Why Atheists Love Science
I think I know why.
Someone recently asked me why I was drawn to science after I rejected religion back in the early days of adulthood. My answer surprised me, but it was the kind of answer you give and then keep thinking about because you finally found the thoughts and words to articulate an idea that has been forming for a long time.
Let’s back up.
I remember believing in God naturally as a child. People say that children are born atheists, but I don’t believe that at all. We are created in the image and likeness of God, and we naturally are made to desire to love and be loved, to know and be known. Made to know and love God. We are naturally awed by order in the created world. We naturally seek order in our lives.
As an adult, I would learn that it is a defined dogma of the Catholic Church that God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural light of reason from created things. De fide. Some Church Fathers believed the knowledge of God is innate; St. Thomas Aquinas held that the knowledge of Him is innate but we also can will to know and love Him better by using our ability to reason. [1]
Let’s really back up.
This is why Aristotle’s epistemology makes sense – and why the spiritualism of Plato and the materialism of the Stoics and Epicureans does not. This is something I learned in my first theology course, but I never knew it in all the years I studied, taught and worked as a scientist. We need to adopt an epistemology, an organizing principle for thought.
Plato was a spiritualist. He believed the soul has always existed, as a spirit, and as such it saw God, saw the whole truth, before the person existed. By some cruel fate, Plato believed, our spirits forget the real world when they descend into our bodies. So to him, the search for truth is a reawakening. The truth is in us, not outside us, and we seek to become conscious of it again. Plato, like Pythagoras, called the body a tomb of the soul.
In contrast to spiritualism, is materialism. The materialist believes all knowledge comes from our senses, from what we can see, touch, taste, feel, and somehow process. Materialism is nothing new, but it is the prevailing mindset of atheism today. Modern science seems to have convinced people that we can explain our world in terms of matter and energy, and nothing else is necessary.
Aristotle held the middle ground, reconciling the material and the spiritual. He believed that we acquire knowledge both through our sensory interaction with the material world and through our contemplation of the spiritual realm. Isn’t that how we all learn though? First we learn about the material world through our senses, then we organize and process that input into complex and abstract ideas. [2]
Now let’s put that together.
Consider children, consider your own childhood. Children aren’t pure spiritualists, though there is some truth to the idea that we know certain things inherently. Neither are children pure materialists, though there is some truth to the idea that we need to rely on our senses to determine whether some things are real. Even children naturally apply the Aristotelian epistemology. (I call them Little Aristotles.)
Children are driven to learn. The first thing an infant does is to sense his mother, most intimately in her womb, and almost as intimately as a newborn. Children then learn because they instinctively trust their senses; they rely on sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. They process it all and discover order in things; they stack, they repeat, they experiment, they mimic, they find patterns. What child hasn’t peered out at the great big world with wonder?
And children, having learned, are driven to love and be loved. to belong. What child hasn’t tried to show off his skills and make people laugh? What child isn’t harmed by neglect or lack of affection? That desire for unity and order, love and knowledge, is in us as children, it’s natural from the very beginning of our life. God told us so.
Be amazed, and recall the revealed dogma of the Holy Trinity – One God, Three Persons. The Father begets and conceives the Son, also called the Word, as an act of the intellect; the Father and the Son together, as one, breathe forth the Holy Spirit as an act of love. Knowing and loving, giving, receiving, communicating with others – it’s in us all, a reflection of the Holy Trinity, and (whether we admit it or not) we are desperate without those things. They are necessary, and if we seek knowledge and love without seeking God, we will naturally never be fully satisfied. That’s why man has always sought God, in any time, any culture. It’s why societies that reject God, fail.
As I grew up, there were contradictory and confusing messages about religion. Every group thought they had the answers, none of them offered much in the way of explanation. Much of false religions do ask you to believe blindly. So after a half-hearted search, I rejected religion in my young adult years. I decided real freedom meant that I could do whatever I wanted, and so that is how I lived, daring anyone to hinder me. I hadn’t done the mental work to reason through God’s objective laws for moral order and love, so in some ways it was also a childlike (if not lazy) search for truth because I just wanted to find order, only I didn’t know why.
And…I was drawn to science.
I was drawn to its rules and order, the way the fundamentals were certain and objective. In a world of moral subjectivism veiled as freedom, I was drawn to something objectively ordered. And that is why I think atheists, in general, are drawn to science. Just like we all seek it as infants, they need that order, that objective truth, that wonder. We know our lives demand order both internally and externally, as children and as adults.
When I discovered and applied the moral order taught by the Church, every experiment I tested in my life brought me success. I learned to be truly free, and the truth of it resonated deep in my soul. This was my empirical evidence, my scientific method that assured me I found Truth. I don’t think atheists can really argue against this because it is to argue against an experiment that hasn’t been tried.
But even atheist scientists know they need to obey laws of order.
Does a scientist enter a laboratory and do whatever he wants, abandoning the known physical laws of nature? It would either be dangerous or ignorantly pointless. Legitimate freedom is not the freedom to do whatever you want, for if that is what a scientist decided to do, he would cease to be a scientist. Science depends on respecting certain basic rules in order to advance in the discovery of truth.
While some things are subjective, moral subjectivism – as a guiding principle born of an incomplete epistemology – fails, and it fails whether we are children or adults. It’s just that sometimes adults convince themselves to forget what they knew as children. Having denied objective moral order, all that is left is objective order in the search for knowledge, but it is an insanity to divide the internal acts of our soul in this way. To do so, creates an unnatural void, one that tries to quiet a spirit that cannot be quieted. [3]
Just as spiritualism isn’t the way to all truth, neither is materialism, and we all know it. We need both. Isn’t it interesting that instead of calling themselves materialists, identifying with what is positive in their epistemology, they call themselves atheists, identifying with something lacking. The atheist knows innately that he has that emptiness. Some people call it a God-shaped hole.
And it needs to be filled.
Atheists are drawn to science because they are drawn to God, driven to know Him. Science offers knowledge of the ordered, created world, so like curious and awestruck children atheists can’t help but love science. It is their soul’s yearning for God.
“Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people, mostly shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were republicans, like all primitive and simple souls; they talked over their affairs under a tree, and the nearest approach they had to a personal ruler was a sort of priest or white witch who said their prayers for them. They worshipped the sun, not idolatrously, but as the golden crown of the god whom all such infants see almost as plainly as the sun.” G. K. Chesterton Alarms and Discursions 1910 Introductory: On Gargoyles
[1] Dr. Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Section 1, Chapter 1, Dogmatic Definition 1, page 13. Thanks Jeff McLeod for the recommendation and explanation of why this book is so necessary to anyone who wants to understand Catholic dogma. The book is difficult to find in print for a reasonable price, but I found an online version at Logos Bible Software for under $30.
[2] Fr. Benedict Ashley O.P., International Catholic University, Philosophy for Theologians, Lesson 2: Choosing an Epistemological Approach to Human Experience.
[3] I do not claim this as an original thought, only one that is original to me.
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Good post Stacy. Sometimes I argue with atheists in my mind. Lately, it has been about practical atheism. When I taught, I quickly realized that their were not many practical atheists. They “believed” in atheism, but never practiced it. For example, I would ask, “Do you love your spouse?” The response is typically “Yes” and their practice is similar to Christian marriage, i.e. wishing the spouse goodness.
However, love cannot be proved. So the next comment usually evolves into “It is a chemical in our brain that we humans have for the betterment of our species.” Now comes the practical aspect though. I would respond, “Very well, how many times have you told your wife, ‘I am very glad my chemicals in my brain tell me to feel this warm emotion when I am in your presence because I don’t believe in the big Cupid guy.’”
Another (related) reason which can be traced back to Aristotle’s philosophy has to do with happiness in general. Aristotle poses the question as to what happiness is, and then answers it by saying that happiness is the pursuit or attainment of the good. What is the good? In layman’s terms, it’s the end for which we were made. As Catholics, we would answer that “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next” (Baltimore Catechism No 1 or 2 Q6).
Aristotle’s own answer is a bit broader: it is to know (or understand, etc) and to love, which are the two activities which set men apart from any other creature or thing. But this true good of man was, for Aristotle, realized by our contemplating such things as the goodness of things, e.g. the “circularity” of circles and the “triangularity” of triangles, etc. Now think of what the emperiological sciences (e.g. “modern science”) has us doing: not exactly the same kind of contemplation as outlined in my little example, but something similar. That is, it is the study of (and in some sense, the contemplation of) the underlying order of nature as explained through material, efficient, and sometimes formal (or even final) causes, all expressed fundamentally through the language of mathematics or in an ordered scheme (as in kingdom-phylom-etc.).
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is the greatest of all things which can be contemplated–God–or even that it is akin to learning the contents of the mind of God, and so it is not the fullest realization of our highest end; but it is at the very least a participation in the highest activity of man, that for which he was made (and for us as believers, it can and should lead back to God)–and for the nonbeliever who reflects on such things, it would (or at the least conceivably could) appear to be the highest good of man, at least on the side of man’s intellect (to know and understand…).
JC wrote: “for the nonbeliever who reflects on such things, it would (or at the least conceivably could) appear to be the highest good of man, at least on the side of man’s intellect (to know and understand…)”
I have oft wondered about this as well. Since reason is one aspect of God, is faith in reason ever enough for salvation? Say someone whose reason leads them to the natural law and good works. Admittedly, there might be more work to be done to perfect the soul, but is it enough to get as far as Purgatory? This theory also appeals to my sense of irony, as it makes the atheist a believer.
After all, we are all like the blind men and the elephant in the old Indian story, none of us can know God more than a little.
I really appreciate your post. I think you missed a big part, though: dishonesty. I think back to high school when so many people said that they dropped Christianity because Buddhism was so much more suited for a smart, open person. Of course they didn’t know anything about Buddhism and didn’t care. People just use excuses to get rid of the best things from their lives. It’s sad, but everyone is trapped in one lie or another. Anyway, I like your more positive perspective.
“It’s just that sometimes adults convince themselves to forget what they knew as children”
Luke 18:15-17
15 Then they also brought infants to Him that He might touch them; but when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called them to Him and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God. 17 Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.”
“Just as spiritualism isn’t the way to all truth, neither is materialism and we all know it. We need both.”
I like to describe the materialistic approach to the world in rather insulting terms, and I don’t apologize for it. I have always been fascinated with science, engineering and invention. My first major was EE. But as life went on the fascination dulled a bit but I lost the overdone comparative feature of it all. The honors, the degrees, the money it can bring, the acclaim, the self satisfaction, or, the failure to produce, the poverty of no job, the competition to be published. I can’t help but say, what actually is the individual’s accomplishment. It is all there from the beginning. We have been given the material world, given the intellect, given the rules to discover, given an ability. Sort of like ants crawling all over Gulliver. What do we add? The answer of course is, we use free will according to the Word and recognize the origin of everything – that is the accomplishment, illustrated by a baseball player passing home plate then pointing to heaven after a home run.
Atheists love science because it is the “magic of reality”, “true poetry”, “beautiful without the haze”, “eternally abundant”. We seek truth and love that we can touch, see, hear, smell, taste. We exalt our earth, life, and the universe as precious and loving. We seek a direct relationship within ourselves and to others. All of this in the absence of the molasses of faith.
Dean, I like that you described faith as a molasses. But science is molasses too.
Contrary to the mythology one finds in popular science articles, real scientific endeavors are slow to sink in. Two of the greatest innovations in the 20th century, Einstein’s relativity and Godel’s theorem, took many years before they were recognized as breakthroughs. If I’m not mistaken, Einstein’s first paper languished in a scientific journal for many years unread.
And the audience at Godel’s presentation didn’t burst into applause the moment he pronounced his result. They scratched their heads quietly and went to the next lecture. They didn’t grasp Godel’s significance “in a flash.” So there tends not to be a lot of “magic” around science. Lots of molasses but no “magic.”
Any important insight takes years, decades, or centuries to unfold. That’s why we have a living Church to help us unpack the mysteries of faith.
Point 2: you mention that scientists love what they can see, hear, smell, and taste. I think if you ask scientists, they will tell you that’s not true. They use sensory data only as an instrument to probe unobservable reality.
Do you think Gregor Mendel was fascinated by the peas he studied, or was he searching for something else? Answer: he used the breeding of peas to create tables of the probabilities of inheritance of traits. Remember, the gene hadn’t been discovered yet. In Mendel’s time (by the way, he was a monk, one of those religious folk you seem to distance yourself from), he could only posit an unobservable “factor” — whatever that would ultimately turn out to be — that would explain the observable patterns of inheritance.
So you see, in actual science, we posit unobservable reality in a hypothetical mode, and we may never “discover” the hypothetical entity in our life time. But we are always oriented toward removing the veil from sensory data to get to the truth of things.
I know you’ve come to believe differently, but this particular character of science is exactly why lots of religious folk do science for a living. It’s very familiar to us, the whole idea of taking years to understand insights, of living in a forward-looking mode of anticipation, expecting to encounter the underlying truth which our sensory data merely points to, but cannot possibly exhaust.
“We seek truth and love that we can touch, see, hear, smell, taste.”
Dean is this always true and what is the cause of this search? If not true, why?
Jared Q. Tomanek,
“However, love cannot be proved. So the next comment usually evolves into “It is a chemical in our brain that we humans have for the betterment of our species.””
Oh yes, but no once can deny that they know what love is. I once asked if someone could write down the formula for “chemicals in the brain” love so that we could make world peace.
Have you seen Leila’s post about Christian love and whether or not it is “gibberish”? It’s really good, definitely worth reading.
http://littlecatholicbubble.blogspot.com/2012/05/is-christian-love-gibberish.html
Stacy, exactly. Some may say it is an emotion/reaction but nobody really lives this belief. Anybody with children know that the sweet smell of a shampooed head only lasts til that diaper explodes with some of the stinkiest stuff on earth. Rather, I choose the best (love) for my children. I choose my wife. Thank God feelings are fleeting and have much more to do with whether or not I ate some awesome Tex-Mex refried beans with my carne guisada.
Can you imagine a love story based on chemical reactions? There would be no conflict because if we are just wired to react with chemicals and every story would be the same. It seems atheism may be influenced by a sort of Calvinism.
If you find the love potion/chemical composition, you will be a gagillionaire. Now, I will only expect partial commission, say 35%, of sales for helping you think of your response.
Stacy said “Atheists are drawn to science because they are drawn to God, driven to know Him. Science offers knowledge of the ordered, created world, so like curious and awestruck children atheists can’t help but love science. It is their soul’s yearning for God.”
How would you respond to someone who said, “People are drawn to science, because it is the highest form of pattern-recognition. People (and most higher phyla) developed sophisticated pattern recognition through evolutionary processes. If you did not develop a thirst for pattern recognition, you missed the patterns, and were thus out-competed by those who could recognize the patterns in the material world and respond accordingly, therefore furthering the chance your genes made it through to the next generation and those of the “not so interested in patterns” did not.”
Mary, Stacy would probably answer this more elegantly but I would say that there is a logical fallacy here. If pattern recognizers are the ones who have the superior chance to survive and this ability keeps evolving to a higher level, then we should be living in a world where most of the neighbors on your block are scientists and there is no one to serve you a latte.
Of course you could also ask for scientific evidence that this is true.
Grant,
“I think you missed a big part, though: dishonesty.”
Yeah, there is that. I am trying to look at it more positive (God knows I haven’t always). It may be part of my journey to forgiving myself for how incredibly stupid I’ve been. There was a LOT of dishonesty, with yourself and then with others whom you hurt. Some of it was honest though, I guess I’m trying to figure out the difference…if that makes any sense.
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/05/indian-skeptic-faces-3-year-prison-sentence-for-explaining-dripping-crucifix/
Who is more dishonest, the scientist who points out the facts, or the Catholics who try to imprison him?
Dishonesty,
There is no Catholic doctrine that says fraudulent gurus should be jailing people who expose them.
Next?