An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It
Bruce Scheiman
Capsule Review
In An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It (Alpha, 2009), Bruce Scheiman makes the claim that religion offers the best means of understanding one's place in the world regardless of whether God exists. Specifically, in his view it offers more than a purely materialist, science-based approach ever could. He offers many interrelated arguments to support his claims. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to dissect Scheiman's ideas in detail, but, after the majority of his edifice eventually collapses under the barrage of questions with which any thoughtful reader would inevitably bombard it, one question remains standing that we must consider.
Scientific materialism is reductionist – it holds that complex natural phenomena can always be reduced to a collection simpler ones. Thus, any biological process is a collection of chemical ones, and a chemical process is a combination of physical ones. In other words, biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics. And we all know that left to their own devices, physical processes will always move towards greater entropy, i.e. a lack of order. So physics will always move away from greater complexity towards greater simplicity. Yet few of us would deny that life, over the millions of years of its existence, has evolved towards greater complexity. From RNA to DNA, from single-cell organisms to multi-cell ones, and eventually towards consciousness and intelligence. How do we reconcile this glaring contradiction?
Scheiman says that only religion can do this. This, though deeply appealing to a vast majority of people (he is right about that), is, of course, false. Thomas Nagel, for one, has offered the idea of natural teleology that is compatible with a fully non-theistic view of the world. His ideas, which, though fascinating, are a subject for another day, may yet end up being, if you will allow me, reduced to scientific materialism as we understand it today. Still, the question of how to reconcile the physical imperative of greater simplicity with life's inexorable march towards greater complexity is something those of us who use science to guide important life decisions must examine seriously.
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You do not need to stipulate life to see local exceptions to the universal tendency toward disorder. Heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and iron are more complex than simple hydrogen and helium. Yet these large atoms are synthesized naturally in stars. As with living processes, stellar nucleosynthesis requires an input of energy and results in large quantities of disorder while producing comparatively small pockets of organization. Crystal growth is another example.
Einstein's famous line about reductionism is "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." (The actual quote is more complicated.)
Some complexities we should be careful not to reduce away include the fact that individual living things do not grow ever more complicated -- they die and return to dust. The wonderful tapestry of life we observe is a temporary uptick in local complexity on the surface of a planet whose rotation is slowing, whose orbit is decaying around a sun which is irreversibly burning off fuel.
The book's thesis reminds me of the story about Niels Bohr, who was said to have hung a horseshoe over his door for good luck. Asked if he really believed such things, he said "Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it." (Actual quote disputed.)
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