How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [8]
Nevertheless please note that in this edition of the book I changed the phrase to read that it is okay not to believe in God. By this statement I am speaking to those atheists, nontheists, and nonbelievers of all stripes as a form of validation from a fellow free-thinker; I am also reaching out to theists and believers of all faiths who, occasionally or even frequently, doubt their faith. Doubt is good. Questioning belief is healthy. Skepticism is okay. It is more than okay, in fact. Skepticism is a virtue and science is a valuable tool that makes skepticism virtuous. Science and skepticism are the best methods of determining how strong your convictions are, regardless of the outcome of the inquiry. If you challenge your belief tenets and end up as a nonbeliever, then apparently your faith was not all that sound to begin with and you have improved your thinking in the process. If you question your religion but in the end retain your belief, you have lost nothing and gained a deeper understanding of the God Question. It is okay to be skeptical.
In light of Darwin’s wise advice, why, one may ask, do I devote an entire chapter (2) to a head-on confrontation of the alleged proofs of God’s existence? The reason is that my laissez-faire attitude toward other people’s religious beliefs ends when they use, misuse, and abuse reason and science in the service of faith and religion. As even libertarians will admit, your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Claims that religious tenets can be proved through science require a response from the scientific community. Making evidentiary claims puts religion on science’s turf, so if it wants to stay there it will have to live up to the standards of scientific proof. This is not an archaic academic or philosophical issue. As I show in Chapter 4, the scientistically based “design argument” is the most common one made. People say they believe in God because of the evidence of their senses and their understanding of how the world works. In other words, they give reasons for their beliefs. What are those reasons? If they are good reasons shouldn’t we all become believers?
GOD AND THE INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED UNIVERSE
The hottest area in the search for scientific support of God’s existence can be found in the so-called “new creationism” that deals in “irreducible complexity” and especially “Intelligent Design” (ID as it is known among its adherents). Although I discuss these at length in Chapter 5, they continue to generate so much attention that it is worth expanding on it more here. It is rapidly becoming the strongest scientistic argument for believers. For example, I participated in two scientific debates on ID in 2000, a number of new books on it have been released by Christian publishers since my book came out, and an entire issue of the Christian magazine Touchstone was devoted to Intelligent Design, “a new paradigm in science that could revolutionize the way we view creation, the cosmos, and ourselves.”
Much is made of the fact that the universe is grandly complex, intricate, and apparently delicately balanced for carbon-based life forms such as ourselves. It is here where science and religion meet, say believers who wish to graft the findings of science onto 4,000-year-old religious doctrines. And they have no difficulty in finding observations from leading scientists that seemingly support their contention that the universe does not just look designed, it is designed. “It is not only man that is adapted to the universe,” John Barrow and Frank Tipler proclaim in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,