Is Religion vs. Science a Red Herring?

While we battle in the public square about whether religious belief can coexist with faith in scientific method, some scientists just go ahead and believe in God anyway.
In The New York Times Cornelia Dean looks at the books of three scientists who came to faith. For instance,

In “The Language of God,” Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician.

Of course, Dean also gives us the latest from the religion-and-science-don’t-mix crowd, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon).

Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist. Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be universal among Homo sapiens.

And, as Dean writes, these authors advance their ideas with something like “religious fervor.”

Of course, ever since Kant, we have been in the position where we can’t prove the existence, or non-existence of God. In fact, we can’t even prove the existence of reality. Anyway, they are two different problems.

The problem of reality is the problem of the “is.” How can we know reality, and how reliable is our knowledge? Since Kant we have gradually come to grasp that all we can have is a view of reality that is good until updated.

The problem of God is the problem of the “ought.” What is our purpose; what should we do; what is the meaning of the universe?

To understand the problem of the “ought” we should go to the man who was both a Catholic priest and a top twentieth century physicist: Georges Lemaître. He was the guy who invented the Big Bang Theory of Creation. It is worth reading what John Farrell writes about him.

Back in the early 1930s, the Nobel Laureate Paul Michael Dirac had a chance to discuss the expanding universe with Lemaître. Dirac was an atheist, and yet later he recalled, "When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion."

Now this is a very disturbing idea, and it cuts across the grain of the usual science vs. religion controversy represented by the books discussed by Cornelia Dean.

What is Lemaître saying? I would argue that he is saying that religion and psychology are both about the human soul, what it means to be a human. Science and creation are really secondary issues. The big issue is: how should I live my life? That applies both at the immanent level of how to treat the other people in your life, and at the transcendent level of what’s it all about?

In other words, forget arguing about the “is.” Evolution vs. Intelligent Design is a blind alley. The big questions are about the “ought.” And whether God exists or not, each one of us acts and lives our life based upon some faith, conscious or unconscious, in the meaning and the purpose of life.

Very often we act against our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. But that is another story.