Atheism, Scientists, and Squids

Practical theism
In Adult Sunday School, we’ve been reading Luke Timothy Johnson’s book on the Creed.  As part of the discussion, we started talking about how to encourage people to consider the existence of God in an empirically slanted world.  A sort of careless atheism seems to be the default creed of a lot of technically and scientifically oriented moderns.  

It seems to me there are a couple of reasons for this attitudinal bent, depending on who you are talking about.  Johnson refers to “practical atheists” who deny God in order to edify themselves and there desires.  I’m not sure that is the correct way to look at such folk; I’ve always thought that, for a convinced atheist, radical self-centeredness was the only truly reasonable approach to life,  To quote Benedict XVI’s sermon from the current Synod of Bishops, “When man makes himself the only master of the world and master of himself, there can be no justice. Then, arbitrariness, power and interests rule."  Practical atheism leads to a rather severe utilitarianism – if something doesn’t provide me with any value, then what good is it?  I really have no idea of how to talk about God to people like that; the only thing I can think of to do is pray for them.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people in this world who are not like the “practical atheists” described above; they are just those for whom nothing can be known that can’t be empirically demonstrated.  They equate, to a first approximation, “knowing” with “measuring.”  I spent a lot of years as a practicing scientist, and the labs of the world are full of them.  If God ever falls out of the equations, they’ll be happy to be believers; otherwise, it is nonsense.  The thing is, you can talk to these people because most of them aren’t really the strict empiricists they think they are.  Guys that do science for a living don’t usually do it for the money – there are lots of more lucrative ways to make a living, and anybody that can get an advanced degree in a real science can usually do several of them well.  And they usually aren’t utilitarians – they don’t really do science because of the useful stuff that comes out of it.  Utilitarians may pay their salaries, but most scientists do science because they are interested in what they study.  

The guy that works on squids does so because he thinks squids are neat; the woman who spends her life looking for extrasolar planets finds the whole idea of alien worlds cool.  In other words, they think that squids and alien planets are intrinsically worthy of study for their own sake.  And the fact that something is of intrinsic value is not a fact that can be empirically determined.  The squidophile has already admitted, without ever thinking about it, that there are ways of knowing something (that squids are neat) other than the “scientific” way of knowing.  And with that admission, the whole theological convention floor is now opened to debate.  The journey from squid to God can turn out to be a pretty short one.