Thinking about knowledge, belief, and God

Sometimes, when I get something stuck in my mind, I can't get it out until I write about it.  Last Sunday's sermon was like that, as it stuck with me all of last week, gnawing and permeating my thoughts, like a kernel of corn that gets stuck in your teeth - a constant and little annoyance.  Thus, last night I finally sat down and wrote down my thoughts to get it out of my head; and as always, writing proves to be cathartic.  The following is what I wrote...

Last Sunday's sermon, given by a lay speaker at our church, was entitled “Heaven and Universe.” Most of the sermon dealt with what heaven would look like, which generally seems like a fruitless and pointless endeavor and inquiry to me, as such would seem not only inherently unknowable, but also irrelevant. But the sermon discussed these ideas, taking most of it from the Book of Revelation, and treating such as fact. This continues to highlight one of my distastes for religion – the treatment of belief as knowledge. With knowledge we can proceed confidently, some might say even arrogantly; with knowledge, we can judge; with knowledge, we can conclude. With belief, we should act with humility; with belief, judgment should be reserved; with belief, we should constantly evaluate our premises, forsaking conclusions. Much of the turnoff for me with religion, and I imagine with many others, is the transgression of this line between belief and knowledge.

But what I have really been thinking about for the past week is the part of the sermon where the speaker briefly discussed the Big Bang at the beginning of the Universe. He made the statement that with all that we know about the Universe, and what we know about how it started, we (scientists) cannot explain what started the Big Bang – how that little point of all mass and energy existed in the first place. For this speaker, such fact (or the elusiveness of said fact) spoke to the existence of God.

I have heard and discussed this line of argument and reasoning many times, and I always find it curious.  Assuming that such ignorance of what started the Big Bang does point to the existence of a God, it in no way speaks to the qualities and characteristics of that God; rather, it only speaks to a powerful being who can be referred to as a Creator. Creation implies a creator, but it does not dictate that such Creator is morally good, merciful, wrathful, loving, judgmental, personal, distant, or any other particular trait that we so often attribute to our deities. Further, Christians that use this line of reasoning see it as proof of their God, three in one, Jesus Christ. Jews see the Creator as Yahweh. Muslims as Allah. All using the same line of reasoning to support that preordained conclusion from belief that it is “their” God who created or initiated this Big Bang.

This line of reasoning also fails in two other respects as well, I think. It comes to the conclusion of God based on the fact that we cannot explain how the Big Bang started or how that singularity of mass and energy even existed. Thus, since we cannot explain this, therefore, God. This is what is called creating a “god of the gaps” mentality. Our species, just a few millenia ago ( a blip in the age of both the Universe and our planet), was unable to explain lightning as a natural phenomena. Therefore, many cultures attributed such to gods (i.e., Zeus). Once lightning could be explained without resorting to deities, belief in such deity began to decline and eventually ceased. Thus, the danger in attributing to a deity that which we cannot explain is that such assumes that we will always be unable to explain. What happens, if at such future time, our understanding of our natural world and Universe continues to grow and we can explain, factually, the origin of the Big Bang itself. What's left for God then?

Further, the line of reasoning reeks of an assumed premise that is actually a preordained conclusion. We state, without scientific knowledge, that something must have put that singularity there to explode, or caused the explosion, of the Big Bang. That something is God. If one counters with the proposition or question, “well, what put God there,” the inquiry is dismissed with defining God as immutable and always existing. Yet, if God could always exist, why couldn't the Universe always exist? The line of reasoning assumes that the Universe cannot always existed, yet a deity can; with no rational explanation for the difference in treatment outside of our preconceived conclusions. There are many in the scientific community that argue that the Universe is eternal, and in a eternal process of exploding and collapsing over and over again over billions upon billions of years.

In any event, I truly do find such arguments curious. I think arguments along this line are directly towards non-believers, and I doubt they are ever persuasive. If one is nonbeliever because they want proof – they will never be a person of faith, by definition. But I think many individuals who are nonbelievers are so, in part, because they find the characterization of a personal, involved God, be it Allah, Yahweh, Christ, or whatever, to be unbelievable. If this is so, providing proofs for the existence of God, whether it be a re-creation of Thomas Aquinas's “prime mover” argument that I have been discussing, or even so far as Anselm's Ontological Argument, does nothing to address this concern. As written earlier, the existence of a “Creator God” does nothing to establish the characteristics and attributes of that deity. Certainly, a being that could create something as massive and awesome as the Universe (at least the one we can perceive) certainly seems powerful (especially compared to us); but its still a stretch of logic to say that this powerful being is Good, or intervenes in the physical world, or is personal and intimate.

All of this is not meant to argue against a God; rather, it is to say that engaging in the line of reasoning that started this reflection does not serve the purpose of reaching nonbelievers. Ultimately, matters of religion are matters of faith. And while I am not always a fan of the NOMA philosophy as I believe it has its own issues with assumed premises (another entry perhaps), it does serve as a reminder that it makes little sense to attempt to explain faith through science. Any successful attempt renders faith meaningless. A religion without faith seems lost and purposeless. I guess what I'm trying to get at here, is as much as I like discussing philosophy of religion, I think religion is better served by never attempting to use their faith to explain scientific knowledge (or lack thereof), and just understand that their religion must and always will be founded upon faith and belief, not knowledge.

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." - Confucius

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Stephen Hawking