The Christian scientist and dogma

Let me treat here what non-Christian, especially atheist, scientists consider the greatest drawback to being Christian: If you are Christian, and especially if you are Catholic, there are a number of dogmas you have to adhere to as facts, and this is simple prejudice (accepting facts without evidence), which (a) is going to blind you to any line of investigation which will tend to contradict your "facts," and (b) creates an attitude antithetical to good science, which is never to accept anything at all "on faith."

The Christian, precisely because he has a set of dogmas he is conscious of, actually has an advantage over the atheist in this area. Why? Consider: Why should one "never accept anything 'on faith'"? What evidence is there to support that you're more likely to be wrong by accepting something "on faith" than by "seeing for yourself"? Well, it "stands to reason." It does indeed; but in the last analysis, the scientist can't give evidence that not accepting things on faith is more likely to make you go wrong; he just accepts this "on faith." Is reason really reliable? Is seeing reliable? Is it more reliable than other forms of acquiring information? Is measurement the best way to "see for yourself," or does it itself distort the information? (There's evidence to support this, by the way, even in physics.)

The point, first of all, is, of course, that the scientist accepts a great deal "on faith": that there is something "out there" that he is observing; that he will never find a real contradiction; that nature behaves in a reasonably constant way; that arguing inductively actually allows you to predict events that haven't occurred; that if what you see doesn't make sense without something unseen, then that unseen event (or something like it) happened (as that the dinosaur bones mean that there must have been enormous animals, whether they were true reptiles or not). And so on. And there are dogmas that are unquestioned and simply false, such as that if something is real, it can be measured, that morality has no factuality to it but is simply emotions or societal attitudes, and so forth.

The scientist also does not check on many of the things he is taught. Having got fairly far in physics, I know that the experiments physics students do in the labs only check out a minuscule amount of what they're learning in the textbooks; and also, if your experiment comes up with a result that differs widely from the standard answer, you rework your data until you get what Rutherford or Faraday found; you don't question their work. So you take your professor's and the textbook's word for it that he isn't lying and that he (or whoever he is relying on) did the experiments that meant that that person "saw for himself." You'd never get anywhere in any science if you questioned absolutely everything that was said; and so the "real" scientific attitude that "I've got to see for myself" is a recipe for stagnating at the very beginning. If science doesn't build on what previous scientists have done, but persists in checking and rechecking in case there's been a hoax, then science makes no progress. Hence, science rests on faith (taking someone's word for it that "this is what I saw").

But how different is this from taking John's word for it that "this is being reported by an eye-witness who knows of his own knowledge the facts he is reporting; it was written so that you would believe that it is true"? And this same John reports Jesus as saying, "Amen amen I tell you, I am speaking of what I know and giving evidence about what I have seen; and you people do not accept what I say." Jesus here is asserting that he has had first-hand knowledge of what he is talking about, and to prove it, he performs acts that no known natural agency can perform, including coming back to life. In order to say that this is false, you have to hold either (a) that the evangelists like John didn't actually put down (or control) what allegedly they wrote, (b) were lying, or (c) were mistaken.

Now an atheist simply accepts that (a), (b), or (c) or some combination is the case; but it turns out that, if you investigate this, you run into serious difficulties with such a position. I am not going to enter into apologetics here; my point is that the atheist takes it on faith that of course Jesus didn't really come back to life or perform the miracles; of course this is just legend, and it's naive to believe anything else. Why bother investigating anything so obvious? It couldn't have happened, and therefore of course it didn't, and the explanation of the Gospel accounts is that they are some kind of delusion or myth.

The atheistic scientist is burdened with a whole carload of dogmas which he can give no evidence to prove, and often not even to support; but he does not realize this. He is therefore much more likely to be a victim to dogmatic blindness than the person who adheres to dogmas, knowing that (a) they cannot be proved, but (b) there is reason supporting them and nothing that disproves them.

And it is simply not true that the Christian will not pursue avenues that seem to lead in directions that contradict his faith. I can testify to this from my own experience; as a philosopher, it is my duty to see what can be known from the observable evidence in front of me, whatever I happen a priori to believe; and it has not seldom occurred that I came to a conclusion that seemed contrary to what I was taught from my religious teachers. The whole theory of good and evil that is the foundation of this book seems, on first encounter, to be the most anti-Christian view of the world you could name; but on deeper investigation, I think it lights up both experience and the words of Jesus and the Catholic tradition in a marvelous manner.

And what I am here saying is not that I am right on this particular point of good and evil, but that the Christian can confidently pursue lines of evidence that seem contrary to the dogmas he holds, because he holds these dogmas, not as something whose "alleged truth" must never be brought into question, but simply as facts, which of course are not going to be shown not to be facts. A fact is a fact, however you know it.

Science is not something for the Christian to be afraid of, because it can never contradict Christian truth. How could it? How could the Christian be worse off for having more evidence than the atheist? Of course, the atheist doesn't believe he has more evidence, but that's the atheist's problem, not the Christian's.

And it is a real problem (partly because a hidden one) for the atheist; because he is so convinced that Christianity is false that he will not consider evidence that would tend to support it. When scientists bring up the "big bang" origin of the universe (for which there is a good deal of evidence) and this implies that the initial moment of the universe was a condition of radical instability, they immediately stop and refuse to draw conclusions "as scientists." As scientists! Science is built on the refusal simply to "stop" at something that doesn't make sense. If the initial moment of the universe was unstable, so that it exploded, then (a) it either existed stably beforehand and something else got it into instability, or (b) there wasn't any universe beforehand, in which case something else brought it into existence, or (c) it is in some kind of "pulsating stability" where it alternately expands and collapses. Alternative (c) is testable, and doesn't seem to have the weight of the evidence (total mass of the universe) in its favor. Which leaves (a) or (b) or abandon the theory altogether. But to accept (a) or (b) leads to something beyond the material universe (which, by the way, might not be anything like the Christian God); but that way lies "religion," and that's not "scientific."

What I am saying here is that a "dogmatic" adherence to dogmas (in the sense of a fear that if you looked hard enough you might find out that they were false) is as endemic a disease in the scientific community as it is in the Christian; and that in either case, it is pernicious to objectivity of investigation. But the atheist is worse off for two reasons: first, that he doesn't believe that he is following unsupported dogmas; and second, that there is no reason why these dogmas should actually be true; they are just "procedural rules" that were invented by--of all people--philosophers a couple of centuries ago that more or less work. The Christian, on the other hand, knows he believes; and if he is intelligent, he knows why he believes, and that it is not unreasonable to believe as he does. He has nothing to be afraid of.