Can Smart People Believe in God?

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

50) Can Smart People Believe in God? by Michael Guillen

I don't know why I'm drawn to these books. They're not written for me, and they offer me little. Guillen's answer to his title question, in any case, is yes. He really didn't need 160 pages to make his case. Here, let me distill his whole book into a simple proof:

Assume that smart people can't believe in God. Isaac Newton believed in God. Isaac Newton was smart. We arrive at a contradiction, so our assumption must be wrong and smart people can believe in God. QED.

In truth, there isn't much more to his book than that. Guillen is a person who, as a college physics professor, television science correspondent, and author of popular science books, has dedicated his life to making scientific knowledge more accessible to people who are disposed to be mistrustful of science. Here, even though he seems to be addressing atheists, it's clear from his churchy rhetoric and appeals to new-agey ideas like "Spiritual Quotient" that his real audience are American anti-science evangelicals, whom he is trying to persuade that science is Godly. Guillen's basic tactic is pitching the Catholic Church's long history of involvement in scientific advancement to an American Protestant audience that has traditionally distanced itself from such efforts. And if he can package his book as a rebuttal of Dawkins and Harris and the rest of our present generation of radical atheists (whom he terms Arrogant Atheists), so much the better for book sales.

In any case, it took me nearly 2 years (I started in March '09), but I have finally hit 50! Um... time to start again at 1, I suppose. :P Maybe this time I'll finish Beloved and The Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and all those other books I started and didn't make it through in the past two years...

Comments

[kosarin.livejournal.com]

Congratulations for getting through! That's awesome, even if the final book wasn't all that great.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

Isaac Newton also believed in alchemy, so......yeah.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Not really sure what your point is. Newton believing in alchemy didn't make him any less smart, and for what it's worth, alchemists didn't so much 'believe' in alchemy as they believed it was a methodology that could offer useful knowledge, much as scientists today believe that the scientific method can offer useful knowledge. And alchemy did in fact offer a number of important breakthroughs in our knowledge of the natural world. Was it as flexible and powerful as our current scientific method? No, but looking down on people for making use of the best available techniques for advancing physical knowledge is no better than looking down on people for making use of the best available techniques for advancing spiritual knowledge. Which is, in fact, Guillen's point.

Note that my critique of Guillen isn't that he's trying to prove that intelligent people can believe in God. It's that his methods of doing so are simple and obvious. I found the book boring, not wrong.

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

To clarify, my point is that it seems like a waste of time to write a book about whether smart people can believe in God when it's clear that smart people can believe in all kinds of things (not just alchemy, but ghosts, fairies, eugenics, Randian objectivism...). So what? For that matter, many of history's greatest scholars and philosophers have been theologians (some of them now canonized!), so you don't even need to go off the reservation, so to speak, to find smart people believing in God. The question in the book's title is thus preposterous on its face, IMO.

No criticism implied or intended of your choice to read the book, I was just responding to your review.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Right, obviously, but despite what one might assume from the title about the implied orientation of Guillen's question, this book is not pitched at atheists who might wonder if smart people can believe in God, but at theists who might wonder if Godly people can be smart. There is a current tendency in parts of the Christian world to try to pull away from science- to try to ban the teaching of evolution in schools, to disparage scientific advances as being the work of 'Godless' scientists and therefore unreliable, etc... Guillen is asserting that smart people can believe in God- that in fact, the majority of scientists do and that a scientific world view is not at odds with Christianity.

For a person who already is convinced of these things, as I am, there's not much of value in this book. But I'm kind of hopeless when it comes to books about the intersection of science and religion. I read them no matter how irrelevant they are to my world view.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on completing 50!

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

Ah, I get it. That is different. In any case, totally agree with you that the ever-shifting (and somewhat porous) border between science and religion = fascinating.