A chance debate

I have a friend who is a non-practising rabbi and an atheist. He recently visited me from New York City.

He is enjoying his Kiddushin—a period of sanctification, which amounts to a year after marriage when a Jewish man is excused from all obligations to cheer up his wife. More like an extend honeymoon period then.

My friend and his bride joined me for Sunday Mass of January 6. As fate would have it, that’s the week The Southern Cross published my column titled “On Science and Religion”. I watched him during Mass thoroughly reading and re-reading the piece. I knew I’d be in for it afterwards.

After Mass we went to a nearby Jewish café. My friend ordered with our coffees the challah (round bread) with raisins in it, and pies made of apple and honey, “in celebration of your New Year. May it be a sweet year, and may you be worthy of abundant years,” he said as our orders were placed.

“In the Jewish calendar, New Year is called Rosh Hashana—the Head of the Year. It is a holy and solemn day when God remembers his creation. It’s also known as the Judgement Day. So I suppose it is not out of order to examine your kittel.” The kittel is a white robe worn by Jewish male worshippers, believed to be the shroud one will be buried in; when used this way it means let us examine your faith.

“So long as we don’t kick the altar to the ground,” I retorted in jest.

We went on to discuss my article. The chief problem he had with it was what he called my “evasive manner”.

“You purport to address the science of evolution and its impact on religion, and yet you avoid talking about chance, which is my central point against belief in the God of creation,” my friend said.

We argued a lot about the point but we were not constructive. Only when I got home did I realise where our problem lay. The word “chance” meant different things to us.

There’s chance of what Aristotle more or less explained in his Physics as an unexpected event due to the conjunction of its causes with action which is done for the same purpose. For instance, I go to the supermarket to buy groceries; I meet an old friend who had gone there to buy cold drink. That’s meeting by chance. Our planned activity produced unforeseen results.

Then there is chance that is defined as an event produced by random motion without any causal nexus. For a person who believes in God there is no such thing. A believer believes that God, as the condition of possibility of all entities, imposes order upon all things. I believe in God, my ex-rabbi friend doesn’t, hence our non-constructiveness on the issue.

I understand that religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs. But, on careful analysis, neither does science. In all realms of human inquiry, the interlacing of experience and interpretation introduces a degree of precariousness into the argument. Yet this does not mean that we cannot attain beliefs sufficiently well motivated to be the basis for our rational commitments.

The usual criticism for practising religion is that of conforming to mediocrity that wounds personal sovereignty—as if the hand-me-down egoistic rumours of so-called progress are enlightening in their chaotic freedom.

Religious faith is not a matter of unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by the Church.

Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing from scientific reason only in the nature of the subject of that belief.

To be religious is to differ from oneself in that within you are good and bad traits competing for supremacy. Practising religion is another means by which one seeks means to privilege the better side.