How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [15]
At Glendale College I challenged my philosophy professor (and now my friend) Richard Hardison, to read The Late Great Planet Earth, believing he would see the light. Instead he saw red and hammered out a two-page, single-space typed list of problems with Lindsey’s book. I still have the list, folded and tucked neatly into my copy of the book. Hardison took no prisoners. For example, where Lindsey writes, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken,” Hardison notes that this creates an “inevitable precision, since we disregard those prophesies that don’t occur.” On page 40 Lindsey explains that when reading the Bible we should “take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning,” yet on page 50 Lindsey says that “the bones coming together and sinews and flesh being put upon them” really means “the regathering of the people into a physical restoration of a national existence in Palestine. Isn’t it fascinating how graphic this physical analogy is?” Lindsey cannot have it both ways. On pages 55—56, Lindsey commits another logical fallacy: “Peter considered the certainty and relevance of the prophetic word to be the most important thing. He even warned that in ‘the latter times’ men posing as religious leaders would rise from within the Church and deny, even ridicule, the prophetic word (II Peter 2:1–3; 3:1–18) If you pass this book around to many ministers you’ll find how true this prediction has become.” Hardison notes that “denial of Lindsey’s position is thus impossible without proving oneself to be among those misguided persons that Peter warns about. This becomes a device to make Lindsey’s position nondisprovable.” Hardison concluded his analysis with this biting statement:
Of all Lindsey’s statements, the one I most want to quarrel with is found in the introduction: “There are many students who are dissatisfied with being told that the sole purpose of education is to develop inquiring minds. They want to find some of the answers to their questions—solid answers, a certain direction.” I think I can offer some possible explanations for this “egregious” development. But even more, I feel impelled to propose that such a student is dead.
Hardison’s analysis shook me up. I did not want to be a “dead” student in only my second year of college. So I continued reading what the great minds in history had to say about God. It was an illuminating experience that got me thinking about the concept of “believing” in God. What does it mean to believe in God or not to believe in God? Are these great questions about God’s existence answerable from a scientific perspective? Can reason alone help us arrive at solutions to the moral dilemmas of our lives? In short, does religion present us with soluble problems to be analyzed with the tools of observation and logic, or are these questions too subjective and too personal for us to come to a collective agreement on a solution?
THE ART OF THE INSOLUBLE
The British Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar once described science as the “art of the soluble.” “No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence,” Medawar opined. “If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble.” If science is the art of the soluble, religion is the art of the