Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [37]
It so happened that I was on a mailing list for the Cambridge Round-table on Science, Art and Religion, a series of discussions among Harvard and MIT affiliates. The first one I attended, on the topic of the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert and the New Atheists, helped shed some light on some of these questions.
Stanley Fish, the literary scholar turned law professor, was the principal speaker at the event. He began his remarks by summarizing the views of the New Atheists and their antagonism toward religious faith. The New Atheists are those authors, including Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, who have countered religion with harsh and critical words in bestselling books.
After his brief report of their views, Fish proceeded to criticize their lack of understanding of religion, a perspective that seemed to fall on a receptive audience since I think as a nonbeliever I was in the minority at the discussion. Fish argued that the New Atheists would have a stronger case if they had considered the challenges to self-reliance that religious faithful have to contend with.
Faith requires active questioning, and many religions demand it of the observant. Yet at the same time, many religions, some branches of Protestantism among them, call for a rejection or suppression of independent will. In Calvin’s words: “Man by nature inclines to deluded self-admiration. Here, then, is what God’s truth requires us to seek in examining ourselves: it requires the kind of knowledge that will strip us of all confidence in our own ability, deprive us of all occasion for boasting, and lead us to submission.”24
These particular words applied primarily to moral questions. But the belief in the necessity for external guidance is unscientific, and it can be difficult to know where to draw the line.
The struggle between the desire for knowledge and the mistrust of human pride reverberates throughout religious literature, including the Herbert poems that Fish and the Roundtable participants discussed. The Cambridge conversation elaborated on Herbert’s inner conflicts about his relationships with knowledge and with God. For Herbert, self-generated understanding was a sign of sinful pride. Similar warnings appear in the writings of John Milton. Although he firmly believed in the necessity for robust intellectual inquiry, he nonetheless has Raphael tell Adam in Paradise Lost that he should not inquire too curiously into the motion of the stars, for “they need not thy belief.”
Surprisingly (at least to me), notable representatives of our group of Harvard and MIT professors in attendance at the roundtable event approved of Herbert’s attempts at self-renunciation, believing it was a good thing to suppress one’s individuality and align oneself with this greater force. (Anyone who knows Harvard and MIT professors would also be surprised at this alleged denial of ego.)
Maybe the question of whether people can access truth on their own is the real issue at the heart of the religion/science debate. Is it possible that the negative attitudes toward science we hear today are partially rooted in the admittedly extreme beliefs expressed by Herbert and Milton? I’m not sure we are arguing so much about how the world came to be as about who has a right to figure things out and whose conclusions we should trust.
The universe is humbling. Nature hides many of its most interesting mysteries. Yet scientists are arrogant enough to believe we can solve them. Is it blasphemous to search for answers or is it merely presumptuous? Einstein as well as the Nobel Prize—winning physicist David Gross described scientists as thinking they are wrestling with God in order to learn the answers to the big questions about how nature works. David certainly didn’t mean this literally (and certainly not humbly)—he was recognizing