Religious Variation and the Conflation of Science and Atheism

Introduction
First, kill the strawman
The Common Metaphysical Question
Science versus religion
Defining God
The problem of evil
Eternal life
Conclusion
Further reading

Introduction

This text aims to be a very basic introduction to the relationship between science, reason, and religion. It's clearly very limited in all sorts of ways but I think it provides a kind of bare minimum to have an at least not totally uninformed opinion. I hasten to note it's not at any kind of academic level, but given what still seems to be the typical quality of public/online debate, it might have some value. The two primary intended audiences are people within a religious tradition worried about feeling pressure to believe irrational things and atheists critical of religion who may want to test their own point of view or assumptions about religion. There's maybe also a little bit of a connection to the more general delineation problem of science.

The main questions the text aims to address are:

Do "proper", traditional, old-school theistic views imply biblical literalism and creationism?
Does (well-defined) science contradict (well-defined) religion?
Does scientific progress lead to an ever-reducing God of the Gaps?
Is the Problem of Evil/Suffering really a knock-down argument for atheism?
Is the "proper", traditional, old-school theistic concept of Eternal Life the idea that God sends people to hell for not believing the right religious dogma?

It's maybe unsurprising I'm going to argue for "no" in all cases, but I hope the arguments and references could be helpful. Note this isn't exactly in defense of religion; it's more in opposition to simplistic anti-religious beliefs.

First, kill the strawman

To start off with, the references below are intended to demonstrate that there's a kind of theism worth thinking about at all. Two points about the sources: First, these aren't sources that are easily dismissed as "not really religious"; after all, they include founding figures of the early Church, famous historical figures, popular writers and mainstream theologians including a pope. Second, some of the references go back more than a millennium before Darwin, so the strongly and perhaps surprisingly un-creationist ideas aren't just examples of backpedaling in the face of scientific successes.

Origen Adamantius (lived ca. 185-254), Philocalia. "What man of intelligence, I ask, will consider that the first and second and third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars, while the first day was even without a heaven? And who could be found so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer 'planted trees in a paradise eastward in Eden'... I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history."
Saint Augustine (408), De Genesi ad litteram. "With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation. [...] Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field in which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although 'they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.'"
St. John of Damascus (676 - 749), An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. "In our case, thoughtfulness, and wisdom, and counsel come to pass and go away as states of being. Not so in the case of God: for with Him there is no happening or ceasing to be: for He is invariable and unchangeable: and it would not be right to speak of contingency in connection with Him. For goodness is concomitant with essence. He who longs always after God, he seeth Him: for God is in all things. Existing things are dependent on that which is, and nothing can be unless it is in that which is. God then is mingled with everything, maintaining their nature: and in His holy flesh the God-Word is made one in subsistence and is mixed with our nature, yet without confusion. We speak of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ, the Spirit of the Lord, the very Lord, the Spirit of adoption, of truth, of liberty, of wisdom (for He is the creator of all these): filling all things with essence, maintaining all things, filling the universe with essence, while yet the universe is not the measure of His power. [...] For He does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence, but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself. For if all forms of knowledge have to do with what exists, assuredly that which is above knowledge must certainly be also above essence: and, conversely, that which is above essence will also be above knowledge."
Saadia Gaon (933), The Book of Beliefs and Opinions. "Apropos of [the category of] action, let me say that, even though we denominate the Creator 'Maker' and 'Agent,' the meaning that we attribute to these terms must not be construed in a corporeal sense. [...] When, therefore, we find the Scriptures, in speaking of some of the works of God, make mention of an act and its opposite, it must all be reduced to the fact that, when God creates anything, He brings it into being without actually taking it in hand or coming in contact with it. The Scriptures do, indeed, characterize the positive and negative acts of creation by saying: And God made (Gen. 1:7), And He rested (Gen. 2:2). However, just as the And He made was effected without motion or exertion, consisting only of the production of the thing created, so undoubtedly, when it is said And He rested, it was not relaxation from any kind of motion of exercise."
Maimonides (around 1175), Mishneh Torah. "It has been stated in Scripture that God has no physical form, as it is written, '...that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath: there is none other'. A physical body cannot be in two places at once. It is also written, '...for you saw no manner of form', and, 'To whom then will you compare Me, that I should be his equal?' - had God had a body it would have been similar to other bodies. If so, what does the Torah mean when it says things like, 'under His feet' (Exodus 31:18), 'written with the finger of God' (ibid), 'the hand of the Lord' (Exodus 9:3), 'the eyes of the Lord' (Genesis 38:7), 'the ears of the Lord' (Numbers 11:1), et cetera? These phrases are in line with the level of understanding of people, who can only comprehend physical existence, and the Torah speaks in terms that we can understand. All examples of this nature are merely attributory. For example, when it says, 'If I whet My glittering sword' - does God really have a sword and does He really kill with one?! Such phrases are figurative. Evidence for this is that one Prophet saw God as wearing garments as white as snow, whereas another Prophet saw God as wearing crimsoned garments from Bozrah. Moses our Teacher himself saw, at the time of the splitting of the Red Sea, God as a war-waging warrior, but at Sinai as a cantor to show him the order of prayer. This shows that God has no form or shape [because He appears different to different people]. God's appearance varies according to each prophetic vision and what it contains. It is beyond Man's intellect to investigate or comprehend [the nature of] God's existence, as it is written, 'Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the purpose of the Almighty?'"
The Zohar (13th century). "Now the narratives of the Torah are its garments. He who thinks that these garments are the Torah itself deserves to perish and have no share in the world to come. Wo unto the fools who look no further when they see an elegant robe! More valuable than the garment is the body which carries it, and more valuable even than that is the soul which animates the body. Fools see only the garment of the Torah, the more intelligent see the body, the wise see the soul, its proper being, and in the Messianic time the 'upper soul' of the Torah will stand revealed."
John Calvin (1554), Commentary on Genesis. "I have said, that Moses does not here subtilely descant, as a philosopher, on the secrets of nature, as may be seen in these words... Moses makes two great luminaries; but astronomers prove, by conclusive reasons, that the star of Saturn, which, on account of its great distance, appears the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference: Moses wrote in the popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God."
Galileo Galilei (1615), Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: 'That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.'"
Robert Chambers (1844). "If there is a choice between special creation and the operation of general laws instituted by the creator, I would say the latter is greatly preferable as it implies a far grander view of the divine power and dignity than the other."
Frederick Temple, Bishop of Exeter (1884), The relations between religion and science. "He did not make the things, we may say; no, but He made them make themselves. And surely this rather adds than withdraws force from the great argument. It seems in itself something more majestic, something more befitting Him to Whom a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years, thus to impress His Will once for all on His creation, and provide for all its countless variety by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what He had previously made. It has often been objected to Paley's argument, as I remarked before, that it represents the Almighty rather as an artificer than a creator, a workman dealing with somewhat intractable materials and showing marvellous skill in overcoming difficulties rather than a beneficent Being making all things in accordance with the purposes of His love. But this objection disappears when we put the argument into the shape which the doctrine of Evolution demands and look on the Almighty as creating the original elements of matter, determining their number and their properties, creating the law of gravitation whereby as seems probable the worlds have been formed, creating the various laws of chemical and physical action, by which inorganic substances have been combined, creating above all the law of life, the mysterious law which plainly contains such wonderful possibilities within itself, and thus providing for the ultimate development of all the many wonders of nature. What conception of foresight and purpose can rise above that which imagines all history gathered as it were into one original creative act from which the infinite variety of the Universe has come and more is coming even yet? [...] Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made many men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelation have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation is everything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are sure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are already learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the method of Revelation."
Pope Leo XIII (1893), Providentissimus Deus 18. "No real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits. ... If nevertheless there is a disagreement ... it should be remembered that the sacred writers, or more truly 'the Spirit of God who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men such truths (as the inner structure of visible objects) which do not help anyone to salvation'; and that, for this reason, rather than trying to provide a scientific exposition of nature, they sometimes describe and treat these matters either in a somewhat figurative language or as the common manner of speech those times required, and indeed still requires nowadays in everyday life, even amongst most learned people."
C. S. Lewis (1952), Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis. "It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our ancestors too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons. My own position is not Fundamentalist, if Fundamentalism means accepting as a point of faith at the outset the proposition 'Every statement in the Bible is completely true in the literal, historical sense'. That would break down at once on the parables. All the same commonsense and general understanding of literary kinds which would forbid anyone to take the parables as historical statements, carried a very little further, would force us to distinguish between (1.) Books like Acts or the account of David's reign, which are everywhere dovetailed into a known history, geography, and genealogies, (2.) Books like Esther, or Jonah or Job which deal with otherwise unknown characters living in unspecified periods, and pretty well proclaim themselves to be sacred fiction."
Fritz Rothschild (1971), Truth and Metaphor in the Bible. "The view that the Bible contains God's message to man has led to ever new interpretations, since it constantly forced believing readers of the Bible to reconcile the words of the sacred text with whatever they held to be true on the basis of their own experience, the canons of logic, contemporary science, and their moral insights. [...] The traditionalist will always feel called upon to interpret the text so that it reflects not ancient error but the highest standards of trustworthy knowledge and insight of his own time. If we believe that God's message is to be found in Scripture, we can expect that basic motifs, metaphors and paradigmatic tales contain guidance ('Torah') for all ages, and it becomes our duty to delve into their implications with reverence and seriousness. On the same assumption, however, the timeless message can never be read through the spectacles of our great-grandparents. It becomes our duty and challenge to do what previous generations have done: to focus upon the sacred text the fullest light of knowledge at our disposal."
R. J. Coleman (1975), Biblical Inerrancy: Are We Going Anywhere? On the history of belief in Bibilical Inerrancy. "The question of biblical inerrancy is remarkably the same now as it was nearly a century ago. Yet it is not the black and white issue commonly conjured up in the minds of most people; namely, one side claiming the Bible contains no discrepancies or inconsistencies whatsoever, with the other side claiming the Scriptures are riddled with error. On the contrary, even Warfield and Hodge conceded that the biblical writers were at times "dependent for their information upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, their personal knowledge and judgment were in many matters hesitating and defective or even wrong." They also recognized that 'inspiration does not suppose that the words and phrases written under its influence are the best possible to express the truth, but only that they are an adequate expression of the truth. Other words and phrases might furnish a clearer, more exact, and therefore better expression... ' These two concessions in themselves permit an unexpected latitude in the kind and number of errors possibly found in Scripture."
Steven Katz (1978), in God and the Astronomers, R. Jastrow, pp. 147-163. "Theological concern with evolution tends to be derived from a literalist reading of Genesis. As I have tried to show, in Jewish religious thought Genesis is not regarded as meant for a literal reading, and Jewish tradition has not usually read it so. [...] The basis for disagreement is not the conflict of evolution with a literal reading of Genesis, but rather the evolutionist's denial of teleology, i.e. the denial of purpose in and through nature, and purposeful movement in and through history, toward some end or goal. While evolution argues for the random, purposeless nature of natural selection, this argument only describes specific events, whether mutations or reproductions, within history and nature. It does not offer evidence for or against the purposeful ordering of nature and history as wholes. As the medievals, for example, Thomas Aquinas in his Five-Fold Way, were wrong when they argued that the existence of a "First Cause" could be proven inductively as a consequence of observing a chain of causation within nature and history, because the observance of a cause in nature or history does not prove there is a cause of nature or history, so, too, modern men, who deny a cause of nature because of the randomness of natural selection, make the same error of logic, but in the reverse direction."
Conrad Hyers (1982), Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance. See also: The Meaning of Creation and Dinosaur Religion: On Interpreting and Misinterpreting the Creation Texts. "The critical question in the creation account of Genesis 1 was polytheism versus monotheism. _That_ was the burning issue of the day, not some issue which certain Americans 2,500 years later in the midst of the scientific age might imagine that it was. [...] Read through the eyes of the people who wrote it, Genesis 1 would seem very different from the way most people today would tend to read it--including evolutionists who may dismiss it as a pre-scientific account of origins, and creationists who may try to defend it as the true science and literal history of origins. [...] In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-`a-vis polytheism, syncretism and idolatry. Each day takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures--creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order. [...] The issue was idolatry, not science; syncretism, not natural history; theology, not chronology; affirmations of faith in one transcendent God, not creationist or evolutionist theories of origin. Attempting to be loyal to the Bible by turning the creation accounts into a kind of science or history is like trying to be loyal to the teachings of Jesus by arguing that the parables are actual historical events, and only reliable and trustworthy when taken literally as such."
Lasor, Hubbard, and Bush (1996), Old Testament Survey, p. 72. "Literary device also is found in the names used. The correspondence of the name with the person's function or role is striking in several instances. Adam means 'mankind' and Eve is '(she who gives) life.' Surely, when an author of a story names the principal characters Mankind and Life, something is conveyed about the degree of literalness intended! Similarly Cain means 'forger (of metals)'; Enoch is connected with 'dedication, consecration' (4:17; 5:18); Jubal with horn and trumpet (4:21); while Cain, condemned to be a nad, a 'wanderer,' goes to live in the land of Nod, a name transparently derived from the same Hebrew root, thus the land of wandering! This suggests that the author is writing as an artist, a storyteller, who uses literary device and artifice. One must endeavor to distinguish what he intends to teach from the literary means employed."
K. Lewis (1997), On the Heresy of Literalism. "The history of American Christianity has been dominated by revivalism and Protestant evangelicalism, particularly in the South. As result, countless earnest Christians have come to rest in the assumption that the only way the truth of the Bible can be maintained is by claiming it to be literal truth. This is the belief that Scripture should be read as literally as possible in every respect, and especially wherever not to do so would seem to deny the power of God to operate apart from the laws of nature. Latter-day appeals to "Inerrancy" as a fighting principle insist upon this literalism, often appearing to bait both skeptical and more traditional contemporary minds. But is this heresy? In 1980 Episcopalian pastoral theologian, Urban T. Holmes observed flatly that "literalism is a modern heresy-perhaps the only heresy invented in modern times." But he did not proceed to argue the case. No one has. Heresy is traditionally understood to emerge within a community of faith when a legitimate point of belief is over-emphasized to the neglect of other equally legitimate, complementing, occasionally countering points of belief needed to make up the delicate balance of doctrines in an "orthodox" rule of faith. Heresy emerges as a truncating distortion of the faith. From the earliest times, Christian heresies have inflicted damage from within upon the Church's theologically ordered system of faith, constructed from the biblical testimony and crystallized in concise credal formulae. The heresy of literalism as such is a modern, post-scientific phenomenon."
Revd Dr Ernest Lucas (2007), Faraday Paper 11. "Scientists and engineers, often with little theological training, began to use biblical passages as a source of scientific information about the age of the earth and the origins of biological diversity, a different way of understanding the Bible from that practised in mainstream theology. One result is that today about half the population of the USA, a world leader in science and technology, adopts this modernist stance in their interpretation of Genesis, leading to predictable conflicts with the scientific community. Ironically, some anti-religious scientists also share the creationists' modernist stance towards interpreting Genesis. This paper argues that both sides in this sterile debate base their positions on a mishandling of the Hebrew narratives, failing to use standard methods of biblical interpretation which have been well established since the time of Augustine and the early Church Fathers."

So, from the early beginnings of the church up to the work of present-day theologians, prominent religious leaders and theologians explicitly, sometimes quite harshly, rejected the stereotypical Fundamentalist religious attitude, and argued for using the best available level of scientific knowledge and philosophical sophistication to test religious beliefs. Origen, Augustine, Saadia Gaon, Galileo and Calvin rejected a literal, pseudoscientific reading of the Genesis stories long before modern evolution-versus-creationism debates. The point I'd like to drive home is that this very traditional kind of theism sits very awkwardly with claims that theism / "real theism" is necessarily linked to creationism or anti-scientific thinking in general.

The Common Metaphysical Question

There's a difficult question that religion has to deal with, but so do naturalism, atheism, agnosticism, theism and any other religious and metaphysical stances: What lies behind the empirically observable universe? "Lies behind" has multiple senses here: "what else is there?", "on what does it depend?", "what is it about?" Let the empirically observable universe include cosmological and evolutionary processes, all possible empirical information, and the best possible scientific models based on objective observation and logical inference. The progress of science doesn't create a God-of-the-gaps by making this question go away; in contrast, the more scientific knowledge, the more the question is about. (Note that "metaphysical" doesn't refer to some kind of "supernatural physics" but to questions concerning all of existence and reality, or questions at a higher level of abstraction than, or at the level of the assumptions of, empirical science; for instance, the question whether such questions exist meaningfully.) Heidegger's fundamental question of metaphysics was "why are there beings at all instead of nothing", and regardless of what his beliefs about the answer turned out to be, he did clearly raise the question of what Being an sich is, as a separate kind of question from what the characteristics of beings, or laws governing beings, are. This "Common Metaphysical Question" arises very naturally: we observe and wonder: could there be things we aren't seeing? Do things exist we don't or even can't observe via objective, replicable methods? Could they be important nevertheless? What relationship is there between observable reality and all of reality?

We clearly have a strong tendency to ask this kind of question, regardless of our particular belief system, despite the fact that it's a very strange question, far outside our natural domain of finding things to eat, avoiding physical dangers, and so on. One response to this tension is to say that such questions therefore go beyond the limits of our reason and the best thing to do would be to not give them any attention. But our evolved cognitive capacities have let us understand far more about reality than the local natural environment that selected them. As said by physicist J. D. Barrow, "There are some who say that just because we use our minds to appreciate the order and complexity of the Universe around us that there is nothing more to that order than what is imposed by the human mind. That is a serious misjudgement. Were it true then we would expect to find our greatest and most reliable understanding of the world in the everyday events for which millions of years of natural selection have sharpened our wits and prepared our senses. And when we look towards the outer space of galaxies and black holes, or into the inner space of quarks and electrons, we should expect to find few resonances between our minds and the ways of these worlds. Natural selection requires no understanding of quarks and black holes for our survival and multiplication. And yet, we find these expectations turned upon their heads. The most precise and reliable knowledge we have about anything in the Universe is of events in a binary star system more than 3000 light years from our planet and in the sub-atomic world of electrons and light rays, where it is accurate to better than nine decimal places." So the fact that we can speculatively trace the capacity to ask the religious question back to things like tigers hiding in the jungle doesn't logically imply that extending the use of that capacity is necessarily nothing but a malfunction. The problem does remain, however - we have to find appropriate ways to critically evaluate our answers to the question.

It may be worth noting that scientists do not uniformly consider any answer to the question other than "nothing", or any response beyond "the question is nonsense", to be opposed to science. Some quotes illustrating this point follow, which of course don't imply any specific kind of religiosity on the part of the quoted; the argument here is only that the type of metaphysical questions and arguments underlying a theistic worldview are apparently not always viewed as not worth attention or as something to be effectively considered taboo. The quotes also provide some interesting responses to the Common Metaphysical Question - perhaps more interesting responses than the "un-ask the question" stance. It's also interesting to see that these responses aren't far away from the very traditional theistic thinking we saw above.

Gottfried Leibniz, Memoir for Enlightened Persons of Good Intention (1690), Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) and Dialogue (1677). "As for me, I put forward the great principle of metaphysics as well as of morality, that the world is governed by the most perfect intelligence which is possible, which means that one must consider it as a universal monarchy whose head is all-powerful and sovereignly wise, and whose subjects are all minds, that is, substances capable of relations or society with God; and that all the rest is only the instrument of the glory of God and of the felicity of minds, and that as a result the entire universe is made for minds. [...] Now it is clear, first of all, that the created substances depend on God, who preserves them and indeed even produces them continually by a kind of emanation, as we produce our thoughts. [...] When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made."
Albert Einstein, On Science and Religion (1940), letter to Maurice Solovine (1952), cablegram reply to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (referenced in Schilpp (1988); credit for finding the reference to Arnold V. Lesikar). "I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people 'can' or 'cannot' observe. One would have to say 'only what we observe exists,' which is obviously false.' [...] You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or an eternal mystery. Well a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in anyway. One could (yes one should) expect the world to be subjected to law only to the extent that we order it through our intelligence. Ordering of this kind would be like the alphabetical ordering of the words of a language. By contrast, the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for instance, is wholly different. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the "miracle" which is being constantly re-enforced as our knowledge expands. [...] I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1954). Another non-atheistic and non-Fundamentalist view similar to Spinoza's God. "A superior survey of the world must be launched, unfettered by myth and the whole tradition: universal knowledge, absolutely free from prejudice, of the world and man, ultimately recognizing in the world its inherent reason and teleology and its highest principle, God."
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1990). Note how Leibniz' or St. John of Damascus' concept of an "emanating" rather than "setting-up" Creator could be a potential answer to his question about a place for a creator even in a universe without beginning or end. "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? [...] Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? [...] Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?"
John D. Barrow again. "We see now how it is possible for a Universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws - perhaps just one law - that are symmetrical and intelligible, laws which govern the most remarkable things in our Universe - populations of elementary "particles" that are everywhere perfectly identical. It is to this simple and beautiful world behind the appearances, where the lawfulness of Nature is most elegantly and completely revealed, that physicists look to find the hallmark of the Universe. Everyone else looks at the outcomes of these laws. The outcomes are often complicated, hard to understand, and of great significance - they even include ourselves - but the true simplicity and symmetry of the Universe is to be found in the things that are not seen. Most remarkable of all, we find that there are mathematical equations, little squiggles on pieces of paper, that tell us how whole Universes behave. For there is a logic larger than Universes that is the more surprising because we can understand a meaningful part of it and thereby share in its appreciation."
Ken Miller, Finding Darwin's God (2000). Ken Miller has a great talk, arguing as a theist against intelligent design, here. "Each of the great Western monotheistic traditions sees God as truth, love, and knowledge. This should mean that each and every increase in our understanding of the natural world is a step toward God and not, as many people assume, a step away. If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us. As a scientist and as a Christian, that is exactly what I believe. True knowledge comes only from a combination of faith and reason. As more than one scientist has said, the truly remarkable thing about the world is that it actually does make sense. The parts fit, the molecules interact, the darn thing works. To people of faith, what evolution says is that nature is complete. Their God fashioned a material world in which truly free and independent beings could evolve. He got it right the very first time."
Martin Rees: "Let me say that I don't see any conflict between science and religion. I go to church as many other scientists do. I share with most religious people a sense of mystery and wonder at the universe and I want to participate in religious ritual and practices because they're something that all humans can share."

So, it doesn't seem true that significant scientific expertise automatically implies a philosophically materialist belief system or a rejection of the value of asking the Common Metaphysical Question. In contrast, it could be argued that meaningfully exploring the Common Metaphysical Question requires a good understanding of both science and religion, since the question sits on the edge of both domains.

Science versus religion

This section is about the relationship - conflict? - between science and religion. So, first off, to start defining terms: What's science? I'd describe it as a system of generating reliable beliefs, with at its core a method of evaluating claims. The method is usually described in terms of falsification: for any scientific claim, independent critics must attempt to demonstrate that it is false, and continued failure to falsify a claim means the claim is strong. It must however be possible to falsify the claim if it were false: coming up with an unfalsifiable claim, a claim that we cannot adequately test, puts you outside the scientific method. In the scientific context, falsifying evidence must be provided via objective (i.e., intersubjective - it can't be something only you can observe) and replicable observations or experiments. For most of the points made in this text however, only the general demand for some kind of objective evidence is critical. Falsified claims are either replaced or adapted to deal with the criticism, and so progress is made: claims become able to withstand more and more criticism. The method leads to and defines a body of results - the scientific literature - and is applied by a group of professionals in a social setting - the scientific community. However, science is not an ideology or a total world view. No matter how focused a broader world view like ideological naturalism or logical positivism is on science, it itself is not scientific: it does not apply the scientific method, in particular not to itself as a whole (note that many claims associated with naturalism - e.g. that science is extremely useful and important - can be tested, but the truth of such claims are not at all specific evidence for naturalism being uniquely reasonable; other worldviews are perfectly compatible with such claims). To put it even more strongly, such a worldview is not only not scientific - being scientific is simply not a characteristic of worldviews in general - but either inconsistent or unjustified by its own principles. This realization led to, for instance, Popperian ideas about metascience displacing positivist attempts at expanding science into a worldview.

Science as it exists in reality is of course not perfect, and the scientific process is not completed, and perhaps it never will be. But however much we criticize scientific culture, we have to consider what we imagine might replace it. OK, so academia is corrupt to its core of grants, feudal structures, and academic publishing - do we therefore just place our trust in some wise-sounding authority figure's opinion? Do we stop caring about providing evidence for statements? Do we replace attempts to quantify certainty with how intuitively convincing a story sounds?

But the sociology of science, however interesting and important, isn't relevant to the argument I hope to make here: We can assume that the science I'm talking about is absolutely, 100% ideal. The point is that even given an ideal state of science, there are logical, inherent limitations to where we can apply this tool, however powerful it is. Science by definition applies to that part of reality about which scientifically falsifiable claims can be made, i.e. empirical reality. Recall that the Common Metaphysical Question is: what else is there? The scientific method makes no claim about empirical reality being all of reality. Nothing about the fact that science exists, or any logical implications of the rules developed to do it, or the fact that the rules work well in their context implies that unfalsifiable statements are untrue or meaningless: they are simply outside science. The scientific method cannot be applied to them. All this means is that we need to involve other grounds for justification and criticism - or simply give up. Either way, pure science remains neutral on the matter.

The prime example of a phenomenon that is inherently outside the limits of empirical science is the purely subjective component of experience, or qualia. No matter how well we understand the brain and neural information processing, no matter how many fascinating data we can gather concerning what is observable about the mind, we cannot objectively observe that purely subjective aspect of experience: there is a perfect symmetry involved that renders it invisible to science. Yet the inherent subjectivity of our consciousness does exist, and is maybe the most important factor in our lives. This is at least highly remarkable. One response to this would be to obfuscate everything about the problem of qualia that doesn't fit a certain worldview, which therefore fails to incorporate an essential aspect of reality.

A point where the boundaries between science and religion could be seen to start converging is the rising hierarchy of explanations that science tends to follow, the elegant process with the maybe slightly unfortunate label of "reductionism". Explanations don't become more and more complex, isolated and particular, but more and more abstract, symmetrical and elegant; while still being applicable to a wide range of specific cases. The idea of an Ultimate Principle at the top of this hierarchy of explanations is conceptually close to the non-physical, transcendent God of real-life theism (as opposed to an anthropomorphic "magical engineer" style designer). The God of science could be defined as the convergence of causality via decomposition. There would still be a non-scientific step from inferring such a Principle and finding it to be scientifically satisfying, to finding it spiritually satisfying - would or could you worship it? Could it somehow be associated with feelings of love and beauty? Could one say that any person or state exhibits the Principle more "purely" than anything else in the universe? Nevertheless, a non-anthropomorphic form of theism seems a quite natural point to which the scientific process alone might lead, and at least a complementary part of a broader worldview.

Alternatively, one could think there's an inherent conflict between the scepticism and truth-seeking of science and the false confidence and delusionality of religion. I think anyone who's spent time in religious environments has had negative experiences in line with the latter depiction. In contrast, for example, the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said "Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters." And indeed, religious doubt surely exists just as much as religious fanaticism. This illustrates the problem with generalizations about religion: They become stereotypes that ignore some critical part of the complexity. I'd like to suggest, as a very basic model of religious variation, that there are two distinct and opposing kinds of religion: let's label them "tribal-dogmatic" and "experiential-transformative". If these styles of religious were to be different enough from each other, then what's true for one kind may have no implications for the other. In this model, the tribal style treats God as a thing in the universe, with definite characteristics and causal relationships with other objects in the universe. In contrast, the experiential style treats God as the power behind a transformative experience, considered to be unexpressable at least to a very large extent, and to transcend physical reality. The experiential God is believed to act "from within" the fabric of reality itself in some way. The two types of religion are described for example by Martin Buber in I and Thou as follows. "The eternal Thou can by its nature not become It; for by its nature it cannot be established in measure and bounds, not even in the measure of the immeasurable, or the bounds of boundless being; for by its nature it cannot be understood as a sum of quantities, not even as an infinite sum of quantities raised to a transcendental level; for it can be found neither in nor out of the world; for it cannot be experienced, or thought; for we miss Him, Him who is, if we say 'I believe, that He is' - 'He' is also a metaphor, but 'Thou' is not. [...] Man desires to possess God; he desires a continuity in space and time of possession of God. He is not content with the inexpressible confirmation of meaning, but wants to see this confirmation stretched out as something that can be continually taken up and handled, a continuum unbroken in space and time that insures his life at every point and every moment."

The tribal-dogmatic style is, I assume, amply-known from e.g. American culture wars (although in reality most believers are presumably somewhere on a continuum between the two types) or various kinds of violent religious extremism. This style, in its most extreme form, will indeed require a shared blind acceptance of some source of authority, regardless of reason. However, nothing in the other, experiential-transformative style obligates Christians to, for instance, treat creation myths as literal truths about physical reality. In general, insistence that Christians "must" believe certain things that have no justification seems to be based on wanting to treat all religion as the tribal-dogmatic type. Since the criticisms of the tribal-dogmatic style will be well-known and I'll return to some of the problems associated with it later, I'd like to present some points that focus on implications of the experiential-transformative perspective.

Religious faith can't be reduced to solely mean 'belief without proof'. 'To have faith' in at least one religious perspective refers to an engagement with the transformative, relational process of religion; a decision to be open to changes that might occur, an affinity to what is perceived as the driving force behind it, and convictions that may involve some form of personal, subjectively accessible evidence.
Russell's teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, invisible pink unicorns and so on have been used to criticize religious faith. Such examples provide excellent thought experiments that show that the lack of disproof of something isn't proof it exists; this is a perfectly valid logical point. However, (1) they are not associated with the cross-cultural transformative experience of religion, (2) they are presented as objects in the universe, and (3) they are by design characterized by specific absurd or contradictory combinations of characteristics that do violate empirical knowledge - we know where teapots come from, and we know that that makes it implausible for one to float around Jupiter. Concerning the second mismatch between the Flying Teapot and God, a possibly useful analogy for how the experiential God would "exist" is the way logical or mathematical truths "exist": they do not exist as physical objects; they are true independent of location; nothing in the physical universe can violate them; they cannot die or decay; they are discovered using the mind, and considered to have inherent beauty and value. So, where the Flying Teapot analogies might overstep into assuming their absurdity characterizes anything non-observable, it's worth considering that we already have an accepted kind of non-empirical existence that isn't inherently absurd.
Experiential-transformative religion is not aimed at explaining processes or predicting events in the empirical world. It provides different kinds of benefits: it adds a unique kind of meaning to the observable universe; it changes how people live their lives; it opens up a broader perception of reality; it cultivates ideals and motivations that would not arise from exclusively within-science considerations; it provides hints of something truly worth worshipping and adapting to.

So while some forms of religion are anti-scientific, others are simply concerned with different aspects of reality, or different relationships with reality than that of explanation. This latter style fits to some extent with Gould's well-known non-overlapping magisteria approach, or NOMA. Criticism of NOMA have been aimed at demanding to know the precise limits of the domains, which of course is a very weak counterargument: perhaps the domains should be defined by family resemblance, perhaps the line may be blurred, and perhaps the characteristic of empirical falsification provides sufficient delineation. These are details to be worked out, and perhaps to let evolve over time, not fatal flaws of the approach. I'm more critical of the emphasis on the role of making authoritative statements - is that really the aim of religion? Further, a more fundamental criticism is that the relationship between science and religion, depending on what kind of religion we're talking about, can be far more interesting than simply separation. From a metaphysical perspective, the scientific world is conceptually permeated by, grounded in and dependent on a deeper reality, which could be viewed from a religious perspective; or, from the relational perspective of e.g. Martin Buber, the doing of science has the potential to be a recreation of the I-Thou meeting in a certain aspect of daily life. But Gould's approach is of course at least pragmatically helpful in setting boundaries.

In a sense, scientific research is one particular way of talking to reality. We "ask" an experiment, and reality "answers" data (and, importantly, it answers independent observers the same way). Simple perception is an example of a non-scientific kind of communication: empirical reality talks to us via our perceptual systems. Philosophical reflection lets us probe the logical relations and possibilities of reality, using intellectual tools to build on existing scientific knowledge. Religions, of course, accept a special kind of communication: revelation. If non-empirical reality exists, it by definition has to talk to us via a route "around" science. As argued above, the existence and success of science don't imply that such communication cannot exist. It only means we have a difficult, or at least a different, job: we don't have objective demonstrability to help us evaluate revelations in a scientific sense. So how do we avoid fallacies and charlatans when leaving the boundaries of science? Well, scientific research isn't the only rational human activity or intellectual context, as mathematics, philosophy (e.g., philosophy of science) and hopefully normal daily life show. Reason has been applied by the religious to find ways to evaluate and interpret what might be some form of revelation. For instance, the 10th century Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon - who of course knew nothing of evolution or the age of the Earth and indeed accepted that creation was an event only a few thousand years past, but nevertheless rejected a literal reading of the creation stories - formulated seven criteria for evaluating claims, and stated these must also be applied to Scripture. "So, then, if we seek to establish the truth in the domain of knowledge obtained by logical inference, we must guard it against the above-mentioned five types of vitiating factors. We must, namely, make certain (a) that there is no other means than the theory in question of sustaining the truth of what is perceived with the senses, not (b) any other method of upholding what is intuitively apprehended by reason. Furthermore (c) it must not invalidate any other accepted fact, nor (d) must one part of it contradict another, let alone (e) that a theory be adopted that is worse than the one rejected. All the precautions are to be taken in addition to exercising, in the determination of the sense percepts and the rational concepts, such expert care as we have outlined before. Add to these the quality of perseverance until the process of reasoning has been completed, and we have a total of seven points that must be observed to make possible for us the accurate emergence of the truth. Should, therefore, someone come to us with an allegation in the realm of inferential knowledge, we would test his thesis by means of these seven criteria. If, upon being rubbed by their touchstone and weighed by their balance, it turns out to be correct as well as acceptable, we shall make use of it. Similarly also must we proceed with the subject matters of authentic tradition - I mean the books of prophecy." One might or might not agree with Saadia Gaon's specific approach or assumptions - we have the benefit of centuries of progress after all - but the point I'd like to make is this: Religious thinkers have always been aware of the difficulties of beliefs about the non-empirical world. People have attempted to construct rational models of full reality - the physical and the non-physical - in the face of significant uncertainty, but not total uncertainty. For instance, at the very least, we know that reality is such that it allows things like life, choice and religious experience to exist. So there are clues to use - which can be done more or less rationally - to build models of full reality which can be tested in their own way, against things like coherence, elegance, our own responses to the models and consistency with our - maybe subjective - experiences.

The 'religious method' underlying this process of model building is iterative, just like the scientific method is iterative. Religious beliefs influence interpretations of experience and Scripture, but also influence one's behaviour, cognition, emotion; one's point of view in the broadest sense. These effects, the experience of what it means to have faith, are interpreted as best possible within the current belief system and used to modify it. In other words, religious beliefs are modified iteratively, based on experience and evidence - so while not a scientific process, not totally dissimilar either. Beliefs from this perspective are like experimental "belief acts" or experiments, based on the current set of beliefs, to be critically evaluated and adjusted in a search for convergence. In Marrett's terms, religion has to be danced to be understood. In more traditional theological terms, arguably the central belief of Christianity is the existence of a Kingdom of God: a spiritual state of being, described extensively but metaphorically in the Gospels. The religious method can be described as the experience of, and the increasing achievement of, or the reduction in deviations from, that state. Note that this process involves nothing supernatural in a science-violating sense: the process simply uses a broader range of modalities and sources of evidence than permissible, or necessary, in science. In consequence, non-Fundamentalist religious understanding knows that it always reflects uncertainty, subjectivity and limitation, while still keeping open the possibility that an objective limit exists. Nevertheless, the claims of Fundamentalism to objectively know absolute metaphysical truth have no justification whatsoever from the point of view of this kind of religion - it's not "gateway drug" situation.

So we can have a non-Fundamentalist kind of theistic belief that's driven by subjective reasons to believe, together with objective constraining tests that the content of beliefs do not violate science or reason. There's not necessarily a slippery slope from theistic belief that interprets scientific knowledge to superstition that violates scientific knowledge. That seems to me to provide a hard division between religious styles that are and aren't science-compatible.

Defining God

The arguments and presentation of non-Fundamentalist theism so far have hopefully cleared the ground for considering theistic answers to the Common Metaphysical Question. Such answers form models of reality.

It's maybe worth briefly considering what models are; this will also be helpful in evaluating claims about what is or is not "probable" about religious faiths. Quantitative models specify a set of mathematical relationships with a finite number of parameters, while reality is considered to have infinite parameters, or at least far more than any useful model. The numerical values of such models are mapped to reality: the model might describe the distance between astronomical objects, or the speed with which something falls, and so on. Every such model is an approximation that "fits the data", or more generally "explains the evidence". Qualitative models are a little harder to define: other relationships, especially causal ones, than mathematical ones are involved, and no numerical values are directly produced. Such models might involve, for instance, expectations in social settings: you expect someone to respond to something you say in a certain way; you might relate that response to an empathic sequence of cognitive, emotional and motivational steps. If the response you get is unexpected, you'd change some aspects of the model - maybe the person has a different motivation after all - until the responses become predictable. Metaphysical models might be compared based on logical and conceptual relationships, or more subjectively on satisfaction and elegance, producing ranked world views. Religious models might produce subjective experience and subjectively evaluated states as predictions, together with metaphysical aspects. Engaging in religious modelling would be the "danced out" religion of Marett: one evaluates the dance. But the characteristic of fitting the evidence remains in all cases; the nature of the evidence just changes.

So: models always exist relative to a background of uncertainty and to other models. It isn't sufficient to think just in terms of true/false propositions that you can or can't prove. The nature of models is: you gain elegance and usefulness, at the cost of having to accept a more nuanced kind of evaluation. So with that in mind, let's go back to the specific case of religious models.

If a model is to contain God, we have to define what we mean by the term "God". But what kind of definition is sufficient, and even possible? Compare a primitive model of disease, in which the existence of viruses and bacteria are yet unknown, but certain effects of those unknown causes can already be taken advantage of. "Disease" is then defined abstractly as "that which makes us sick and spreads via close contact or bodily fluids." Or a driver could model the mechanisms of his or her car as "whatever makes it work so that it goes faster when I press the accelerator," and the essential component of the mode would be to recognize when things stop working and the car should be taken to a garage. These are "such that" or "that which" definitions, which I call abstract or implicit definitions. You have something observed, and you define something as that which caused it; or that which is such that the experience was what it was. Once you have that implicit target, you can try to learn more about it, but even knowing nothing about what the cause is doesn't prevent you from inferring it exists from what it does. Questions tend to become "what is it?", rather than "does it exist?"

An example of an implicit definition of a theistic God is:

that on which the existence of objective, empirical reality ultimately depends, such that it is the reason for our universe being physically lawful, mathematically describable, having such organizational properties that life arises, and containing the phenomenon of consciousness; and such that it transcends the empirical universe; that is, such that it is expressed by, but not identifiable with, the essence of Nature;
that which is felt (perhaps indirectly) as a loving Presence during subjective religious experiences; such that it explains the personal transformations and subjective states associated with certain religious beliefs or experiences.

"God exists" means that these indirect definitions refer to the same thing, which we label "God".

Note the two sides to this definition of God: on the one hand, an objective Ultimate Principle, Source, Ground of Being, etc, underlying lawfulness and consciousness; and on the other, the subjective, personal side that makes faith in such a God meaningful. The components of the implicit definition pose interesting questions separately, but parsimony comes into play in their combination. For instance, subjective religious experiences involve individuals feeling what they perceive as a divine, transcendent Presence or encounter of some kind: but what is it that is felt? Is there something more than random firings of temporal lobe neurons? Obviously such neurons must fire, since our brains work that way, but is that narrow explanation the most useful, most expressive model?

The essence of the theistic position, it seems to me, is that the best, most elegant model of reality as we experience it is that the cause of the empirical universe allowing religious experiences is also what those experiences are ultimately of; that the fact that the experiences result via empirical neurocognitive relationships with a certain kind of changing behaviour fits with how the Presence or encounter of religious experiences is experienced; and that the transformation itself is a way in which the cause continues to affect empirical reality that pushes it towards what was experienced. That is, the argument is that there is a parsimonious model to consider, in which all the components converge onto one thing. The experience that believers assign to God - the experience described in terms of pure love and beauty, ultimate meaning, and so on - could be argued to be just the way you'd expect us to respond to the theistic (e.g., Spinozan) God, analogously to recognizing the beauty of a mathematical proof or feeling awe at a scientific view of the universe.

(It may be worth noting here that one argument against the potential rationality of religious faith is that a religious person is atheist in respect to "all other gods" except the one he or she happens to believe in. But at least some different beliefs could be reasonably seen more like different specific models of God than as believing in different gods. In line with this, there are commonalities in people's understanding of God and their response to God over the world and over religions. For instance, the dissolution of ego is hardly very different from dying to the flesh, and we constantly see the idea of becoming one or harmonized in some way with whatever-we-call-that-ineffable-transcendent-Presence.)

If we define and model a (form of a) theistic God in this way, does that address some of the problems arising from characteristics that are typically assigned to God? For instance, one claim is that "God" is too complex an answer to the universe. However, this fails to acknowledge that theism can incorporate the general fact that complexity can arise from simplicity E.g., in the well-known Game of Life simulation, complex patterns and behavior arise from very simple rules. J. D. Barrow points out how the complex universe can be explained by simple rules: "We see now how it is possible for a Universe that displays unending complexity and exquisite structure to be governed by a few simple laws - perhaps just one law - that are symmetrical and intelligible..." The complexity argument is only valid for an anthropomorphic "magical engineer / sky wizard" kind of God, i.e., a straw man when considering the ideas presented above. Throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, God has always been considered as something more than and radically different from physical creatures like us. The idea of a theistic Creator is quite close to a supremely necessary and elegant law, or something beyond even the concepts of laws - whatever underlies such laws themselves. We would always only experience such a God via some medium, which of course is the role of Christ and the Spirit in Christian theology. Note that we can experience beauty and awe in e.g. the context of mathematics and cosmology, which do not contain emotions like awe themselves; so even if God is non-anthropomorphic and above emotions Himself, the human response to God could consistently and meaningfully involve similar experiences and emotional translations. We just need to remember that we're unavoidably experiencing God from a human perspective, and not the "pure" God (which is, notably, fully in line with traditional sensibilities). Another argument is that of infinite backwards causality: what good is a Creator as an explanation, since then we have to explain the Creator? The counterargument here is two-fold. First, the theistic model gets its parsimony from being a common explanation to multiple objective and subjective "data points"; it doesn't claim to explain the universe in a mechanistic sense at all, which is the job of science. Second, to end an infinite regression, we need to break out of the causality of the empirical universe: we need any First Cause to be transcendent in some way, to no longer be something within rules of the physical universe that we want to explain. That is, we already knew we need something that doesn't need a cause in the way observable physical phenomena do. Since a transcendent God fulfils that requirement, the First Cause problem supports rather than contradicts a theistic model, although not necessarily uniquely.

The problem of evil

Any version of the idea of a loving God with the power to create the universe seems to contradict the suffering we can observe in the world. Why would a powerful, loving God allow suffering? My main argument that this is not, in fact, a good argument for atheism is that it's quite conceivable that suffering is a necessary evil for us to exist in a recognizable form. If suffering were not allowed in our universe, our universe would not be our universe and so, effectively, it and we would not exist - we'd be destroyed to save us from ourselves. Our existence as life forms is fundamentally bound together with the same features of reality that imply the existence of suffering: The complexity, lawfulness, consistence, and chaos that lead to evolution, life and sentience also lead to disease, decay and conflict. So there's a Gestalt switch one could undergo that would re-evaluate the tolerance of suffering as an act of mercy, not sadism. This, surprisingly, does not seem to be a well-known response to the problem of evil, yet it can be found reasonably directly (given that it's a parable) in the Gospels, in Matthew 13: 24-30: The Wheat and Tares: "Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn."

One response to the problem of evil that I do think fails is the "free will defense", at least in its simplest form: If God would prevent us from doing evil, it would interfere with His plan for us to be free beings. But, very obviously, not all suffering stems from the exertion of human will and the whole idea of free will as something outside natural causality is flawed from a basic modern understanding of human behavior and decision making (which I'd argue should be explicitly or implicitly based on the ideas in Wiener's Cybernetics). There is no conflict between human goal-directed behaviour - i.e., choice - and deterministic processes. Control systems exist by virtue of causal processes! It doesn't take away their emergent property of control, or ability to work towards an equilibrium, or endogenously motivated behaviour, or, in other words, voluntary choice or "free will"; and that doesn't take away the determinism of the component processes. To coin a phrase: this is the Free Will-versus-causality fallacy: there is no "versus". Free Will is built by causality. But in a modified form, the argument becomes a special case of the general "necessary evil" argument - without causality and a complex but consistent, predictable universe, we indeed also wouldn't have free will, but it would just be one of many things we wouldn't have.

Multiversal mercy is an idea closely linked to, but expanding upon, the "necessary evil" solution to the problem of evil. Imagine, slightly anthropomorphically, a God who would not tolerate suffering, hovering above a multiverse. That God would instantly delete, or prune away, every universe with suffering: we wouldn't even have had the chance to suffer. The cost is that we wouldn't exist at all. The multiversal mercy answer to the problem of suffering is that God allows possibly many suffering universes to exist because in the end, from the infinite perspective, their existence will be worth it. It's an act of mercy we aren't snuffed out to remove the evil and suffering in which we're bound up, as in the Parable of the Wheat and Tares. The theistic answer to the problem of evil is that whether our very existence is justified will be determined by where it eventually ends, as a stable state, not the route via which it gets there.

This leads to the ancient question about the relationship between "God" and "goodness". Our intuitive as well as scientific understanding of goodness leads us to a kind of social symmetry, or a game theoretical kernel: if we treat each other as equals, we should be able to find a set of behavioral rules that lead to a fair balance. And because the balance is fair, it will tend to be stable: if one player acts unfairly, the other players will acquire a motivation to collaborate against him. If, as above, we consider where creation is headed, it will have to be towards such a stable state: unstable states will eventually fall and be replaced, until a supremely stable social state is achieved. This must be balanced, must involve mutual respect: players will "love their neighbor as themselves". If we judge the Creator by the end-point of His creation, this end-state is what matters: and it's what we'd already intuitively call "good". Therefore, "God is good" is a meaningful and possibly true proposition, given the existence of a God expressed by Nature's endpoint.

Eternal life

I'd like to speculate very briefly on consciousness and the idea of eternal life, with a simple thought experiment. Imagine looking out of a window at a mountain. Now imagine someone else, many years later, looking out of the same window at the same mountain. Under reasonably mild assumptions, there would be very strong similarities between the conscious experience of you and that other person - spanning time, perhaps beyond your own lifetime. In a sense, your states of consciousness at those moments, in that respect, are the same thing. So after your death, this moment of your consciousness is copied, re-incarnated if you will, in this other person. What, then, about more complex or more personal states? The second person could have a more or less similar emotional response to the view; could be looking out of the window for more or less similar reasons; could have more or less similar memory structures related to the experience. So there's a scale of similarity of consciousness that could be achieved.

My impression is that the traditional religious concept of "life everlasting" is far less like "angels on clouds" than something like a state of consciousness that would exist in a converged state of the universe, as mentioned above in the problem-of-evil response. For the state to converge, it must be stable, and if it's to contain conscious life, it must be amenable to life's stable existence. Hence, there wouldn't be things in that state that would lead to self-annihilating wars, for instance. What kind of personalities would need to populate that living-yet-stable universe for that to be the case? What kind of conscious experiences would they have? Christianity would suggest that we'd need Christ-like personalities: extreme, individually irrational altruism. So to the extent that individuals can achieve that personality, that state of experiencing, now, their experiences will be the same as those of their future brothers-and-sisters-in-mind. We could say that we've found a way for our consciousness to have, to partake in, that life everlasting, without having to make claims about stereotypical and problematic life-after-death scenarios.

The other side of life everlasting is hell. The stereotypical belief is that Christianity asserts something like this: God judges people on whether they believe some set of theological statements, and tortures those who don't believe in those statements for eternity after they die. But this strange view contradicts traditional religious sources. The Bible, in the first place, talks about the afterlife in metaphors that contradict each other as soon as taken literally; it often talks about destruction rather than torture; and it reserves whatever these metaphors refer to for the uncharitable; the unloving; the hypocrites. The parable of the sheep and the goats isn't unknown, but its point seems to be frequently ignored. Matthew 25:31-46. The Sheep and the Goats: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.' Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.' They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.' Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." It's conspicuous that what the "goats" did wrong, according to just about the most authoritative source in Christianity, was failing to care for their neighbor in real-life, practical ways - not failing to submit to some religious authority or to affirm some dogma.

Conclusion

So, if we take all the anti-scientific stuff out of religion, what's left of it? I hope that this text has shown at least a possibility that what we're left with isn't necessarily no-religion, but maybe better religion. That kind of religion could be expressed by the final quote of this text, from John's first letter, 1 John 4: 7 - 8: "Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." We're so familiar with this idea it's maybe lost how, at the very least, fascinatingly bizarre it is! This presents a vision of an active, lived-out form of faith that connects ontology with a certain kind of extreme altruism, for which it seems trivially obvious that it's about something different from, and potentially complementary to, the kind of value offered by science.