Scruton - The face of God : the Gifford lectures 2010

The Face of God

The Gifford Lectures 2010

ROGER SCRUTON

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Roger Scruton, 2012

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Contents

This book contains the published version of the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of St Andrews during the Spring of 2010. Lord Giffords bequest was to sponsor public lectures in the Scottish Universities that would promote and diffuse the knowledge of God. And he hoped that the lectures would be accessible without specialist expertise. I have therefore tried to avoid the technical details that academic philosophers might think to be essential to the proper development of my argument, and I have passed quickly over debates that seem to me to be marginal to the concerns of ordinary educated people.

I am grateful to the University of St Andrews for inviting me to give these lectures, and to the lively audiences who made it such a pleasure to deliver them. I am particularly grateful to Professor John Haldane of the department of philosophy, who took a leading part both in securing the invitation and in ensuring that it would be such a rewarding and pleasurable experience to accept it.

In preparing these lectures for publication I have filled in some of the arguments, but tried to maintain the relatively informal style in which they were first composed. Here and there I have added footnotes that will guide the interested reader to discussions that I have judged to be too specialized or intricate to deserve a place in the text. Previous versions have been read by John Cottingham, Fiona Ellis, Alicja Gciska and Raymond Tallis, and I am grateful to them for their comments and criticisms.

Malmesbury, June 2011

Lord Gifford was not an orthodox adherent of any religion, but someone who nevertheless believed that our relation to God is the most important relation we have. He lived among people who shared that belief, and he himself assumed that philosophy, psychology and anthropology would confirm it. I doubt that he anticipated the culture that prevails today, in which the belief in God is widely rejected as a sign of emotional and intellectual immaturity. But I think he would have endorsed the attempt to explore what we lose, when we lose that belief. And this will be one of my themes in what follows. I will be considering some of the consequences of the atheist culture that is growing around us: and I will suggest that it is not only an intellectual phenomenon, expressing a disbelief in God, but also a moral phenomenon, involving a turning away from God.

You might wonder how people can deliberately turn away from a thing that they believe not to exist. But God is in intimate relationship even with those who reject him. Like the spouse in a sacramental marriage, God is unavoidable, or avoidable only by creating a void. This void opens before us when we destroy the face not the human face only, but also the face of the world. The godless void is what confronts us, when our surroundings are defaced. I do not deny that atheists can be thoroughly upright people, far better people than I am. But there is more than one motive underlying the atheist culture of our times, and the desire to escape from the eye of judgement is one of them. You escape from the eye of judgement by wiping away the face.

I begin from the scientific worldview, which many people believe is the real source of current doubts about the belief in God. According to Richard Dawkins, the most prominent of the evangelical atheists today, human beings are survival machines in the service of their genes. We are by-products of a process that is entirely indifferent to our wellbeing, machines developed by our genetic material and adapted by natural selection to the task of propagation. Genes themselves are complex molecules, put together in accordance with the laws of chemistry, from material made available in the primeval soup that once boiled on the surface of our planet. How it happened is not yet known: maybe electrical discharges caused nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms to link together in appropriate chains, until one of these chains achieved the remarkable feature that we know as life, but which is better described as the encoding of instructions for its own reproduction. Science may one day be able to answer the question how this occurred. But it is science, not religion, that will answer the question.

As for the existence of a planet, in which the elements abound in the quantities in which they abound on planet Earth, such a thing is again to be explained by science though the science of astrophysics rather than the science of biology. The existence of the earth is part of a great unfolding process, set in motion by a Big Bang, which contains many mysteries that physicists explore with ever increasing astonishment. Astrophysics has raised as many questions as it has answered. But they are scientific questions, to be answered by discovering the laws of motion that govern the observable changes at every level of the physical world, from galaxy to quark, and from black hole to supernova. The mystery that confronts us as we gaze upwards at the Milky Way, knowing that the stars crystallized in that smear of light are merely stars of a single galaxy, the galaxy that contains us, and that beyond its boundaries a myriad other galaxies turn in space, some dying, some emerging, all forever inaccessible to us and all receding at unimaginable speed this mystery does not call for a religious response. For it is a mystery that results from our partial knowledge, and which can be solved only by further knowledge of the same kind the knowledge that we call science. Perhaps, if the Big Bang theory is correct, there was a moment when this all began. But what was true at that moment is in principle unknowable to us, the laws of physics operating only from the moment an infinitesimal fraction of a second later (so-called Planck time), when the spacetime continuum emerged. To the question how were things at the beginning? there is no intelligible answer; in which case maybe it is not an intelligible question. Indeed the concept of a