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Is religious belief a betrayal of the intellect because it isn’t scientific or because it’s “faith without evidence”? In this episode, I examine challenges from thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Stephen Hawking, and argue that scientism refutes itself and that Christian faith is rooted in evidence—not blind belief.
TRANSCRIPT:
Is religious belief—or religious explanations—a “betrayal of the intellect”?
Some people think it is. And they think this for a few different reasons. One common reason is that religious explanations are unscientific. Another is the idea that religious belief is belief without evidence.
But are those actually good reasons to think that religious belief betrays the intellect? That’s the question we’re going to think through in today’s episode.
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So, as I mentioned at the beginning, there are two common reasons people give for thinking that religious belief—or religious explanations—somehow betray the dignity of our intellect.
The first is that religious claims aren’t scientific. In other words, their truth can’t be verified by the means of modern science.
The second is that religious belief is belief without evidence.
What I want to do is take a look at both claims and see whether they actually hold up.
Let’s start with the first one, which we might sum up like this: religion is a betrayal of the intellect because it’s unscientific.
You can hear this line of thinking in a famous exchange involving atheist Richard Dawkins during his 2013 debate at the Cambridge Union Society with Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury. Dawkins argued that a religious explanation—like appealing to God—are, in his words, “a betrayal of the intellect.” He calls them a “phony substitute for an explanation,” a “pernicious charlatan,” something that “peddles pseudo explanations where real explanations could have been—and will be—offered.” Here’s Dawkins in his own words:
[VIDEO]
40:17 - “to a scientist, however, what’s really objectionable about religion is that it fosters the idea that we should be satisfied with a non-explanation to a difficult question instead of working hard—it’s hard work—working hard to provide a real explanation. Religious explanations are supernatural. But in no possible sense is a supernatural explanation for anything an explanation, it’s a cop-out, 40:46 a betrayal of the intellect, a betrayal of all that’s best about what makes us human, a phony substitute for an explanation, which seems to answer the question until you examine it and realize that it does no such thing. Religion and science is not just redundant and irrelevant, it’s an active and pernicious charlatan. 41:14 It “peddles false explanations, or at least pseudo explanations, where real explanations could have been offered, and will be offered. Pseudo explanations that get in the way of the enterprise of discovering real explanations. As the centuries go by, religion has less and less room to exist and perform its obscurantist interference with the search for truth.
Now, you might be wondering at this point: “Okay, so what exactly does Dawkins think counts as a real explanation?” He doesn’t say it explicitly right there, but we can piece it together from what he says earlier in the debate.
He opens his remarks like this:
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30:03 I’m going to be talking as a scientist because I’m passionate about scientific truth. . . What I care about tonight is, “Is it true?” And is it true really matters to a scientist.”
Did you catch that? He’s going to talk as a scientist. He’s passionate about scientific truth. And truth, he says, is what matters to a scientist.
Then, later, when he’s criticizing what he sees as “God of the gaps” reasoning, he makes this comment:
[VIDEO]
39:17 “gaps shrink as science advances.”
So, putting all of that together, it seems pretty clear that Dawkins thinks real explanations—genuine explanations—are scientific explanations. And the implication is that scientific explanations are the only legitimate form of rational explanation.
That view actually has a name. It’s called scientism—and this is very strong version of it.
Another prominent voice who takes this same view is Lawrence Krauss. In a 2017 interview with Vox, Krauss says:
[PHONE READ #1]
“Why?’ questions are ultimately meaningless” and that “they’re really ‘How?’ questions” and thus “they’re all scientific questions.” Concerning religion, he says “religion doesn’t explain anything…the best religion can do is say that ‘God did it,’ which is code for ‘I don’t want to think about it.”
So for Dawkins and Krauss, science is the only thing that counts as a real explanation. And underneath that is the assumption that science alone gives us genuine knowledge.
Even Stephen Hawking, in his 2010 book The Grand Design, tips his hat at scientism when he says,
[PHONE READ #2]
“Philosophy is dead” and that “scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
So, what are we to make of all this? Is scientific knowledge really the only kind of knowledge there is? Should we even bother asking religious questions—like whether God exists—since those questions go beyond what modern science can test?
Because if Dawkins, Krauss, and Hawking are right, then any knowledge of God that I arrive at through philosophy, or historical investigation into whether God has revealed—say, through prophets or through someone like Jesus—wouldn’t be real knowledge at all. And if that’s the case, then pursuing it really would be pointless. Why chase something that’s purely subjective and disconnected from reality? That really would be a betrayal of the intellect.
But here’s my contention: scientific knowledge is not the only real form of knowledge. Or, to put it another way, scientific explanations are not the only legit explanations. And if that’s true, then shouldn’t reject religious explanations simply because they’re not scientific.
To support that claim, I want to offer two arguments against scientism—specifically the version that says scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge.
The first argument is that scientism is self-referentially incoherent—which is just a fancy way of saying it refutes itself.
Consider the statement: “Scientific knowledge is the only real form of knowledge.”
That statement itself is not scientific knowledge.
You can’t observe it.
You can’t test it in a lab.
There’s no experiment you can run to verify it.
There’s no equation that captures it.
In short, the truth of scientism cannot be established using the methods of modern science. This means that, by its own standard, we can’t know whether scientism is true.
And that creates a serious problem for the scientism advocate—because it means scientism itself isn’t real knowledge.
You see this clearly in the form of syllogism:
P1: Any knowledge outside the boundaries of scientific knowledge is not real knowledge.
P2: Scientism is knowledge that is outside the boundaries of scientific knowledge
C: Therefore, scientism is not real knowledge
Do you see it? If you want to explore the argument more carefully in writing, check out my book Prepare the Way: Overcoming Obstacles to God, the Gospel, and the Church, available at shop.catholic.com. And even if you do see it, still get my book—I’d appreciate it!
Now, here’s a second argument against scientism. Its advocates confuse methodology—the method we use to study reality—with ontology—reality itself.
People who think that science is the only rational way to know anything usually assume that whatever science can’t detect simply doesn’t exist. Anything beyond science gets dismissed as superstition or imaginative constructs.
This attitude is manifest in a statement Dawkins made in the British online newspaper Independent,
[PHONE READ #3]
“Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are part of the charm of childhood. So is God. Some of us grow out of all three.”
But to think that whatever science can’t detect is imaginative (not real) is fallacious. Philosopher Edward Feser gives a helpful analogy in his book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Metaphysics.
Imagine you’re trying to find plastic cups on the beach, and you decide to use a metal detector. You can scan the beach all day—and surprise—you don’t detect a single plastic cup.
Does that mean plastic cups don’t exist? Of course not.
All it shows is that the metal detector isn’t the right tool for detecting plastic.
The failure of the method ells us nothing about reality—it just tells us about the limits of the method.
Now, if it’s unreasonable to conclude that plastic cups don’t exist because the metal detector can’t detect plastic cups, then isn’t it equally unreasonable to say that God doesn’t exist simply because science can’t detect God? Yes—it’s unreasonable!
Our inability to detect God using science says nothing about whether he exists. It merely reveals the limitations of science: it can only tell us about what’s empirically verifiable and quantifiably measurable. If God exists and isn’t a physical object, then we wouldn’t expect science to detect him in the first place. To know things beyond science, we need other tools—like philosophy or divine revelation.
To say otherwise—to claim that whatever we can’t know by science isn’t real—is to let the method dictate what is real rather than letting reality dictate the proper method for studying it.
So at this point, we’ve got two solid arguments against scientism:
First, it’s self-refuting.
Second, it confuses methodology with ontology.
Now, let’s turn to the second objection—the claim that religion betrays the intellect because it involves belief without evidence.
Dawkins makes this argument in a 1997 article he wrote for The Humanist entitled “Is Science a Religion.” He writes:
[PHONE READ # 4]
“Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.”
Julian Baginni, a British atheistic philosopher and editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine, agrees. In his book Atheism: A Short Introduction, he writes,
[PHONE READ #5]
“Belief in the supernatural is belief in what there is a lack of strong evidence to believe in” (that comes from page 32).
Alright, so it’s clear that Dawkins and Baginni think religious belief is belief without evidence. So how do we respond?
Well, first of all, we need to ask: What kind of religious belief are they talking about?
Belief in God?
Belief in Jesus and what he revealed?
Or both?
If they’re talking about belief in God simpliciter, then they’re over-generalizing. Many people believe in God because of evidence—like the fine-tuning of the universal constants and the initial conditions of matter at the Big Bang, or even the multiverse. For many, those things point to a supreme intelligence behind the cosmos.
And notice—this isn’t a “gap” science will later fill, because we’re talking about explaining the existence of the physical universe itself, where science can’t go.
Now, I appeal to the fine-tuning argument here because it gives us probable knowledge of God’s existence, which means the intellect assents to the proposition based on evidence but moved by the will. That’s belief or faith. It’s different, so I would argue, from what Aquinas’s Five Ways can do, which is compel assent once the intellect grasps the truth of the premises.
So for many, belief in God is not without evidence.
But what if Dawkins and Baginni have in mind belief in Jesus what he taught?
Here again, they miss the mark. Christianity does not encourage belief without evidence. On the contrary, it’s built on the evidence of testimony.
John the Evangelist explicitly presents his own testimony as evidence. He writes in John 20:31,
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“[Jesus’ signs] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name”
He writes similarly in 1 John 1:1, 3. He writes,
[PHONE READ #7]
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life . . . that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us (1 John 1:1, 3).
John makes it clear that he’s not asking for blind faith. He’s saying, Believe because we were there. We saw these things with our own eyes.
Now, someone might respond, “Sure—but we’d need to evaluate John’s credibility.” Absolutely. We’d have to ask many questions: Is he lying? Did he hallucinate? Did he have a vision?
But because John’s testimony is embedded in a real historical context—there was a man named Jesus, he died, his tomb was empty three days after his death, and many people thereafter clamed to have seen him, talked with him, and ate with him—we actually can evaluate the testimony to see if it’s worthy of rational belief.
It would be different if John were saying, “I proclaim to you, Jesus, whom I, and everyone else, have never seen or touched. You just have to believe!” That would be a demand for blind faith, since there’d be no way to test the claims.
But that’s not what John is asking of his readers.
Therefore, we can truthfully say that Christian faith demands belief based on evidence rather demanding, as the Catechism puts it in paragraph 156, a “blind impulse of the mind,”
Now, someone might counter with this: What about Jesus saying in John 20:28, “Blessed is he who believes and does not see”? Doesn’t that endorse blind faith?”
Baginni actually appeals to this passage on page 33 of his Atheism: A Short Introduction.
The answer is “no,” it doesn’t endorse blind faith.
Jesus is talking about belief without physical sight and touch, not belief without evidence.
Recall that Thomas said, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). As Christian apologist John Lennox argues in his book Gunning for God (pg. 44), such empirical verification is just one kind of evidence. Therefore, it doesn’t follow that from Jesus’ praise of belief without physical sight we must believe without evidence (blind faith).
So what other kind of evidence is there? The narrative itself tells us. Notice Thomas’s doubt is in response to the testimony of the apostles: “We have seen the Lord.” Although Thomas’s belief would have been without sight if he had believed the apostles, it would not have been without evidence, since the testimony of the apostles is a kind of evidence. This provides a rationale behind Jesus’ rebuke of Thomas—namely, the apostles’ testimony was sufficient for rational belief.
If you want this response in written form, check out my article “Christian Faith is Not Blind Faith” at catholic.com.
Well, my friends, that’s it for today! If you found this video helpful, make sure to like, subscribe, comment below, and share it with someone who might need to hear this. And for more resources, check out my website at karlobroussard.com.
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