God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (2 page)

O
nce again I am deeply indebted to Brent Meeker and Bob Zannelli for their meticulous reading of my various manuscripts and their many invaluable corrections and changes. They are longtime members of the discussion group avoid-L (“Atoms and the Void”) that I created over a decade ago, now ably managed by Bob. Others from avoid-L who have helped on this book include Greg Bart, Martin Bier, Yonatan Fishman, Don McGee, and Christopher Savage. I have also received valuable assistance from religion scholar Hector Avalos, ancient historian Richard Carrier, physicist Taner Edis, and writer Andrew Zak Williams. Keith Augustine was of great help with my discussion of near death experiences. Sean Carroll and Alexander Vilenkin graciously replied to my e-mail queries on cosmology. I am grateful to Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at People for the American Way, for tracking down some references for me. Also, I wish to express my appreciation to the prominent free thinkers Dan Barker and Michael Shermer for their continual encouragement and support.

Beside these friends and supporters, I am fortunate to have a loving family that continually provides me with inspiration and encouragement.

Finally, I wish to add that I am forever grateful to the late Christopher Hitchens for his inspiration, support, and friendship. He was the greatest writer, intellect, and gentleman I personally have ever known.

Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck.

—Thomas Jefferson
¹

M
adeline Kara Neumann was a fun-loving, eleven-year-old girl who liked to wear her straight, brown hair in a ponytail. A photo that ran in a newspaper after she died shows her kneeling proudly over a work of art she was creating at an outdoor chalkfest in Wausau, Wisconsin. Since Kara, as she was called, was completely under the care and authority of her parents, she was not allowed to choose her own religion, nor was she free to decide to take herself to the doctor. She died on Easter Sunday 2008, after suffering days of ghastly pain from undiagnosed but easily treatable diabetes. Her devout Christian parents had refused to take her to the hospital, believing that prayer alone can heal the sick.

Kara's father, who once studied to be a Pentecostal minister, testified that he neither wanted nor expected his daughter to die. Believing himself to be a good parent, he had faith that God would heal Kara, as promised in the Bible:

Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick, and the Lord shall raise him up. (James 5:14–15)

During the trial after her death, Kara's father was resolute. “If I go to the doctor,” Dale Neumann said, “I am putting the doctor before God. I am not believing what he [God] said he would do.”

Instead of acting like normal, prudent parents, who would naturally seek real help when it was obvious their daughter was in serious condition, the family contacted Unleavened Bread Ministries. The founder of that fundamentalist church, David Eells, has written: “Jesus never sent anyone to a doctor or a hospital. Jesus offered healing by one means only! Healing was by faith.” A statement posted later on that church's website by Eells reveals that the Neumanns, believing the scripture verse cited above, “contacted one of our elders to ask that I call them to pray for their daughter. That elder got in touch with me Saturday evening and I called the Neumanns.” As a direct result of her “loving” parents' faith-based inaction, Kara Neumann died the next morning, the day Christians celebrate their Lord Jesus' resurrection and victory over death.

The Neumanns, who were convicted of second-degree reckless homicide (and who remain unrepentant), are right about one thing: the Bible is very emphatic that faith will heal the sick. Jesus said, “All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive” (Matt. 21:22).
²
Nothing could be more clear: he said all things. He didn't say “maybe,” or “if I feel like it,” or “if you are specially chosen.” You will receive all things if you believe. Coupled with James 5:15 (above), who could blame the Neumanns for thinking their prayers would be answered by the creator of the universe who loves them and promised to hear their prayers and who has the power to perform miracles and heal illness?
³

Here are a few of many other biblical passages that support the Neumanns' faith:

Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. (Matt. 7:7–8; Jesus speaking)

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? (Matt. 7:11; Jesus spoke these words immediately before giving the Golden Rule)

If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. (Matt. 18:19; Jesus talking)

And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ. (1
John 3:22)
⁴

These and many other verses clearly teach that believers should expect miracles in their lives. Christ and his followers reportedly performed many healings, resurrections, and other miraculous deeds, and Jesus specifically promised that all Christians would be able to do the same, and more:

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it. (John 14:12–14)

There is no room for misinterpretation here: if believers ask for anything in the name of Jesus, “I will do it,” he assures them. Jesus healed the sick, and so can you.

To demonstrate such power, Jesus actually cursed and withered a fig tree because, being out of season, it had no fruit when he was hungry. When his disciples marveled at this petulant miracle, he replied:

Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea,” and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (Mark 11:22–24)
⁵

If the Bible is true, then why did Kara die? Why were her devout believing parents' prayers not answered? Why have no mountains been thrown into the sea by faith? Why have no miracles ever been proved?

The obvious answer is that the Bible is wrong. As Vic Stenger shows us in this book, anyone who respects observation over belief can see that wishful thinking does not equal truth. In the real world, faith healing is faith killing. So, after millennia of observing the patent folly and the perfect failure of faith, why do people still believe in “absurdities the most monstrous”?

Jews and Muslims have a slightly different idea of faith than Christians do (
aman
and
iman
, respectively, from the same root). In the Hebrew and Islamic scriptures, faith is more like trust. It is similar to how the word is used in the phrase “full faith and credit of the United States.” For Jews and Muslims, faith is a “guarantee” or “promissory note.” Christians might sometimes understand it in that secondary sense, and even a few atheists may use the word (unadvisedly, in my opinion) in a natural sense, as when expressing confidence in the character of one's father, or trusting that the scientists and engineers did a good job creating the plane one is riding in. “That is not faith,” Dr. Stenger writes, “but trust. The term
faith
should be reserved for unfounded beliefs. Such faith is foolish.”

Stenger is right. Christian faith is not trust. When the New Testament came along, “faith” and “belief” (from the Greek
pistis
) took on a more focused and more dangerous meaning. Although the Hebrew scriptures and the Koran offer descriptions of what we should have faith in, they do not provide a definition of what faith is. Only Christianity tries to elevate belief into a virtue (or gift) in and of itself. Faith has been reified. It has become something to have and to hold, a quality of character, an evidence of goodness, a divine endowment, or an act of the will that changes an outcome. Christians don't always agree on exactly what faith is, but they all claim it can change outcomes or thoughts. Thomas Aquinas defined faith as “the act of the intellect when it assents to divine truth under the influence of the will moved by God through grace.”
⁶
Martin Luther shifted the emphasis, claiming that “faith is God's work in us,” which “changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts, and all our powers,” a “living, bold trust in God's grace,” which brings a “confidence and knowledge of God's grace.”
⁷
John Calvin had a more passive definition
of faith: “A firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
⁸

Here is the actual New Testament definition of faith, which I memorized as a child in Sunday school: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Heb. 11:1). That is the famous King James Version, but it turns out that the words “substance” and “evidence” are not so evidently substantial in their meaning. As we saw with Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, there is room for interpretation. Some English translations replace the word “substance” with “assurance,” “realization,” or “proof.” (The Amplified Bible suggests “title deed.”) Others replace the word “evidence” with “conviction” or “certainty,” but they all come down to the actual confident possession of something that you don't have or see. The Bible simply assumes that the “things not seen” are existing eternal entities, as opposed to merely mundane physical observations: “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18).

Of course, if faith were simply the “evidence of things not seen,” it would be like a scientific hypothesis under testing. The highly probable but still postulated existence of quarks, for example, is based on “evidence of things not seen.” (The evidence is indeed seen, but the quarks are not.) However, no scientist says that quarks exist “by faith.” A probability, even if very high, is neither a substance nor a certainty. The only substance or certainty is observation.

But looking at the Bible itself, in its entirety and in context, it is clear to see that the biblical “evidence of things not seen” is not merely a tentative hypothesis in the scientific sense, falsifiable and subject to disconfirmation. It is a “substance of things hoped for,” a “certainty.” It can perform miracles, after all, a claim never made by any scientific postulation.

Notice that the Bible does not say faith is equal to knowledge. Just five verses after defining faith, the author of the book of Hebrews tells us that we can't really know if God exists before we decide to believe in him: “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb. 11:6).

How's that for circular reasoning? You can't know by observation or evidence
if God exists: you have to believe it. That is like saying: “Why should you believe in God? Because if you believe, then you will believe.” (And if you don't believe, you won't be pleasing God, and you don't want to risk that, do you?) In fact, you can't have a God unless you first believe, according to that verse.

This does not mean that the existence of God is not testable in principle. If there is a God as defined by the Christian writings, then he should be observable. Responding to believers who claim faith equals evidence, Dr. Stenger writes: “The parallel between science and religion, that both are based on data (experience) and theory (interpretation), is strained. Science takes its data and forms theories (that is, models) that can be tested against other data. When religion does that at all, it always fails the test.” If Kara Neumann had been miraculously healed, that would count as evidence in favor of faith. Her death, therefore, should count as evidence against it.