Provisional Deism
Fair warning: it’s never been my intent to be preachy with this website. Just wanted to help communicate more about how I think. Last night, as I couldn’t fall asleep, I saw an article on the Encyclopedia of Life, a project that was E.O. Wilson’s TED prize wish. I started reading about E.O. Wilson and came across this Salon article where he discusses science and religion. It struck a chord with me because it verbalized much of my own beliefs as they stand today.
You can read the whole article here on Salon.com, but a few excerpts below:
Darwin’s own transformation from devout Christian to non-believer obviously raises significant questions in our own time. It raises a very provocative question: If you fully accept the theory of evolution by natural selection, does that logically lead you to atheism?
Well, it does up to the origin of the mind and spirit. And one of the Vatican’s scientific spokesmen, incidentally, just recently turned thumbs down on intelligent design. John Paul II took the position that evolution’s been pretty well proved, and certainly was acceptable as God’s way of creating the diversity of life. But the human soul was injected by God. So that’s a kind of compromise position that a lot of devoutly religious people have taken.
But that begs the question, when did the soul enter? I mean, if you accept evolution, at some point humans evolved out of something that came before. So do all creatures have some kind of soul? Or do only humans have a soul?
Yeah, that’s the dilemma. Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.
Are you saying we have to choose between science and religion?
Well, you have to choose between the scientific materialist view of the origin of the mind on the one side, and the traditional religious view that the spirit and the mind are independent of the process of evolution and eventually non-corporeal, capable of leaving the body and going elsewhere.
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What about the sense of awe, of wonder? That’s something you hear about all the time among religious people. And you also hear about it from some scientists as well.
Well, you do. You hear about it from me. Awe is hard to put into words. But it certainly involves a sense of the mightiness and splendor and almost indecipherable intricacy of something greater than ourselves. A lot of religious mysticism arises directly from it. But it’s equally experienced by the secularist whose mind opens to the splendor and intricacy of the material universe.”
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Would you be comfortable saying that science can have a sacred dimension?
Sacred, yes, in the sense of spirituality. This would be based upon a deeper understanding of just how intricate and surprising the universe is. The story of the origin of life on this planet — the time scale, the magnitude of it, the complexity of how it has been put together — all of that engenders in me even more awe than I ever felt as a devout Southern Baptist growing up.
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That’s an interesting perspective. Basically, you’re saying it’s necessary but [religion is] wrong.
Well, you see, that’s the dilemma of the 21st century. Possibly the greatest philosophical question of the 21st century is the resolution of religious faith with the growing realization of the very different nature of the material world. You could say that we evolved to accept one truth — the religious instinct — but then discovered another. And having discovered another, what are we to do? You might say it’s just best to go ahead and accept the two worldviews and let them live side by side. I see no other solution. I believe they can use their different worldviews to solve some of the great problems — for example, the environment. But generally speaking, the difficulty in saying they can live side by side is a sectarianism in the world today, and traditional religions can be exclusionary and used to justify violence and war. You just can’t deny that this is a major problem.
…and finally to the part that caught my eye.
Let me follow up on this because I’ve heard you call yourself a deist.
Yeah, I don’t want to be called an atheist.
Why not?
You know, being a good scientist, and having been drawn up short so many times on my own theories and speculations — as all honest scientists are — I don’t want to exclude the possibility of a creative force or deity. I think that would be a mistake to say there is no God or supernatural force. As the theologian Hans Kung once said, how are we to explain there is something and not nothing? Well, that’s a question I’m happy to leave to the astrophysicist — where the laws of the universe came from and what is the meaning of the origin of existence. But I do feel confident that there is no intervention of a deity in the origin of life and humanity.
That is the distinction between theism and deism.
That is the distinction. So I am not a theist, but I’ll be a provisional deist.
To be a deist, you’re saying maybe there was some creator, some presence, that set in motion the laws of the universe.
Maybe. That has not yet been discounted as a hypothesis. That’s why I use the word provisional.
It’s fascinating because everything you’ve said up until now suggests that you should be an atheist. Why hold out the specter that maybe there was some divine presence that got the whole thing going?
Well, because there’s a possibility that a god or gods — I don’t think it would resemble anything of the Judeo-Christian variety — or a super-intelligent force came along and started the universe with a big bang and moved on to the next universe. I can’t discount that.
At this point in my life, that’s pretty much my vein of thought on this issue, which I’ve thought about intently for at least the last eight years. I know, ‘provisional’ sounds like a cop-out, but hey - I can’t claim to know all the answers at just the age 23.