Can God and Science Co-Exist?
The head of the Human Genome Project is an evangelical Christian: Francis Collins. His new book is The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
Steve Paulson interviewed him about contentions at the intersection of science and religion: The believer.
Hating on Atheism:
Collins makes a point which I believe presents an insurmountable obstacle to strong atheism:
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. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.
I’m going to be dogmatic about this: if you think that the capacity to reason comes with the responsibility to be inquisitive, atheists are abdicating that responsibility. You can’t just shrug and say the Big Bang came out of nowhere, fin. How can the Big Bang just happen? In fact, saying the Big Bang came out of nowhere is embracing the same kind of ‘magical thinking’ at which atheists routinely scoff.
A routine response is that “asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what’s North of the North Pole.”
Nice try. The only problem with seeking what’s ‘beyond’ the North Pole is using a compass to do it. There’s a heck of a lot of space and sky enveloping the ground level at 90° North. Similarly, even if ‘space’ and ‘time’ don’t make sense beyond the extent of our universe, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t something out there—maybe not before or surrounding but definitely existing.
Hating on Theists:
On the flipside, Collins rebuffs ‘God of the gaps’ argumentation, the sort that says, “if we don’t understand how something could happen, then it is clearly a miracle, and thus evidence of a supernatural force”:
When God is inserted in a place where science can’t currently provide enough information, then sooner or later, it does. My God is bigger than that. He’s not threatened by our puny minds trying to understand how the universe works.
It’s really puzzling when people attempt to suppress inquiry in the name of preserving religion, like school boards in America chipping against evolution. If your religion is true, then you should not fear inquiry—truth doesn’t suffer from attempts to establish its accuracy (I’m reminded of my Theory of Knowledge teacher who used to say something to the effect that truth is only made stronger by attempts to refute it. This notion is also part of classic First Amendment theory—that the Marketplace of Ideas can establish correctness.)
Obviously, ‘pure reason’ worries religious authorities because it culminates in an alternate moral path, effectively replacing religion altogether. But they should be humble when decrying advances in understanding as inevitably subverting the moral order. The Catholic Church didn’t let Galileo off the hook until 1992! From L’Osservatore Romano, November 1, 1992:
Certain theologians, Galileo’s contemporaries, being heirs of a unitary concept of the world universally accepted until the dawn of the seventeenth century, failed to grasp the profound, non-literal meaning of the Scriptures when they described the physical structure of the created universe. This led them unduly to transpose a question of factual observation into the realm of faith.
[...]
Galileo’s judges, unable to dissociate faith from an age-old cosmology, believed quite wrongly that the adoption of the Copernican revolution, in fact not yet definitively proven, was such as to undermine Catholic tradition, and that it was their duty to forbid its being taught.
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- The Reticent Volcano
Emily Dickinson The reticent volcano keeps His never-slumbering plan; Confided... - ‘life is a loaded gun’
I’m not into Billy Collins, but anyone who loves Emily...
You don’t make any point, just attack both sides, and poorly.
It is contrary to reason to think anything existed before the beginning of the universe. Even the string theorists want there to be an infinite chain of universes stretching back for eternity and into the future for eternity. There are two problems with this. First, infinity is simply unreal. Sooner or later you have to accept that there had to be a beginning and it had to be extremely simple, not a complex God. Second, there isn’t any evidence to indicate that another universe or anything at all “preceded” this universe because time is an internal property of this universe. It is only wishful thinking.
As for the problem of the universe needing a cause, it is a non-sequitur circular argument. It is turtles upon turtles. If the universe needed a cause, why is God exempt from this need? If God can be exempt from the need for a cause there is no reason why the universe should not be exempt. Otherwise God needed a cause, and the cause of God needed a cause, and it is turtles standing on the backs of turtles all the way back into eternity.
In the interest of simplicity, without substantial evidence to the contrary, the begining of this universe was simple enough, and there is no reason to assert that there was anything before it other than wishful thinking.
I don’t believe that secularists (the word you’re looking for when you say atheists) actually do say that the big bang created existence. Physics certainly doesn’t; many physicists do not believe in the big bang at all anymore, and of those who do, the prevailing trend is to see the big bang as a collision between topological M-branes which just happened to wipe out what was there previously.
If a bomb goes off in a room, and then we come in afterwards, it’s hard to tell what was there previously. Would it be appropriate to say what was there previously if we don’t know? No. It would be appropriate to say “we don’t know what was here before the blast, and do not yet have a way to tell.” That is in essence what we do for the big bang; those who favor the cyclic state theory suggest that the big bang follows a big crunch, those who follow brane theory and other upshots of superstring theory suggest that it was just an enormous catastrophe, and a great number of people suggest that there was in fact no big bang in the first place, and that we’re misinterpreting the effect of energy lensing on background microwave radiation as the universe expanding.
The important point is that no physicist claims to even know what happened *at* the big bang, let alone before it. It’s not that we’re saying there was nothing before it, and I don’t know anyone who believes there was nothing before it. We just haven’t figured out any way to tell what was there previously yet.
There is no reason that science precludes the concept of ‘God.’
I personally favor the multi-verse membrane theory on the initiation of the big bang. A couple of membranes in the multi-verse medium collided, and the perturbations in the membranes caused the irregular clumps of matter, such as stars and things, to form.
Does this have anything to do with ‘God.’ Does it seek to prove or disprove the existence of ‘God?’
No. ‘God’ is supposed to be all powerful, all knowing, and all that crap, yet people keep limiting the power of ‘God.’
Why could ‘God’ not have caused the big bang? Why could ‘God’ not have created the multi-verse membranes, and whatever may be on a scale we can’t begin to comprehend.