How to Believe in God
· The Atlantic
I grew up in a faithful Methodist household in deep-red Texas during the George W. Bush years, when the political sway of Evangelicals was at its zenith. At the same time, evangelists of a robust atheism—figures such as the biologist Richard Dawkins, the critic Christopher Hitchens, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris—toured the country offending salt-of-the-earth Americans with their contempt for religious belief. It was hard for me to ignore that a number of their assertions were clearly correct: Young-Earth creationism, for instance, instantly struck me as absurd when I first learned about it from a history teacher in my public junior-high school, who confidently told me that the world is only a few thousand years old.
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That wasn’t what my family or church taught, but Christians who subscribed to those beliefs were suddenly ascendant, and their thinking colored the country’s religious landscape. Meanwhile, the New Atheists were making hay of the fact that such faithful misapprehensions about nature were easily disproved by scientific discovery. Though I continued to attend church as usual, I privately wondered whether the entire enterprise might be rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding.
This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.
The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me. Before I could rationally account for what had happened, a verse of poetry from John Ashbery came to mind:
A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
That seemed to explain things perfectly, jarringly so. I was dazed in class as afternoon darkened to evening.
The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God. With this, they strive for the ultimate alchemy, transforming faith into fact.
Bolloré and Bonnassies’ book is part of a burgeoning genre of apologetics that relies on relatively new scientific developments and theories, like quantum mechanics and cosmology, to make an ancient case. Their book, which has already sold more than 400,000 copies around the world, arrives at a time of both bloody religious conflict and rapidly collapsing religious belief, especially among the young and the highly educated. It joins other recent projects—including two new documentaries, The Story of Everything: The Science That Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe and Universe Designed—that propose the same tantalizing theory: that there is incontrovertible proof that a divine power created the cosmos, and that this evidence is mounting.
This is a seductive idea, which Bolloré and Bonnassies spend a painstaking 500 pages trying to support. Keen to reassure readers that a sophisticated and intelligent person might reasonably justify belief in God, the authors acknowledge how such a thing became unthinkable. They identify a series of scientific breakthroughs that helped undermine religious faith over the centuries, including Galileo’s heliocentrism, Newton’s clockwork universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the revelation that Earth is not thousands but billions of years old. But in drawing upon those exact fields of study to reverse the long-term march toward unbelief, the authors appear to have missed the mechanism by which those prior discoveries eroded faith: Namely, that people had staked their belief on evidence that was overturned by subsequent data. There is always a risk that today’s proof will be undone by tomorrow’s evidence. Trusting in the existence of God largely involves deciding not to operate strictly within the confines of reason as we know it, a choice that usually emerges from sentiment rather than argument.
[Read: Can religion and science coexist?]
Bolloré and Bonnassies do not appear concerned. “We have conducted this work as a rigorous investigation,” they write. “We have always used rationality as our only compass.” Enough, they suggest, with emotional and mystical arguments for the presence of a divine power, or fanciful ideas such as young-Earth creationism; theirs is a project explicitly devoted to reason. Their “panoramic view” of the available evidence spans from the Big Bang, which they say implies an act of creation by demonstrating an absolute beginning to the universe, to the unlikely “fine-tuning” of the cosmos to create the conditions for flourishing life on Earth. Their book includes “one hundred essential citations from leading scientists” across multiple disciplines who have either allowed for the existence of God or asserted it outright. This includes Robert Wilson, an astronomer and a Nobel Prize winner in physics, who is quoted observing that the Big Bang theory makes “the question of creation” unavoidable. Luc Jaeger, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, likewise states that “science practiced in a sincere quest for the truth brings man closer to God.”
To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.
This was not always apparent to me. I came to this understanding through trial, error, and my own brushes with scientific rebuttals to the existence of God.
After that brisk autumn afternoon, life went on unremarkably, though I continued to mull over what the experience could mean. That it meant something at all was another strong intuition that I could not entirely account for. There were plenty of ordinary and dismissive explanations for what had happened, all related to the vagaries of the brain. Surely I had just been tired, bleary-eyed, suggestible, available—highly sensitized, in other words, to typical seasonal splendor. That made sense to me, but I didn’t believe it. The natural beauty wasn’t the cause of what I had felt, but rather an invitation to pay attention to what I felt.
[From the July 1915 issue: Scientific faith]
I began to ask myself what it would cost me intellectually if I were to choose to metabolize the experience as it had occurred to me. That decision came with several implications. If God is real, then perhaps other things—goodness, righteousness, beauty—that are usually dismissed as matters of subjective experience might also be objectively real. That prospect was much more agreeable to me than another consequential implication of electing to believe: That, as the New Atheists had so vigorously argued, theism meant putting aside any pretensions I had of sophistication or intellect.
As I explored this problem, I spent hours in my college library reading Saint Augustine, a foundational philosopher and theologian. Here I encountered another strange sensation: Every word I read felt like remembering something I had once known but somehow forgotten. This recalled an observation of Plato’s, who argued that the soul contains lost memories of the divine—that we are born knowing the truth of the universe, but forget it all when the mundanities of life get in the way. Maybe he had a point, I thought. And maybe the Christian NeoPlatonists, Augustine among them, had some points as well. I contemplated this for a while before I realized that there wasn’t any sense in debating it with myself anymore. I knew what I felt, so I gave up and chose to believe.
I’m still sorting through the ramifications. In my years of working out exactly what I believe, I have been relieved to learn that faith does not in fact demand the surrender of logic and vigorous intellectual inquiry—a case Bolloré and Bonnassies convincingly bolster with numerous testimonials from award-winning scientists. Still, to trust in the existence of God is to accept both the appearance and the possibility of being naive or delusional. No accumulation of promising developments in our analytical understanding of the world can delay confrontation with that essential fact. Having faith is a vulnerable thing.
Bolloré and Bonnassies’ arguments are more likely to shore up the faith of wavering believers than to win new converts. This itself is no small thing. The authors may even be right about the growing evidence for the existence of God secreted away in the latest science. But their approach has a history of upsets. The only way to inoculate belief against that cycle of disruption is to treat faith as a decision that transcends scientific proof.