The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Of Miracles and Magisteria

a book review by Richard Morrock

Physicist Victor Stenger is renowned in skeptical circles as a hard-core atheist, and in his latest book, he targets organized religion as well as the quantum spiritualism of Deepak Chopra and the accommodationist position taken towards religion by adherents of Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). This book is clearly a must-read for anyone interested in the role of religion in society today, and it also provides an easy-to-understand explanation of quantum theory, showing that it lends no support to “New Age” spiritualism.

Stenger discusses everything from the origin of the universe to the 2012 elections. Even where one might disagree with his conclusions, he is still thought-provoking. Stenger demolishes the theist argument that science is no less based on faith than religion. He draws a firm line between faith and trust. We have faith in supernatural entities, whose actions we cannot experience directly, or in political or religious leaders whose sincerity has yet to be tested, but we trust science—or a reliable friend, or our auto mechanic—based on our experience. To believe in something in the absence of evidence is, in Stenger’s estimation, foolish, and it would be hard to disagree.

Many scientists, following the logic of NOMA, have concluded that science has nothing to say about the supernatural. Stenger points out that scientists have looked into near-death experiences and the effectiveness of prayer on the sick, finding nothing but trickery and self-deception. Why should angels, demons or God himself be considered off limits?

In fact, scientists had better hope that the supernatural doesn’t exist, because if it did, all scientific experiments could be invalidated. How would we know that a positive result was caused by the phenomenon the scientists were investigating, or by some lab worker who silently prayed for the outcome, or by an invisible imp lurking in the corner? Should scientists call Ghostbusters to sweep their labs before each experiment? What, then, about spooky action at a distance?

Stenger is right when he points out the hypocrisy of religious leaders who preach morality to their followers while leading depraved lives in private. And he has fun with the Catholic doctrine that we are all sinners and must suffer the tortures of purgatory before we are admitted, if even then, to heaven. We are still waiting for a priest to say to the grieving relatives at a funeral, “Your beloved husband and father is now burning in the fires of purgatory for a thousand years because he did some bad things in his life.” Instead, they invariably remind us that the departed are looking down on us from heaven.

Stenger says that the Vatican never excommunicated a Nazi leader. This is incorrect. Hitler and Goebbels were both excommunicated, but not because of their role in World War II or the Holocaust. Prior to the war, Goebbels married a Protestant woman without agreeing to raise their children—whom the couple murdered during the last days of the Third Reich—as Roman Catholics. Hitler was best man at the wedding. It’s not that the Vatican didn’t oppose Hitler—they thought he was too tolerant of other religions!

The theistic argument has always been that if the universe exists, it must have had a creator, who can only be God, whatever characteristics one ascribes to Him. This raises the question of who created God. Theists invariably respond that God always existed, to which Bertrand Russell replied that if God could always exist without being created, so could the universe.

That was before the Big Bang Theory (the cosmological event, not the TV show). Scientists accept the idea that the universe had a beginning 13.7 billion years ago. Even though this is consistent with the biblical account (“Let there be light”), fundamentalists in Kansas banned the Big Bang theory from the schools along with Darwinian evolution. Fundamentalists are opposed to science in principle, not only where it contradicts the Bible. Ironically, while the Big Bang theory does not prove the existence of God, it at least leaves open the possibility.

If the universe was created by a Big Bang, what caused the Big Bang? Perhaps a purple-robed patriarch? Stenger gives us a number of alternative scenarios, all of which leave out supernatural entities. One of these is the two-sided universe. One side is ours, and the other is a mirror image in which time runs backwards. Each side begins with a Big Bang and ends with a Big Crunch, causing the Big Bang on the other side. There, since the arrow of time runs in reverse, ashes burst into flame and turn into wood, water runs uphill, and predators regurgitate their prey, which then comes to life, and the two run off backwards with the predator in the lead.

Another scenario Stenger presents is the Multiverse, which holds that our universe is the result of a black hole created in a much larger universe, which in turn came from an even bigger one, and so on forever. This seems to contradict Stenger’s own claim that there are no infinities in nature, which, if true, would narrow down the number of possible scenarios for the origin of the universe. Furthermore, it overlooks the likelihood that each “daughter” universe would be far smaller than its “mother,” ultimately leading to mini-universes too small to create any new ones. And it hands the theists the argument that God must have created the Multiverse, since what else could have started it? In any case, we have no more evidence for other universes than we have for God, and this theory violates Occam’s razor by postulating a vast number of unproven entities. Also, how could scientists verify the existence of black holes, if they are in other universes?

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Stenger is a reductionist, arguing that reality is “particles all the way up.” He dismisses the theory that there are different levels of reality, with new laws emerging at each level, claiming that this is supposed to lead to God controlling everything. Not necessarily. What he terms the emergentist (I prefer “interactionist”) position is just as compatible with atheism as it is with theism. The different laws that emerge at various levels—physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, philosophy—coexist with, rather than replace, the laws at the lower levels. After all, you cannot understand a football game simply by knowing the laws of physics; you also have to understand the rules of football, even if the players and the ball are ultimately made up of particles. Sometimes events at one level of reality cause events at another level, typically higher but occasionally lower. Stenger denies the possibility of such “top-down causality.” But examples of this would be someone suffering a heart attack (biological) after receiving distressing news (psychological), or the public getting angry (psychological) over something a politician said or did (historical). This has nothing to do with any supernatural creator.

Gould’s argument for NOMA, which Stenger rejects, was never intended to be a description of reality, but rather a prescription for it. NOMA reduces the Bible and other holy books to works of literature, often set in historical context, but no more literally true than Doctor Zhivago or Saving Private Ryan. These works have something to tell us, even though we recognize them as fiction. Just as we should learn to distinguish between faith and trust, as Stenger informs us, so should we distinguish between knowledge, derived from science and involving facts, and wisdom, which is supposed to be provided by religion, and which involves values. To be sure, we have pretty much mined the Bible for whatever wisdom it contains, and there is no shortage of pious but unwise people.

Science does not know everything, but if there are things we do not know, or may never know, there are others we can now be sure of. The supernatural does not exist; the laws governing the universe are immutable, and do not change because of our prayers; we don’t go to heaven or hell, or get reincarnated when we die; there is no inherent purpose to anything in the universe, except for our own lives and what we make of them. If the public can be educated to accept this, it hardly matters whether or not they call the laws of nature “God.”

God cannot yet be disproved, but at least we can dismiss angels, demons, ghosts and Santa Claus. And if miracles were real, far from proving the existence of God, they would actually disprove it. After all, if the laws of nature do not always apply—if the dead return from the grave—then anything is possible and no God is required to maintain the order of the universe, because there isn’t any order.

Religious people will not abandon their beliefs in the face of Stenger’s arguments. But they might revise them. Take away the supernatural elements from religion, which can be disproven, and the difference between the religious and scientific camps become little more than a matter of semantics.