Atheist

Joe and Lenny

Father Joe is a Jesuit priest. Lenny, his brother, is an Atheist. Joe, the Catholic priest, did not think the shroud was genuine, though he readily admitted that proof that it is fake is illusive. Lenny, the atheist, thought it was the real deal, the actual burial cloth of the historical Jesus. “Obviously,” he said, “I don’t think the images are miraculous. They are probably some natural phenomenon that we don’t understand. Clearly, they are not manmade. You simply can’t ignore the scientific and historical evidence like my brother does.”

Struck by what seemed an absurdity, as I stood with these two men in the undercroft of the church munching on lemon squares, I turned to Father Joe. “Why do you think it is fake?” I asked.

“It doesn’t work in my soup,” he replied. “Lenny might be right. It might be genuine. But he thinks it is irrelevant. I would be okay with that, if I could really see it that way. I just can’t”

The Shroud is Irrelevent?

I agree with Lenny, who also teaches science, that the shroud is probably real. I agree, too, that it is irrelevant, at least in the sense that he means. It doesn’t matter to me if the shroud is real or not. I don’t see it as an essential ingredient in my soup. However, in another sense, I knew it is very relevant; more like a dash of salt or a pinch of pepper that doesn’t overpower but brings out the flavors. A decade of studying the Shroud has enhanced my scientific reasoning skills, given me a greater appreciation for tradition through history, and focused my thinking about scriptural meaning and possibilities.  The shroud, real or fake, does not affect my faith. But the study of it has.  

“My brother is afraid of certainty,” said Lenny.

“My brother is afraid of faith,” said Father Joe. “He is an intellectual atheist. Was it not for my faith, I would share his beliefs. God, however, is very real to me.”

Colossus of Rhodes

“I’m interested in how religion and anti-religion cloud truth. Take, for example, the Colossus of Rhodes. Thanks to Shakespeare, it is a popular belief that the giant statue straddled the entrance to the harbor, one foot on each shore. Historians know better. So do engineers. It was probably more like the Statue of Liberty. But can you imagine what it would be like it this was a religious question. You would have some people claiming that it straddled the harbor miraculously and skeptics saying it didn’t even exist.”

I had just given a talk on the Shroud. I had explained why I thought it might be real. Now I found myself being lectured to by an atheist, whose brother was a Catholic priest who did not think the Shroud was real. But Lenny did. And he had very strong opinions about why it was so difficult to accept it.  That evening and early the next morning, I sat down and reconstructed as best I could the conversation I just related. It was longer, punctuated by jokes, interrupted at points by others with questions of me or members of the church offering coffee and more lemon squares. I also compiled Lenny’s opinions as distinct points.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1902), more than anyone before him and since, has shaped what has become, particularly in the first decade of the 21st century, a significant debate about the existence of God. His two works, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man seemed to many people to remove the need for God in the creation of the world, mankind and all living things. Evolution completely contradicted a severely-literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation. How can you accept that God was responsible for the "creation of every living creature that moves, of every kind . . ." and man and woman distinctly as such in his image, by the sixth day no less. “Darwin made it possible,” said Dawkins, “to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”  

Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

He attempted from his perspective to give a measure of legitimacy to religion—which he respected—by defining “two great realms of nature's factuality and the source of human morality.” There was, he thought, as he explained in his now classic book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, two non-overlapping magisteria. (6)

Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, our era’s most famous militant atheist disagreed. As he saw it, non-overlapping magisteria or NOMA, as it came to be known in the heady world of academia, doesn’t work because religion makes claims about nature’s factuality, specifically its origins. To Dawkins, there was only one magisteria. Religion was simply bunk. One Internet pundit, a supporter of Dawkins’ views, dubbed Dawkins’ one and only magesteria SOMA. He defined it as science only magisteria. He suggested a name for what he said was a “brain-dead” magisteria. He called it COMA for creationism only magisteria. Oxford’s Alister McGrath, a biologist, a scientific-atheist turned Christian, now an Anglican priest who frequently takes to the stage to debate Dawkins one-on-one, in a serious vein suggested partial-overlapping magesteria, which he called POMA.

Natural Theology

Natural theology blossomed in the age of science as the first wave of the modern scientific quest for God in William Paley's 1802 book, Natural Theology.  Paley, by way of analogy, compared the complexity of living things to the lesser complexity of a watch. Upon finding a watch, he argued, we would immediately realize that it had a maker. Living things being even more complex, he reasoned, certainly were the products of an intelligent designer. But Darwin, just a few years later, demonstrated how very complex living forms could evolve from much simpler forms. Darwin’s ideas demolished Paley’s argument. Dawkins explained it best. Theologian McGrath agrees. In his book, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, he writes:

Dawkins holds that the existence or nonexistence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth-century writer William Paley for the existence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins's home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. This book remains the finest criticism of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley's ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way "proving" the existence of God, and Dawkins's extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.

Baumgardner Fires Back

Baumgardner fired back accusing Roger of wanting LANL to officially endorse atheism. That is actually not surprising, for a careful reading of other material by Baumgardner reveals that he classifies everyone as either an atheist or a Christian, and to be a Christian he asserts requires complete belief in biblical creationism. Rogers wrote another letter:

John Baumgardner's response to my letter attributes statements to me that I did not make. I was advocating classical scientific method as the best approach to the solution of problems. I did not advocate or even mention atheism. I did not advocate any control over religious expression. Religion is "revealed": The body of knowledge in science is developed by application of a specific logical process. The two operate in different spheres. Science and atheism are two different things. Trouble comes when a person attempts selectively to accept or deny scientific observations primarily on the basis of religious beliefs. By definition, a "scientist" is a person who uses scientific method. Like Caesar's wife, a scientist must be above suspicion. The more "renowned" the scientist, the more careful he should be.

It was as close as Rogers would get to expressing religious convictions in scientific context. Rogers wasn’t an atheist. But he certainly was not the religious fanatic that some skeptics, including Nickell, portray him as.

String Theory

Steven Weinberg is not impressed by fine tuning yet none the less thinks that committed atheists can appropriate the idea to help explain something called string theory. String theory is very esoteric for our purposes here and we won’t get into it here except to comment on it. Weinberg suggests that the fine tuning required for human life can be explained by the theory and there is no need to invoke a creator God.  However, not everyone is enamored with string theory, including the atheist Feynman and the Anglican priest Polkinghorne and The New Yorker’s regular science and philosophy columnist, Jim Holt who called it a theory of nothing:

Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made, not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a Theory of Nothing.

Polkinghorne simply called string theory, “A conceptual flight of fancy in its way as breathtaking as any idea in eschatology.”

Feynman was, well, characteristically Feynman:

I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.”

Russell the Victorian

Born in Wales in 1872, Russell grew up during the height of the Victorian era. His father, Viscount Amberly, a fervent atheist, wanted to be sure that Russell and his brother and sister were raised as agnostics, something he stipulated in his will shortly before his death, when Russell was only three years old. But Russell’s grandmother, a conservative Scottish Presbyterian—but not so conservative as to not appreciate and accept modern science including Darwin’s theory of evolution—petitioned the court to have that particular provision of the will set aside. With his grandmother’s supervision and selection of tutors, he was home schooled. His home was filled with daily vocal prayer and Victorian standards of morality. The home schooling worked well. The prayers and rigorous morality apparently did not.

Russell the Atheist

In 1890 he won a scholarship to Trinity College at Cambridge where he distinguished himself in both mathematics and philosophy. By the time he graduated he had decided that he was an atheist. By 1908 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Four years later he published Problems of Philosophy, which has since become a classic but nowhere on a par with his monumental, A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, published in 1945. For this last work, in particular, but also for his condemnation of Communism and Nazism he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. During the presentation, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy said:

With his superior intellect, Russell has, throughout half a century, been at the centre of public debate, watchful and always ready for battle, as active as ever to this very day, having behind him a life of writing of most imposing scope. His works in the sciences concerned with human knowledge and mathematical logic are epoch-making and have been compared to Newton's fundamental results in mechanics.

Beliefnet

The site bills itself as the largest unaffiliated spiritual web site on the Internet.  Spiritual perhaps, but definitely a business. Beliefnet now is part of the News Corporation that includes Fox Television; over 100 newspapers such as The Times (of London), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post; the website MySpace and the television show American Idol. Beliefnet has created itself into vast multi-overlapping magestias for cyber warriors from various traditions, beliefs and peculiarities, all having to do in some way with faith. Visit the site and you will find thousands upon thousands of people debating, questioning and explaining. They are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Wiccans and Atheists and Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soulers. Everything is organized into groups and subgroups and fragments within each because there are so many varieties and beliefs. There are conservatives and liberals. There are rigid adherents to denominational intricacies and live-and-let-live and what-ever-makes-sense-to-you proponents.  Dig deep enough and you will find arguments akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and does the tune change the results.  

There are plenty of celebrity participants on Beliefnet. Michael J. Fox did an interview about his battle with Parkinson's disease and how it increased his sense of spiritually and gratitude. Michael Jackson wrote a moving essay for Beliefnet. “What I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary,” he wrote. “The Sabbath was when I could be.” Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have appeared in interviews with Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet’s senior religion editor.

There are countless interactive public interviews with many of the leading theologians and Biblical scholars. An interactive public interview is similar to a radio talk show in which telephone callers ask questions of guests.  On Beliefnet, the callers type in questions and the guest replies by typing a response. One such interview was with John Dominic Crossan.

As one might expect, there is plentiful discussion about the scientific quest for God on Beliefnet, and much of it can be very interesting until a extremist fundamentalist, be he a Christian or an Atheist, imposes himself into a discussion and saturates the dialog with  proclamations. “The Bible says. . .”

One of the more interesting areas of discussion that has spilled out from academia and the all so commonly disquieting Eastertide season of television specials. It is the quest for the historical Jesus.  Who was this man, Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians proclaim is the Son of God? Is there more to the story than what we know from the three synoptic gospels, the theologically rich Gospel of John, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul and others evangelists? In the context of what we know about 1st century Palestine and its people, is it believable? And in the context of a scientific worldview, is it believable? And nothing is more central to the story than the subject of the resurrection? Did it happen?

Modern Biblical Literalism in Pia’s Day

In 1898, modern biblical literalism, particularly as it is seen in North America, had not yet emerged. That would happen in the next decade, in the years leading up to World War I, as a response to the liberal interpretations emerging from the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Darwinism and modernity in general.

The situation was different in France, particularly in the Académie des Sciences. It was perceived to be, if not the high temple of Atheism and Agnosticism, at least a precinct where the mention of God or Christ was off limits. This is probably not surprising given France’s strong secular attitudes born of the French Revolution.

Delage, amongst his French colleagues, had committed a heresy. Marcelin Berthelot, the secretary of the physics section of the Academy, the renowned discoverer of thermo-chemistry principles, and a militant atheist, ordered Delage to rewrite his paper so that it dealt only on the chemistry and made no mention of Christ. One can’t help but think of Galileo being told to retract his conclusions. His conclusion was omitted from official published proceedings. It was silly. It was akin to an ostrich hiding its head in the sand—which we all know they don’t do as we realize it wouldn’t work well. Newspaper reporters had the story and the Paris edition of New York Herald trumpeted the headline, "Photographs of Christ's Body found by science."

The Legend of the Teapot

But globes are too easy, too boring. A teapot is more sophisticated with its lid, spout and handle. Rotated in virtual space and with simulated lighting coming from certain angles the spout and handles can be made to cast shadows elsewhere on the pot.

There are around the water coolers where graphics artists congregate two legends about how the teapot became something of a symbol for computer graphics, a model for students to learn by and a demonstration for different software programs. The first is that it is Russell’s Atheist Celestial Teapot, a sort of antithesis of “What hath God wrought.” The other legend is that a computer graphics student at the University of Utah, Martin Newell, needed a 3D object to work with for his PhD thesis and his wife had suggested the family’s teapot.  That teapot is now on display in the Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  The picture of the teapot in this book is not a painting of a teapot by an artist and it is not a photograph. It is a computer generated image. The very shape of the teapot in 3D space is represented by a series of X, Y and Z values—every point, every dot, every pixel or whatever you want to call them could be written out as a long list of numbers, put in a spreadsheet or a data file.

It is important here to make a distinction between what an artist paints or a photographer shoots and the computer generated image. All are representations of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. But the painting or the photograph are produced by actual reflected light. Many factors control how much light is reflected at any place on the image: where the light comes from, how bright it is, how direct or diffused the light is, the color and shininess of the surface. But the one thing it never is is the proximity of any part of the object to a camera or the eye of an artist. It may seem that way at times but it is because a close feature is affected by any of the other factors mentioned above.