Unscientific Religion

It is my frequent pleasure and frustration to take part in the discussions on certain stories on the BBC website, and most recently on this one.  Whenever the Corporation open any story with a religious element up for comment, it very quickly fills up with largely ill-informed anti-theistic mockery, sweeping generalisations, factually untrue statements and arguments which seem to assume that all theists are either ISIS soldiers or Young Earth Creationists.

One of the main issues that I see though, and one that is the greatest obstacle to the understanding of religion by a great many atheists, is that they insist on viewing everything solely through the prism of science.  Now obviously science is one of the most powerful tools humanity possesses to learn about and make sense of the world in which we find ourselves and by using it our knowledge continues to grow and grow, and our capabilities as a species continue to grow and grow.  However, the idea that every single thing must therefore be explicable via the scientific method is not only potentially limiting, it is dangerous.

I’m not saying anything new here, or expounding any profound new theories.  This has all been said before, but it appears to be worth reiterating.

I say potentially limiting, because an insistence that everything must be essentially a scientific phenomenon of some sort, either understood or not, can lead to circular reasoning.  I have seen a wonderful refutation of miracles which runs, “We know that miracles are impossible because all apparent miracles are just scientific phenomena that we don’t understand, and we know that they are just scientific phenomena that we don’t understand because miracles are impossible.”  Effectively, “Miracles never happen because they’re impossible, and we know they’re impossible because they never happen”.  As soon as you allow the slightest doubt that they might be possible, the reasoning falls down.

Likewise the attempts to do a scientific study of prayer.  The flaws in this should instantly be obvious, unless you have no understanding of what prayer is or how it works.  As far back as 1867, George MacDonald was decrying ‘scientific’ attempts to study the efficacy of prayer as nonsensical in his Unspoken Sermons.  “As to the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of prayer by the result of simultaneous petition, I am almost ashamed to allude to it.”  The majority of studies focus on praying for ill or injured people, and whether prayer has any effect on recovery rates.  That’s not prayer.  That’s trying to get a mail-order miracle.  Prayer is a conversation, a process, a relationship, and totally subjective and internal and personal and intimate, all things anathema to scientific enquiry.  It’s not something that can be slapped down onto a laboratory table and dissected.  Nonetheless, when amputated limbs fail to instantaneously grow back, anti-theists crow that prayer has been disproven. 

I do not believe that science and religion (a false dichotomy in any case) are intrinsically opposed.  It is true that certain ‘scientific’ claims as to the nature of the world and our own origins as a species have been shown to be incorrect by scientific enquiry, and when this happens we should acknowledge it and do so graciously, adjusting our beliefs accordingly.  However, that doesn’t mean that I subscribe to the ‘God of the Gaps’ theory that says that gradually the need for God will diminish until it disappears altogether beneath the burning light of Science (capitalised with worrying frequency).  The most important questions that religion attempts to answer are ones that science is unable to.  Not ‘currently unable to’ but by nature and definition completely unequipped to.  Not ‘what’ and ‘how’ but ‘who’ and ‘why’.

Here is a quote from the comments on the story linked to above:

"If something can have an effect on the world, it's physical. If it can't, then it doesn't exist."

I am assuming, and by the context and the contributor’s other comments I think that this is safe, that by ‘physical’ he means scientifically verifiable.  Scientific enquiry requires repeatable, observable, measurable results, and as soon as you start measuring a thing, what you’re really doing is counting it.  It might involve breaking one aspect of a thing down into arbitrary units like degrees or millimetres or centilitres or moles, but ultimately it’s about counting.  As soon as you start to say that only things that can be counted are important, and that if it can’t be counted, it must either be irrelevant or false, you are straying into very dangerous territory indeed, and territory that not even the most ardently scientistic anti-theist actually ever really strays into, although they would almost certainly deny it.

Claiming that prayer and miracles can’t be studied scientifically might appear to be a cop out, but claiming that if they can’t, they are false or unimportant is terrifying.  The most important things in life cannot be counted or measured; hope, love, grace, mercy, loyalty, kindness, courage, compassion.  Can you weigh love or take the temperature of courage?  How many moles of compassion can you fit into a beaker?  The ideal world of the adherents of scientism must be a cold, hard, mechanical, angular, inhuman but wonderfully efficient place to live.

And then there’s God Himself of course.  Above and beyond and behind and beneath and through and around the world, how should we go about measuring Him?  If He is the omniscient, omnipresence, omnipotent being that we believe Him to be, what should we break Him down into so that we can count him, and if we can’t, must we therefore discount even the concept of Him, let alone the Reality?

I put the C. S. Lewis quote at the top of this page there for a reason.  It may well be that the things we hold dear are unmeasurable and uncountable and unscientific, and are irrational and illogical and subjective, but as far as I am concerned they are far better and far more important than anything that can be weighed or measured or cut up in a laboratory.  If that makes me irrational and illogical, then so be it.

Keeping Miracles Miraculous

There was a story this week on the BBC website about evangelical Christians who go around performing (or at least attempting) miraculous healing.  They claim to have cured heart disease and cancer, and even raised the dead.

They perform these miracles in front of large crowds, and “they are not interested in little effects that are on the border of statistical significance - they want big flashy miracles.”  As far as I can tell, the true purpose of these displays is not to heal the sick, but to demonstrate the power of God, and to make converts.

I believe in miracles, I truly do, but this makes me deeply uncomfortable.  It seems to me far too much like demanding proof, treating God almost as a mail order service, and worse, of putting God to the test.  They are apparently not disheartened when there miracles fail to materialise which happens frequently, but they are still making demands of God, and of trying to make miracles something every-day and ordinary, that can be performed on demand and that turn God into little more than a mobile surgical unit.

When (if!) this happens, they surely cease to become miracles.  They are no longer 'miraculous' merely inexplicable, which to me is not the same thing at all.  There is also the sneaking suspicion that it is not God at work here, but some mystic power of the faith healer.  After all, if all you have to do is pray for a miracle, then anyone could do it.  It could be argued that most people do not believe sufficiently strongly, but then surely if these miracles are there to make converts, why wouldn’t God zap them better and provide instant proof-on-tap.

Worse still, according to the article, some of these people have claimed to have gold teeth ”miraculously appear in their mouths”, and ”had enormous and unaccountable gems materialise during prayer sessions”.

Well firstly, I clearly go to the wrong church, and secondly, uh… really?  God is handing out shinies and dental blingery by way of miracles now?  I not only struggle to believe this (not that I’m trying), but I struggle to believe that anyone else believes it.  Surely a God that heals on demand, and worse, that doles out wealth on demand, is a God who’s on some seriously thin theological ice?  If He’s willing to lean into the world and pluck out a cancer on command, why on earth would he need asking, assuming he’s a benevolent God.  If He has no problem with dropping gems under people’s chairs, why is there poverty?

It also has deep implications for the concept of faith.  After all, these people are often referred to as ’faith healers’, but surely a directly observable incident of physical intervention negates the very idea of faith.  I wouldn’t believe in a god who was flashy and obvious and in-your-face.  I’d wonder what his angle was.  Thomas was told that he would have been far better off if he’d believed without seeing proof, so are these ’healers’ doing their flocks a severe disservice?  Would these people believe at all without these miracles and if so, of what value is this thin and fragile ’faith’ that demands constant proofs and reassurances?

I believe in miracles, and I believe in the power of prayer.  I do not believe in this.  Some of it may be sincere wishful thinking and a willingness to see statistical off-chances as the direct intervention of God.  Some may well be fraudulent and deliberate deceit, for the aggrandisement of the ’healer’.  Mostly though, I think they simply serve to obfuscate those true miracles that do, very, very rarely, and never on demand, actually occur, when God is willing to break his own rules for the sake of the game, and I think that this does immeasurably more harm than it does good, even for those poor people who will believe anything and try anything to get the miracle they think they need.

Roleplaying Games as Theological Analogy (Part 3)

I wasn’t actually planning on there being a third part of this series, but based on recent events, I’ve decided to add an extra little bit.  I should hasten to say that this makes use of a very similar analogy to one used by CS Lewis, but I think illustrates the point better.

I am running a game for some friends from university, done over the internet and playing by text on a private internet chatroom.  This game has been going now for about five years, with a couple of longish breaks.  Several player characters have been killed along the way, until only 2 of the original 5 who started the campaign were still alive, although other characters had joined to replace those who had fallen (played by the same players).

This week, one of these two survivors finally fell, but not in a particularly satisfactory way.  The player had some stuff going on at home that meant that his attention was only intermittently on the game, and so I was controlling his character, and making his dice rolls when he couldn’t come to the computer.  The characters had got into a fight, and the character in question was badly injured, and quickly bled to death.  The player returned to the computer to find that the character he’s been playing for the last 5 years had died in his absence, something that I felt badly about, and so I offered him the option of me using my GMly omnipotence to undo events, and say that his character had survived after all.

However, the player was happy to go along with whatever I decided, and so I erred on letting events run their course, with the result that the player is now taking over control of a recurring NPC.

Now, I could have reached into my created world, and worked a Lazarene miracle, indeed not only bringing a dead character back to life but making it so that they had never died in the first place.  The only reason I even considered this was due to the unusual circumstances involved.  I’m glad that the player didn’t insist that I bring his character back to life, not that I expected him to, because once you break the laws of a universe once, it becomes easier and easier to do so, and for worse and worse reasons.  Other players start complaining if one person is seen to be immune to the universal laws that they are bound by.

Nonetheless, miracles can and do occur, but only very occasionally, and we do indeed hear people complaining that only certain people seem to get miracles.  “Why doesn’t God heal the amputees?” is a common (albeit often somewhat mocking) question.  I think the game illustrates this very well.  After all, if The Great GM in the Sky reached into this created world and broke the game rules frequently, then not only would they not be miracles, but they would not be rules.   The game would break down completely and that would be no fun at all, either for the players, or for the GM.

Sometimes it’s best not to insist on receiving miracles when things go badly wrong, but simply to accept the decision of the GM and play with what you have.  Although the character within the created world may not see it as such, ultimately the player knows that it is the best thing, both for themselves, for the other players, and for the Game itself.