Does Science Preclude Atheism because Atheism Destroys Reason?

Exposing the sophistry of John Lennox’s facile remarks on atheism

AI-generated image by Julius H. from Pixabay

The mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox thinks that not only are science and religion compatible, but science excludes atheism.

In a talk he gave, “Has Science Buried God?” he turned the question around and said, “science can bury atheism.” Why does he think that’s so?

The conflict between Christian and scientific cultures

Well, he begins by pointing out that the great geniuses of early modern science, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clarke, Maxwell, Babbage, and Faraday all “believed in God.” Moreover, that’s not just an accident, he says, since “the Christian view of the universe as created by an intelligence is at the bedrock of the development of modern science.” Thus, “far from science burying God, it was belief in God that was the motor that drove the rise of science.”

Those assertions are specious, though. Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was culturally Christian because it was only just emerging from the theocratic medieval period when Christianity was mandatory.

One reason the early modern scientists were Christians, then, is that practically everyone in Europe was still Christian. That was the governing mythos, so you adapted by conforming to the social norms, and if you didn’t, you could face discrimination. In Victorian Britain, for instance, “The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford and denied custody of his two children after publishing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism.”

Moreover, the connection between science and theism is weakened by the fact that the ancient Greeks pioneered science and they were naturalists or pantheists. Leucippus and Democritus, for instance, first proposed atomism as a reductive explanation of natural patterns.

More importantly, though, the logical connections between science and theism are weak. If God can perform miracles, why trust in nature’s stability? Why investigate so-called laws of nature when they can be violated at any moment by God, angels, or demons?

In fact, theism supports not science but witchcraft and sorcery. If there are disembodied spirits floating around, controlling what happens in the material world, why not bypass the natural processes, and attempt to deal directly with the supernatural causes, with the spirits, as the prehistoric animists and witches took themselves to have been doing?

Thus, the early modern scientists may still have been personally Christian, as it was prudent for them to be if they wanted to prosper in Europe at that time. But in their professional capacities as scientists, they were deists rather than theists. The scientific methods allow for a handwaving, philosophical, or theological answer to the question of how the natural order got started, but once that answer is given, science is applied to the results on the assumption that there are no miracles, and thus that theism is false.

(Recall that deism is the view that God created the universe and left it alone to run as a self-sustaining machine, whereas theism is the view that the universe’s personal creator intervenes miraculously in nature, disrupting the rationally explained order.)

When the scientist uses math to formulate what’s supposed to be an inviolable equation that’s part of a well-tested theory, the scientist assumes there’s no mind at the bottom of everything that could decide to upend the natural order and start over or to adjust things arbitrarily, based on a whim or a free choice.

No, in offering that kind of explanation, the scientist assumes that the material world is a slave to itself, that nature works as it does because manifestations of matter and energy have no choice but to unfold as they do. The masters of that servitude, as it were, are physical forces operating on the initial configuration of material elements, and on their emergent constructs. To describe things physically is to objectify them and thus treat them as naturally programmed robots.

True, that mechanistic model of nature has been complicated by quantum indeterminacy, chaos theory, and the dynamics of self-organizing systems. But the relevance of those developments is just that the evident wildness of natural creativity has further discounted even the early modern scientists’ presumptive deism, let alone any lingering theism.

Art and miracles

Lennox contends, though, that there’s no conflict between science and religion.

The biblical God, he says, isn’t a God of the gaps, a placeholder that gives a name to mysteries that scientists don’t yet understand. Rather, God is supposed to have created everything, including what scientists do understand. Thus, says Lennox, the more scientists comprehend how nature works, the more they can appreciate the universe as God’s handiwork, just as the more you understand the engineering of cars or the art of painting, the more you can appreciate the details of why cars or paintings are as they are.

“The more he [Newton] understood how it [nature] worked, the more he admired the genius of the God that did it that way.” Thus, says Lennox, “Newton’s faith — and my faith, indeed — increases because the heavens are constantly and increasingly — in detail — declaring his [God’s] glory.”

Again, this is specious. True, experts on a subject can appreciate it better than nonexperts. And if you know already that cars and paintings are produced by minds, you’re liable to admire the inventors and artists, especially if you recognize all the obstacles they had to overcome to learn how to produce their great works.

But notice what else follows from this kind of knowledge. Engineers are constantly improving their craft, which is why you don’t see only one model of cars being produced, but one after another in a long series of innovations, each model improving on the last. Likewise, artists are seldom content with their handiwork. Hence the saying attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, that “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Therefore, if you’re going to compare nature to human art, and thus to treat the “natural” order as an artifact, you wouldn’t just admire the creator. You’d wonder why the creator left certain bits unfinished, or whether the creator isn’t constantly sneaking back to the studio to tinker with the creation.

And with that intrusion of theism rather than just deism, you’d re-establish the conflict between science and religion. If the universe is perfect and doesn’t need to be improved, then you’ve lost the analogy with human artifacts. But if the analogy is strong, we should suppose that behind the scenes, as it were, God is still working on nature, that his art is never finished. This would mean that the natural order is subject to supernatural alteration, which would make nonsense of the scientific mode of explanation.

Again, scientists assume that there are no miracles, as in intrinsically unfathomable events. If the theist says that God operates behind the screen of quantum mechanics, for example, adjusting the flow of events supernaturally, this would indeed be a God of the gaps. The theist would be using part of nature that’s still mysterious as a hiding place for God’s activity.

Notice, then, how theism and science would pull the theistic scientist in opposite directions. Theism might entail that because God wants to hide his miraculous tinkering, there will never be a natural explanation of quantum phenomena. But in so far as science is methodologically naturalistic, the scientist should trust, rather, in human ingenuity and the scientific process, in which case the scientist might work to reduce the quantum mysteries to something more explicable. The more we understand how nature works, the less room there is for a miracle.

Theism and scientific pride

Next, Lennox points out that science and religion can explain different aspects of the same thing. You can give a physical explanation of why a person stands up to get a glass of water, or you can give a psychological one, and they needn’t compete. And indeed, that’s likely so because properties and patterns emerge in nature, and on pragmatic grounds we turn to independent vocabularies that specialize in different subjects, rather than trying to shoehorn all phenomena into one grand theory.

God, Lennox says, no more competes with science as an explanation of the universe than the positing of Henry Ford competes with engineering as an explanation of the motor car.

But this is facile. Suppose Henry Ford was a tyrant who punished everyone who tried to reverse-engineer his designs. In that case, knowing that Ford created the automobile would indeed conflict with the practice of engineering because engineers would be dissuaded from studying how cars work.

Likewise, if we take theism seriously, as witches, alchemists, and other occultists do, we should wonder whether the Creator would be inclined to punish scientists for their impudence. And of course, this was the very defeatist attitude towards free thinking that prevailed for centuries in medieval Christendom. Only knowledge that was deemed consistent with the Bible was permitted. The rest was forbidden on God’s behalf, meaning that the Church condemned it as blasphemous and liable to trigger divine punishment. The Plague, for example, was attributed to God’s displeasure with humanity.

Here again, when we look past the specious platitudes about how science and theism complement each other, we find the clashes that embroiled much of Western history. All you need to do is follow theism to its logical conclusion, without mistaking theism for deism. Sure, if God created and then abandoned the universe, taking no interest in what transpires within nature, and thus reserves no rewards or punishments for the faithful or for vain upstarts, deistic religion could coexist with science — because God and theistic religion would be irrelevant to our life.

But Lennox’s Christianity is theistic, so he must push beliefs about God much further than that, and the more forthright he is in doing so, the more apparent will be the conflict between his religion and the principles and methods of science.

If scientists suspected they could be punished in Hell for all eternity, for daring not just to uncover how nature works, but to use empirical knowledge to modify God’s creation (the wilderness), do you think they’d proceed with such humanistic abandon? No, they’d think twice about performing some experiment or selling their expertise to some capitalistic enterprise.

Maybe God wants us to be godlike and to re-engineer nature, to replace the wilderness with civilization. Or maybe he wants us to submit to his commandments and serve him like obedient children. That would be a question for theology, and theologians are liable to disagree with each other. Given that uncertainty, would it be prudent for scientists to leap to the former conclusion, to hope that God won’t mind if they implicitly condemn the divinely created state of nature by preferring to live in a human-created society? No, it would be better to err on the side of caution, with the prospect of everlasting punishment in the balance.

Thus, taking theism seriously counts against the practice of science, which means they’re in conflict after all.

Does atheism destroy our confidence in reason?

Here’s another of Lennox’s sophistries: he says the reason he thinks science can bury atheism is that “science can be done.” Citing Eugene Wigner’s paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Lennox says Wigner is wrong since the success of mathematics only seems “unreasonable,” as in miraculous, “if you start by believing atheism. But if you start by believing there’s a rational intelligence behind the universe, then doing science is reasonable.”

Yet as I’ve argued elsewhere regarding mathematics, Wigner was mistaken, rather, because the success of math in science can be deflated. Mathematical statements often generalize from experience, but in so far as they’re treated as necessary in some special sense, they’re only fictive, meaning that we ensure their necessity by evoking them, by stipulating and defining into being the corresponding mathematical abstractions. We suspend our disbelief in them, ignoring how simplistic the abstractions are, just as we might ignore how a fictional story deviates from reality because we have an ulterior purpose in entertaining the story for our pleasure or edification.

In any case, once again, Lennox’s argument is facile, which is to say that he isn’t taking theism seriously enough. He’s sugarcoating his religion to make his “faith” seem compatible with science’s secular humanistic ethos.

Suppose God exists, and God gave us the ability to think and to recognize the logical order in Creation. We labour for centuries to uncover that structure, and arrive at our treasured mathematical equations about space, time, numbers, and so forth.

Why couldn’t God change his mind about that structure, snapping his fingers and ushering in a new order, falsifying all that hard work of mathematicians and scientists? In fact, isn’t that the monotheist’s explicit promise, that an apocalyptic event is in the offing, that God will soon bring history to an end and rule over us and nature directly, removing the demonic intermediaries who’ve led us astray, like Prometheus, a model for Christianity’s Satan?

Lennox wants to say that science and math make no sense on the assumption of atheism. And with a flourish, he offers this response to the atheist: Tell me, O atheist, “what do you do science with?” The answer is the brain. And Lennox replies socratically, “Tell me about your brain with which you do science. What do you really believe about it? Give me a short answer.” And the answer, Lennox says, is that “the brain is the end product of some mindless, unguided process.” Lennox then says he looks at the atheist, sometimes smiling, and asks, “And do you trust it?”

“Be honest with me,” he says, “If you knew that the computer you use every day in your lab was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it?” Lennox says he always forces the atheist to answer, and he’s asked “dozens of world-famous scientists, and every single one of them has said no.”

Thus, Lennox thinks that science rests on faith, too, on trust in the products of mindless, unguided processes. “You don’t do science unless you believe the universe is rationally intelligible.” The question, then, is why atheists believe any such thing if the very thing they do science with — their brain — is something they wouldn’t trust. “Atheism,” he says, “followed to its logical conclusion, destroys rationality.”

Turning the tables on Lennox

But that’s backward. If God, angels, demons, and miracles were real, they would destroy rationality because anything could happen at any time, based on the whim of an all-powerful deity or of its trickster underlings. The universe would be like North Korea or Stalinist Russia. You could be minding your business, trusting in your limited knowledge of how the society works, and then from out of nowhere, in a Kafkaesque manner, a soldier could barge through your door and throw you in a dungeon on trumped-up charges.

There would be no trustworthy regularity in nature if physicality were at the mercy of a person’s free choice and artistry. If the monotheist’s God were real, Creation would be what astrophysicists call a “white hole.” On bizarre quantum mechanical grounds, anything could pop out of such a hole at any time. In other words, nature would be what monotheists call the divine paradise of “Heaven” in which you could materialize anything you want just by imagining it.

Why is the universe that we find much more restricted than that? Maybe God could change things, but he doesn’t want to. But why wouldn’t God want to, and how do we know what God wants? In fact, the theist says God does change things with miracles. If God shows he wants to change things by sometimes performing miracles, why doesn’t he perform more of them? If he helps some people with miracles, why doesn’t he help everyone?

Again, the conflict is apparent when we think harder about what theistic religion and science entail. Scientists proceed by the logic of induction, which does indeed rest on a kind of faith, the kind that informs pragmatism or methodological naturalism. The assumption is that the future will work roughly like the past. Scientists don’t claim to know there’s some metaphysical guarantee of such order. They just assume there’s such an order so they can press the human advantage, to see how far we can progress on that basis. The faith here is pragmatic and humanistic, not theological.

And what scientists find in their experience is the natural order — not an ideal realm handcrafted by a loving creator, and not a place with which you can sensibly bargain, but a fullness of evolving processes. Those processes happen regardless of whether we want them to, and they seem to happen in the same way in many places and with great reliability, as if they had no choice in the matter but were mindlessly forced. So, nature reveals itself as something that’s impersonally, indifferently, and slavishly self-creative, which makes nature monstrous, according to our social, proto-theistic sensibilities.

Our social instincts prompt us to posit minds and values everywhere since we prefer to live in a society, not in the cosmic wilderness. If God created physicality, he’s a stern overlord indeed, running nature as a totalitarian dictator runs his dystopia, as an ordered unity brooking no deviation from the script. But if nature is so regular, there’s no longer any need to posit the mind behind it all. You could have the mere illusion of an all-powerful dictator, as in the Wizard of Oz, and the dystopia would run by itself, like a self-organizing machine.

If God doesn’t express his character in his handiwork, what’s the point of talking about a supernatural source of nature? What does that add to our understanding? All it does is provide the slippery theist the opportunity to smuggle all sorts of conservative, theocratic prejudices and canards into philosophical interpretations of science.

It’s a matter of adapting our way of thinking to apparent reality. In prehistory we presumed nature is alive — as indeed it largely is in our corner of the universe. Eventually, skeptics started looking carefully at what there is beyond our familiar corner, and what they found is a type of being that makes theism gratuitous.

We then adapted to the universe’s naturalness by learning how to build an artificial alternative because we came to understand that nature won’t accommodate itself to our preferences, not even if we ask it nicely to do so. Nature isn’t fundamentally alive, caring, or personal. Nature just happens because it’s perfectly wild at the quantum level, and if you give metaphysical wildness enough time and space, an order evolves and emerges until it decomposes.

The humanistic ethos

What, then, is the scientific ethos that’s consistent with atheism? It’s Lucretius’s existential revolt against nature’s monstrousness. It’s secular humanistic pride in the sacred anomalies of self-consciousness and personal agency, coupled with despair for the tragedy of our misplacement in an inhuman cosmos.

Science is the Promethean endeavour of learning how to hoodwink nature’s grotesque, headless creativity. Precisely because nature doesn’t seem to be morally or personally driven, but is fundamentally physical and thus forced and slavishly ordered, we could employ instrumental ingenuity in learning how nature works, and nature would have no choice but to keep working that way. We could then use that empirical knowledge to improve on nature, to build a better world, known as “civilization.”

The notion, then, that science’s utility undermines atheism by destroying rationality is nonsensical — unless by “reason,” Lennox is talking about a metaphysical principle of sufficient reason, as in a guarantee of an absolute answer to every conceivable question. If nature is godlessly creative, as in monstrously, amorally, and pointlessly ordered, we have no reason to expect that we can deeply understand everything or perhaps even anything.

We find we’re equipped with certain cognitive faculties, and we put them to use — because what else are we going to do? In the Paleolithic period our ancestors may have tried out lots of irrational lifestyles, and some may have proven fruitless. One lifestyle that caught on is the kind of pragmatic curiosity that underlies science. We do the best we can with what we have. We trust not so much in nature, but in ourselves because we’ve developed that virtue or vice of pride, based on many natural and cultural trials and errors.

After learning that we can understand some things, we try to understand everything by exercising the same techniques — not because we know that that extension will work, but because we’ll try it out to see if it works, or because we’re curious, arrogant, or desperate. We’re primates, after all.

Turning around Lennox’s question, then, about trust in computers and brains, we might have reason not to trust certain computers, if we knew they were subject to human error or to shoddy manufacturing. If the computer were made by a cheap company that cuts corners, we’d have reason to suspect it could crash.

Why don’t we think the same about nature? Why do we expect the future to work like the past with no miraculous interruptions, acting as if apocalyptic theism were so much hot air?

It’s because we’re familiar with nature’s impersonality, with its lack of personal or evaluative discrimination. Good and bad people die equally, regardless of their successes or failures in life, just as Ecclesiastes stresses, so it’s as if God weren’t there. There’s no need to posit personal genius or error in explaining the existence of nature since nature is evidently in the business of creating and evolving itself from one stage or level to the next.

Science and the story of theism

What does theism imply about the brain?

It implies anything you want since theism is an unfalsifiable, self-reinforcing delusion. Did God make all brains equal, or are some better than others because God’s plans for us differ? Does God want us to exercise all our faculties or show some restraint? Do our brains malfunction because demons interfere with God’s plan or is there a flaw in that very plan because God is imperfect? What’s God’s character like?

Take your pick from a thousand possible answers to these theological questions, none of which is conclusively testable.

And what does atheistic naturalism entail about the brain?

What we should expect from the brain is just what we find if we assume the brain is the product of a mindless, monstrously unguided, self-evolving process, such as the natural selection of genes in an impersonal series of environments that prune species by killing off the unfit members so they can’t replicate. What we find, then, is a control center that’s efficient at performing certain tasks, helping us survive by outcompeting other species for limited resources in an amoral, undiscriminating (natural, physical) domain.

And we find that the brain has certain weaknesses to offset its strengths because the brain evolved under suboptimal circumstances. For instance, the human brain is subject to a host of cognitive distortions, blind spots, and disorders.

Thus, we shouldn’t trust everything the brain does. Lennox’s very religion, for example, is the product of anthropocentric sophistries to which the human brain is susceptible. So, we shouldn’t trust those thought processes; rather, we experiment with ourselves, to find which ways of life work best. We struggle to improve our character and to learn how to think well and apply our strengths to the right set of problems.

Science, for example, is irrelevant to theistic religion because that kind of religion is based on a fiction that makes lots of people happy in a social setting. Why spoil a good story? Indeed, if the story’s captivating enough, no one can spoil it for you. Even if the critics pan your favourite film, that wouldn’t affect what the movie means to you. And if you learned to be a Christian at your parent’s knee, no objections by skeptical atheists are likely to spoil your nostalgia or the fantasy that you know the universe’s secret.

That’s the sense in which science and religion are compatible. We compartmentalize the parts of our worldview to avoid cognitive dissonance so we can keep enjoying our favourite stories. We selectively suspend our disbelief, enthralling ourselves with some myth or propaganda because our time is fleeting and we want to find peace of mind somehow, doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.