One of the fascinating things about watching how the science and religion debate has evolved is to see how religious apologists have been backpedaling, shifting the goal posts, trying to find ways to avoid having god become redundant. This process has been going on ever since scientists no longer saw their role as reconciling science with religious revelations and started pursuing their lines of inquiry wherever it led. This decoupling of science from religion began in the mid-19th century as the new sciences of geology and biology made it impossible to believe in a 6,000 year-old Earth or in the special creation of species.
This began the inevitable process of scientific explanations contradicting the religious ones that had been used as evidence of god’s actions. As various inexplicable phenomena and miracles that had been considered evidence of god’s actions came under scientific scrutiny, they were found to have natural, physical explanations. And science has the huge advantage over religion in that it is reliable and predictable, unlike god explanations. As Stephen Hawking says in this interview, science will win over religion because science works.
The more sophisticated theologians and religious apologists realized that having their faith depend upon the existence of such gaps in knowledge was a losing strategy that was causing religion to look silly because it required constant shifting of things that were supposedly inexplicable by science (‘intelligent design’ being the most recent manifestation) and ‘the god of the gaps’ became a term of derision, with even religious apologists disavowing it. As Isaac Asimov said, “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”
As an example, in response to the publicity surrounding the book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow that claims that god is an unnecessary concept, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was quoted as saying that “Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.” (I have just started reading The Grand Design and will provide a review when I am done.)
Williams’ comments were supported by other religious leaders in Britain. Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, said “The ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.” Similarly, Fraser Watts, an Anglican priest and a scholar in the history of science at Cambridge University, said that “A creator God provides a reasonable and credible explanation of why there is a universe.”
These apologists’ words signal a shift to what may be the last goal post. Rather than looking for specific inexplicable things to ascribe to god’s actions, a strategy that has not worked well for them in the past, they have gone big, for the Hail Mary, saying that the universe itself, either its physical existence or the reason for its existence or both, is inexplicable without god. The cartoon strip Jesus and Mo recent points out one obvious problem with this approach.
(Another response to Hawking’s claim that god is unnecessary is to adopt a world-weary ‘So what?’ attitude, and suggest that these questions are not even interesting. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation … The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.” Sacks also tried to pooh-pooh the support for atheism generated by Hawking’s book, telling the London Times “What would we do for entertainment without scientists telling us with breathless excitement that God did not create the universe as if they were the first to discover this astonishing proposition.”)
So sophisticated modern theologians have been reduced to claiming that god has to exist as the ultimate creator of the universe, which is no different from one of Thomas Aquinas’s old proofs of god that said that you needed something to produce the something of our universe out of a prior nothingness. This argument may have seemed plausible at one time. After all, the universe has a lot of stuff in the form of planets and stars. How could all this stuff suddenly appear? Surely their sudden appearance must violate the laws of science and the only way this could happen is because of the actions of some divine being?
But that argument is simply not credible anymore. Theologians think that since there is matter in the universe that did not exist before the universe came into being, this must constitute a violation of currently accepted scientific laws and thus requires some agency to create it, and thus is evidence for god. Of course, as I have argued before, saying ‘God did it’ is not an explanation for anything in the first place but in the next post, I will show why this hope is misplaced even on scientific grounds because the creation of the universe does not violate any laws.
A while back in one of my comments I pointed to the “something more/nothing but” dispute in artificial intelligence. I did get an interesting response by one person, to wit that AI and other forms of intelligence too could be described as “emergence.” Do you consider emergence theory good science? And I’d be interested to hear your take on it somewhat more systematically if you get the time.
Thanks.
Ken,
I am not familiar with ’emergent theory’. I am aware of the idea that some phenomena are emergent in the sense that their properties only come into being after a certain critical mass has been reached.
For example, pure water consists of H2O molecules but the properties of wetness and viscosity do not exist at the level of individual molecules but only emerge above a certain critical mass.
I think that intelligence/consciousness is like that, that one needs a critical mass of neurons before one sees it.
Like with water, there is nothing magical in the transition, though we cannot (at least as yet) pin down when the transition occurs.
Thanks. More on emergence later. For now, I thought you’d appreciate the irony of this article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100920/wl_time/08599202026900
The pope warns that “extreme atheism” could help promote conditions such as existed in Nazi Germany.
In “The Grand Design” Stephen Hawking postulates that M-theory may be the Holy Grail of physics…the Grand Unified Theory which Einstein had tried to formulate, but never completed. It expands on quantum mechanics and string theories.
In my e-book on comparative mysticism is a quote by Albert Einstein: “…most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and most radiant beauty – which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all religion.”
E=mc², Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, is probably the best known scientific equation. I revised it to help better understand the relationship between divine Essence (Spirit), matter (mass/energy: visible/dark) and consciousness (f(x) raised to its greatest power). Unlike the speed of light, which is a constant, there are no exact measurements for consciousness. In this hypothetical formula, basic consciousness may be of insects, to the second power of animals and to the third power the rational mind of humans. The fourth power is suprarational consciousness of mystics, when they intuit the divine essence in perceived matter. This was a convenient analogy, but there cannot be a divine formula.
Is there an uncaused cause (God, gravity, whatever)? That question assumes there is a beginning and end to spacetime. In commenting on my e-book on comparative mysticism, I mentioned the infinite here in the eternal now. One person replied, “What the hell does that mean?” Here is my response:
If I asked “where are you here and now?” you might reply with your current address and local time. It would also be true that here and now could refer to that city and day, that state/province and month, that country and year, this Earth and decade, this galaxy and century, this Universe and millennium. Continue on and eventually you will get to infinity and eternity, where we all are here and now.