Just the Facts

I drove past a billboard not long ago that raised my blood pressure a bit. It’s the sort of billboard that dots the landscape in various parts of the country but that one very seldom sees in blue state, outrageously liberal Rhode Island. Trumpeting the “fact” that God created the heavens and the earth (because the first sentence of that irrefutable science text, the Bible, tells us so), it not-so-subtlely rejects the fact of Darwinian natural selection by putting a big X through the familiar cartoon chart of primates evolving into humans. “Jesus Christ,” I thought. “The barbarians have arrived.”

Don’t get me started with the “Darwin is just a theory” crap—it’s a theory in the same sense that gravity is a theory. It’s a testable hypothesis that has stood up to the challenge of subsequent data and observations so well that attempts to deny it are clearly driven by some other, poorly hidden, agenda.  More importantly, it is possible to believe in a creating God (as I do) and the truth of natural selection (as I do)—but only if one is willing to let the facts of science inform one’s divine paradigm.

I once heard something on NPR’s “Here and Now” that raised my blood pressure even more. At the beginning of a segment on the dangers of global warming with Bill Nye the Science Guy (I wonder if “Nye the Science” is his middle name and “Guy” his last name?), the interviewer played a brief clip from Mr. Guy’s recent appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire,”

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/07/29/bill-nye-climate-change

where host S. E. Cupp berated him for his close-mindedness.

Isn’t it a problem when “science guys” attempt to bully other people? Really, the science group has tried to shame anyone who dares to question it [global warming] and it’s not working with the public!

When asked by the “Here and Now” interviewer to comment, Bill said

When you have a bullying person calling you a bully, you just have to roll with it. That’s fine. I just wonder what really motivates her. The evidence is overwhelming—other countries aren’t having talk shows like that.

I wonder the same thing—what is the motivation for denying something that the vast majority of qualified scientists confirm the truth of? The interviewer went on to note that every time their show has a segment on global warming, they receive dozens, even hundreds of emails complaining that they did not give equal time to “the other side”—rather than having a legitimate debate about the best ways to address global warming, apparently there needs to be a debate about whether it exists. My inner rational person wants to scream THERE IS NO F**KING OTHER SIDE TO A FACT!!! Fortunately, Bill Nye and others have more patience than I do.

How is it that in the twenty-first century we constantly find ourselves spinning our wheels in belief ruts that advanced hominids should have escaped from centuries ago? In the mystery novel I am currently reading, Tana French’s Faithful Place, the main character and narrator Frank MacKey is discussing with his sister the frustration he faces when trying to teach his nine-year-old the difference between truth and bullshit.

I want Holly to be aware that there is a difference between truth and meaningless gibberish bullshit. She’s completely surrounded, from every angle, by people telling her that reality is one hundred percent subjective: if you really believe something is true, then it doesn’t actually matter whether it is in reality true or not. . . I want my daughter to learn that not everything in this world is determined by how often she hears it or how much she wants to it be true or how many other people are looking. Somewhere in there, for a thing to count as real, there has got to be some actual bloody reality.

This nails the problem. In a world in which everyone is an expert, in which everything posted, texted or tweeted can immediately become truth without verification or testing, the sharp line between truth and fiction becomes blurry and is ultimately erased, especially when the fiction one is spinning is something that one really, really, really wants to be true. Good luck to Frank, and to all of us, when trying to swim against that stream. Shouting “But there are no facts to support what you are claiming” into the maelstrom of “But I really believe and want this to be true” often seems to be an exercise in futility similar to spitting into a hurricane.

Except that everything I’ve been pontificating about so far—the importance of facts as the reliable touchstone and antidote to our penchant for believing things to be true just because we want them to be true—can easily and justifiably turned right back on me when the discussion moves to belief in God’s existence. As a Facebook acquaintance posted in a discussion recently, “Could some person who believes in God’s existence just provide me with ONE PIECE of evidence to support that belief?” The palpable frustration in her question is the same frustration I have with global warming and natural selection deniers. Yet I have regularly written in this blog over the past few years that when it comes to belief in God, the evidence rules change. Why do I think I can get away with that?

I have said and written that the best, perhaps the only, evidence for God’s existence is a changed life—and, of course, the person who claims her or his life has been changed is the primary judge of whether the claim is true. The evidence is subjective, in other words. Many theists identify a powerful, life changing internal event as their primal contact with and evidence for God—I am thinking, for instance, of Pascal’s “Night of Fire,” of John Wesley’s “my heart was strangely warmed” and Simone Weil’s “for the first time in my life something drove me to my knees” as examples.

But I have never had such an experience–my divine encounters end to be more like a steady drizzle than a downpour–and even the most powerful encounters of this sort are subjective and first person accounts. The “changed life” that I attribute to the presence of the divine in my life could just as easily be explained as maturation, finally growing up, learning to deal with my history or simply growing weary of wrestling with ghosts from my past.

Ultimately, the evidence for God’s reality in my life counts as evidence only because the belief is already in place. There are stories out there about atheists and agnostics who have been convinced of God’s existence because of convincing rational arguments and effective marshalling of objective evidence, but that has not been my path. I was born into an atmosphere saturated with belief in the divine and although my beliefs concerning what and who that divine is have morphed through many permutations and continue to do so, I still breathe that same God-infused atmosphere.

That is undoubtedly not the sort of evidence that my Facebook non-believer acquaintance is looking for, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. This will be good to remember the next time I am sharply critical of people who shape their evidence to fit their beliefs. For better or for worse, with the highest stakes possible, I am doing the same thing.