The idea of causality may explain why some people believe in God. An old theological argument holds that since everything has a cause and a reason it leads to a chain whose origin–or so the reasoning goes– must be God. There are some standard rebuttals: Who created God? The usual reply would be that God is the only entity that needs no creator to exist. But then the criticism would be that if something exists that needs no creator, why can’t it be the whole universe?
This discussion indicates that our actions and beliefs are not dictated solely by causality or other intellectual constructs. We are human beings, and at the deepest level, we are not strictly logical. We are emotional, intuitive, sometimes inspired, and sometimes just wrong. Scientists, of course, cannot divorce themselves from being human, nor should they try. We believe in science not just for pragmatic reasons. Some of us are motivated by the pursuit of some sort of absolute truth–or as absolute as we can get, given the limitations we bring to the problem and the intrinsic uncertainties of the world we inhabit. The existence of such a high-minded and, to some extent, unrealistic goal is not rationally defensible, nor is it defensibly rational. In fact, it is somewhat akin to a religious belief.
