The Science of Discworld IV

observing an interesting experimental test of the efficacy of prayer, indeed of the existence of the kind of deity in which the Church of England believes, indeed the general concept of a belief system.
Silentio dei
is not the difficulty: God has indeed spoken to both sides – or so they genuinely believe. But He has spoken with a forked tongue. From outside, if He existed in a form consistent with the beliefs of the Church of England, then surely He would have told everyone the same thing.
    So this particular religion fails a definitive experimental test, one inadvertently set up by the believers themselves. In science, that would be a good reason to reject the hypothesis.
    Worldwide, religious believers outnumber atheists, even if we exclude people who nominally belong to a religion but don’t practise it. However, across the board, the world’s religions find it virtually impossible to agree on the supernatural features of their belief systems. They often seem to agree on fundamentals such as a god – but which god? Each religion, each sect, has a god that – it tells us – demands a different set of rituals, a different form of worship, different prayers. Each is in the minority, so at most one can be correct. But they all appeal to the
same
reasoning: faith. Since their own beliefs disagree, faith clearly doesn’t hack it. Thus the apparent majority turns out to be smoke and mirrors.
    The writer and comedian Ricky Gervais fn2 made a similar point more pithily in 2010:
    The dictionary definition of God is ‘a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe’. Included in this definition are alldeities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6000 years ago, historians have catalogued over 3,700 supernatural beings, of which 2,870 can be considered deities. So next time someone tells me they believe in God, I’ll say ‘Oh, which one? Zeus? Hades? Jupiter? Mars? Odin? Thor? Krishna? Vishnu? Ra …?’ If they say, ‘Just God. I only believe in the one God,’ I’ll point out that they are nearly as atheistic as me. I don’t believe in 2,870 gods, and they don’t believe in 2,869.
    Ultimately, religious beliefs are based not on objective evidence, but on faith. Religions are belief systems, and many proclaim this as an advantage: faith is a test, set by God. If you don’t agree with them, you’ve failed. Many religionists – and a proportion of postmodernists – have claimed that science is also a belief system; in effect, just an alternative religion. Not so. They have failed to understand the key difference between science and belief: in science, the highest points are given to those who
disprove
the tenets of the alleged faith, especially its central tenets. In science there is no continuing central dogma, such a strong characteristic of religions. Indeed, that is what defines any particular religion: its central creed. Rationality, or indeed science, continually matches ideas against each other – and for science, to the extent that it’s possible, against events in the real world – and is prepared to change its stance according to the way they do or do not agree. For religions, in contrast, events in the real world are held up to the dogma. If they match, they are accepted; if they don’t, they are either ignored or declared to be evil, needing to be destroyed.
    Science can’t disprove religious beliefs.
Nothing
can. That’s the problem. It’s like trying to prove that our universe does not sit on a shelf in Unseen University, a region of the multiverse that is forever inaccessible to us. But the inability of science to disprove religiousbeliefs in the supernatural does not make it a belief system, even if it may sometimes lead people not to believe in the supernatural. When presented with extraordinary hypotheses, disbelief is not the opposite of belief. It is the default, neutral stance: ‘I’m not interested in playing this game, it makes no sense.’
    Many religious people try to reject atheism by portraying it as merely another form of belief, with the natural position being what they call agnosticism. They then interpret that stance as the view that the chances of God existing are about 50-50. So by being neutral, you are already halfway towards agreeing with them. This is nonsense. As Christopher Hitchens has said: if we are asked to accept a proposition without