Day 51 – science and faith
Late-twentieth-century science has overturned the assumptions that reigned at the end of the nineteenth century. –PATRICK GLYNN
Atheists have always tended to use discoveries of science as a weapon against theists. For a while, it appeared they did so with good reason. Starting with Copernicus in the fifteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth, a succession of scientists painted a composite portrait of our universe that seemed quite different from the one traditionally described. The universe was not within our reach but was a vast expanse of mostly empty space, billions of light-years across, interspersed occasionally with stars and their planets. Earth was not the center of the universe, as had been touted for centuries, but just another planet within it. Its claim to fame was that only on it had life been discovered. The world was not a few thousand years old, as creationists had claimed, but was found to extend farther back in time than ever imagined. Man did not appear to be the most special creation on earth but the last in a long sequence of random evolutionary steps within the natural world. Every stone the scientists looked under seemed to yield something atheists could use as evidence and theists had to explain away. It was as if the door to God had been closed shut by science with no key available to reopen it.
The repercussions in the last two centuries should not be understated. Belief in God, once taken for granted, has lost considerable ground to disbelief, especially in the scientific community. Although most Americans still believe that God exists, they are often perceived by the educated to do so out of scientific ignorance. Even among these "uninformed" masses, enough scientific information has become known to them to shake many a faith at its foundation. If theists are honest enough to admit it, at least a seed of doubt has been planted in many of their minds. Atheists, on the other hand, have tended to walk with a swagger. They have boldly asserted that the universe is 100% natural and that belief in God has become obsolete. The cry "God is dead!" has echoed through college campuses and has received considerable ink in the lay press. Along with the announcement of God's demise, the atheists have injected into the vacuum thus formed their own worldview, one that is devoid of any absolute morals, any sense of meaning and purpose, and any hope of life beyond the grave. Thus has been born the culture seen in America today.
What is little known by most people is that science, for centuries the thorn in the side of theism, has in the past fifty years become its pulpit. A series of recent discoveries, all accepted by the scientific community as evidential, has cast serious doubts on the atheist's case. For one thing, the presumption of an eternal universe seems to be inaccurate. Though admittedly billions of years old, it has been found (through the measurement of its background radiation) to have had a definite beginning in time. Once thought to be random, it seems more likely (in light of what scientists call the anthropic principle) to be highly structured and precise, down to the smallest details. What's more, the whole purpose of this fine-tuning of the universe, the end to which the universe seems to be pointing, say the scientists, appears to be the existence of human beings. At the same time, the veracity of several key concepts of Darwinism has been called into question. The picture that science now gives us of the universe is that of a huge, precise, non-random, finite mechanism built for one purpose: human existence. It is as if science has found the hidden key, reopened the door, and brought us face-to-face with the reality of God.1
Daily Quotation
Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, 48.
1I am not a physicist. For this reason, I chose not to include in the main text a detailed account of how the dual discoveries of background radiation and the anthropic principle have seriously called into question the atheist's belief in a random and eternal universe. These concepts involve mathematical formulas far too technical for my level of training. If I were asked to explain the two discoveries in terms the average non-scientist could understand, I would (after making apologies to the physicists for over-simplification) use the following analogy:
Suppose that you and I, while driving through a busy city, happen to notice the smoke and rubble of a multi-story building that has recently collapsed to the ground. At first, we assume that this collapse was purely random, the chance result of blind forces (wind, erosion, gravity, etc.) acting in concert. Upon closer inspection, however, we notice several peculiarities about the debris that make us question its randomness. For one thing, we see that the building has collapsed in such a way that no structure nearby is affected. In addition, a broken clock we find in the rubble shows that the time of the collapse was three in the morning, when traffic and pedestrians would be at a minimum. Furthermore, a quick glance at the site from a distance indicates that the building seems to have fallen symmetrically, as if a giant foot has caved it in from top to bottom.
Our curiosity getting the best of us, we decide to study this site and determine what really happened. We enlist a corps of engineers to assist us in our efforts. They are able to analyze the smoke and dust that has yet to settle to the ground and confirm the time of the explosion. Within the structure the engineers find evidence of tiny explosives spaced at intervals that seem to have guaranteed a symmetric collapse. It is further determined that for the collapse of the building to be so symmetric, the timing of the detonation had to be just right. In fact, the experts discover that if only one of these explosives failed to fire or only one fired at the wrong time, there would have been no chance at all for a safe implosion. Incredible as it seems, if the timing was off to any degree in the first half-second of the explosion, the engineers predict that the damage to nearby buildings and to any people in the area would have been great.
After days of such analysis, the engineers come to the unanimous conclusion that the collapse of the building was not a random event at all, that it was designed and planned, that the goal from the start was to explode the building in such a way that the city's architecture and population would be preserved. In short, what they discover is an explosion organized from the beginning for one purpose: the improvement of the city.
Now scientists have believed for many years—based on evidence that the universe is expanding—that a big explosion, commonly called the Big Bang, started the whole process. In a sense, when scientists look at the universe, they find themselves gazing at the aftermath, the rubble, of a cosmic explosion. For many years, the evidence seemed to suggest that this explosion was random and that any design seen within it was the result of multiple blind forces acting in concert over billions of years. Human existence, it seemed, could be attributed solely to chance. Then the scientists discovered background radiation in the universe and determined it to be the "smoke" left over from the Big Bang. They were then able to analyze this radiation and determine mathematically the approximate time of the explosion. The universe, it began to appear, had a definite beginning in time. It was not, as the atheists had hoped, eternal.
If that was not disconcerting enough, the atheists had to be alarmed even more by the discovery in the early 1970's of the anthropic principle. While analyzing the "rubble" of the universe, scientists found multiple constants (four in all: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force) that had to be precisely timed and arranged to make life possible. They also found that if any one of these constants were altered to any degree in the first nanosecond of the Big Bang, life would never have occurred. The Big Bang, far from being the random event heralded by the atheists, seems to have been a designed, nonrandom explosion orchestrated from the beginning for one purpose: the formation of life.
The implications are tremendous, as Patrick Glynn explains:
For hundreds of years science had been whittling away at the proposition that the universe was created or designed. Suddenly, scientists came upon a series of facts that seemed to point toward precisely such a conclusion—that the universe is the product of intelligence and aim, that in the absence of intelligent organization of a thousand details vast and small, we would not exist... Today, moreover, the physicists find themselves constantly looking over their shoulder at the theologians, who watch with intrigue as the scientists are forced to wrestle anew with an issue they thought they had put to rest a long time ago: God... The anthropic principle...does offer as strong an indication as science and reason alone could be expected to provide that God exists. –Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence (Roseville, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 1999), 8-9, 40, 55.
No comments:
Post a Comment