Some
ideas become so imbedded in the sub-conscious of a culture that they are
assumed without challenge. One of those notions is that science has buried God.
But
is it true? Has science really got rid of God? Is that even possible? Science
is the study of the physical universe, so it can’t tell you, and never will be
able to tell you, that a spiritual being does not exist.
“All
right,” says someone, “but science has certainly got rid of the need for God. We now understand the
universe so well that we no longer need to appeal to the activity of a deity.”
This is also mistaken. Understanding how something works doesn’t get rid of the
need for a creator or designer. In fact, it increases it. When you understand
how a kettle, a car, or a radio works, you don’t say, “I understand it, so no
one made it.” On the contrary, you admire all the more the skill of the maker,
and consider foolish any notion that such things came about without intelligent
input. So it is with the universe – the more it is understood, the more the
power and wisdom of the creator become obvious. John Lennox makes the point
this way:
Take a Ford motor car. It is
conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world, who was seeing one
for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine
that there is a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further
imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr Ford inside the
engine liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr Ford did not like
him. Of course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the
engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr Ford inside it. Neither
would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to
introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for its working. His grasp of the
impersonal principles of internal combustion would be altogether enough to
explain how the engine works. So far, so good. But if he then decided that his
understanding of the principles of how the engine works made it impossible to
believe in the existence of Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place,
this would be patently false – in philosophical terminology he would be
committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the
mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand.
It is likewise a category mistake to
suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the
universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the
existence of a personal creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe.
In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe
works either with its cause or its upholder.[1]
Let’s
look at three scientific facts which I hope will show that science points
towards, not away from, God.
We
live in a fathomable universe
What
kind of universe makes science possible? We need:
i.
A rational creation
ii.
Rational creatures
i.
A rational creation
If
the universe tumbled into existence without a creator/designer, why would
anyone suppose it to operate according to discoverable and consistent laws?
Does not the existence of natural law naturally point to a lawgiver? To quote again from Lennox:
One person who drew attention to this
circumstance ... was the eminent historian of science and mathematician Sir
Alfred North Whitehead. Observing that medieval Europe in 1500 knew less than
Archimedes in the third century BC and yet by 1700 Newton had written his
masterpiece, Principia Mathematica, Whitehead asked the obvious
question: How could such an explosion of knowledge have happened in such a
relatively short time? His answer: “modern science must come from the medieval
insistence on the rationality of God ... My explanation is that the faith in
the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern
scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology”. C. S.
Lewis’ succinct formulation of Whitehead’s view is worth recording: “Men became
scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature
because they believed in a lawgiver”[2]
ii.
Rational creatures
For
science to be possible there needs to be a creature capable of rational thought.
If atheism were true, everything in the universe is purely physical, reacting
according to physical law, which would mean that there is no such thing as
rationality. Every thought of the mind would be only the by-product of chemical
processes over which we have no control. As the Christian apologist, Frank
Turek, says, it’s not merely “that science supports theism but theism supports
science. In other words, theism makes doing science possible. We wouldn’t be
able to do science reliably if atheism were true.”[3]
We
live in a finite universe
Up
until the previous century, atheists believed that the universe existed eternally.
That view was wrenched from their grasp by a number of independent scientific
discoveries proving that the universe had a beginning a finite time ago.
Science
is the search for causes to explain effects. What could be the cause of the
universe? People will often reply, “The Big Bang.” But that isn’t an
explanation – it’s the thing that needs to be explained. “The Big Bang” is just
a name for the event of the universe coming into existence – it’s not the cause
itself; it’s simply the effect.
So
the question remains, what adequate cause could bring the universe into
existence? The cause must possess the following features:
Non-physical
The
cause can’t be physical, because matter is not eternal.
Powerful
It
must be unimaginably powerful to produce a universe from nothing.
Eternal
It
must be timeless (i.e. eternal), because it brought time into existence.
Personal
Impersonal
things don’t have the capacity to choose. If the cause of the universe was
impersonal and had eternally existed then the universe would have existed
eternally as well. The only way you can have the universe come into existence
from an eternal cause is if the cause chose to act.
So
the cause is a personal, powerful being, unconfined by time or space. In a
word, that cause is God – the omnipotent, eternal, personal God revealed in the
Bible.
I remember hearing a presentation by an
atheist who was asked what it would take for him to believe in God. He replied
by saying that, were something at that moment to appear out of nothing in front
of him, he would believe in God. The odd thing is that this atheist had just
been speaking about a universe that came into existence out of nothing. The
question is, why would something coming into existence out of nothing in
the present prove God, whereas everything coming into existence out
of nothing in the past didn’t?
We
live in a fine-tuned universe
A
finite universe points to a powerful creator, but a fine-tuned universe points
to an intelligent designer. This can be seen in physics and biology.
Physics
Physicists
have found that the existence of the universe is balanced on a very thin
tightrope. There are dozens of physical constants and quantities which, had
they been the slightest bit different, would have ruled out stars, planets and
chemistry.[4]
It’s
like a machine with a control panel. The panel has dozens of dials, each with
trillions of possible settings. For the machinery to work each dial has to be
set to the right value. If one of the dials is the slightest bit off then the
machine can’t work. If you arrived at the factory and found the machine working,
would you conclude that someone had come in and randomly spun all the dials? Of
course not. But this is what atheists are forced to conclude about the universe
– by sheer fluke it came into existence (without a cause) with the settings
exactly right. To give you an idea of how finely tuned the universe is,
consider that the dial on our factory machine for the cosmological constant has
1010(120) settings – that’s a 1 with a trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion zeros after it![5]
(The number of subatomic particles in the entire known universe is only 1 with eighty zeros after it!)
Or
consider the force of gravity. Imagine a ruler stretched across the observable
universe – a ruler 14 billion light years long and divided into inch-long
segments. If the force of gravity was moved one inch along that ruler the
universe wouldn’t exist.[6]
These
are just two of the dials that have to be set just right. There are loads of
others.
Random
chance is never going to spin those dials to get the correct values. You need
an intelligent designer.
Biology
Back
in Darwin’s day it was supposed that a single cell was a simple thing, but
research has revealed its complexity. The cell is like a motor car factory with loads of mini assembly lines and
all the different parts performing different functions in a very busy but
highly efficient way. A typical cell contains billions of units of DNA comprising
the chromosomes that make the machines that cause the cell to work. DNA can
only be described in terms of language or code, and has been likened to a
computer program; indeed, Bill Gates said DNA is far, far more advanced than
any software Microsoft had created.[7] Every single one of the trillions of
cells in the human body contains a database larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But where does
this information come from? Who is the programmer? Who wrote the language and devised
the code? Information can only come from intelligence. Thus,
biology, as well as physics, points to an intelligent designer.
Conclusion
3,000 years ago King David wrote, “The
heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). 2,000 years ago Paul wrote that
the existence and power of God are “clearly seen...by the things that are made”
(Rom 1:20). This has only become more obvious as science has advanced and
knowledge increased. As the agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow said:
For the scientist who has lived by his
faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the
mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls
himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have
been sitting there for centuries.[8]
The
more we investigate the universe, the more we see the fingerprints of God. Science
has not buried God; it has buried atheism. You can reject the existence of a
creator if you want, but in light of a fathomable, finite, fine-tuned universe,
you can’t claim that science is on your side.
[3] Frank Turek, Stealing from God, Why atheists need God to make their case,
NavPress, 2014, p. 145.
[4] The fine-tuned constants include the force of
gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The
fine-tuned quantities include the entropy level of the universe and the ratio
of protons to electrons.
[7] Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, cited in
Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, A Journalist Investigates Scientific
Evidence That Points toward God, Zondervan, 2004, p. 238.
[8] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers,
cited in Geisler & Turek in I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist,
p. 94.
