RUTHFULLY YOURS

I hate it when the bad guys are right. But it happens sometimes, and when it does, we should own up to it.

The bad guy who drove a wedge between faith and science was the 18th-century skeptic Voltaire, who did more than any other to undermine religion in the Enlightenment world. The eponymous hero of his 1759 novel Candide wanders through sundry disasters of mid-18th-century Europe, under the tutelage of “Dr Pangloss”, a lampoon of the philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who reassures him after each mishap that this is “the best of all possible worlds”.

Candide finds himself in Lisbon during the 1755 earthquake that leveled the city, killing up to 100,000 people. Untold thousands more perished along the Mediterranean coast. No matter, Dr Pangloss explains after their narrow escape: If we hadn’t gone through the earthquake, we wouldn’t be sitting here now eating strawberries.

The novel was an elaboration of Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, which lamented:

These women, these infants heaped one upon the other, these limbs scattered beneath shattered marbles. What crime and what sin have been committed by these infants crushed and bleeding on their mothers’ breasts? [translation David Bentley Hart]

Voltaire taunted the theologians with this question: How could a benevolent and omnipotent God slaughter so many innocents at random? If this is the best of all possible worlds (as Leibniz maintained), because a good God would not create a worse one, why do such awful things happen? That is one trouble with the so-called clockmaker’s argument, one of the five classic proofs for the existence of God cited by St Thomas Aquinas. The workings of nature are so complex and perfect, the argument states, that they bespeak a design, and a design must have a designer. The trouble is that the same clock seems to set off a bomb at random intervals.

There is a false premise in Voltaire’s argument, namely that humankind is always and inevitably subject to the ravages of cruel and capricious nature. We now build cities able to withstand earthquakes; the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 killed 16,000 people in much more densely populated regions, a terrible toll, to be sure, but a fraction of the Lisbon dead. No human being need die from hunger, or cold, or bacterial disease; if some die, it is the fault of human action, not an Act of God. But we are getting ahead of the argument.

To argue that bad things are part of a beneficent divine plan that we cannot yet grasp, as do many Christian theologians, David Bentley Hart contended in a celebrated essay,

… requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of – but entirely by way of – every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome.

To avoid what he dismisses as “vacuous cant” about the workings of Providence, Hart instead cites the

… Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths, and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy remnant of the world God intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God.

God’s alibi in Professor Hart’s account is the fallen state of nature itself, its “ancient alienation from God”, and the prevalence of “spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God”. Perhaps the Devil was behind the Lisbon earthquake and the 2004 tsunami? That view is embedded in a popular genre of horror films; the fact that it is popular, though, does not make it any less problematic. One requires an intellect as recondite as Professor Hart’s to reconcile the notion of a good and omniscient God with a nature abounding with “powers hostile to God” who randomly inflict unspeakable suffering on multitudes of innocent people. Hart’s argument risks falling into the fire of apocalyptic paranoia, in order to quit the frying pan of vacuous cant.

Another source of cant, namely Immanuel Kant (1824-1807), began his philosophic career by pondering the Lisbon earthquake, and concluded it by destroying Leibniz’ influence in philosophy. That demarcates the point at which science was separated from religion. As the co-inventor (with Isaac Newton) of the calculus, Leibniz began the modern scientific revolution with explicitly theological motives. His contribution to mathematics expressed a view of nature that could not be comprehended without God. I summarized Leibniz’ theology recently in this space (Now for something about nothing …, Jul 24, ’12). Kant usurped Leibniz’ influence to become the dominant figure in Enlightenment philosophy, by proposing a system that had no need of God. But we are getting ahead of ourselves again.

It is hard to believe in a benevolent God without seeking the good in the universe, and that, I think, explains why popular religion ignores Professor Hart’s dour vision of a fallen world, and cleaves instead to a variant of the providential argument, namely Intelligent Design. Proponents of Intelligent Design include Christians like George Gilder as well as observant Jews like Michael Medved and David Klinghoffer – friends and political allies, I note as a matter of full disclosure. I sympathize with them, but I think they are on the wrong track.

The usual refutation of Intelligent Design states that it requires assumptions that cannot be experimentally verified by scientists. The opposing camp, the Darwinian evolutionists, cannot verify their arguments, either. Darwinian evolution is an after-the-fact explanation of phenomena rather than a predictive science. Neither the particular way in which evolution occurs, nor the pace at which it occurs, are matters on which Darwinian theory sheds much light.

Despite numerous attempts, including one by the anti-religious polemicist Richard Dawkins, Darwinians have failed to create a model that can predict evolution. University of Texas mathematician Granville Sewell, an Intelligent Design proponent, surveyed the damning evidence in a 2000 essay for The Mathematical Intelligencer. The quarrel between the Darwinians and the Creationists comes down to a confrontation between a quasi-religious belief that nature is a closed system that self-evolves in the absence of a creator, and the explicitly religious belief that a creator directs the process. The South Parkcaricature of Dawkins got it exactly right.

If the Intelligent Design argument cannot be proved, as the Darwinians claim, neither can it be refuted. Science as such has no stake in the argument: Something that neither can be proved nor falsified does not belong to the realm of science in the first place.

Quite apart from the scientific debate, I have two objections to Intelligent Design. Both are theological rather than scientific.

If the evidence for Intelligent Design lies in the perfection of nature down to improbably refined levels of detail, what stake does created man have in created nature? Did the same God who designed the mitochondria of living cells and set universal constants in the cosmos also create unstable tectonic plates, the plague bacillus and the tsetse fly? Why are some parts of nature benevolent and others hostile toward man? That is the Lisbon earthquake problem. More than two centuries ago, Voltaire’s skepticism and Kant’s critical philosophy beat the stuffing out of Leibniz’ theism, and in a fair fight. Why should we expect a rematch today to come out differently? That is why Intelligent Design subverts faith, despite its defenders’ best intentions.

The second argument is this: If a design does indeed exist in the mind of God, why should we presume that we are able to understand it? Why should the finite mind of created humans have the capacity to understand the grand design of physical creation, any more than we can understand the workings of Providence in history?

In fact, the assertion that the human mind can grasp the whole design of creation is neither Christian nor Jewish, but Platonic, and its most famous exponent in modern science was Albert Einstein, who believed not in the God of the Bible, but (as he wrote) in “Spinoza’s God”, that is, a God who is indistinguishable from nature. (The great British mathematician Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawkings’ long-standing collaborator, is perhaps the most prominent Platonist working today.) Nature’s harmony contains an inherent beauty that makes it perceptible to man, in Einstein’s view.

Einstein was not only irreligious, but wrong. He could not countenance the uncertain world of the quantum revolution that emerged in the mid-1920s, and spent the last three decades of his career in a fruitless quest to restore determinism to physics. What Einstein eschewed, though, was a liberating event for religious thought, wrote Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading mind of 20th-century Orthodox Judaism: As long as mathematical determinism ruled physics, he observed, religious philosophy was excluded. The truth of Soloveitchik’s observation is self-evident on reflection: If nature can explain itself through deterministic models, then religion can have nothing to say about the world outside of itself.

The most devastating refutation of determinism came from Austrian mathematician Kurt Goedel, whose famous incompleteness theorems of 1931 proved that no mathematical system could prove all of its own assumptions. It also proved that we can formulate mathematical statements that are known to be true, indeed are true by definition, but that cannot be formally proved.

That ruined the great mathematical project of the early 20th century, the quest to find a comprehensive logical foundation of mathematics. A deeply religious man, Goedel noted that this presented a problem for the philosophers, who sought a deterministic system to explain mathematics without recourse to human intuition (or divine inspiration). But it was of small concern to the mathematicians, who always would have an infinite number of new problems to solve. Goedel was optimistic that all mathematical problems eventually could be solved, but with intuition rather than with a general algorithm.

Goedel’s quip points toward a solution of both the theological and the meta-scientific problems in Intelligent Design. David Bentley Hart’s vision of a fallen world beset by forces hostile to God, with God as a hapless bystander, belongs to the horror movies or the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But there is another way of thinking about man’s relationship to nature, emphasized in rabbinic Judaism and espoused eloquently by Rabbi Soloveitchik: God made an imperfect world and gave the task of improving it to his junior partner in creation, humankind.

As Rabbi Soloveitchik observed, the final perfection of nature is a messianic vision: In the prayers for the New Moon, for example, Jews look to the day when God will restore the moon to parity with the sun. But there is a great deal to do in the meantime. Man is not the passive victim of earthquake, flood, famine or disease. We can build defenses against natural disasters, cure disease, and eliminate hunger. Whatever harm befalls us today, we can change our destiny in the future. God does not reveal his infinite mind to us, except through an infinite procession of discoveries, to which we are led by intuition, or, if you will, inspiration.

We are not the passive victims of nature. We strive to establish human dignity by mastering nature. We are neither gods who can grasp the infinite mind of the God of Creation, nor mere animals for whom evolution is destiny. We do not need to worry whether there is an Intelligent Design, nor whether we might grasp such a design if it indeed exists: As creative beings, we are part of the design. We do not know the full scope of the design, because we do not know what we have yet to accomplish. God does not need us to justify his position as creator; our task is nobler, and incomparably more challenging, namely, actually to advance his work of creation.

With this in mind, theodicy – Leibniz’ term for the justification of God given the existence of evil – is beside the point. As Professor Jon Levenson of Harvard University wrote in his 1994 bookCreation and the Persistence of Evil:

Biblical faith has no need of theodicy (YHWH explicitly condemns the theodical arguments of Job’s friends in 42:7). Jeremiah’s famous accusation (Jeremiah 12-13) against YHWH is neither a philosophical judgment of God nor a cry of horrified despair but rather an indignant demand that God rise up and destroy the wicked:

You will be in the right, O LORD, if I make claim against You,
Yet I shall present charges against you:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper? …
Drive them out like sheep to the slaughter,
Prepare them for the day of slaying!

The answer – and please note that there is an answer here – is nothing like those rationalizations proposed by the philosophers: “Drive them out like sleep to the slaughter.” The answer to the question of suffering of the innocent is a renewal of activity on the part of the God of Justice. In light of the answer, it becomes clear that the question is not an intellectual exercise but rather a taunt intended to goad the Just God into action.

Levenson’s observation applies to natural calamities as much as it does to human evil. We do not shrink in terror, like Professor Hart, before the monsters of the fallen world: We ask for divine inspiration to advance the unending work of creation.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. His book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It’s Not the End of the World – It’s Just the End of You, also appeared last autumn, from Van Praag Press.