In this series we are; “Answering the Big Questions”,
questions that I am sure you have either asked yourself, or have been asked by
others and which challenge our faith, and here is a big one that many people
ask; “Has science disproved God?” Actually is not usually phased as a question,
more of an assumption that God, or that belief in God has been rendered old
fashioned or obsolete due to our greater understanding of science. “We have
science now to tell us how things came into existence, and how they work, so
why does any rational intelligent person still need to believe in God?”
It
interesting to note that whilst this is certainly a big question, it is really
only a question that has been asked recently, and by that I mean in the last
150 years or so. Before that it was never an issue, and we will look at the
reasons for that in a moment. But to put this in context, in a future session
we will look at “Why does God allow suffering?” and that is a question that has
been asked right from the get go. We read in John’s gospel:
“As he passed by he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked
him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” [John
9:1-2]
Right back at
the beginning people were asking “Why does God allow suffering”, but no one can
up to Jesus and said to him; “Surely science has disproved that God exists?”
It’s a modern question – but why do people ask it?
So why do
people think that science has disprove God? Why do people see this conflict? Some would point to the debate over origins; and the division over whether the Earth created in seven days or over fifteen billion years as suggested by modern scientific theory. Others might look to creation vs evolution, or the scientific method that says truths can only be trusted if they can be measured and verified and categorised. Taking things 'on faith' is a response best left to previous ages. As Timothy Keller says, quoting a popular belief:
“Doesn’t religion call for leaps of blind faith in an age of science reason
and technology, they ask? Surely fewer and fewer people will feel the need for
religion and it will die out”
(Timothy
Keller (Making Sense of God)
Regardless of the response there is a
lot of emotion behind this question and a lot of rhetoric. It’s not a debate we
do very well because we often start from very entrenched positions. The debate
between science and religion has described by a number of writers as ‘a warfare
metaphor’. with science and religion in conflict and at opposite ends of a
spectrum of beliefs, and any discussion between these seems to start with the
assumption the opposing argument needs to be beaten down and squashed
completely. So I want to do two main things this morning. I want to talk about
the history of the interaction between science and religion; to show this idea
that the two are naturally in conflict did not exist until fairly recently, and
then, because obviously the answer to the question ‘has science disproved God
is a resounding “no”, I want to look at a number of areas where a purely
scientific world view (and by that I mean an approach that takes God out of the
equation) does not give a satisfactory explanation.
So let me
start by explaining what I meant by this being a fairly recent question. We see
a great divide between faith and science, but go back more than 150 years and
that divide disappears, and people wouldn’t understand our difficulties. Put
simply much of the scientific enquiry that took place in the 18th
Century and earlier took place because either the church encouraged it or it
was done by men (there weren’t that many women involved in science in those
times unfortunately), who had a strong and clear Christian faith.
 |
| Isaac Newton Johannes Kepler |
Take Isaac
Newton, for example, perhaps the greatest scientist who has ever lived, he
formulated the laws of gravity, among many other discoveries, so surely he was
a scientist, not a theologian? Well in addition to his more famous works he
wrote a number of tracts on the literal interpretation of the Bible. In the
introduction to his greatest work, his three volume ‘Principia’ he
writes:
“When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such
Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity and
nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it useful for that purpose.”
One of the
greatest scientific text books in history and that is in the introduction.
Or take Johannes
Kepler who in the early 1600’s formulated the laws of planetary motion. We
recognise another great scientist there, but he said that his motivation was to
give glory to the creator of those laws. He wrote:
“God is praised through my work in astronomy”.
Were Newton
 |
| Columbus at Salmanca |
And we like
to see conflict where there is none, and a good example that is unfortunately
still taught in our schools is that of Columbus Columbus Columbus
only survived because he happened to run into a fairly large obstacle on his
journey – namely the continent of America
Or take Galileo who was summoned before a Papal hearing in 1633 and charged with heresy for his astonishing claim that the earth went round the sun (a model first proposed by Copernicus fifty years earlier). Galileo was force to recant his views. Popular myth has it that suffering with ill health and facing torture from the inquisition, Galileo kneels and recants, but, murmurs quietly under his breath “e pur si muove”, “even so it does move” A more complete account would mention the fact that Galileo was a rather proud and haughty person. The church had no problem with a discussion about the earth going round the sun or not, provided it was presented as a possibility for discussion, not as fact. Galileo did indeed comply, and published his ideas as a ‘discussion’, but he did so in a way that would arouse the anger of the church. He presented his ideas as a debate between three men.
Sagredo is the impartial moderator who will hear both sides of the argument.
Salviati is the scientist who presents the case for Galileo’s ideas.
Simplico (and the name gives this away), Simplicio is something of a foolish simpleton; he is the one who rejects these new ideas. In the illustrations and in the text it is very clear to all the Simplico is none other than the Pope himself; Pope Urban VIII.
 |
| Frontispiece of 'La Dialogue' |
Galileo is thumbing his nose at Papal authority and his trial for heresy was because he had insulted the Pope, and indeed a number of other friends and colleagues who had advised him against such a course of action, not for his actual scientific ideas.
Yet Galileo
and his dispute with the Catholic Church is still presented as one of the
clearest examples of science and religious views in conflict.
So there was
no conflict for many centuries, but that changed in the 19th
Century, not with as you might assume with the publication of Darwin’s book;
‘On the Origin of Species’ but with the publication in 1874 of a far lesser
known book by a man called John William Draper called ‘The History of the
Conflict between Religion and Science” that largely suggested scientific
thought and enquiry was in some way superior to religious thought and enquiry.
A totally false supposition by the way, but it came just at a time when science
was coming of age. Prior to this this time the intellectual elite were the
clergy; you had to study theology for years before you could become a priest or
a pastor, science, on the other hand, was something done by amateurs in their
back gardens. But as science grew during the 19th Century the desire
for scientists to be seen as intellectually superior grew. They were the ones
that now had to study for years and go to university. The industrial revolution
was in full swing and the effects of science were visible for all to see and so
this struck a chord with the general population. Indeed Draper’s book, which
was only one in a series on scientific enquiry, was a runaway success, it
out-sold all the other books in the series, went through 50 printings and was
translated into ten languages – no mean feat for the mid 1850s.
And so was
born this idea that science and religion are at opposite ends of a spectrum and
you can only hold onto one. It is ingrained in our culture but it is not true.
Francis
Collins the lead scientist involved in the human genome project, mapping the
complex code of our DNA has said this:
“One of the greatest tragedies of our time is this impression that has been
created that science and religion have to be at war.”
So forgive me
for the quick history lesson, but I wanted to dispel the myth that it is
natural for science and religion to be in conflict or in opposition. When we
are confronted with this question this warfare metaphor is very evident in the
background and sometimes influences how we respond; faith and Science as two
boxers in opposing corners who come out slugging as soon as the bell rings. but
history paints a very different picture. And so moving on now I want to return
to the question in hand “Has Science disproved God?” and give you four reasons
why I do not think that is so. Four simple examples that you can use if you get
involved in such a debate- but hopefully to do so in a way that isn’t quite so
confrontational. You will never avoid the creation vs evolution debate, or the
thousands of years or billions of years debate. Cavemen and dinosaurs will
still come up, but let us at least try to start with some simple points.
1) Something from Nothing
The popular
world view – what science has termed the standard model is that 15 billion
years ago the universe suddenly came into being through an event called the Big
Bang. Go back fifty billion years nothing, thirty billion years nothing, twenty
billion years nothing, then suddenly fifteen billion years ago we have a
universe. How did that happen?
And it is
enormous. We think of the sun as huge, but it is just a small star gathered
together with some 100 billion other stars to make our galaxy. Here is a
picture of our nearest neighbouring galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda
and it is a good picture of what our galaxy looks like from the outside,
and this were our galaxy, we would not
be near the centre, but right out hear out the edge.
 |
| Deep space galaxies (Hubble Space Telescope) |
Yet the universe
is made up of not one galaxy but 100 billion other galaxies. This picture from
the Hubble Space Telescope shows not stars, but galaxies spread through space.
How did that happen? How did all of this come from nothing? Of course science
has no answer – and in many ways it is a question that lies beyond science. It
is not possible to answer the how and why of that question with a scientific
world view alone.
Nothing,
nothing, nothing, billions of years of nothing then suddenly something. Science
can’t explain that, but it is easy to understand creation if we believe in a
creator God. God, at some point in the past, and I’m not going to enter the
young earth, old earth debate, whether the universe if 15 billion years old of
just a few thousand, that is a subject for another time, but whatever you
favoured timescale, something from nothing is hard to explain in a world view
that has no creator God and very simple to explain with a world view that has
at its centre a creator God who at some point in the past simply said “let
there be Light”.
This is
actually made all the more amazing by some recent developments in cosmology.
You may of heard of people talking of dark matter and dark energy, people will
drop that into a conversation to kill the debate “We scientists have all these
word you don’t even know about so how can you talk to us about creation.”; it’s
that warfare metaphor all over again, but to put it simply, dark matter and
dark energy have to be suggested because what we see isn’t enough to make the
math add up. All these billions and stars and galaxies aren’t enough, in fact
the standard model would now say this is just a fraction of what there actually
is. When you play that back all science is doing is making God even bigger and
even more majestic.
And then just
this month, new evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope has been presented
that suggests there are not a mere 100 billion galaxies but 2 trillion (20
times more). Suddenly this enormous something from nothing has grown into
something that is twenty time larger.
“The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his
handiwork.”
[Psalm
19:1]
2)
Order from Disorder
Secondly:
Order from Disorder. One of the fundamental principles of science is something
called the three laws of thermodynamics, don’t worry too much about the long
name, because at their heart the ideas are very simple. The second law in
particular says systems will move from being ordered to being disordered. Let
me explain what I mean by that.
If I drop
some cubes of ice into a beaker of boiling water I have a very ordered system
(you might like to think of different areas of the beaker being in different
states – boiling water and cold ice. But very rapidly that system moves to a
state of disorder where there are no different orders no different types of
stuff, there is disorder, the ice melts, cools the water a bit and soon the
whole beaker is at the same temperature; no different states, no different
orders.
At no time;
if I has a beaker of warm water, would I suddenly observe ice cubes forming and
the rest of the water increasing in temperature to compensate. That would be
crazy, because it would break a law that at the very heart of science itself.
So if the
lack of difference is always increasing; if things are become ‘samey’ (a
principle that we call entropy) how do complex systems arise which are by their
very nature ‘ordered’?
 |
| William Paley |
William Paley
a clergyman in the late 18th Century wrote this;
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were
asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for
anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. But suppose I had
found a watch upon the ground, I should hardly think of the answer I had before
given, There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an
artificer or artificers, who formed the watch.
And he went
on to say:
Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which
existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on
the side of nature being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds
all computation.
A very clear
and forthright reason for believing in a creator God, creation is complex, it
does just happen by accident.
Of course
Richard Dawkins; the modern day champion of the atheist perspective opposes
this viewpoint, and supposes that evolution occurs without the need for a
creator or artificer, and hence titled one of his books “The Blind Watchmaker”.
Evolution is ‘blind’ yet complexity and order occurs all around us in defiance
of the laws of science.
The crux of
the evolution vs creation debate can be summarised in this point. With a world
view where things happen by chance then it is very difficult to explain complex
systems arising naturally, no matter how much time you give for random events
to occur, but with God, our watchmaker, at the centre of our world view then
the complexity we see all around is far easier to explain.
3) Life from Non-Life
Let us move
this idea of complexity on a bit further because the third reason why, I
believe, science has not yet offered a fully credible world-view that can
dispense with God is ‘Life from Non-Life’. It is still one of those great
unanswered questions of science. We can define living organisms; we can
categorise living organisms, we can understand to enormous detail how living
organisms work, but that event that caused those ‘living organism’ to emerge from
non-living material is beyond our grasp. Something as fundamental as; “how did
life coming into being?” is still an unanswered question. Science will say it
is only a matter of time, theories abound, it is taught in schools as fact but
Richard Feynman perhaps one
of great theoretical physicists of the 20th Century said this:
“Through all the ages, men have tried to fathom the meaning of life, but if
we take everything into account, then I think we must frankly admit that we do
not know”
And if you
think that’s fifty year old quote and science has moved on since then I have
recently been working through a lecture series on the Origins of Life by one of
the key researchers in this area. He spent a lot of time discussing how
difficult it is to even define what life is and then made the astonishing
comment, that “we may never ultimately know the method by which life emerged” I
see that as an enormous gap in a world view that excluded God.
Life is
incredibly complex, the simplest organism is incredibly complex, and that is of
course acknowledged by all. As Christians our response is very simple; “Yes
life is complex, hence we have a creator God for whom creating this wonderful
complexity is no problems. If you wish to dispense with God, if you want a
world view where life emerges as a result of random chance then then you need
time, lots and lots of time, and then, the argument goes, anything is possible
and you will eventually get those random, accidental changes that cause life to
happen.
The
illustration is often used of the ‘Monkey and the Typewriter’ (or the keyboard if we want to be more
modern), you may have heard it. If a monkey sits at a keyboard and hits keys
randomly every second, given enough time he will type the works of Shakespeare.
We need lots of time, but given enough time it will happen, (complexity from
random events) and that is the argument you hear for live evolving from
non-life – it just needs enough time. Now a single strand of DNA, that
fundamental component of life is far more complex than the works of
Shakespeare, but let’s make it even easier. We are not looking for the complete
works just the phrase “To be or not to be, that is the question”. Hitting keys
randomly at one a second and just using the 26 letter keys A-Z, how long will
it take for our monkey to randomly type that phrase?
30 letters,
with the chance of hitting the right key each time 1 in 26. So 26 x 26 thirty
times
Is 3 x 10 42,
that’s a 3 with 42 zeroes after it
OK, no
problem, we will get some more monkeys and give them a bit more time.
If we covered
the surface of the earth (including the sea) with moneys and keyboards we have
room for 5x10 13 monkeys (about 50 trillion). Tying 30 keys a second they have
2 attempts a minute, but let’s give them some more time. In fact let’s give
them the entire life of the universe, 15 billion years to randomly type; “to be
or not to be, that is the question”.
Even then,
with the earth covered in monkeys, typing for 15 billion years we still only
have a 1 in 10 billion chance that one monkey will type “to be or not to be,
that is the question.” Just once. Not the full works of Shakespeare, not the
complexity of a DNA helix, we can’t do a simple phrase from Hamlet.
On the
subject of probability, Alistair McGrath who has debated with Richard Dawkins
on evolution has said that when we ascribe a very low probability to an event
but say “but it could still happen”, we are actual.ly giving that event more
credibility that it deserves. Extremely low possibilities need to be seen for
what they are – effectively impossible
Does life
just happen by accident, even given billions of years? I think life from
non-life is a great argument for a creator God.
4) Morality from Selfishness
The last
issue I believe where faith in a creator God is vital for an understanding of
the world around us is the issue of morality. Put simply; ‘what prompts us to
do good’. How do we decide what is right or wrong? You see a world view where
stuff just happens cannot explain morality, why bother to be good when the sole
purpose of our existence is to pass on our genes to the next generation? This
is what our children are taught in school. Life is an accident, you are an
accident, good and evil are relative and whatever you want them to be; there
are no absolutes of right and wrong, good and evil, and we wonder why the
highest cause of teenage death is not drugs or alcohol abuse but suicide. Why
bother to live if there is no ultimate right to wrong.
Science can tell you that if you add poison to someone’s tea it will kill them, but it cannot answer the question is killing right or wrong?
Richard Dawkins has said:
“I don’t know on the whole what is moral. Science has no method for determining what is ethical.”
Also
“It is impossible to jump from atoms to ethics and from molecules to morality”
Now those are scary quotes. Science, and people like Dawkins freely admit this, alone can’t explain or define right and wrong; the moral code we all live by, and yet we know what is right and wrong. Somewhere within our core being we know that. We may not always do what is right, but we know there is a difference. A world view devoid of a creator God cannot explain our morality; why not take that selfish approach that keeps us at the top of the pack and pushes down everyone else? Why make sacrifices in life? Why not simply do what we want when we want? No matter how that might at times seem attractive there is something in us that cries out this is wrong, yet a world view where God imprints his character on his creation makes this very understandable.
Without God do we really want to live in a world with no absolute right or wrong, where there is no way to determine what is ethical, where anything goes providing it enhances me? Dawkins was right to call his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ but do we want to live in such a selfish world? We value self-sacrifice, we value putting other first; yes it is hard sometimes, but in our heart we know this is a better way for the world to be.
 |
| Paul Kalanthi |
Paul Kalanthi was a gifted neuro-surgeon and a devout atheist, as a scientist pushing back the boundaries of medical science; he had no need of God, science provided a comprehensive and complete world view, until he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at the age of 34. He wrote about his journey back to faith in his book ‘When Breath become Air’ which was on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list for many weeks, and in it he wrote this:
“All science can do is reduce phenomena to manageable units. It can make
claims about matter and energy, but about nothing else. For example science can
explain love and meaning as chemical responses in your brain that helped your
ancestors survive. But if we assert, which virtually everyone does, that love,
meaning, and morals, do not merely feel real but actually are so –science
cannot support that. Scientific reason is inapplicable to the central aspects
of human life including hope, love, beauty, honour, suffering, and virtue.”
With a world
view that stands on scientific principle alone we can’t explain these, things
that are central to our being, morals are beyond explanation. And yet with a
moral, just, loving God, who imprints his character on his creation their
origin is perfectly explainable.
Morality from
Selfishness is a great reason for believing in God.
Summary
In Summary I
started with a brief overview of the history of the interaction between science
and religion and how the idea that the two are in conflict is a very recent
model – only something that has happened in the past 100 years or so. All too
often scientists have a low opinion of those who profess a faith whilst many
Christians feel that scientific discoveries and enquires seek to diminish or
dismiss God, but we can engage in meaningful discussion without this warfare
metaphor becoming dominant.
I have an
academic background in Astrophysics and Cosmology; cosmology textbooks sit
alongside my Bible commentaries on my bookshelf and I see no conflict there.
Science is a great power for good, it has transformed or lives in ways previous
generations could not have imagined, yet if this becomes our sole world view;
our sole ‘pattern to live by’ then it is woefully inadequate and so in the
second part I suggested four areas where scientists themselves will admit the
story is not yet complete, and where it will only be complete with God at the
centre bringing a reason and explanation for how things are:
- Something from Nothing
- Order from Disorder
- Life from Non-Life
- Morality from Selfishness
Timothy
Keller says this in his latest book, ‘Making Sense of God’:
"A religious faith makes sense to four out of five people in the world
(80%). Religion / faith is certainly not dying out soon and that is for one of
two reasons. Either people find that a purely secular world view has something
missing, or most people intuitively see a transcendent realm beyond this world."
Has science
removed the need for God? Absolutely not, but it is a ‘big question’ that will
continue to be asked and it is a ‘big question’ that we as Christians need to
be engaged in answering,
