Is Belief In God Scientific?
Jun 06, 2008
In the last entry, I talked about what constituted “proof” of God’s existence, and we saw that no proof for any belief (whether religious, scientific, or otherwise) could possibly be irrefutable, convincing any and all skeptics. Even the best arguments and ‘proofs’ have a rational escape hole somewhere. Still, there are great arguments which must be weight when it comes to something as important as belief in God. We should note that everyone has a strong desire for the answer to this question to work out one way or another (this we might call bias or conflict of interest). Christians want God to exist because he provides hope, purpose, meaning, and eternity while atheists too bias their decision by wanting a world absent of God because it provides, self-reliance, relative morality, self-exaltation, and freedom from any God who might judge them. When judges receive cases that present a conflict of interest, they must recuse themselves from the case. Unfortunately, nobody can hand this decision to another judge. We must each weight the evidence for ourselves and make the best conclusion. From here, I will offer the first of many reasons to come regarding why science leads me to believe in God. Before our first reason, we need to go a little further with respect to what science might find in the universe concerning God.
In the 1950s, a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and declared that he had not found God. C.S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the castle attic looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play. Therefore, in no case could we ‘prove’ God’s existence as if he were an object wholly within our universe like oxygen and hydrogen. Rather, as C.S. Lewis also notes, “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Thus, we don’t learn about the sun by staring into it but by looking at the world it reveals and sustains.[1]
With this in view, let me just state this first reason as a question—Why is there something rather than nothing? Carl Sagan famously said, “The Cosmos is all there ever is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.” Besides being a revealing wordplay on the Gloria Patri, it is also a bad explanation of the facts. Consider the words of scientist Francis Collins: “Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it.” This was all discovered in the late 1920s when Edwin Hubble noticed that galaxies were moving rapidly away from each other, shattering the impression that many held regarding the stillness and changelessness of the universe. Incredibly, space itself was expanding along with the universe. Right away, scientists realized that these galaxies were moving apart, not due to any cosmic force, but because they were once flung apart by a primeval explosion. Scientists projected a moment in which all the mass in the universe was compressed into a point of infinite density, the entire universe contained in a single atom. From that infinitesimal point came an explosion, filling the universe with light and creating a temperature of 100 Trillion degrees Centigrade. The fact that the universe was expanding solved the problem that had enamored scientists for years: why the galaxies continued to stay apart from each other rather than being pulled together by the force of gravity.
While it has often been noted that Christians so desire God to be real that they ignore any evidence to the contrary, it can also be argued that atheists often so wish God to be a myth that they refuse any evidence to the contrary. For a couple of examples, consider the reactions of several scientists to the discovery of the Big Bang and expanding universe. Astronomer Arthur Eddington called the concept “preposterous, incredible, repugnant.” Physicist Philip Morrison of MIT confessed, “I find it hard to accept the big bang theory. I would like to reject it.” Allan Sandage of Carnegie Laboratories said the idea was “such a strange conclusion” that “it cannot really be true.” Why would these scientists be so opposed to this brilliant scientific discovery? If true, it would imply that there was a “moment of creation” when the universe and all its laws came into existence. Before the Big Bang, there were no laws of physics so the “natural laws” cannot be used to explain the Big Bang itself; rather the Big Bang produced the physical laws we now know. If the universe was produced outside the laws of physics, then its origin satisfies the basic definition of the word ‘miracle.’[2]
The Bible is unique in positing this miracle in such a way that science has now verified its veracity. The Bible did not have to begin with a specific point-in-time creation event, but in fact it did, and it was unique to do so. In Buddhism, “there are multiple world systems constantly coming into being and passing away.” In addition, Hinduism and Buddhism describe endless cycles of time stretching into the indefinite past while the Bible presents time as finite. The Greeks and Romans believed in the eternity of history. In contrast Jews and Christians have always believed not only that God made the universe, but also that He made it out of nothing (literally speaking the universe into existence). We experience time and space in such a way that they seemingly have no end, and in such a way that it is almost unimaginable that there was a time when time and matter did not exist. In fact, nobody else (whether philosopher or worldview system or religion) ever did imagine it except for Judaism and Christianity. But modern science has confirmed that the universe was indeed ‘created’ out of nothing. In addition, the Big Bang theory resolves one seemingly glaring contradiction in Genesis, namely that light was created on the first day (Gen. 1.3) but the sun (which produces our light) was not created until the fourth day. However, we now know that the Big Bang happened with a burst of light and energy, and that the sun came into existence later. Arthur Eddington, who once chafed at the Big Bang eventually acknowledged it and reluctantly admitted, “the beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look at it as frankly supernatural.” Astronomer Robert Jastrow puts it even more vividly, “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 mountains of ignorance; his 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.”[3]
The old argument stands: “Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.” Scientists can no longer deny that the universe has an beginning and now must resort to denying that existence must have a cause. Next time we will look at the argument from design.
[1] This paragraph closely mirrors Tim Keller’s Reason for God, 122.
[2] Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity
[3] Ibid.
