Michael Keller

Do scientists believe in God?

14 03 2012

One of the common arguments against belief in God is that the majority of scientists in the world do not believe in a higher power. If they don’t believe in a deity then why do we? If scientists are smart, and they don’t believe in God, why do we?

A few years ago, though, a significant major Pew Study revealed that most American scientists (51%) believe in some form of higher power deity. While this percentage is far lower than most average Americans, the study does note some very interesting data points. For instance, this exact study was done with the same questions back in a 1914 survey as well as in 1996. While American culture has become less influenced by Judeo-Christian values, surprisingly American scientists answered almost the same way as their 1914 counterparts. In other words, in the academic scientific world, there has not been an increasing secular drive among America’s scientific community. This is important to highlight because all that has increased in recent years then is the rhetoric of those who would like to create a wedge among the scientific and theistic communities.

However, the Pew Research Poll shows a trend that younger scientists are actually more likely to believe in God than their older brethren. This shows that increasingly the younger generation is able to fuse a belief in the scientific physical world with a transcendent metaphysical worldview. In general, we are watching this movement worldwide where a new emphasis on the “spiritual” is not necessarily at odds with “physical” world.

So instead of increasing secularization within the American scientific community, we are seeing, at the very least a remarkable stabilization of opinion towards God, and perhaps even an increase in compatibility between theistic and scientific communities.

How can this be? Simply put, the scientific world studies and tests the physical world and therefore does a great job of telling us “what is.” What science cannot do is tell us “what ought to be.” The reason for this is that the moment you move from “what is” to “what ought to be” you have moved from “fact” to “value.” This is not a slight on science, just the limitation of observation. The famous philosopher legal scholar Stanley Fish has a great article about this. He says, “While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it.” The reason for this is that the world of “ought” is filled with values, assumptions, presuppositions, and, frankly, opinion.

The spiritual world can be defined a lot of different ways, but at the very least it is the realm where we find values and the reasons for what ought things to look like. It strives to give meaning and purpose, all out of assumptions and presuppositions. It is because of this divide that perhaps we are seeing a new coexisting synergy between science and faith that will likely increase in the coming years

Michael Keller

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: belief, faith, God, Naturalism, religion, science, theism, universe
Categories : Tough Questions

Is Doubt the Enemy of Faith?

25 01 2012

Doubt gets a bad rap. We live in a world where we are not supposed to doubt, it is unhealthy—bad. Doubts, though, are like confrontations, which also have a bad rap. However, it is in confrontations that change can happen. Sometimes my wife needs to confront me, and at that point there is a back and forth until eventually one of us realizes our error (or often we both do) and we change. Today—we are so afraid of confrontations—we don’t have them. In a Facebook generation we just unfriend, ignore or avoid—but then we are depriving ourselves and others of possibly growing.

Doubts are the same way. We often are afraid of them—or we don’t deal with them—but then we never grow. In fact they may actually help. How do I know? Look at the famous, but often misunderstood biblical story of Doubting Thomas often used to illustrate how it is wrong to doubt. It can be found at the end of the Book of John.

What does Jesus do when he approaches Thomas here? Two things: First, he calls him out for doubting clear evidence—the other apostles eyewitness accounts. Most people highlight this aspect of the story. However, the second thing Jesus does is actually gives into the demands of Thomas! Thomas demands to see Jesus, his pierced hands and side, and then Jesus—after rebuking Thomas, actually gives him exactly what he demands. Why would he do that?

Jesus is trying to keep Thomas, as well as the listener from falling into one of two camps prevalent in ancient and modern culture. The first camp can be called the blind faith camp. This group of people thinks doubts are the enemy of faith. That blind faith camp never questions their faith, never ask hard questions, and never seeks answers for when doubts rise up. They say that the definition of faith, is you don’t know, so stop trying to ask questions and just believe. There is almost a fear if that if you do ask questions then you will lose your faith.

The second camp out there is what I call the persistent cynicism camp. These are individuals who try to poke holes in everything and mock all truth statements, and undermine all claims of purpose. I know these people exist because I was one of them. Whose to say what is true? What is true for you is true for you, but what is true for me is true for me. In some respects these people are committed to the belief that there is no belief—there is nothing else out there.

Through his actions, Jesus wants to avoid both extremes. Notice he rebukes Thomas not for doubting in general—but for doubting clear evidence from his friends. In other words, he was in the
persistent cynicism camp. He was not seeking or trying to find answers, he made a blanket statement and he was not going to budge. However, on the other hand—Jesus actually gives into his demands, and validates and even answers Thomas’ demands. So it seems, from a fresh reading of the passage, doubts are not necessarily the enemy of faith, only if they stay in a persistent state of cynicism.

In fact, they may actually boost a faith/trust paradigm. How does Thomas respond after Jesus shows him the evidence? All the gospels have Jesus trying to show others who he really is, but the one person who confesses Jesus’ full nature is Thomas! No other human being had a higher view of Jesus than Thomas. In verse 28 he says, “My Lord and My God.” This is a personal expression of intimate relationship that is accomplished through processing doubts. So use them, search them, and build off them.

Michael Keller

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: Christianity, doubt, Doubting Thomas, faith, Jesus, religion, skepticism
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Was John Stuart Mill Wrong?

23 11 2011

Ever heard of John Stuart Mill’s famous Harm Principle? Maybe you don’t recognize Mill’s name, but my guess is that you hear this principle really often. In his treatise On Liberty Mill says, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” This principle has been absorbed into the modern psyche as, “You can do whatever you want to do in life as long as it does not hurt other people.” Today this philosophy ends up being the defining moral assumption of college students. I often hear from students here in New York that they are free to do as they please as long as they do not injure others. What I do in the privacy of my own home or with people that are consenting adults doesn’t matter to people who aren’t being directly affected by my behavior. So what if I eat what I want to eat, or act the way I want to act? If it doesn’t harm others, why do people care?

College students like the harm principle because it professes to be self-evident. This principle suggests that we can all see what is good and bad equally, and therefore, we need no particular history, heritage, or religious assumption to navigate moral choices. This was John Stuart Mill’s whole premise: we can be free from religious or social norms that bind us to a particular moral structure, because truth and morality are self-evident and common in all humans.

The principle actually works quite well until we realize that we all mean different things when it comes to “harming others.” What one person defines as harm may be rejected by another. One college student thinks looking at pornography in his dorm room does no harm to others, while another individual will insist that, in fact, it does do harm because it changes the viewer’s attitude towards the opposite sex by objectifying and commercializing the human body. The way you eat does no harm to others, until your weight cause healthcare problems that the state and those who pay taxes to it have to support. Our simple individualistic actions end up being a lot more complex then with thought. Whose definition of harm do we go by? Who gets to say what it means to hurt others? In other words, what is supposed to be self-evident ends up not being so clear after all. Not only are our actions more complex then we tend to believe, but our ability to agree on what harms society is also suspect.

What is one to do? Clearly morality and truth are not as self-evident and obvious as we once thought. While it seems simple enough—do the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people, and do the least amount of harm as possible to others—this is not so simple. Multiculturalism—the idea that cultures can co-exist next to each other and be promoted equally is an offshoot of this principle. World leaders today agree (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9s5zmOuVmc) it hasn’t worked as well. Let’s acknowledge this experiment has failed—self-evident truths are actually not self-evident but rooted in particular competing and different historical locations. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can decide, which particular cultural set of assumptions is best suited to love and care for others.

Michael Keller

Comments : 4 Comments »

Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Postmodernism is Dead

28 09 2011

British writer Edward Docx, writing for the UK-based Prospect Magazine, has announced to the world, “Postmodernism is dead.” How does he know? He points to this past Sarurday, September 24th, when the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened up its new exhibit: “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990.” Clearly if we have beginning and ending dates to a period it must be over. Right?

The main problem of course is that postmodernism itself is so stinking tricky to define. Docx does a great job weaving through the various artists, pop stars, philosophers and even architectural feats that define postmodernism. In the end the essence of postmodernism is the confluence of all narratives. He says:

…[T]he notion of a single, overarching view of the world—a dominant narrative (or to use the jargon, meta-narrative)—vanishes. There is no single narrative, no privileged standpoint, no system or theory that overlays all others. Hence, Lyotard argued, all narratives exist together, side by side, with none dominating.

With the equalizing of all narratives, no narrative can outpace other narratives. This has been a blessing and a curse. It has allowed greater discourse from minority voices, empowering them to speak up and come to the civic table with their views. At the same time, it means there is no longer a standard and criteria of excellence. Who gets to say something is good or true or beautiful? With the equalizing of all narratives, we also get the inability to speak up against terrorism, injustice, and other ills of the world.

Making things more difficult is that with no meta-narratives, humans have to now construct their identities with not much more than basics of class, gender, religion, sexuality, and maybe some other bare situational criteria. Humans are not mysterious and special, but socio-constructed and therefore determined. Clearly this is not a good place to mediate in for long.

Ironically, the unintended consequence of postmodernism is that nothing else matters except the marketplace–money rules. The only way people judge meaning today is through the market. Artists used to ask, “What are you trying to say?” Now it is, “How many have you sold?” By removing all criteria of excellence, we are left with nothing but the market to rule us. The tyranny of the majority through the marketplace is the opposite of the liberating equality of all narratives. This is not what postmodernism intended, if anything.

So what is happening now? The internet may be a clue. Perhaps the most postmodern tool out there is cyberspace. Here is a place where every view is heard, every blog has an opinion, and every Facebook page speaks a story. The internet completely relativizes all narratives. It would be a great place for social activism or even social revolution, but that isn’t what we find there. Instead, it is social media, Facebook, Twitter, Email, LinkedIn. The search for meaning, and relationship is everywhere on the internet. The world of postmodernism has birthed a new yearning for authenticity. Docx says,

We desire to be redeemed from the grossness of our consumption, the sham of attitudinizing, the teeming insecurities on which social networking sites were founded and now feed…If the problem for the postmodernist was that the modernist had been telling them what to do, then the problem for the present generation is the opposite: nobody has been telling us what to do.

It is no wonder that we yearn for authenticity. Working with college students in New York, the highest ideal I find is—Are you real? Do you tell it how it is? Perhaps this is the same reason why so many brands are now going green and sustainable. Seeing that consumers want authenticity, they will market ethics and good will.

Indeed we are past the age when relativizing all narratives seems to bring about the greatest good. Now we are asking, what narrative out there brings values and authenticity that will lead to human flourishing? When comparing the possible choices out there, the Christian narrative has more than a fighting chance.

Michael Keller

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: faith, modernity, postmodernism
Categories : On Anything and Everything

Is Secularism a Faith?

10 08 2011

In a fascinating review of Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, secular humanist Andrew Koppelman said a few years back:

[M]odern secularism is a religious worldview, with its own narrative of testing and redemption, and shares the vulnerabilities of such views. The news that secularists also live in glass houses has implications for ongoing stone-throwing operations.

The reason why I love this review, and often come back to it in discussions, is because it is one of the more honest evaluations of the emerging secular framework done by one of their own. Koppelman notes, for instance, that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology, and that secularism’s continued commitment to human rights does not logically flow from atheism. The article continues to note that as a secularist he thinks his own worldview has a faith/hope underpinning, much like the religious views that secularism tends to mock. These features mean that, for Koppelman, both religious and secularist worldviews have a form of “gap”: he notes that the “gap” in religions is the fact that one has to believe that in history amazing actions and events have happened, while the “gap” in secularism is that there is a normative commitment to human rights that does not seem to be able to be accounted for by mere evolutionary principles.

Still, while acknowledging that all faiths require a “leap,” Koppelman continues to argue that secularism has a smaller leap of faith. For him, you don’t have to believe in any historical event, just a common commitment to human life void of an overarching system. He says, “Secularists are committed to what one might call “Naked Strong Evaluation”: the idea, unsupported by any particular metaphysical claim, that the commitment to decent treatment for all human beings is mandatory…” I appreciate Koppelman’s honesty in the article to acknowledge that his own position takes epistemic faith, much like Christianity. I also appreciate that he acknowledges that the idea of human rights did not originate in atheism, but in fact Christian doctrine.

So while Koppelman seems to think that secularism borrows Christian capital to account for human rights and morality, he doesn’t think it necessarily invalidates his position. In the end of his review, Koppelman goes to Martin Luther King Jr. and notes that it was his Christian faith that drove him to stand up for justice in the midst of oppression, and it would be wrong to negate the good of his work simply because of the foundation he drew from.

The candidness of Koppelman is refreshing, and it demonstrates how harder it will be for secularists to make moral claims of injustice the further Western culture gets from Christendom. An example can illustrate this: a book review in the Wall Street Journal notes that the sex ratio of the worldwide population has unnaturally skewed to be male heavy. The author concludes that the only explanation is that girls are being aborted at an alarming rate simply because of their sex. The right to live is coming up against the rights of the parents to want a happy and nice life that they think sons will provide for them instead of daughters.

So who gets to win? The secularist today would say the little girls’ right to live wins because it is a higher good, compared to the parents’ preferences. For now. Without a mooring of morality into something deeper than “it makes sense,” atrocities can seem justifiable. Just look at the psychology of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Christianity roots human rights in the imago dei, and humans made in God’s image not only have to be treated with sacred dignity, but also cannot be reduced to “it makes sense.”

Both religious and secularist views are forms of faith; both have “leaps;” both make moral assertions. Yet Koppelman makes clear that, in regards to human rights, one offers better consistency for those of us who care about massacres, the poor, and the AIDS epidemic – and it is not his own point of view. The big question for those of us who care about these things is then, where is your view of morality located?

Michael Keller

[Note: this article is by Wondering Fair's newest contributor, Michael Keller. Great to have you with us, Michael!]

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Andrew Kopperman, Charles Taylor, ethics, faith, morality, secularism, worldview
Categories : On Anything and Everything

Is God Against the Imagination?

13 04 2011

Is God against the imagination? Curiously, many people respond with an affirmative yes. The second of the Ten Commandments – which asks us to not adore any image of God or of any other being – seems to imply so. If we are not allowed to use own imagination for the most sacred of purposes, is it forbidden then, or polluted? And what does this negative perspective imply for our art?

Obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with the imagination. One glance at the world God created reveals the wonder of imagination—of what can be created out of nothing. God is a creative God, who conceived shrimps before the oceans existed, and who made us creative beings as well. Imagination has given birth to the works of Shakespeare, the art of Picasso, medical advancements, and technology. Any invention – of electricity, roller coasters, or the smart mop of the infomercial – depends on a previous mental picture of what the final object will be like.

Yet, while imagination can be a wonderful and powerful thing, it can also be destructive. Like every human gift, it can be used for good or for harm. For example, there is an increasing market for clinics and counselors set up to help children cope with internet and video game addiction. These children are so wrapped up in the imaginary world that they are unable to cope with and participate in reality. A more subtle, but equally harmful phenomenon occurs when we maintain an inaccurate view of ourselves, be it an image that is too positive, too negative, or just distorted, and can’t seem to see our potentials and limitations objectively.

The complexity arises when we attempt to conceive of a God whom we cannot see face to face. Though God gives us tools in Scripture to better know and understand his character, we must to some extent rely on our imaginations to conceive of him. The problem; however, is not that we conjure an image, but that we create a God in our minds who is limited to what we want him to be. For some of us, we grab hold of the notion of a loving father, but ignore the aspects of a wrathful God of justice. For others, we cling to the God of the Law, but flee from the emotional aspects of a God who would die for his people. We place limits on God’s character by making him into a God who serves our needs and ideals.

Instead of a condemnation of the imagination, the second commandment brings us instead to reflect about who our God is, how have we come to conceive him, and, more importantly, if we are atheists or skeptics, who is the God we have rejected. Why is it that we strive to create a God who is limited to our own faculties? Should we not want a God who is bigger than our minds can conceive of—who is more than we are? If we worship a God who is merely what we can conceive or want him to be, than are we not simply worshipping ourselves?

The issue the second commandment appears to address is not our imaginative powers per se – which are a wonderful gift of God, and which fosters beauty and art and epic stories and good thinking. The issue, however, is about how we construct our idols by means of how we conceive of God. Essentially, this commandment cautions us to be careful with our own personal projections, lest we become incapable of visualizing the true God, behind the colourful yet inaccurate image we’ve made of Him.

Michael Keller heads City Campus Ministry, at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in New York, United States.