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Follies of the Wise Follies of the Wise The human penchant for disastrously confusing fantasy with fact is most plainly seen in the impulse to ascribe one’s own concerns to divine powers and then to harden one’s heart against unbelievers. FREDERICK CREWS Gerald Fried SKEPTICAL INQUIRER March / April 2007 27 n the day after Christmas 2004, a major earth- take a subtler track. Just such an adjustment was made with quake and tsunami devastated coastal regions considerable suavity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan around the Indian Ocean, killing as many as Williams, in a Sunday Telegraph article of January 2, 2005: O300,000 people outright, and dooming countless others to mis- The question: “How can you believe in a God who permits ery, heartbreak, and early death. Thanks to video cameras and suffering on this scale?” is . very much around at the moment, the satellite transmission of images, that event penetrated the and it would be surprising if it weren’t—indeed, it would be world’s consciousness with an immediate force that amounted, wrong if it weren’t. The traditional answers will get us only so psychologically, to a tsunami in its own right. The charitable far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to contributions that then poured forth on an unprecedented scale exist in an environment where we can live lives of productive expressed something more than empathy and generosity. They work and consistent understanding—human lives as we know also bore an aspect of self-therapy—of an attempt, however them—the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its symbolic, to mitigate the calamity’s impersonal randomness and own. Effects follow causes in a way that we can chart, and so can thus to draw a curtain of decorum over a scene that appeared to make some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are proclaim too baldly, “This world wasn’t made for us.” No greater getting dangerous (Williams 2005, p. 22). challenge to theodicy—the body of doctrine that attempts to rec- oncile cruelty, horror, and injustice with the idea of a benevolent Thanks to the Sunday Telegraph’s provocative headline, “Of God—had been felt by Western pundits since the great Lisbon Course This Makes Us Doubt God’s Existence,” Williams’s earthquake and tsunami of November 1, 1755. opinion piece raised many an eyebrow, enhancing the archbish- On that earlier occasion, mainstream Catholic and Protestant op’s well-cultivated reputation for theological brinkmanship. faith received a lesser blow than did Enlightenment “natural On a careful reading, however, his essay appears in a truer light theology,” which, presuming the Creator to have had our best as a traditional exercise in Christian damage control. “Doubt interests at heart when he instituted nature’s laws and then retired, God’s existence”? Hardly. It sufficed for Williams that “we are made no allowance for either Satanic influence or divine payback told” about the Lord’s plan to allow the world “a pattern of its for wickedness. God’s indifference, it then suddenly appeared to own”—one that, if it occasionally puts us in harm’s way, does so Voltaire and others, was more complete than any deist had dared only because the fashioning of a law-abiding cosmos struck the to conceive. As for the clerics of the era, they welcomed the disaster Almighty as the best means for us humans to achieve “produc- with unseemly Schadenfreude as a useful topic for sermons. “Learn, tive work and consistent understanding.” A more complacent O Lisbon,” one Jesuit intoned, “that the destroyers of our houses, expression of anthropocentric vanity would be hard to imagine. palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many Having made a conciliatory feint toward heretical thoughts, people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are the prelate went on to slam the door on unbelievers by suggesting your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapors, and exhala- that only “religious people” can care about the loss of individual tions, and similar natural phenomena” (Wieseltier 2005, p. 34). lives within a mass die-off. Through their prayers, Williams The same opportunity was seized in early 2005 by Hindu, related, pious folk “ask for God’s action” to assuage the suffering Muslim, Christian, and even Buddhist fear mongers, and they of the maimed and the bereaved. Wait—hadn’t the writer just were joined by, among others, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, conceded that it’s useless to plea for any intervention against who proclaimed, “this is an expression of God’s great ire with nature’s laws? That point, we now realize, was only a rhetori- the world” (Wieseltier 2005). But two and a half centuries of cal stratagem for exempting the recent tsunami from inclusion increasing scientific awareness had made for a significant dif- among motivated supernatural deeds. The God who had been ference in lay attitudes. Now the rabbi’s callous words—Leon paring his fingernails when the hundred-foot waves came ashore Wieseltier rightly called them “a justification of the murder of was now presumably back at his post and ready to be swayed by children”—met with widespread revulsion. By 2005 only an spoken and silent prayers that would waft toward heaven, even unschooled person or a blinkered zealot could fail to understand though they lacked any known physical means of doing so. that a thoroughly natural conjunction of forces had wiped out The point of Williams’s essay was not to question theol- populations whose only “sin” was to have pursued their liveli- ogy but to reassert it in the face of other people’s misgivings. hood or recreation in lowlands adjacent to the ocean. Viewed from the archbishop’s interested angle, the upheaval of Theodicy, in this altered climate of opinion, would have to earth and ocean served as a trial of faith whose outcome was Frederick Crews taught at the University of California, Berkeley, assured: “The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such for more than thirty years before retiring in 1994. A frequent tests again and again—not because it comforts or explains, but contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is also the because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given author of more than a dozen books, including The Pooh Perplex, to them.” Although many harsh experiences “seem to point to Skeptical Engagements, The Memory Wars, and his latest, a completely arbitrary world,” convictions about divine mercy Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker and Hoard, will remain in place because those convictions “have imposed 2006), from which this article is adapted. He is a Fellow of the themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart” Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. (Williams 2005, p. 22). My aim in telling this story is not to scoff at apologetics for 28 Volume 31, Issue 2 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER otherworldly belief, though I do regard them as uniformly feeble, science” or its slick city cousin, “intelligent design,” into biology but to call attention to a clash between two intellectual currents. curricula. Their hope is to show that scientific research and edu- One is scientific empiricism, which, for better or worse, has cation have no bearing on issues of ultimate meaning and hence yielded all of the mechanical novelties that continue to reshape needn’t be feared by the pious. To that end, they emphasize that our world and consciousness. We know, of course, that science science exemplifies only methodological naturalism, whereby tech- can be twisted to greedy and warlike ends. At any given moment, nical reasons alone are cited for excluding nonmaterial factors moreover, it may be pursuing a phantom, such as phlogiston or from reasoning about causes and effects. Hence, they insist, the the ether or, conceivably, an eleven-dimensional superstring, that practice of science doesn’t entail metaphysical naturalism, or the is every bit as fugitive as the Holy Ghost. But science possesses a atheist’s claim that spiritual causation is not only inadmissible key advantage. It is, at its core, not a body of correct or incorrect but altogether unreal. ideas but a collective means of generating and testing hypotheses. In one sense this is an impregnable argument. Even when sci- Its trials eventually weed out error with unmatched success. ence is conducted by ardent believers, it has to disregard theolog- When the Archbishop of Canterbury mentions “effects [that] ical claims because those claims typically entail no unambiguous, follow causes in a way that we can chart,” he writes as an heir, real-world implications, much less quantitative ones, that might however grudging, of the scientific revolution. But when he reads be tested for their supportive or falsifying weight. The allegation the Creator’s mind at a remove of nearly fourteen billion years, that God was responsible for a given natural fact can’t be either and when he implies that some prayers stand a good chance of established or refuted by any finding; it is simply devoid of sci- being answered, empiricism has given way to lore supported only entific interest. And thus it is true enough that scientists stand by traditional authority. That is the kind of soothing potion that under no logical compulsion to profess metaphysical naturalism. people quaff when they either haven’t learned how to check the Quite obviously, however, trust in the supernatural does get evidential merits of propositions or would rather not risk the loss shaken by the overall advancement of science.
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