Posted on 04/11/2022 12:06:16 PM PDT by Heartlander
Andrew Klavan’s reference to the popular Bell Curve meme calls to my mind one particularly provocative version of that meme, in which the three figures representing the different levels of insight and intelligence address the relationship between science and belief in God.
The dullard on the left-hand tail of the curve says, “don’t listen to science, all the answers come from God.” The representative of conventional wisdom sitting at the top of the curve says, “God isn’t real. You should trust the science.” But then, as in all versions of the meme, a twist occurs. The jedi-savant figure at the extreme right-hand tail of the curve reaffirms the existence of God because of, not in spite of, what science has discovered.
Something like this progression has played out in Western science and culture over the last century and a half. Proponents of fundamentalist and anti-intellectual expressions of religion often expressed distrust of science for its alleged atheistic tendencies. On the other hand, popular spokesmen for science, such as Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, and Lawrence Krauss, have told the public that science does, indeed, render belief in God untenable. Consequently, they have helped to establish the conventional wisdom that science shows “God isn’t real” or belief in God is “a delusion,” as Dawkins put it.
But as I show in a new book, Return of the God Hypothesis, several major scientific discoveries over the last century have quietly cast doubt on these confident atheistic presumptions. Whereas Richard Dawkins claims that “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should observe if, at bottom, there is no purpose, no design…nothing but blind pitiless indifference,” science itself now tells a decidedly different story. Indeed, at least three major discoveries about the origin of the universe and life contradict the expectations of the scientific atheists and materialists who have long assumed that everything we see in the universe can be explained as the result of purely mindless, materialistic processes. Arguably, these discoveries also point in a distinctly God-friendly direction.
First, astronomers and cosmologists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning, contrary to the expectations of scientific materialists who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent and, therefore, in no need of an external creator.
This evidence for a beginning—from numerous discoveries in observational astronomy and developments in theoretical physics—has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists. As Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery establishing a cosmic beginning, later observed, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses…and the Bible as a whole.”
Discoveries from physics about the structure of the universe reinforce such a theistic conclusion. Since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe have been finely tuned, against all odds and for no underlying physical reason, to make our universe capable of hosting life. Even slight alterations in the values of many independent factors—such as the strength of gravitational and electromagnetic attraction, the masses of elementary particles, and the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe—would have rendered life impossible. Essentially, we live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe,” or what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely “Fortunate Universe.”
Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable fine tuning for life points to a cosmic “fine-tuner.” As former Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible. Or as British physicist Paul Davies exclaimed, “the impression of design is overwhelming.”
Third, molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells of an exquisite world of informational nano-technology—digital code in DNA and RNA; tiny, intricately-constructed molecular machines, a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system that resembles, but vastly exceeds, our own digital high technology. Biotechnologist Leroy Hood has noted that DNA contains “digital code.” But this would seem to imply that a Master Coder had a hand in the origin of life. At the very least, the discoveries of modern biology are not what anyone would have expected as the result of blind materialistic processes or “pitiless indifference.” Even Dawkins may have conceded as much when he recently confessed to being knocked “sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.”
All this implies that science itself increasingly supports what Klavan asserts throughout his essay—namely, that “there is a God” and “Creation speaks his nature.” Indeed, we might amplify the theme of Klavan’s essay (and the Bell Curve meme about science and God) by quoting the famed physicist Werner Heisenberg, who said: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Klavan’s insight about the relationship between dystopias and atheism (or scientific materialism) is also perceptive. The fictional dystopias of Brave New World, The Giver, The Matrix—and I would add, C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength—invariably depict future states where men and women are treated as purely material entities devoid of moral impulse and spiritual longing. In such dystopian societies, a reductionist and materialistic concept of human beings ensures that something important—love, freedom, human rights, justice, dignity, faith—is always horrifically omitted or suppressed by those in control.
The totalitarian dystopias of the 20th century replicated this pattern, but in real life. National Socialism and Soviet Marxism both cited science as a justification for their materialistic ideologies and utopian visions but succeeded only in creating hell on Earth—and, indeed, in perpetrating genocide. All of this supports Klavan’s other key contention: “We need not abandon the scientific knowledge of modernity, but we must subjugate it to the needs of our humanity rather than allow its fleshless, sexless, motherless materialism to turn us into itself.”
Very interesting read.
A friend gave me something once that said basically, “Saying a Big Bang explosion created the universe as we know it is like saying an explosion in a printshop resulted in the Websters unabridged dictionary”. That is as almost 40 years ago and it stuck with me.
It is either the Creator or blind chance. I choose the Creator, God.
Very good article. Every year there is more evidence that the only explanation for the universe is that it was created, and that it was created to support life just like ours.
For a couple centuries the argument has been:
“Science disagrees with how I have interpreted the Bible. That means either science or the Bible are false”
We have ignored the idea that some interpretations of the Bible have mislead us. We have also learned much about the Bible in recent decades, and the more we learn the more sophisticated and accurate the Book becomes.
“Science disagrees with how I have interpreted the Bible. That means either science or the Bible are false”
Very true. A lot of people who say they don’t believe in God, simply don’t buy into the religious interpretations to which they’ve been exposed. Many even claim that they believe in an intelligent First Cause to the universe, but still identify themselves as non-religious since they don’t follow a doctrine, or haven’t seen one that reflects what they personally believe about God.
Regarding my fingerprints link... It’s my belief when the religious leaders told Jesus during the triumphal entry to silence His followers and he replied, “If they hold their peace the stones will cry out”, this is a perfect example of the rocks crying out.
I’ve read other publications about God’s footprint into the creation of the universe. One “minor” fact is the rings of Saturn absorb meteors/space debris that would otherwise hit Earth.
The science shows that the two basic principles of bible are correct.
That the universe was created in a flash by a force outside of the universe. This is called God’s transcendence.
The second thing that modern science shows in genetics is that the genetic code arose out matter and energy and every so often the code is updated. This information comes from outside of the known causal reality. This means that some outside force is getting involved with creation and is manifested in the creation. This is called God’s immanence.
“every so often the code is updated.”
Sounds rather like evolution...
I think of the big bang as the opening of a cosmic zip file!
Not quite. One of the points made by geneticists is that they can measure the amount of time that it takes for random mutation to make changes in an organism. So they can measure the complexity of an organism and measure the amount of time it takes to create the complexity that goes into organism by way of random mutation.
What the geneticists say is that the the 3-4 billion years allotted to the creation of the life is way to short for the observable changes needed to create the complexity of life byo random mutation.
There are not one but two fundamental mysteries.
The first is the mystery of the beginning of inorganic chemistry, the elements and the periodic table.
The second is the mystery of the beginning of organic chemistry: Life.
Now maybe God did code for organic chemistry in his creation from the beginning 14 billion years ago. Only it didn’t show on earth until maybe four billion years ago. But we don’t know that.
Similarly, it may well be that the whole universe emerged from an underlying substructure and our universe is only one emergent of a much larger metaverse. But again, we don’t that. Nor can we know that. Not at this time.
Atheists of course, love the metaverse and space aliens. But in both cases—if they were true —all they would do is throw back further in time the first cause. By that I mean, if there were a metaverse—then the question would become—what is generating the metaverse. Similarly, if there space aliens—then the question would become—ok great—where did they get their genes from?
If you want to have your mind blown, go read the short article “The Age of the Universe” on Gerald Schroeder’s website.
That’s a little complex for me.
I think the really great and most fascinating issues of human life are God, Sex, and Death (not to mention that all that we experience is primarily subjective).
You can spend an entire lifetime thinking and wondering about those, and never really figure them out, or cease being fascinated.
To me, the really interesting thing about ‘evolution’ is:
Most people who believe in it as science describes it seem to think it’s all done and finished.
But I don’t think evolution ever ends, and the best is yet to come.
(Unless, of course, we choose to DEvolve; which seems to be a going trend in some quarters...)
Moses (or the author of Genesis) knew that might existed but prior to the existence of stars and the sun. It took until the 1980s for science to catch up with this. Job, the oldest book in the Bible gives an accurate view of the solar system. There is no way the ancients could have known this without it being revealed to them
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