HAS SCIENCE KILLED GOD?
A CENTURY AGO, THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS BELIEVED IN THE ETERNITY OF THE UNIVERSE. IT HAD ALWAYS EXISTED. RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE ABOUT "CREATION" OR A "BEGINNING" WAS SEEN AS MYTHOLOGICAL NONSENSE.CREDIT: NASA, ESA, GARTH ILLINGWORTH (UCSC), RYCHARD BOUWENS (UCSC AND LEIDEN UNIVERSITY), HUDF09 TEAM.
In my last article, I suggested that recent debates in philosophy have raised questions about the notion of "rationality" that are not without relevance to the New Atheism. The failure to take into account such questions about the nature of rationality itself has produced a curious penchant among the New Atheists for hurling nineteenth-century thunderbolts against seventeenth-century notions of God.
Indeed, the "New Atheism," as many intellectual historians have noted with irony, is actually a rather Old Atheism.
I suspect that my reflections on the place of science in the ongoing conversation will attract a few more such thunderbolts.
So how does science come into the conversation about the New Atheism? Richard Dawkins is unquestionably a noble and credible representative of the New Atheism - if not atheism as a whole. After all, as he himself declared recently, he is "the world's best known and most respected atheist." So I think it only fair to engage with his take on the sciences and atheism. I have a great deal of respect for him, even though we disagree on some big issues.
Dawkins's main argument is that science proves things, whereas people who believe in God run away from reality, and try to avoid thinking about things. As I argued in an earlier article, this sloganeering approach to both science and religion does rather miss the mark on both fronts.
I'm completely with Dawkins when he demands that we offer reasons for believing that things are true. Where he and I diverge is over what can in fact be proved. My problem is that just about everything in life that really matters can't be settled by science. It's a view that is widespread among professional philosophers of science, and I can take no special credit for it.
The real issue concerns what may be considered to be reliable knowledge. No attempt on the part of human beings to make sense of the world, whether scientific or religious, can hope to achieve a logically coercive proof of its conclusions. That's possible only in the highly restricted domains of logic and mathematics. Our best hope is to try and identify the best evidence-based explanation for what is actually observed and encountered in the world.
And science moves on. It's on a journey, and often leaves ideas behind, even when these were the wisdom of the age. Science once believed in phlogiston, now it doesn't. It has moved on, and it will move on again in the future.
The philosopher of science Michael Polanyi thus shrewdly observed that scientists believed many things to be true, but knew that some of those would eventually be shown to be wrong. The problem was that they weren't sure which ones they were.
Apart from a few fanatics, science is fully aware of the provisionality of its truths, and its wider implications.
That's why Dawkins is so right to emphasise the provisionality of scientific theories, including Darwinism. They're the best we have today - but who knows what tomorrow will bring? As Dawkins rightly points out:
"We must acknowledge the possibility that new facts may come to light which will force our successors of the twenty-first century to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition."
Yet this makes any case for atheism based on science dangerously premature. Some might indeed argue (although it is a very weak case) that today's scientific understanding of things points in an atheist direction. But what of tomorrow's?
Following Dawkins, many New Atheists see science as some kind of one-way intellectual superhighway to atheism. Anyone who challenges the intrinsic atheism of science is dismissed as a village idiot who probably doesn't believe in gravity either.
Well, it's just not like that. Although New Atheist propagandists regularly declare that scientific advance and progress in the last hundred years has eroded the case for belief in God, the facts are otherwise.
A century ago, the scientific consensus took the form of a belief in the eternity of the universe. It had always existed. Religious language about "creation" was seen as mythological nonsense, incompatible with cutting-edge scientific knowledge. That was the scientific wisdom of that age.
The fixed scientific belief of that bygone age played an important role in the great 1948 debate between the atheist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and the Christian Frederick Coplestone (1907-90).
Russell thought this scientific consensus of that age was more than sufficient to lay the whole God question to rest once and for all. The universe is just there, and there's no good reason to think about what allegedly brought it into being.
But things have changed since 1948. During the 1960s, it became increasingly clear that the universe did in fact have an origin - the so-called "Big Bang."
This idea was met with fierce resistance by some atheist scientists of the day, such as the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who was worried that it sounded "religious." Happily, this irrational prejudice was overwhelmed by the evidence in its favour.
Yet it is an undeniable fact that the new understanding of the origins of the universe resonates strongly with the Christian doctrine of creation. It proves nothing; yet it is deeply suggestive.
A replay of the Russell-Coplestone debate was staged in 1998 to mark its fiftieth anniversary. It featured two leading philosophers, the Christian William Lane Craig and (then) atheist Anthony Flew.
Craig, the philosopher who many now regard as the natural successor to Coplestone, argued that the recognition that the universe had an origin pointed to it having a cause - and that the only plausible cause was a divine creator.
Flew experienced considerable difficulty in the debate at this point. He was unable to deploy the strategies of earlier generations of atheist apologists with any plausibility. Since then, of course, he moved decisively away from atheism, prior his death in 2010.
Two vitally important areas of human thought that clearly lie beyond the legitimate scope of the natural sciences are the non-empirical notions of value and meaning. These cannot be read off the world, or measured as if they were constants of nature. Dawkins thus rightly points out that "science has no methods for deciding what is ethical."
Other leading scientists, of course, have made much the same point. Sir Peter Medawar (1915-97), who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on immunology, was a self-declared rationalist with a distaste for religion. Yet he still insisted that it is "very likely" that there are limits to science, given "the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer."
Medawar makes it explicitly clear that he has in mind questions such as: "What are we all here for? What is the point of living?" These are real questions, and we are right to seek answers to them. But science - if applied legitimately - isn't going to answer them. We are free to find answers to those questions elsewhere, and we are not irrational in doing so.
God lies outside the scope of the scientific method. In one sense, therefore, science has nothing legitimate to say about God. As the Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) judiciously remarked,
"science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists."
If science can't answer ultimate questions, then we need to look elsewhere for those answers. That's no criticism of science. It's simply recognizing and respecting its limits, and not forcing it to answer questions that lie beyond its scope.
If science gets hijacked by fundamentalists, whether religious or anti-religious, its intellectual integrity is subverted and its cultural authority is compromised.
I love science, but I hate the way it gets exploited by extremists of any kind who see it simply as a tool for their own deeper agendas. Darwin's great supporter Thomas H. Huxley (1825-95) saw this long ago, when he declared that science "commits suicide when it adopts a creed."
Much more needs to be said about the relation of science and faith. I explore some of these issues further, with detailed interaction with the scholarly literature, in my book, Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things.
But we need to move on, and look at an important concern about religious faith raised by the New Atheism - that it possesses an intrinsic tendency towards violence. I will reflect on this important concern, for which I have much sympathy, in my next article.
Alister McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at King's College London. His most recent book is Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).
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