: “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh” (1 Peter 2.18). The book of Philemon is almost as bad:

I am sending [Onesimus, your slave]—who is my very heart—back to you. I would have liked to keep him with me so that he could take your place in helping me while I am in chains for the gospel. But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that any favor you do would not seem forced but would be voluntary. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord. (Philemon 12-16)

Here Paul could have said, “Slavery is wrong.” Here he could have said, “I am not sending him back because I have no authority to do so. He is a free human being with his own will.” But he sends him back and suggests that, since Onsemus is a Christian too, perhaps Philemon should treat him a little better.

Many proponents of slavery used the Bible to endorse the position so maybe this wasn’t the best moral to use in trying to suggest that morality implies a god.

From there, though, Klavan makes a hard, awkward turn to Christianity. He’s essentially saying, “Words often don’t have physical referents in the real world, and Christianity calls Jesus ‘the Word,’ so it’s likely true.” It’s a hard sell, completely out of the blue, completely illogical, for anyone other than a Christian who already accepts all this. Of course, given the fact that it’s a conservative source, Klavan is justified in assuming that most of the readers already accept these presuppositions, but the ideas themselves make very little sense without those presuppositions, which we skeptics reject. This, then, is still another example of question-begging.

The idea that Jesus spoke in parables in order to make the connection between language and ideas that have no physical referent is just speculation like scientists’ speculations about multiverses, so I’m not even going to deal with it.

Finally, there’s this: “In ancient civilizations, where everyone, including slaves, considered slavery moral, it was immoral still. They simply hadn’t discovered that truth yet, just as they hadn’t figured out how to make an automobile, though all the materials and principles were there.” Funny: if there was a god that felt that slavery is immoral and he wrote a book, it’s ironic that he didn’t say as much in that book but left it for us to discover while untold millions suffer in slavery.