Ruminating on Ruse: Key Themes in the Evolutionary Naturalism of Michael Ruse

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Ruse on Atheism, Belief, and Faith

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Editorial Introduction

Bradford McCall, PhD

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Chapter 3 of the companion volume (i.e., Reading Ruse: Michael Ruse on Darwinism, Science, and Faith) to this current text has five readings, all of which are related to Atheism, Belief, and Faith. It begins with a reading regarding The Arkansas Creationism Trial Forty Years On.² This reading covers the concept of falsifiability as an idea which has been made very popular by the Austrian-English philosopher Karl Popper. For all intents and purposes, the idea of falsifiability is that there must be—if something is a genuine scientific theory—some evidence which could count against it in order for an idea to properly be ruled scientific. Popper deliberately distinguishes science from something like religion. Popper is not denigrating religion—he’s just saying it’s not science. For example, take, say, a religious statement like God is love; there’s nothing in the empirical world which would count against this for a believer. With science, you’ve got to be prepared to give up a belief, but not so with religion. Even the best science is constantly putting itself to the test of the empirical evidence and, if it cannot handle this, it falls. No matter how prestigious the idea formerly.

The way that Newtonian mechanics—the best and most fruitful science ever—had to give way before Einstein and the other physicists of the twentieth century. Kuhn is wrong. Call them paradigms or whatever, but if they are part of science, they must be falsifiable. Science is not like religion. And if you doubt that, go and look at the book edited by Imré Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, the report on a conference earlier in the decade, where the philosophies of Popper and Kuhn were spelled out and the two sides went at each other, trying to show the flaws in the position of their opponents.³

In the second reading of chapter 3, Ruse explores God and Humans.⁴ He asks us, before we start to talk about God, why should we talk about God at all? Shouldn’t we start with atheism, and bring in God only as needed? The trouble with this approach is that atheism is, as it were, the default position. Atheism says that there isn’t a God. So why argue about that? Until Ruse hears about God and why he should take him seriously, he chooses to remain silent and untroubled about the whole question. The burden of proof is on those who believe. So first let us make the pro-God case; only then can we turn to the anti-God case.

Who is the God of the Jewish tradition? This is the God of the all-defining and all-important work for Christians, the Holy Bible. This Bible falls into two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. What is taken by Christians as foundational is that the God of the Old Testament—the Jewish Bible—is also the God of the New Testament—the exclusively Christian part of the Bible. Nothing makes sense if these are not the same deity, and there are repeated passages in the New Testament, from the mouth of Jesus and others, affirming the identity and continuity. We find a story of God, of humans, and of the relationship between the two. Humans are persons, that is to say, beings with feelings, thoughts, and a sense of identity. This is true also of the deity. God is above all an intensely personal being. God is creator, absolutely and completely. He made the universe out of nothing. What is important, whatever the language, God is Father not just in the sense of creator, but also in the sense of ongoing care and concern. God loves his children and wants the best for them. No one reading the Bible can miss how the picture of God changes through the various books. Not only is there a move to God being the only God, but also a more refined and concerned being starts to come into