How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [12]
GLADLY WOLDE WE LEARNE
If there is a God, He has yet to provide incontrovertible evidence of His existence, leaving belief in Him instead to lie in the realm of faith, or emotional preference, which is the very basis of the theological position known as fideism. Because I see this as the most tenable of all theistic possibilities, I have explored it further since I first wrote this book. As Martin Gardner, a fideist and believer in God, noted in his 1983 book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener: “If ‘evidence’ means the kind of support provided by reason and science, there is no evidence for God and immortality.” Gardner rejects the flood story (“even as a myth it is hard to admire the ‘faith’ of a man capable of supposing God could be that vindictive and unforgiving”), does not believe that God asked Abraham to kill his son (“Abraham appears not as a man of faith, but as a man of insane fanaticism”), and finds wanting most of the stories in the Bible: “The Old Testament God, and many who had great ‘faith’ in him, are alike portrayed in the Bible as monsters of incredible cruelty.”
If, as I argue in Chapter 4, beliefs are based on emotion rather than evidence, personality instead of reason, upbringing more than arguments, it would seem to vindicate Gardner’s fideism as the most honest of all the reasons to believe in God. In a personal aside, Gardner confesses that he does have some faith:
Let me speak personally. By the grace of God I managed the leap when I was in my teens. For me it was then bound up with an ugly Protestant fundamentalism. I outgrew this slowly, and eventually decided I could not even call myself a Christian without using language deceptively, but faith in God and immortality remained. The original leap was not a sharp transition. For most believers there is not even a transition. They simply grow up accepting the religion of their parents, whatever it is.
Gardner is, if nothing else, refreshingly honest about his faith: “The leap of faith, in its inner nature, remains opaque. I understand it as little as I understand the essence of a photon. Any of the elements I listed earlier as possible causes of belief, along with others I failed to list, may be involved in God’s way of prompting the leap. I do not know, I do not know!”[12] We do not know either, but we ought to be able to respect this honest appraisal of how and why you believe, and especially acknowledge what Gardner, as one of the chief teachers of science and skepticism, have offered us for enlightenment on the problem. As the clerk of Oxenford in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales proclaimed: “gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”
Part I
GOD AND BELIEF
R. Buckminster Fuller
Sometimes I think we’re alone.
Sometimes I think we’re not.
In either case, the thought is quite staggering.
Chapter 1
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?
The Difference in Our Answers and the Difference It Makes
The word God is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness,—a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs.
—Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 1873
In my senior year of high school I accepted Jesus as my savior and became a born-again Christian. I did so at the behest of a close and trusted friend, who assured me this was the road to everlasting life and