Are Believers Dolts?

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For years, I’ve done almost all my reading on Kindle, the Amazon e-reader. I prefer it to the printed page. With Kindle, I can carry around my library even when traveling. It has a back light so I can read regardless of light conditions. And e-books are substantially less expensive.

One of the features I use regularly is that of trying a sample of a book before buying. It usually consists of a chapter or two so you can get a sense of the quality of the content and writing.

On a recommendation, I recently read a sample of the book, Sapiens, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. The title refers to Homo sapiens, the human species to which modern humans belong. The book is about our evolution, pre-history and history.

Promising Limitless Bananas
It doesn’t take long to learn where the author stands on belief in God. In comparing the intellectual abilities of Homo sapiens to monkeys, Harari asserts, “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

“This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

…Only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist….”

Fact is, our minds allow us to do a lot of things other animals presumably can’t do. Among them is the kind of conceptualization that Harari does when describing the lives of the first Homo sapiens and their ancestors. They’re also things that “don’t really exist.”

Another is the ability to think about what used to be called “universal concepts,” such as “dignity,” “respect,” “honesty” and “love.” They also “don’t really exist” if you discount all but the physical.

But what irks me about Harari’s writing is the implication that believers are dolts and that faith is irrational. It’s true that you can’t measure or test the truth of faith by a scientific experiment, but that doesn’t make it irrational. There are more paths to truth than the scientific, and faith is among them. 

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Others are art and music, other activities that distinguish Homo sapiens. Faith has its intellectual component and includes insights into the meaning of life and death that are beyond the pale of the purely “intellectual.”

What’s more, it’s hard to believe that Harari really thinks believers are dolts. He knows that among believers are intellectual giants, including scientists. Do people like Harari view these believers, some of whom are scientific colleagues, like weird cousins whose embarrassing existence is best ignored?

Odd, because they include some of the world’s most admired and influential scientists, contemporary people like 69-year-old Francis Collins, the physician-geneticist who leads the National Institutes of Health and is former head of the Human Genome Project; John Eccles, the Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse; and Georges LeMaitre, the Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician and astronomer who was the first person to identify that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by a theory of an expanding universe and to propose the “big bang theory” (the scientific theory, not the TV show).

These believer-scientists join the ranks of pioneer scientists who were believers, people like Albert Einstein, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Robert Millikan, Werner Heisenberg, William Thompson Kelvin and Max Planck.

Unanswered Questions
It’s worthwhile to remember here that though religion can’t answer all of life’s questions, neither can science. Among the questions it has failed to answer is how the universe began (The big bang theory presumes the existence of whatever “went bang.”), the limits of the universe and why there is something rather than nothing.

Besides scientists, of course, there are millions of highly intelligent believers in all walks of life. Among them were great artists, like Michelangelo; the builders who were inspired by their faith to create the great cathedrals; the composers, like J.S. Bach, who wrote great music based on religious themes. To suggest that believers are dolts is as foolish as suggesting that scientists or atheists are.

All of us, in one way or another, are searching for God no matter how we define that search. We need to respect each other and give each other the benefit of the doubt.