Templeton Conversation, pt. 2: Christoph Cardinal Schönborn

Whenever I hear someone talk about God, except in the Einsteinian sense, I am reminded of the stunning vastness and elegance of the universe. The Old Testament God, which Steven Pinker dealt a few posts ago, is simply incompatible with reality as we know it today. Even ignoring the bible's cosmology and all of its problems, the character depicted as the world's author in the OT is far too small and petty to account for all the astounding things we have learned in the intervening centuries.

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn discusses the process by which Western society has advanced beyond a superstitious understanding of God and His creation. While this is partially accurate, I have to take issue with his characterization of the evolution of Western thought on several counts. First, this de-mythologization has not been uniform. Many people in the United States unfortunately maintain a very superstitious understanding of God and the universe. I would appeal to the poll I cited a while back; results are also available from the same poll a year later which are slightly more encouraging, with only 51% percent of Americans flatly denying the staggering preponderance of evidence supporting evolution. A compilation of similar polls is collected here. I submit that all of these people who ascribe to young-earth creationism are clinging to the eleventh-century-BCE concept of God.

It's not surprising that Schönborn neglects to mention the views of what must be at least a dominant plurality of Americans. As clergy members and other theists often point out in debates about God, no educated person believes those things. Pointing out that people who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old are ignorant does not diminish their number; it does not render a description of their beliefs a straw man; it does not prevent them from constituting a voting majority in U.S. elections. Their ignorance has very real implications for the most powerful country in the world.

Second, Schönborn attributes the advances made in theistic belief to a movement by "Athens and Jerusalem," conflating the schools of thought which evolved in Greece and Israel over a period known as the Axial Age, spanning 800-200 BCE. While it is true that many thinkers in those two areas shifted toward a more naturalistic understanding of the world, they were not involved in a cohesive movement. The Hebrews came to question the vengeful, intercessory God of their oral tradition after an extended period of suffering and misfortune; it was not at all apparent that the deity who made a covenant with Abraham was interested in coming down and fighting battles on behalf of His Chosen People. The Greeks moved away from their earlier ontology in which melodramatic, anthropomorphic gods were responsible for what went on in the world at about the same time, but their transition was the result of a relatively comfortable lifestyle that became available to their upper classes, making the "contemplative life" possible. Their worldview changed as a result of rational contemplation rather than empirical experiences. While the Hebrews and the Greeks made this advance roughly simultaneously, it's inaccurate to describe them as part of a single movement.

Those two points really don't have that much to do with the rest of the essay, but obviously they meant a lot to me. In any event, Schönborn moves on to explain why the discovery of a rational, ordered world "fully vindicate[s]" the theistic worldview. He describes the world as a "teleological hierarchy," meaning that it is arranged in levels and that a group of subordinate levels exists for the benefit of a primary level, on which humans exist. This is a common view among theists. It demonstrates what I like to refer to as the "anthropocentric conceit."

Humans generally believe that the universe exists, in one sense or another, for their benefit. Early Mesopotamian cultures believed that the world did not extend far beyond the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in which they lived (once again, there's that Old Testament cosmology that I won't shut up about). Later thinkers such as Augustine knew more about geography but still assumed that the Southern Hemisphere was uninhabitable and that only the North had been created for human beings to inhabit. The anthropocentric worldview has gradually yielded more ground as it has been contradicted by new facts about the world around us. When Edwin Hubble showed that our galaxy is one of a vast number and that the universe has no discernible physical center, anthropocentrism retreated into the notion that humans are the ontological center of the universe. I see no reason to assume that, as we investigate further into the fundamental nature of the universe, we will not discover new details which make Schönborn's position seem as provincial as that of Augustine.

Schönborn criticizes "scientism," the notion that the quantitative and reductive methods of scientific thought are sufficient to explain everything. Scientism is not universal throughout modern society, he says; instead, most Westerners live in an amorphous philosophical zone with no solid justifications for the things they believe about the parts of existence that cannot be scientifically accounted for. Increased leisure has bred a materialistic and hedonistic society, he says; almost no one lives life as if they really believe in God. So far he hasn't really made a case for believing in God. I agree about the hedonism of modern society, but I don't how he is any closer to proving that God is relevant. Science doesn't have to prove a damned thing for the God hypothesis to be wrong, so appealing to the squishy hole in head of Joe Sixpack isn't getting us anywhere.

In his final paragraph, Schönborn talks about the human longing for purpose and a universal recognition that, essentially, something is missing from life. In principle there must be something out there, some higher meaning which a naturalistic worldview misses out on. This is a pursuit which cannot be made obsolete, he asserts. This is an old argument: the body needs food, and air, and water; we see that these things exist to meet our needs. The soul needs purpose, the argument goes, and such purpose must exist a priori. There must be some higher formative principle behind the universe, and hey presto, there's God! We found Him, guys. Good work.

In fact, our psychological need for purpose is as much a result of our evolutionary origins as any of our biological needs. There is a competitive advantage in an animal that assigns agency to everything it observes. The animal may be wrong when it assumes that a noise was made by a potential predator, but if it reacts accordingly it remains better off than one that has assumed a noise made by a predator is actually innocuous. The human sensory array is exquisitely efficient in recognizing patterns and searching for meaning. That tendency is inherent in our intelligence. An attempt to extrapolate God from that is fallacious.

Science has its limitations, no doubt. Schönborn is right in his description of the scientific method as reductive and qualitative, and in saying that mere scientific investigation cannot answer all of the "Big Questions" we have to ask ourselves. It can help us to judge whether or not our world resembles one designed by an intelligent entity, and it has increasingly revealed that that is not the case. The poverty of the scientific method does not imply that the God hypothesis is anything more than bankrupt. There's nothing here that indicates that belief in a personal God remains relevant.