apologists, compromises and small gods

The fellows at the John Templeton Foundation have a new idea of reconciling science and religion: mealy-mouth, vague apologetics.





As long as there’s been tension between new scientific discoveries and religious dogmas, there has been an endless supply of pundits and commentators trying to bridge the gap. Their language is usually measured to an extreme, but sometimes they’ll veer off to quote their personal beliefs like so:

while some naturalistic philosophers have developed ethical systems without God, many other naturalists acknowledge this doesn’t work and that such ethical systems are entirely arbitrary.

This quote comes from BioLogos, a project of the covertly theistic John Templeton Foundation ran by a small group of scientists who just happen to be Christian apologists. And what they seem to be trying to tell us in a small treatise on the nature of good and evil is that if there was no God, then what we consider right or wrong and moral or immoral would vary by culture, custom and sect. Why am I not swayed by this argument? Well, if the writers who thought of this premise spent more than five minutes in anthropology class, they would know that it’s exactly what happens out there in the real world.

Different cultures and religious groups have their own rules, traditions and ideas of ethics. Yes, everyone says we should be respectful, honest and fair to each other but the devil here is in the details. What constitutes this respect and honesty for a particular culture? In one country, a man shaking hands with a woman he just met is considered respectful and in good taste. In another, the woman’s husband or father would demand the man’s head on a stick for his act of disrespect. If our ethical and moral rules are so universal because of God’s hand in society, how would we reconcile that two societies with religious beliefs have such different standards?

The modern apologetics movement and the groups who want to force science to reconcile with any religious belief that has enough political pull remind me of Terry Prachett’s novel Small Gods. The story’s premise is that a seemingly mighty and powerful god worshipped by countless people comes down to check on the vast empire built in his name but finds out that he’s actually become a small god, a relatively powerless spirit that has to seek favor with other deities to make anything happen. And yet, there are temples built in his name and he’s feared as a mighty destroyer of infidels and the one true god of the land. How did that happen?

Well, somewhere along the way, people became more afraid of his supposed wrath and put their faith in the scriptures written in his name and the temples built by the clergy of his religion. The belief was in the system, in securing your afterlife, in preparing your soul for life after death, in converting the unbelievers, in replacing any and all doubt or question with an absolute answer. Today’s apologists are trying to convert the heathens by deluding popular science with ham-handed statements on how a god could’ve done all that behind some sort of cosmic curtain. A number of groups insist on a shotgun marriage between science and religion to get friends in high places without rattling any nerves.

Their real goal and their real concern lies in appeasing vast institutions and be seen as heroes in the “culture war” by both sides, especially the religious one since it dominates the demographic landscape. The vacuous arguments and lengthy speeches about how we should “reconcile our differences” come and go depending on how well they’re received. Old ones will be revised and new ones will be invented to achieve a political goal and the invocation of God has become a placeholder for a particular worldview and a permission to use a big question mark as an answer to life’s tough questions.