Modern-day defenders of orthodox Christianity – of any religion with a supernatural element – face a host of challenges. Chief among them is the widespread assumption that science and religion are hopelessly incompatible.
In his best-selling book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins asserts that “religion is now completely superseded by science”. It’s a familiar line. Religion, we’re told, is shadowy and value-laden – an exercise in “blind faith”.
And the Bible says that the Earth was made 6,000 years ago in the course of seven days. Anyone who believes that is crazy! These notions are deeply ingrained, but they are fallacious. And they distort the true beliefs of most Christians in Australia.
For a start, the accounts of Creation in the Book of Genesis cannot be read literally and were not intended by their authors to be read literally. The Bible is not a science textbook.
What the Bible teaches is that the Universe was conceived, and brought into being, by God – and that, ever since, it has been sustained and monitored by God.
In using the term “God” I am content to adopt Richard Dawkins’ own definition: “A supernatural creator that is … appropriate for us to worship”.
The Bible also teaches that Mankind (i.e., the species Homo sapiens) occupies a special place in the Universe. We are not – to borrow a phrase from Stephen Hawking – mere chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet. Rather, in the poetic language of the Eighth Psalm, we are “a little lower than the angels” and “crowned … with glory and honour”.
Dawkins said “Religion has been completely superseded by science”. Such statements ought never to be equated with statements of scientific fact. They are expressions of opinion. This point cannot be emphasised enough.
Most of the greatest scientists down the ages – giants such as Galileo, Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton – held radically different opinions, even if they based them on different facts.
Today there are countless cutting-edge scientists who believe in God, some extremely eminent men and women among them. To name just a couple: astronomer Allan Sandage, generally credited with being the first person accurately to estimate the age of the Universe, and biologist Francis S. Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.
How can this be, if science and religion are so blatantly incompatible?
There’s a straightforward answer. Many of the discoveries of modern-day science point towards – rather than away from – God’s existence. The theistic case, far from being arrant nonsense, is intellectually honest and reasonable. Provided it too is based on true facts.
The following propositions are generally accepted by a majority of scientists worldwide in the pertinent fields.
First, science itself is predicated on a key assumption: that there is an objective order underlying Nature, which is ascertainable and explicable. (This, by the way, is a profoundly theistic notion, traceable to St Augustine.)
Second, the Universe had a finite beginning, about 13.7 billion years ago (the so-called Big Bang).
Third, before the Big Bang, there was literally nothing. Shortly after the Big Bang (the “singularity”) there was something, viz., the gigantic quantities of matter and energy which constitute our still-expanding, cooling Universe.
Time itself also came into being at the Big Bang. (Tellingly, until the mid-1960s, the Big Bang theory was resisted by many scientists because of its obvious theological implications. Then the evidence for it became overwhelming.)
Fourth, there are four fundamental forces which govern the Universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The absolute and relative strengths of these forces have remained the same (or virtually so) since the moment of the Big Bang.
Fifth, the values of the so-called Constants of Nature – pure numbers of huge practical significance, such as the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron (1/1836) – have also stayed the same throughout the history of the Universe.
Sixth, a crucial point, there could be no life anywhere in the Universe if the strength of any of the four forces of Nature were even slightly different. So too if the values of any of the Constants of Nature were not precisely as they are. Among many other things, the carbon out of which we are all made could not have been generated inside stars.
This is the so-called Goldilocks Enigma (the title of one of Paul Davies’ best books). The central concept is that, like Goldilocks’ porridge, the Universe is “just right” for life.
Davies’ book is replete with stunning examples. For instance, the ratio of the mass of the neutron to that of the proton is 1.00137841870. Without that slight deviation in weight (the neutron is about 0.1 per cent heavier), there would be no atoms, no chemistry, no life.
Let’s take stock. The six propositions stated above are, as I’ve said, relatively uncontroversial. And they have almost nothing to do with evolutionary biology, the keystone of many an atheist’s arch. So far, we’ve been in the realm of physics, chemistry and cosmology.
To turn, then, to evolutionary biology. Its ambit and significance are often over-stated by both sides.
The likes of Dawkins would have us believe that evolution provides a cast-iron refutation of every premise of theology. In the introduction to his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins tipped his hand explicitly. He wrote that if he had lived before 1859 – when Darwin published On the Origin of Species – he could not imagine having been an atheist.
On the flipside, some well-meaning Christians are intimidated by people like Dawkins. They are tempted to contest established science, and quickly get out of their depth. There’s no need.
Point number one: Darwinian theory does not explain – nor purport to explain – the existence of life. It is concerned with the process of diversification of life once life exists.
The origin of life on Earth remains a near-total mystery. It seems fairly well-established that the first single-celled prokaryotes appeared about 3.85 million years ago. But where did they come from? Exotic theories abound, but little can be said with confidence. All life on Earth is based on DNA, yet DNA itself is a staggeringly complex substance.
Point number two: Darwinian evolutionary theory is often invoked to explain how all life on Earth descended from one original “primitive” life-form. This is supposed to have happened by a steady process of natural selection acting upon slight, successive, random mutations of DNA occurring periodically in individual organisms.
Unquestionably, some biological change is caused that way. But whether – and, if so, how – such a process accounts for the rich diversity of all life on Earth is highly contentious in the relevant scientific communities. (See Professor Kim Sterelny’s excellent books Dawkins vs. Gould and What Is Biodiversity?)
Point number three: the uniquely human faculties of cognition and conscience are, to put it mildly, hard to explain in a purely Darwinian framework. Likewise religious faith, our uncanny sense of “self”, and free will.
Take free will. Only a very few die-hard determinists are prepared to assert that it’s an illusion. To the question: “Can any of us ever do anything other than what we end up doing?” their answer is, in substance, “No”.
Whatever the ambit of Darwinian theory may ultimately prove to be, one thing can be stated with certainty. Known evolutionary processes are – in and of themselves – another suggestive aspect of the Goldilocks Enigma. They “work”, but only just.
One of the twentieth century’s foremost atheists, Carl Sagan, summarised the position this way: Evolution works through mutation and selection… If the mutation rate is too high, we lose the inheritance of four billion years of painstaking evolution. If it is too low, new varieties will not be available to adapt to some future change in the environment. The evolution of life requires a more or less precise balance between mutation and selection. When that balance is achieved, remarkable adaptations occur.
To me, this is one of the most under-discussed aspects of the whole God Debate. It is another stunning example of fine-tuning in Nature.
What follows from all this? I venture the following:
The Universe might not have existed at all – but it does. Why? And how?
If the Universe is just a one-off fluke, it ought to be chaotic, featureless and dead. For, as British cosmologist John D. Barrow has observed, “there are so many more ways to be disorderly than to be orderly that one would have expected a universe pulled out of a hat at random to be a very asymmetrical and disorderly one”.
Very few scientists, whatever their religious views, contend that the Universe is a one-off fluke.
So the critical issue arises. It becomes necessary to account for the overwhelming appearance of design in the Universe – in the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, to say nothing of other phenomena there’s been insufficient space to touch upon here.
It’s also necessary to account for the uniqueness of Mankind as a sentient, conscience-possessing species, capable of mulling over the deepest questions of ethics and philosophy. To date, only two logical possibilities have been advanced to explain this state of affairs:
The first is that our Universe is one of many, many gazillions of other universes – perhaps an infinite number of them. Each operates under slightly different laws. If that is so, the argument runs, the ordered complexity of our Universe should not seem surprising to us. We just happen to be in one of the few universes (perhaps the only one) whose laws sustain life.
This is the so-called Multiverse Theory. It is the fallback position of, among others, Richard Dawkins. Does it convince you?
It doesn’t convince me, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it flouts Occam’s razor, otherwise known as “the principle of parsinomy”. This is the idea that, in framing an explanation for any given phenomenon, all hypotheses and assumptions which are not strictly necessary should be eliminated. In short: keep it simple, stupid!
Atheists are fond of invoking Occam’s razor for their own purposes, but many seem unaware of its relevance to this critical issue.
Dawkins claims in The God Delusion that the Multiverse Theory, for which there is no objective evidence at all, is “simple” and only “apparently extravagant” – “if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws”.
But that is a gigantic “if” (how could anyone in our Universe ever possibly know?), and in any case begs the question where the fundamental laws of all of those gazillions of other universes came from – a question that, on Dawkins’ thesis, must necessarily have a naturalistic answer.
It’s hard to see how any such naturalistic answer could reasonably be described as simple. According to some variants of the Multiverse Theory, many or even most of the universes in it must be fakes; you and I may well be “brains in a vat”, a la The Matrix.
If the number of universes is infinite, there must also exist an infinite number of “freak observers”, intelligent beings like us who strictly speaking ought not to exist, according to the laws of the relevant universe, but do! You and I could be such freak observers, who only imagine that we perceive “reality”.
To borrow a favourite expression of my mother’s: it all sounds like a load of old codswallop.
That brings me to the other possible explanation for the organised complexity of the Universe. It’s the one which has been instinctively favoured by billions of people down the centuries: the Universe must have been created, with Mankind in view, by a supernatural being of unfathomable wisdom and power. To wit: God.
In the words of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah:
He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heaven by his understanding.
Roy Williams is a writer for the Bible Society of Australia’s King James Version 400th Anniversary celebrations.
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