Respect for empirical knowledge doesn’t determine if one believes or disbelieves in God, though it has generally forced any believers, pagan and pantheist and Christians and others, to see a God of reason. After all, the very term `empirical knowledge’ is meaningful only if it refers to something, some realm of being subject to perception and analysis, which is rational.
To Einstein and perhaps Aristotle, the terms `God’ or `the Old One’ or the like, refer to a seemingly impersonal principle of reason which can be seen in the consistent properties of things and the order and partial predictability of events in this universe or cosmos or whatever. To some such as William Paley and many more recent thinkers, reason necessarily implies the existence of a God with at least some of the characteristics of personhood and some, maybe complete, transcendence to this universe which is His Creation or maybe part of a greater Creation. I feel some sympathy for Paley’s belief that examination of the order found in the natural world is a sign of a Creator but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s nearly a proof in the modern sense, though it might be a proof in the older sense of being a test of coherence, perhaps a test of whether the human mind can make sense of the existence of a God like the God of Jesus Christ. Now, there is a trend for more some more serious scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and some young physicists who blog on the Internet, to make more explicit the belief of Einstein and — maybe — Aristotle that being is self-sustaining and divinity is a name for the order or rationality to be found in that being. Divinity is what brings stuff into some rational order but it’s part of the same realm of being as stuff rather than being transcendent to it.
While we can’t really prove in the modern sense that a Creator exists by examining contingent forms of being such as the stuff of our bodies and the stars of our universe, we can prove it in that older sense, that is, we can test the hypothesis that we can view this universe as a Creation and do so in a way that’s coherent, reasonable, and perhaps convincing in a way that considers the forms of reason which we include as emotions and feelings. Unfortunately to those who wish to score quick victories for God in their debates, that sort of proof is meaningless in the context of a discussion between those holding radically different sorts of beliefs or disbeliefs.
I’ve mentioned “emotions and feelings” not to toss them aside but rather to bring them into our forms of discussion about beliefs as being truly parts of our reasoning processes, part of our rationality. Most human thinkers tend to downgrade emotions and feelings, thinking them to be non-rational when it would appear likely they are part of a greater rationality. See Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio for discussions of the true nature of human thought, emotions, and feelings and some reasons why emotions and feelings are part of a greater form of human thinking in which reason often plays the dominant role but not always. You can also check out Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World by Gerd Gigerenzer who has shown that we sometimes see irrationality in human thought and behavior because we don’t properly understand the contexts in which human thinking evolved and is still quite effective. For example, the idea that human beings can’t handle probabilistic reasoning is based on tests using the abstractions of percentages when human reasoning evolved to handle frequencies, not 30% but 3 out of 10. I think this implies, consistent with the speculations of Professor Damasio, that emotions and feelings are, at least in part, efficient encodings of the empirical experience of the racial experience of human beings and human ancestors. This isn’t to reduce emotions and feelings to being defective forms of rationality but rather to see them as some sort of deep, racial intellect: a capitalized and communal form of intelligence shaped over millions of years of experience.
This makes for a perfect mess, implying that what we call `reason’ is probably a mutilated and amputated form of a more total form of reasoning which considers vast amounts of empirical experience which has fed into our simple common-sense and also our fanciest theories of mathematics and physics. In fact, Professor Damasio considers these sorts of issues, including their impact on our theological beliefs, in Looking for Spinoza.
Let me confuse matters a little more — I would hope this is a useful and fruitful sort of confusion. I’ll mention another claim regarding our beliefs or disbeliefs about God and their relationship to empirical knowledge. In The Perfectibility of Man, John Passmore, made the quite plausible claim that an all-powerful God can be invoked to explain any possible world. I think this to be true at the level of physics but not at the level of narrative, a distinction of being which I’ve used often but I haven’t been able to find a truly clear way to speak of that distinction succinctly or perhaps even clearly. Please bear with me while I try to pull some strands of thoughts together in a quite preliminary way that is very interesting to me.
I don’t think we can prove God exists by assuming that the order we find in our universe must be a result of design in the way of a human engineer or architect or administrator. I also don’t think it makes much sense when those modern scientists argue that the self-ordering nature of certain physical processes tell us a Creator isn’t necessary.
We can return to the older understanding of prove, to test for coherence. In particular, I would suggest the proper test for a theology or an atheology is: does that system of belief or disbelief combine with empirical knowledge in such a way that the result is a coherent understanding of our experience of our environments as understood by fairly basic understandings. In other words, there is a bootstrapping of sorts which can be seen as necessary by the historical fact that our body of concepts and our other cognitive and narrative tools has increased greatly, at an especially rapid rate in recent centuries. I’ll quickly mention that there might be forms of belief in which there is a radical separation between God and Creation but those lie outside of the mainstream of thought of Western Civilization and largely outside of the stream of any thought human beings could see as rational.
Think about the very concept and term `order’. Paley was right in his day for the same reason that theologians and others were right in conjecturing the existence of a soul to bring mere flesh to life. To my knowledge, no pre-modern thinker, certainly no one who had a major public impact, had proposed a more general understanding of `order’ which would allow for order forming because of the interactions of simple things or mere blobs of matters which engage in well-defined relationships. Darwin accomplished much because he, self-confessed as a man lacking in a talent for abstract thought, honestly confronted evidence that indicated that life had evolved by some sort of processes which are not `random’ as some would say but rather self-directed or self-ordered if we speak in terms of a `self’ which is the totality of an environment and a family line of organisms. Our understanding of such processes and the order which results have to be much broader and even much looser than Platonic or Aristotelian ideas would have it. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, properly acknowledged by some modern thinkers to be a great empirical thinker, knew only what he could in the 13th century and had a quite restricted idea of order and how it can come about. To be sure, the general principles he advocated would have forced any true Thomists to very openly and honestly examine the empirically-founded claims of Galileo and Darwin and Einstein and Heisenberg and Watson. Then they would have gotten to work developing proper concepts and words and maybe even revising grammatical structures.
It would have then been the job of an entire community of thinkers to develop what we can call a moral narrative, the foundational work of a civilization, an understanding of what-is, perhaps as a self-contained something divine in its own right or perhaps as a Creation. One of the causes of the decay of the West is the emptiness at the heart of the West, a lack of a purposeful and morally well-ordered understanding of the world, however `world’ is defined. There are some of us who would argue that Western Civilization was its dynamic and forward-moving self just because the traditional Christian understanding of Creation is a narrative centered around the incarnation of the Son of God. In my current understanding, this story is one of an evolving and developing world dedicated to the purpose of forming the Body of Christ. My understanding of this Body and the ways in which it is forming are richer and more complex than the traditional Christian views just because I’ve responded to modern empirical knowledge with its richer and more complex understanding of God’s Creation.
By a somewhat torturous route, I’ve come to the claim that our belief or disbelief in God is the result of our understanding of our world, though in practice most will inherit a greater or lesser understanding from parents or teachers or clergymen rather than developing it on their own. Moreover, I’ve claimed this understanding has to be a story because we are ourselves participants in streams of events, some of which are recorded in books or family stories. The failure, conscious or unconscious, to form a narrative of our lives and the surrounding world will likely result in either disbelief or perhaps a radical and desperate spiritual conversion of a sort which might not result in a rational form of belief.
Now I can return to alleged proofs of the existence or non-existence of God. They aren’t set, and couldn’t possibly be set, in the context of some raw experience of reality. Those proofs are set in a developing or developed understanding of the world, perhaps as a self-sustaining entity or perhaps as a Creation. Most discussions or debates involving mixtures of disbelief and belief will be incoherent because everyone will bring his or her own understanding of the world and then make points from inside of that world. It would make sense if those discussions or debates involved respectful efforts to explore the various understandings rather than engaging in logical analysis, from a stance inside one world, of a dogma existing inside another world. If such discussions or debates could be held more often, then the various sides could not only learn about each other’s understandings of what-is but perhaps learn from each other. I’m constantly amazed by discoveries of the sheer richness and complexity of this world, and though myself a Christian, I’ve found my understanding of the world as part of a Creation to be enriched regularly by insights from non-believers or those struggling with their partial loss of belief.
Empirical knowledge as such, or a proper appreciation of its importance, doesn’t force us to belief or disbelief in any divinity, let alone the God of Jesus Christ. However, any sane human being has to use his empirical knowledge to understand what-is and that understanding will be intertwined with any belief or disbelief. Each will support the other. In a time of rapid change in empirical knowledge, it will be a dynamic dance of sorts rather than a static relationship.
The problem we currently have is we modern men of the West haven’t yet properly integrated empirical knowledge into our various systems of thought. Our discussions have decayed into incoherence. We talk past each other or yell at each other rather than sharing insights and trying to understand each other.