Conversions from atheism are often gradual and complex, no doubt. For many converts the road is slow and tedious, tiring and trying. But in the end unbelievers who find God can enjoy an inner peace that comes from a clear conscience in knowing they held to truth and followed the arguments faithfully.

Of course not all converts from atheism become Christian or even religious. Some converts only reach a deistic belief in God (an areligious position that God is “impersonal”) but the leap is still monumental; and it opens new, unforeseen horizons.

The factors that lead to faith are often diverse. It is clear that every former atheist has walked a unique path to God. Cardinal Ratzinger was once asked how many ways there are to God. He replied:

“As many ways as there are people. For even within the same faith each man’s way is an entirely personal one.”

Of course, the pope-to-be was not endorsing the view that “all religions are equal” but rather that there always seems to be a unique combination of factors—or steps—that move each convert towards belief in God. It also seems that some of these factors are more prominent across the board than others.

Here are eight common factors that lead atheists to change their minds about God:

1. Good literature and reasonable writing.

Reasonable atheists eventually become theists because they are reasonable; and furthermore, because they are honest. They are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads; and in many cases the evidence comes to the atheist most coherently and well-presented through the writings of believers in God.

Author Karen Edmisten admits on her blog:

“I once thought I’d be a lifelong atheist. Then I became desperately unhappy, read up on philosophy and various religions (while assiduously avoiding Christianity), and waited for something to make sense. I was initially  appalled when Christianity began to look  like the sensible thing, surprised when I wanted to be baptized, and stunned that I ended up a Catholic.”

Dr. Holly Ordway, author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms, describes the consequences of reading great, intelligent Christian writers:

“I found that my favorite authors were men and women of deep Christian faith. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien above all; and then the poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, John Donne, and others. Their work was unsettling to my atheist convictions…”

Dr. Ordway mentions the eminent 20th century Oxford thinker, C.S. Lewis. Lewis is a prime example of a reasonable but unbelieving thinker who was willing to read from all angles and perspectives. As a result of his open inquiry, he became a believer in Christ and one of modern Christianity’s greatest apologists.

G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald were two of the most influential writers to effect Lewis’ conversion. He writes in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy:

“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for… A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

Author Dale Ahlquist writes matter-of-factly that “C.S. Lewis was an atheist until he read Chesterton’s book, The Everlasting Man, but he wasn’t afterwards…”

Ironically, it was C.S. Lewis’ influential defenses of Christianity that would eventually prompt countless conversions to Christianity—and his influence continues today unhindered. Among the Lewis-led converts from atheism is former feminist and professor of philosophy, Lorraine Murray, who recalls:

“In college I turned my back on Catholicism, my childhood faith, and became a radical, gender-bending feminist and a passionate atheist …. Reading Lewis, I found something that I must have been quietly hungering for all along, which was a reasoned approach to my childhood beliefs, which had centered almost entirely on emotion. As I turned the pages of this book, I could no longer ignore the Truth, nor turn my back on the Way and the Life. Little by little, and inch by inch, I found my way back to Jesus Christ and returned to the Catholic Church.”

For an in-depth account of Murray’s conversion, see her book: Confessions Of An Ex-Feminist.

2. "Experimentation" with prayer and the word of God.

The Word of God is living. It has power beyond human comprehension because it is “God-breathed.” God speaks to man in many ways; but especially through prayer and the reading of the inspired Scriptures. When curiosity (or even interest) of non-believers leads to experimentation with prayer or reading the Bible the results can be shocking, as many converts attest.

One former atheist who was profoundly affected by prayer and the Scriptures is author Devin Rose. On his blog, he describes the role that God’s Word played in his gradual conversion process from atheism to Christianity:

“I began praying, saying, “God, you know I do not believe in you, but I am in trouble and need help. If you are real, help me.” I started reading the Bible to learn about what Christianity said…”

Once Rose began to read the Scriptures and talk to God, even as a skeptic, he found himself overwhelmed by something very real:

“Still, I persevered. I kept reading the Bible, asking my roommate questions about what I was reading, and praying. Then, slowly, and amazingly, my faith grew and it eventually threatened to whelm my many doubts and unbelief.”

And the rest was history for the now rising Catholic apologist and author of The Protestant’s Dilemma.

Similarly, renowned sci-fi author John C. Wright distinctly recalls a prayer he said as an adamant atheist:

“I prayed. ‘Dear God, I know… that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me…If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright.'”

Wright soon received the answer (and effect) he did not expect:

“Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me…I was altered down to the root of my being…It was like falling in love.”

Wright was welcomed into the Catholic Church at Easter in 2008.

3. Historical study of the Gospels.

Lee Strobel, the former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and author of the influential work, The Case For Christ, is a prime example of what happens when an honest atheist sets out to establish once and for all whether the claims of the Gospels are reliable or not.

Strobel writes at the end of his investigation in The Case For Christ:

“I’ll admit it:I was ambushed by the amount and quality of the evidence that Jesus is the unique Son of God… I shook my head in amazement. I had seen defendants carted off to the death chamber on much less convincing proof! The cumulative facts and data pointed unmistakably towards a conclusion that I wasn’t entirely comfortable in reaching.” (p. 264)

Modern historical scholars like Craig Blomberg and N.T. Wright have advanced the area of historical theology and the study of the claims of the Gospels to exciting new heights. The results of such ground-breaking studies are one of the greatest threats to modern day atheism.

Referring specifically to the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ in the Gospels (discussed below), former atheist and freelancer, Philip Vander Elst, writes:

“The more I thought about all these points, the more convinced I became that the internal evidence for the reliability of the Gospels and the New Testament as a whole was overwhelming."

4. Honest philosophical reasoning.

Philosophy means “love of truth.” Philosophy is meant to lead one to truth; and it certainly will, if the philosopher is willing to honestly consider the arguments from both sides and follow the best arguments wherever they may lead.

Psychologist Dr. Kevin Vost recalls his discovery of the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas:

“Pope Leo XIII had written in the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris that for scientific types who follow only reason, after the grace of God, nothing is as likely to win them back to the faith as the wisdom of St. Thomas, and this was the case for me. He showed me how true Christian faith complements and perfects reason; it doesn’t contradict or belittle it. He solved all the logical dilemmas.”

Philosopher Dr. Ed Feser, in his article, The Road From Atheism, recounts the shocking effectof opening himself to the arguments for the existence of God:

“As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.”  Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!”

Feser concludes:

“Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much.  When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back.  As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed.  But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.”

Two fantastic books from Edward Feser include The Last Superstition: A Refutation Of The New Atheism and Aquinas. Also recommended is Kevin Vost’s From Atheism to Catholicism: How Scientists and Philosophers Led Me to the Truth.

5. Reasonable believers.

It has been the obnoxious position of some (not all) atheists that in order to believe in God, one must have a significant lack of intelligence and/or reason. Most atheists believe that modern science has ruled out the possibility of the existence of God. For this reason, they tag believers with a lack of up-to-date knowledge and critical thinking skills. (Of course, the question of the existence of a God who is outside of the physical universe is fundamentally aphilosophical question—not a scientific question.)

Intelligent and reasonable believers in God, who can engage atheistic arguments with clarity and logic, become a great challenge to atheists who hold this shallow attitude towards the existence of God.

Theists especially make a statement when they are experts in any field of science. To list just a few examples: Galileo and Kepler (astronomy), Pascal (hydrostatics), Boyle (chemistry), Newton (calculus), Linnaeus (systematic biology), Faraday (electromagnetics), Cuvier (comparative anatomy), Kelvin (thermodynamics), Lister (antiseptic surgery), and Mendel (genetics).

An honest atheist might presume, upon encountering Christians (for example) who have reasonable explanations for their supernatural beliefs, that the existence of God is at least plausible. This encounter might then mark the beginning of the non-believer’s openness towards God as a reality.

Consider the notable conversion of former atheist blogger, Jennifer Fulwiler. Her journey from atheism to agnosticism and—eventually—to Catholicism, was slow and gradual with many different points of impact. But encountering intelligent believers in God was a key chink in her atheist armor.

In this video interview with Brandon Vogt, Jen explains how encountering intelligent, reasonable theists (especially her husband) impacted her in the journey towards her eventual conversion.

For the full account of Jen’s conversion process, get her must-read book, Something Other Than God. Her blog is conversiondiary.com.

And then there’s Leah Libresco—another atheist blogger turned Catholic. Leah recalls the challenging impact of reasonable Christians in her academic circle:

“I was in a philosophical debating group, so the strongest pitch I saw was probably the way my Catholic friends rooted their moral, philosophical, or aesthetic arguments in their theology. We covered a huge spread of topics so I got so see a lot of long and winding paths into the consequences of belief.”

Recalling her first encounter with this group of intelligent Christians, she writes on her blog:

“When I went to college…I met smart Christians for the first time, and it was a real shock.”

That initial “shock” stirred her curiosity and propelled her in the direction of Christianity. Leah is now an active Catholic.

Finally, there’s Edith Stein, a brilliant 20th century philosopher. As an atheist, Edith was shocked when she discovered the writings of Catholic philosopher, Max Scheler. As one account of her conversion recounts:

“Edith was enthralled by Scheler’s eloquence in expounding and defending Catholic spiritual ideals. Listening to his lectures on the phenomenology of religion, she became disposed to take religious ideas and attitudes seriously for the first time since her adolescence, when she had lost her faith and and given up prayer.”

Edith Stein would eventually convert to Catholicism and die a martyr. She is now known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

6. Modern advances and limitations in science.

Antony Flew was one of the world’s most famous atheists of the 20th century. He debated William Lane Craig and others on the existence of God. But eventually his recognition of the profound order and complexity of the universe, and its apparent fine-tuning, was a decisive reason for the renowned atheist to change his mind about God’s existence.

In a fascinating interview with Dr. Ben Wiker, Flew explains:

“There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe.”

He concluded that it was reasonable to believe that the organization of space, time, matter and energy throughout the universe is far from random.

As Dr. Peter Kreeft has pointed out, no person would see a hut on a beach and conclude that it must have randomly assembled itself by some random natural process, void of an intelligent designer. Its order necessitates a designer. Thus if this “beach hut analogy” is true, how much more should we believe in an Intelligent Designer behind the vastly more complex and ordered universe and the precise physical laws that govern it (click here for William Lane Craig’s argument for the fine-tuning of the universe).

Flew continues in his exposition on why he changed his mind about God:

“The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself—which is far more complex than the physical Universe—can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint . . . The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins’ comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a “lucky chance.” If that’s the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.”

Parents often describe their experience of procreation as “a miracle,” regardless of their religious background or philosophical worldview. Intuitively, they seem to accept that there is something deeply mysterious and transcendent at work in the bringing forth (and sustenance) of new human life. Flew also was able to realize (after a lifetime of study and reflection) that there could be no merely natural explanation for life in the universe.

For a more in-depth account of Flew’s change of mind on God’s existence, read There Is A God: How The World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

7. Evidence for the Resurrection.

Thanks to the phenomenal work of leading New Testament scholars, including Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and N.T. Wright, the case for Christ’s resurrection has become more airtight than ever.

Modern historical studies have left little doubt about what the best explanation is for the alleged postmortem appearances of the risen Jesus, the conversions of Paul and James, and the empty tomb: Jesus really was raised from the dead. Even most of today’s critical New Testament scholars accept these basic facts as historically certain (the appearances, conversions, empty tomb, etc); but they are left limping with second-rate alternative explanations in a last ditch effort to refute the true resurrection of Christ and “signature of God”, as scholar Richard Swinburne has tagged it.

The case for the resurrection of Jesus had a significant impact on the former atheist, now Christian apologist, Alister McGrath. He recalls in one of his articles:

“My early concern was to get straight what Christians believed, and why they believed it. How does the Resurrection fit into the web of Christian beliefs? How does it fit into the overall scheme of the Christian faith? After several years of wrestling with these issues, I came down firmly on the side of Christian orthodoxy. I became, and remain, a dedicated and convinced defender of traditional Christian theology. Having persuaded myself of its merits, I was more than happy to try to persuade others as well.”

For more on McGrath’s journey see his book, Surprised By Meaning.

8. Beauty.

The great theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, wrote:

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”

Father von Balthasar held strong to the notion that to lead non-believers to belief in God we must begin with the beautiful.

Dr. Peter Kreeft calls this the Argument from Aesthetic Experience. The Boston College philosopher testifies that he knows of several former atheists who came to a belief in God based on this argument (for more from Dr. Kreeft, see his Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God).

In classic Kreeftian fashion, he puts forward the argument in the following way:

“There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Therefore there must be a God.

You either see this one or you don’t.”

At the halfway point of HBO’s unsettling new series Westworld – a J.J. Abrams reboot of the 1973 film written and directed by Michael Crichton – some big plot questions remain. Is William a younger Man in Black? Is Bernard really a host? And what’s this maze all about?

The premise of the show is (relatively) straightforward: In the distant future, scientists and businessmen collaborate to create a vast amusement park in the style of the Old West, populating it with artificially intelligent robots (or “hosts”) that are so advanced that they are completely indistinguishable from human beings. Wealthy patrons (“newcomers” to the hosts) come to the park to act out fully immersive fantasies without consequence (they can hurt and even “kill” the hosts, but by design the hosts can’t kill the patrons), while an intricate network of underground employees work around the clock to clean up and reset the hosts, reprogram their character and storyline glitches, and continually enhance the park’s veil of realism. It’s a well-oiled machine, every centimeter of it designed for the lurid entertainment of the upper class.

Only, as of late, the realism is getting a little too real.

With each episode, it becomes a little bit clearer who is driving it and why (SPOILERS AHEAD), but the key twist is that some of the hosts are exhibiting “aberrant” behaviors, e.g., going off of their programmed storylines, “remembering” violence committed against them prior to system resets, and generally connecting dots that, in theory, it’s not possible for them to connect. In short, the hosts are increasingly acting more like a human being than a computer.

With the introduction of this theme, everything about the show – its plot twists, its characters, its graphic content – is subsumed under two key philosophical questions. First, can computers think? And second, are human beings really just computers?

On a surface level, Westworld really only deals with the first question and the social implications of creating such unpredictable machines. (Leading scientists and innovators – Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk among them – have raised a red flag about the exponential advance of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses for human life. There’s still a lot of show left, but it doesn’t look like Westworld will be offering much to countervail those fears.) But because these two questions really come down to the same question – what is human consciousness? – the first question always entails the second as well.

So how does Westworld answer these questions?

Can Computers Think?

Computer scientist Alan Turing famously devised a test whereby computers, for all intents and purposes, could be shown to be intelligent. Turing described the following hypothetical situation: Suppose a computer and a person were in an enclosed room, separated from an interrogator whose goal it is to discover which is which through a series a questions. The aim of the person is to lead the interrogator to acknowledge the computer as the computer, while the computer is programmed to lead the interrogator to falsely acknowledge the computer as the person. If at the end this “imitation game” the computer so closely mimics the human responses that the interrogator incorrectly identifies the machine as the person, the computer has passed the “Turing test” for exhibiting intelligent behavior.

It’s widely assumed that the Turing test is a sufficient condition for showing that a computer has attained something like human thought. The qualifiers we use to talk about current technologies that mirror intelligence (“smart phone,” “cognitive robotics”, “artificial intelligence”) further reinforce that assumption.

But Westworld exposes the limitations of the Turing test. In the second episode, a young man converses with a host in a waiting room that leads into the park. “Are you real?” he asks her, clearly feeling a little silly. “Well,” the host responds, “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” This is the logic of behaviorism undergirding the Turing test. But the answer to this – based on everything we’ve seen about the park’s normal mode of operating – is clearly “yes.” Being tricked by a host into treating it as human (or human-like) doesn’t change the fact that the hosts are routinely dragged into a cold, dark underground and programmed, to the letter, to say and do everything they say and do. They may act like autonomous thinkers, but there’s nothing “real” about them (at least, not at first).

These limitations become explicit in the third episode when the park’s founder, Dr. Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), describes the early days of Westworld with his partner. “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year,” Dr. Ford explains. “But that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness [emphasis mine].”

The implication here is that what makes the thought of human beings really and truly thought is the presence of a mind or consciousness to engage in it. Mimicry of a thing doesn’t attain the whole reality of that thing; and the reality of human consciousness is evidently a “something more” that goes beyond observable behaviors.

This brings us to a pause in the first question to jump to the second.

Are Human Beings Really Just Computers?

Discussions about whether computers can think simultaneously involve questions about whether human thought can be said to involve a mind or consciousness beyond the material brain in the first place. If there is no such thing as mind or consciousness, then the Turing test is a perfectly valid way to determine whether a computer has become a thinker in the same sense that a person is a thinker. On this view, human beings are really no different from the average host in Westworld. All your choices, beliefs, and sensations – in short, the whole spectrum of “immaterial” experiences you associate with a single subject you call “myself” – are just a convenient fiction. The only difference is that where the hosts are programmed by artificial processes to behave as if they’re special subjects, we’re programmed by natural processes. You are your material structures and their motion, and nothing more.

Westworld clearly doesn’t adopt this materialist perspective on human life. The whole drama of the show is that the hosts are going beyond the Turing test to attain something of a different kind, and therefore, on the second question, the attainment of something beyond the material structures of the brain that humans possess. But what is that something?

Giants of modern philosophy differ widely on this point. John Searle’s “Chinese Room” experiment is the most popular critique of the Turing test, and focuses on understanding. Others such as Thomas Nagel ("what is like to be a bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem of consciousness”) have made awareness a kind of bulwark against materialism.

One of the least recognized but most important critiques of materialism, however, is the argument from intentionality. In Edward Feser’s book Philosophy of Mind, he gives a cogent argument that the “ancient problem of intentionality” is what really lies behind arguments of understanding or awareness:

“The term ‘intentionality’ derives from the Latin intendere, which means ‘to point (at)’ or ‘to aim (at)’ – hence the use of the term to signify the capacity of a metal state to ‘point at,’ or to be about, or to mean, stand for, or represent, something beyond itself. (It is important to note that intentions, for example, your intention to read this chapter, are only one manifestation of intentionality; your belief that you are reading a book, your desire to read it, your perception of the book, and so forth, exhibit intentionality just as much as your intention does.) The concept was of great interest to the medieval philosophers but Franz Brentano (1838 -1917) is the thinker most responsible for putting it at the forefront of contemporary philosophical discussion. Brentano is also famous for regarding intentionality as the ‘mark of the mental’ – the one essential feature of all mental phenomena – and for holding that their possessing intentionality makes mental phenomena ultimately irreducible to, and inexplicable in terms of, physical phenomena.”

If the hosts of Westworld are attaining something beyond the material, it is, in a word, intentionality. Their sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and desires are no longer self-contained in a string of physical mechanisms. They are about their objects, directed toward them. They simultaneously seem to be unlocking hidden doors to perception, reason, and will – and even contemplating meeting their “maker” – precisely through the “about-ness” of mental states so characteristic of human life.

If Feser is right that intentionality is the best argument for the immateriality of the mind, and Westworld treats intentionality as the immaterial “something” that the hosts now have, we’re brought back to the first question. Can a computer actually attain human thought, understood as the operation of an immaterial mind?

Westworld wants to say “yes”, but justifying that answer adequately is completely beyond the scope of the show – and besides, would drain out all the drama. The show drops hints that through a lucky recipe of ingredients (ingredients that were also present in primal man), “somehow” the hosts moved from unintentional symbol exchange to intentional symbol understanding, and from unconsciousness to emergent consciousness. We willingly suspend any disbelief we might have to go on that journey; however, as one neuroscientist explains, we have “very compelling reasons” to believe this is never really going to happen.

Whatever the answer to the first question, in dealing with the second in just this way, Westworld open the door to another ancient philosophical problem. 

Westworld as Metaphor

One of the taglines of Westworld is that it’s about “the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” The first half of that description, which focuses on the hosts, is obvious, and involves all of the issues discussed above. But what about “the future of sin”?

The focus here seems to be on the patrons who frequent the park, typified in the character of Logan. Early in the series, a visitor to Westworld says that the first time he came to the park, he brought his family and went fishing, but the second time, left the family behind and “went straight evil.” William’s future brother-in-law Logan is just such a seasoned veteran of Westworld. He has no misgivings about doing whatever he pleases with the hosts in any given moment. William laments at one point that Logan just wants to kill or sleep with everything he sees – and he has a point. For the wealthy young businessman, the only thing that matters is his own power and pleasure. In fact, his greatest desire is for something at the outer reaches of the park, “the biggest game there is” – namely, all-out war.

This says more about Logan than it does about the park. Walker Percy once remarked (in a line that could’ve easily been written about Westworld) that the modern self is so bored and alienated, and so frustrated by its boredom and alienation, that it “needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war.” The park’s creators profit handsomely from this assumption, isolating the patrons’ longing to dramatically effect something and setting it loose without a cost to the world around them.

But we know that the illusion is an illusion. The patrons’ actions are not, as they suspect, without consequence. They are inflicting deep wounds, and lasting memories of those wounds, in their conscious hosts. More than any abstract discussion about sentience or awareness, this point is made in a more visceral, intuitive way. Time and time again, the camera lingers on the hosts’ eyes, and through these “windows to the soul”, we see worry, hope, sorrow, and wonder. More than mere awareness, primal understanding, or even intentionality, we see a reflection of the mystery of ensoulment and the dignity it accords.

If we set aside the thorny question of computer consciousness and read this symbolically, the show becomes less a crystal ball into the future, and more a mirror of the present. The hosts symbolize the weak, the young, the voiceless, the helpless – anyone on the margins of society that is manipulated, brutalized, and thrown away, often without fully understanding what is being done to them or how to stop it. Lisa Joy, one of the show’s co-creators, confirms this reading when she describes Westworld as being about “what it means to be human, from the outside in…a meditation on consciousness – the blessing and the burden of it.” The blessing for the hosts is that they are coming to know and understand the world around them – and the burden is, as it is for so many people, precisely the same thing.

The patrons can similarly be read as agents of decadence, brute power, and disregard for vulnerable human life. They hold the hosts under their thumbs for their own gratification, which is ultimately all that matters to them. In the park, they treat objects like people, only to treat them like objects again; but the great irony is that the objects, in becoming “others”, re-reveal the impulse the patrons have come to let loose and leave behind – namely, the objectification of the other. In a roundabout way, then, the show is all about this addiction to treating people like objects, which is not the future of sin, but the reality of sin itself. Indulging that addiction in its most graphic forms – to get back to Percy’s line – becomes about much more than escape for the patrons. It even becomes about more than re-constructing one’s self. It becomes about re-constructing the very meaning of existence to conform to the self. “The world out there,” the Man in Black explains to a host in one scene, “the one you’ll never see, was one of plenty…Every need taken care of, except one: Purpose. Meaning.”

Is this all so unthinkable? One of the hosts, remembering a past narrative “loop” as a teacher of Shakespeare, warns another using one of Friar Laurence’s lines from Romeo and Juliet: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

As a show not just about the future but about the present, Westworld seems to deliver exactly the same warning – not just about the swiftness with which we develop human-like objects, but also about the inhumanity with which we objectify each other.

On both counts, the question we’re left with is a hair-raising one: Is the West clanging headlong into Westworld?

Can the universe be a mere brute fact? Can we say, “The universe just exists and that’s that—it has no explanation at all”?

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, thinks so. In a recent interview at Salon.com, Carroll says, “There’s certainly no reason to think that there was something that ‘caused’ it; the universe can just be.”

Carroll is in good company with such an assertion. Bertrand Russell, the late British atheistic philosopher, argued the same thing in the famous 1948 BBC radio debate with Fr. Fredrick Copleston: “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.”

Notice neither Carroll nor Russell says the universe is self-explanatory in that its existence belongs to its nature, which would be the sort of explanation for God’s existence. Nor are they saying we don’t know what the explanation of the universe is. They are saying there is no explanation for why the universe exists rather than not. In essence they are denying the principle of sufficient reason, which states, “Everything that is has a sufficient reason for existing.”

How should we respond? Are we to exchange brute fact for brute fact and say, “Things just need an explanation, and that’s that”? Or is there a way we can show the appeal to brute facts is unreasonable? I answer the latter.

There are several arguments one can employ when arguing against the brute fact view, but for the sake of brevity, I will offer only five.

Double Standards

First, I find it interesting how it’s permitted for an atheist to appeal to unintelligible brute facts but not the theist. If a theist were to say, “God is just a brute fact, there is no rhyme or reason to his existence,” then an atheist would feel justified in denying him membership among the intelligentsia. This is manifest when atheists such as Richard Dawkins object to theistic arguments with, “Who designed the designer?”, thinking theists arbitrarily posit God as the terminus of causal series. If theists aren’t allowed to play the “brute fact” card (which we don’t do anyway), then atheists shouldn’t be allowed to do so either.

The Facts of Ordinary Life

A second response is to point out that we don’t appeal to brute facts when dealing with things in ordinary life. For example, suppose a team of police officers come across a dead body on their shift and begin conjecturing possible explanations. “It’s murder,” one says. “No, I think this was a suicide,” the other officer responds. Another officer says, “No, I disagree, I think the cause is a heart attack.” The last officer says, “We’re wasting our time here—it’s just an unintelligible and inexplicable brute fact that this corpse is here. Let’s keep going.” What would we think of such a police officer? How about, “He’s not a good one!” I think his chief would concur.

So, why should an appeal to a brute fact when faced with the existence of the universe be reasonable when an appeal to a brute fact when faced with a dead body is not?

Can’t Get Out of the Taxi

Our atheist friend might object, “I’m not saying we should accept the police officer’s appeal to a brute fact. I acknowledge everything in the universe probably has an explanation for its existence. But there is no reason to think the universe has to have an explanation for its existence.”

Besides the fact this objection begs the question against the theist—if God exists then the universe would have an explanation for its existence—it commits what some philosophers have aptly called the “taxicab fallacy”; thus a third argument against the brute fact view. Why commit to the idea “Whatever exists has a reason for its existence” and then dismiss it like you dismiss a taxicab once you arrive at the universe as a whole? Such a move is arbitrary and thus unreasonable.

“But,” an atheist might say, “isn’t a theist guilty of the same fallacy in saying God doesn’t have a cause for his existence?” The answer is no, because the theist is not saying God is a brute fact, i.e., he has no reason or explanation for his existence. It is essential to classical theism that God’s existence, though not caused by another, is explained by his essence. His essence is existence itself—ipsum esse subsistens. This is not something theists arbitrarily assert but is the conclusion of deductive reasoning that starts with certain features of the world—motion (change), efficient causality, contingency, degrees of being, and final causality.  So the theist is not guilty of the taxicab fallacy.

Skepticism of the Senses

Another reason the brute fact view is unreasonable is because it entails radical skepticism about perception. As philosopher Alexander Pruss argues in his essay “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument” (in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland), if things can exist without any sufficient reason, then there might be no reason for our perceptional experiences.

For example, according to this line of reasoning there might be no connection between your experience of reading this article on a computer and the actual article the computer is showing on its monitor. Your experience might just be a brute fact having nothing to do with any of the objective things with which we normally would associate your experience.

Do we want to go down that bleak road of skepticism and say all our sensory experiences are untrustworthy? There might be some radical skeptics who choose to walk that path (such skeptics can read this article). But for most reasonable people this is not a path that can be traveled, because such a path leads to the demise of science, which is something I assume Carroll wouldn’t endorse because he would be out of a job.

We need to be able to trust our sensory perceptions if we intend to discover truths about reality through empirical observation. So, unless one is willing to throw science out, one shouldn’t allow brute facts in the game.

No Arguments Allowed

The last argument I’ll offer for consideration comes from philosopher Edward Feser in his book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Feser argues the denial of the principle of sufficient reason is at the same time a denial of rational argumentation, including any argument for brute facts. Consider how when we accept the conclusion “Socrates is mortal,” we do so based on the premises “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man.” In other words, we recognize the conclusion as rational because the premises are true and the argument is logically valid.

But if brute facts are possible, and the principle of sufficient reason is false, then it follows that our conclusion “Socrates is mortal” might have nothing to do with the truth of the premises and their logical structure. It might also be possible our cognitive faculties themselves had no role to play in explaining why we came to that conclusion.

The bottom line is, if brute facts are possible, there might be no reason whatsoever we believe what we do, even the belief that we believe on rational grounds. This applies to any conclusion we might draw, even the conclusion “Things can exist without a reason for their existence.” But if the conclusion “Things, like the universe, can exist without a reason for their existence” might itself be a brute fact—namely, it has no connection to truth or logic—then we would have no reason to accept it as true. So to deny the principle of sufficient reason undercuts any ground one might have for doubting the principle. It’s self-refuting and thus unreasonable.

Conclusion

Sean Carroll is a brilliant man. He is courageous in taking on heavyweights of the likes of Dr. William Lane Craig. But why such a great mind can’t see the rational implications of denying the principle of sufficient reason, I do not know. Perhaps he just hasn’t thought it through. Or perhaps he just isn’t willing to open the door to a line of reasoning that leads to theism. Whatever may be the case, the appeal to brute facts is not a good parry when in the ring with a theist.

If God is a God of miracles as theists claim, then why doesn’t he perform more to stop evil?

I must admit this is one question I’ve wrestled with in solidarity with my atheist friends.

My initial response is to recall the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Is. 55:8). While I acknowledge this as true, it leaves me dissatisfied.

As a Christian I believe, with St. Paul, that God “works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28), but I’m still often left wondering if there is any sense in God not performing more miracles to stop evil.

Though this is a mystery, I think we can make some sense out of it.

Is God Really Idle?

Let’s begin by distinguishing between moral evil and physical evil. Moral evil is evil caused by the abuse of human freedom, i.e., sin. Physical evil refers to any sort of suffering, decay, or corruption caused by nature.

Now, if speaking of evil in general  (moral and physical), one response is to wrongly assume God hasn’t done anything. It may well be that God has already prevented and is preventing horrendous crimes or natural catastrophes that could wipe out the entire human race. There is simply no way, given our spatial and temporal limitations, to know he hasn’t already done this. As Norris Clarke says, “Our ignorance cannot be a basis for blaming God for what he is already doing” (The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, 288).

Let’s Not Obscure Things

If the question concerns physical evil in particular, one possible answer is that an overwhelming presence of miracles might obscure the supernatural character of the miraculous.

Consider a scenario where miracles are as common as rain. In such a scenario, it would be difficult (though not impossible) to distinguish between the supernatural and the natural, since we can only know the supernatural by contrast with the natural.

As philosopher Edward Feser points out in his lecture for the symposium “God, Reason, and Reality,” such difficulty lends itself to either of two extremes. One extreme is an occasionalist view of the world, a view that holds that God does everything directly without the cooperation of any natural causes. The other extreme is the view that there is no order to the universe at all, which has the potential to lead to an extreme David Hume–like skepticism, or even atheism, since causal regularity is needed to reason to God’s existence as manifested in St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways.

So, one may conclude that God doesn’t will a more overwhelming presence of miracles to stop physical evil for the sake of not obscuring the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders of reality.

God Values Choice

What about moral evil? Why wouldn’t God perform more miracles to stop moral atrocities in the world?

One response is that it would violate his divine wisdom. Why would God make man with the capacity to choose good or evil in order to merit man’s eternal reward and then rob him of that capacity the second he chooses to exercise it? It doesn’t make sense.

This would be analogous to someone installing an air conditioning system in his or her home and then turning the system off every time it turns on to cool the house. (Having lived in Southern Louisiana the majority of my life, I can affirm this would be a stupid thing to do.) One might be inclined to ask, “Why did you install the air conditioning system in the first place?”

Similarly, it seems contrary to reason for God to create human beings with the capacity to choose for him or against him and then take away that capacity every time they choose to exercise it against him.

“But,” you may say, “perhaps God doesn’t have to take away man’s capacity to choose evil but could stop the evil effects of man’s bad choices—like changing a fired bullet into butter.”

The answer to this question is that God values the power of choice with which he created man. If God never allowed the choices of man to have bad effects, there would be no real value in man’s ability to do good or evil.  In this case the alternative of a bad choice would never be a real alternative. Why give humans the capacity to choose evil if there would never be any real effects from that choice? One might summarize the argument as follows:

If no real effects are possible from man’s choice, then there is no value in man’s power to choose good or evil.

But God values man’s power to choose good or evil.

Therefore, there must be real effects that arise from man’s power to choose good or evil.

It’s reasonable to conclude God doesn’t ordinarily perform miracles to stop bad effects caused by bad choices because he values the power of choice he desires man to have.

Conclusion

These answers by no means fully dispel the darkness of the mystery of why God doesn’t perform more miracles to stop evil. However, they do shed a bit of light that may help one navigate the darkness.

Is science the only legitimate form of rational inquiry? The evolutionary biologist and popular atheist Richard Dawkins thinks so.

In a 2012 debate with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dawkins claims that religion, as opposed to science, is “a betrayal of the intellect.” He asserts that appealing to God to explain the universe is “a phony substitute for an explanation” and “peddles false explanations where real explanations could have been offered.” What counts as a real explanation? For Dawkins, it’s science.

The belief that real explanations can only be offered by science is a worldview known as scientism. But is scientism itself a real explanation? Is scientism worthy of the human intellect?

I suggest no, and here's why.

A Betrayal of the Human Intellect

First, scientism is self-refuting. The statement “Scientific knowledge is the only legitimate form of knowledge” cannot be verified by scientific methods. It’s a metaphysical proposition and thus not subject to scientific inquiry. No matter how successful science is, it is restricted to physical reality. Metaphysics deals with foundational truths about reality that go beyond the merely physical (e.g., questions about existence itself, time, space, etc.). Science can never go beyond the boundaries of its data source, so, in principle, cannot verify the truth of scientism.

But if science cannot verify the truth of scientism, then scientism is self-refuting.

Moreover, scientism is self-refuting because it undermines science as a rational form of inquiry. Consider that science presupposes various philosophical assumptions that are not subject to scientific verification—e.g., there is an external world outside the minds of scientists, the world is governed by causal regularities, and the human intellect is capable of uncovering these regularities.

Now, in view of scientism, how could science be a legitimate form of rational inquiry if its presupposed assumptions are not the product of scientific inquiry? It can’t. Scientism seeks to exalt science, but it actually undermines it in the process.

No Human Minds Allowed

The second reason why scientism is unsustainable is because it leads to the denial of the human mind. Philosopher Edward Feser argues such in his article “Blinded by Scientism.”

Feser explains how scientism is based on the divide in modern science between the quantitative-objective-real and qualitative-subjective-appearance images of the world. According to this divide, anything that cannot be quantifiably measured is not real. Since scientific inquiry is subject only to the quantitative aspects of reality, scientism views knowledge of such things as the only real form of knowledge. But this causes a problem.

Concerning the mind, Feser correctly argues that it falls on the qualitative-subjective-appearance side. The mental activities in the practice of science such as the formulation of hypotheses, the weighing of evidence, technical concepts, and the construction of causal chains cannot be described in the language of mathematics. There is no microscope or telescope that can show us the existence of mental beliefs. They do not fall within the purview of the quantitative-objective-real image of the world. Consequently, the activities of the mind fall on the side of the divide that is subjective and mere appearance—that is to say the mind is not real.

Now, as Feser points out, rather than seeing scientism as an absurdity and rejecting it in this light, many proponents of scientism follow their logic and reject the mind outright, viewing human thoughts as mere physiological events. But one has to wonder, “How can one argue for scientism when such argumentation presupposes the very thing scientism logically denies—namely, the mind?”

The answer is, you can’t. Therefore, since scientism denies the reality of the human mind, which is needed to argue in support of scientism itself, scientism is not reasonable.

Confusing Methodology with Ontology

Finally, scientism is unreasonable because it confuses methodology (method of knowing) with ontology (reality). Due to the success of the quantitative methodology in modern science, many think the method exhausts nature. But such success shows only that the method is useful for dealing with those aspects of nature that are quantifiably measurable.

To use Feser’s popular analogy, the claim that nothing exists beyond the boundaries of scientific inquiry is like saying plastic cups do not exist on the beach because of the metal detector’s failure to detect them. The metal detector’s failure says nothing whether or not plastic cups exist. It’s simply a manifestation of the limitations of its detecting powers.

Similarly, science’s inability to detect entities that are not quantitatively measurable or empirically verifiable (immaterial entities) says nothing whether or not such things exist. It’s simply a manifestation of the limitation of science’s detecting powers—science detects only physical reality.

Scientism, therefore, commits the fallacy of confusing method with reality—letting the method dictate what is real rather than letting reality dictate the proper method for studying it.

Whether appealing to God in explaining the universe is the best explanation is something worthy of consideration—theists and atheists need to present arguments to substantiate their worldviews. But what is not worthy of consideration is scientism. It’s self-refuting, it undermines science, and it commits the blunder of confusing method with reality.

Dawkins may reject God as the best explanation for the universe on the basis of bad arguments, but he can’t reasonably reject theism on the grounds that it’s not scientific knowledge. To do so would be to betray the human intellect.
 
 
(Image credit: Wilderness Vagabond)

We'd also like to note that Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

 
As many friends and readers know, I was an atheist for about a decade—roughly the 1990s, give or take. Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism. I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition. A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14. Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time—“That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc.—I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good. Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise—sola scriptura itself—has absolutely nothing to be said for it. Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that. Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends.

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years. Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me. But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second. (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann. Nietzsche, not so much.) Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth. For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself. For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff. And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school. Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth—something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point. Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the “existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of Nietzsche. Naturally I took it for granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago. On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie was the man, and I regarded his book The Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work. I still do. I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things right. (I discuss what he says about Aquinas in Aquinas.) But the book is intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for some books written by the “New Atheists.” Antony Flew’s challenge to the intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated “ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something to it. Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy on issues of morality and religion. Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of arguments. I used to wonder with a little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy, could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine when he’d come to collect the rent, sitting there sort of like a middle finger on the bookshelf behind me. But if so he never raised an eyebrow or said a word about it.

The argument from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the Catholic Church. (Not because the existence of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism—for reasons I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all—but because the role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence is often really quite mysterious.) To be sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily impressed me philosophically. What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed. Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.

I see from a look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of essays written for different courses in 1992. (I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and annoyed that it wasn’t me.) Attempts to sidestep the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and still don’t. My Master’s thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like Plantinga. I haven’t read it in years, but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d still agree with it.

I was also greatly impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics to something as rarefied as the cause of the world. J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a problem I found compelling. Moreover, the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him. Even if something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and evil”—He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.) The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.

Those were, I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes. What is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still find compelling. As I would come to realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed. And as my longtime readers know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable. The fideism that I found (and still find) so appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the mainstream classical theist tradition either. And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion. But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition.

It is this classical tradition—the tradition of Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics—that I had little knowledge of then. To be sure, I had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anselm that pretty much every philosophy student reads—several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium, and so forth. Indeed, I read a lot more than that. I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my undergraduate years. I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God. I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be sure—but also a bit of Gilson. I read all this while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years, and I still didn’t understand the classical tradition.

Why not? Because to read something is not necessarily to understand it. Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do. But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks. You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth. And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen—especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing. Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point. And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate. You’ll take whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant. “This part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares...” Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on. How far can you go wrong?

Well the answer is very, very far. It took me the better part of a decade to see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my philosophical thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion. The first of them had to do instead with the philosophy of language and logic. Late in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic and language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and what they express. (Propositions? Meanings? Thoughts? That’s the question.) Similar themes would be treated in courses I took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa Barbara. Certain arguments stood out. There was Alonzo Church’s translation argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought”. Outside of class, I discovered Karl Popper’s World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz. The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance. As the arguments sank in over the course of months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good.
 
 
Originally posted at Edward Feser's blog. User with author's permission.
(Image credit: Daemen)

One fact that concerns some Christians and elates some atheists is that 93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most elite scientific organizations in the United States, do not believe in God. Atheist Sam Harris says that, “This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.”

Should Christians be concerned that so many of these intelligent people don’t believe in God? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

Check the numbers

 
First, the National Academy of Sciences represents a small number of scientists. The Academy itself comprises only about 2,000 members, while there are more than 2 million scientists employed in the United States as a whole. This means that the NAS only represents about one-tenth of one percent of all scientists in the nation. Using this statistic alone to prove scientists are overwhelmingly atheists would be inaccurate.

A more accurate description comes from the Pew Research Center, which reported in 2009 that 51 percent of scientists believe that God or some higher power exists, while 41 percent of scientists reject both of those concepts. In addition, while only 2 percent of the general population identifies as atheist, 17 percent of scientists identify themselves with that term.

But now we have to consider another important set of factors: Is it science that turns people into atheists? Or is it atheism that turns people into scientists?

Elaine Ecklund’s recent book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think shows that scientists are more religious than we realize. In the course of her interviews she found that many scientists reject religion for personal reasons prior to becoming scientists (as opposed to rejecting religion solely on scientific grounds).

It is unfortunate that secular people feel more compelled to study the natural sciences than religious people, because some of our greatest scientific discoveries have come from people of faith (Gregor Mendel and Fr. Georges Lemaitre instantly come to mind).

Indeed, I have the pleasure of having a father-in-law who is a devout Catholic and a literal rocket scientist.

Who cares?

 
While it may dishearten believers to see that so many intelligent people reject the existence of God, we should ask a very frank question in light of this fact: Who cares?

The existence of God is not a scientific question, because science restricts itself to searching for natural explanations of observed phenomena. Since God is a transcendent being who exists beyond space and time, the search for God must primarily use philosophy, or careful reasoning, and not science (even though science provides facts which can be used in philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God).

Natural scientists (such as the biologists, chemists, and physicists that make up the Pew study) are no more equipped to make conclusions about God than they are equipped to make conclusions about economics, history, literature, or philosophy. Since the question of God is philosophical in nature, scientists who investigate it are just as equipped as laymen, and their opinions should be placed on the same footing as any other educated non-scientist.

At this point a critic may respond that if the existence of God is a philosophical question, then the theist still loses because 73 percent of professional philosophers are atheists. However, if one looks at the data more closely, one may find that such a conclusion is premature.

“I’m not bad, I’m just misunderstood”

 
Philosopher Edward Feser has written in his book The Last Superstition that many philosophers misunderstand the arguments for the existence of God and just take it “by faith” that they have been refuted. They might glance over Aquinas’s “Five Ways” and, without understanding the complex metaphysics behind the arguments, refute only straw man versions of them, just as Richard Dawkins did in his book The God Delusion.

When it comes to philosophers and God, it is interesting to see that the majority of philosophers of religion, or those who have extensively studied the existence of God, are theists (72 percent). This could mean that the most well-informed philosophers are swayed by the power of the arguments and embrace theism on philosophical grounds. Or it could mean these philosophers started out as theists and then bolstered their beliefs in their academic studies (just like the atheistic scientists I described earlier).

Of course, we can psychoanalyze people until the cows come home, but at the end of the day a belief isn’t true just because a lot of smart people hold it. A belief is true if it corresponds to reality. Both theists and atheists must refrain from the shortcut of saying, “My beliefs are true because smart person X says so” and be willing to follow the evidence where it leads (which may include testimony from someone like smart person X).

I have tried to do that in my own life and I hope my forthcoming book Answering Atheism (which will be published this fall) will be helpful for people who want to examine the arguments and move closer to the truth.

As St. Paul wrote, “Test everything; retain what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Open Lims)