God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

How You Get There Is What Counts

I am in sympathy with Stenger’s project, the demonstration that the religious dogmatic idea of God is bad for human beings and other living things. But I can’t accept his logic which is tendentious and self-contradictory.

Stenger recognises, quite correctly, that neither theism nor science has a universally accepted meaning. So he defines the former in terms of the religions of the Book: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The obvious difficulty then is that even this restriction doesn’t reduce the conceptual variability of the idea of God very much. So he reduces it further to what he believes are its essentials: a consciousness that is responsible for existence and that regularly if unexpectedly involves itself in the course of that which exists. Fair enough. He captures the bulk of religious adherents in this net, even if some of the most modern outliers escape.

He’s got the same issue with science. There is no agreement about what constitutes scientific thinking, scientific method, or even a scientist. So Stenger defines science as the formulation and testing of conceptual, that is to say linguistic, models. Science, he believes, describes but does not interpret the world. While even his epigraph by the great Von Neumann contradicts this claim, it is possible to rationalise it by suggesting that what he intends to convey is that scientific models are always tentative. Unlike religious dogma, these models are debated, tested, and often discarded depending upon whether they work or not. A model works better than another if it effective in a wider range of practical or experimental circumstances.

And therein, according to Stegner, lies the fundamental difference between science and religion. Nothing about science is fixed; not its principles, its methods, or its conclusions. Science learns through experience and adapts itself to the world as it is. Science is inherently relativistic. Religion, on the other hand, imposes an experience and filters the world through a mesh of complex doctrines. Science is empirical and experimental; religion is rationalistic and dogmatic. What could be simpler or more obvious? Science explores reality; religion gropes for the source of existence. The former works; the latter doesn’t. Epistemology and ontology are on the side of science.

Stenger’s pragmatic criteria of ‘working,’ however, is itself problematic. Ultimately he means that which works is that which is beneficial to human life. What benefit does he have in mind? Longevity? Prosperity? Personal satisfaction? Surely he can’t mean horsepower, explosive yield, or giga-cycles per second. And if not, what are we to think when these bigger benefits are not correlated with one another? Nuclear physics works in correctly predicting the power contained in atomic structures. It fails in protecting us from radiation poisoning. The internet provides incredible knowledge and convenience. It also created Trump. Are these things working or not?

Clearly any consensus about the meaning of ‘working’ is as temporary and variable as everything else about science. To claim otherwise would be dogmatic. This is an issue of politics not morality; or, rather, political morality. Even the rules of scientific argument are unclear. But rules there are. Science is rarely a violent activity, other than perhaps the occasional conference punch-up by rivals. Certainly no one has suggested warfare as a response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, despite the intense emotions its can generate. Science is a kind of politics which in fact seeks to establish what ‘better’ means. When it stops doing this, it is termed Scientism and has effectively become a religion.

And this it seems to me is the real distinction between science and religion - the nature of their politics. The politics of science is ‘open’ in the sense that disagreement is tolerated, sometimes grudgingly but always eventually. There are certainly scientific schools of thought, cliques, and movements which believe each other to be misguided, misinformed, or lacking intelligence. But they unavoidably remain together in the attempt to discover not only what works better but what working better means. There is perhaps no better example of this than in the debate about climate change, which is essentially about what is good not just for human beings but for the entire planet.

Religion stops this search for the criterion of the good either by defining some abstract end point to human existence (the presence of God) or by prescribing some universal rules for behaviour (morals) which are hidden rationalisations for institutional self interest. Once established, these are then beyond debate. Consequently dogmatic religion is subject to heresy, schism, and alienation. The alternative to debate is often violence which is never good for human beings. More damaging, however, is the destruction of the kind of political community that constitutes science. This is a community that is in a sense pre-religious. That is, it doesn’t allow itself to become fixated on what anything means, especially God.

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