Appetizer #1: On god and science

In arguing for the existence of God, many apologists are fond of appealing to scientific discoveries that, they maintain, support their view of a divine prime mover. I'm thinking here of arguments such as the Cosmological Argument which, although primarily a philosophical argument that is presented as logically deductive in the form of a syllogism, nevertheless relies on an interpretation of cosmology for at least one of its premisses. I am also thinking of the various arguments from design, either those that have to do with biological complexity or the fine tuning arguments concerning the fundamental constants in physics.

Already we have touched upon three of the major sciences – cosmology, biology and physics - but apologists will often press other scientific ideas into service in order to further their arguments, ideas such as causality, logic, the origin of consciousness, even mathematics and the nature of infinity.

These appeals to science strike me as ironic because when apologists are forced to move away from hijacking scientific terminology in order to make their case, they invariably switch to a position that relies on the tiresome old complaint that science cannot explain everything; that there are gaps in its knowledge, and that scientists are arrogant if they assume that methodological naturalism is the only game in town.

I mention all this by way of preface, not because I want to rebut these arguments here (I deal with them in another section of the book), but because I want to suggest that these issues, all interesting and absorbing no doubt, become dull and puerile once a supernatural deity is inserted into the equation.

It seems to me that issues such as causality, logic, biodiversity and the fundamental constants of nature, as well as unsolved problems like the origins of the cosmos, life and consciousness, are issues that only become interesting subjects, or absorbing intellectual problems, when one discards the notion of God. As soon as one posits the supernatural, not only is one bereft of an explanation—because the supernatural explains nothing—but one is also left with nothing left to investigate. The invocation of the supernatural stultifies any further discussion, for it is not open to any analysis. So, purely from an aesthetic point of view, the concept of God is mind numbingly dull.

On the other hand, science is enormously interesting. If the last 300 years had taught us anything it has taught us that science works. It is capable of producing testable, repeatable results, it makes accurate predictions and, by its very nature, is the one mode of discourse where an individual's biases are systematically corrected for. It is also the one mode of discourse, or so it would seem, where it is perfectly acceptable to simply say “I don't know”. I ask you, since when has saying “I don't know” been arrogant? It seems the very antithesis of arrogance, especially when set against the certainty propounded by the religious amongst us.

It is certainly true that there remain gaps in scientific understanding, indeed it may well be the case that those gaps will endure for a long time to come. It may even be the case that they will never be closed. However, as many others have pointed out, what reason have we got to imagine that scientific ignorance can be usefully or justifiably replaced with religious certainty? The assumption made by many that any gap in scientific understanding can be filled by the invocation of a deity is as wrong-headed an assumption as it possible to make. It has a name in fact, it is called the God of the gaps argument, and it is not qualitatively different from simply waving a little white flag and surrendering to ignorance.

There is, I submit, a much better way, to regard the nature of science and the gaps in its understanding, and conveniently enough it brings us back to the concept of god. I offer you a very short extract from my book to illustrate my point:

"It is important to recognise that whilst it is possible for a layperson to go to a library, pick up a book, and educate themselves on a particular aspect of scientific understanding, there is no shelf in any public library which contains the unvarnished truth about the Laws of Nature. Nature's laws are fixed and immutable, whilst scientific understanding is always in flux, always playing catch-up. This is not a criticism of science, far from it. It is precisely this flexibility that gives science its strength, its integrity, and its honesty.

"Science proceeds on the basis that, barring outside intervention, the universe operates to certain laws. These laws are observable and, when understood, predictable (the peculiarities of the quantum world aside). By processes of observation and experiment, scientists can form explanatory frameworks or theories, for the various aspects of the material universe. Theories can be rigorously tested over a long period of time, and over a wide range of conditions and variables. Of course, such a process cannot be exhaustive. That would require observation and experiment in all possible times, places and circumstances and obviously this is impossible from a practical point of view; much of science is indeed inductive. Accordingly, one of the main tenets of science is that experiments must be repeatable and theories must be subject to peer review and susceptible to falsification should contrary evidence be presented. This in a nutshell is the scientific method, and it is a truly remarkable achievement.

"So, with the Laws of Nature on one hand and scientific understanding on the other, it is the job of science to keep the differences between them as small as possible; the ultimate, but possibly unreachable, goal being that they one day become one and the same thing. Should that happy day ever dawn then one could imagine it as a time when science would, in a sense, be complete; there would be nothing left to find out. On that day humanity, or a subset of it, with total knowledge of the universe and everything in it, might even be described as a race of Gods!

"Well, perhaps that is over egging things slightly, but hypothetical playfulness aside, the point to be made here is that if God belongs anywhere at all, then it is at the end of a natural process and not at the beginning of one."