Science, Religion & the Existence of God Seidel Abel Boanerges I. Has Science buried Religion? II. Three Reasons why the Existence of God makes a HUGE difference. III. Four Reasons for the Existence of God I. Has Science buried Religion? Science and religion are the two most pervasive influences the world has ever known. When I typed science in google, I got 2.04 billion pages, and when I typed religion, I got about 629 million pages. You can see the amount of material that is available on the internet excluding the volumes and volumes of printed books and journal articles. These days there is an attack on religion. The whole science vs. religion debate. Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor and a radical atheist says this about religion - Among the diseases like AIDS and mad cow, a case can be made that faith is one of the world s great evils comparable to the smallpox virus but hard to eradicate. Faith being belief that isn t based on evidence is the principle vice (evil) of any religion. For Dawkins, scientific belief is based on verifiable evidence, and belief in God is a blind faith without any evidence. Limitations of Science 1. Science does not explain everything. Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher said Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods, and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know. Traditionally science was never thought to deal with the questions of purpose. That s the job of philosophy. It s philosophy that deals with the questions of why? Science deals with the questions of How? Example: Aunt Matilda s cake illustration There is a limit to science, everything cannot be known just by pure science. If someone comes and says to you I love you, what is the scientific proof for that? Or 1
how do you define right from wrong? Lying is wrong how can you come to a conclusion from pure science. Why is there so much of suffering in the world? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did it originally come from? Or where is it heading? What is the meaning of life? These questions really fire the human imagination. Science does not explain everything. 2. The scientific description of something is not the only way of description. There are other ways of describing the same thing that will make sense. If you were visiting me and I say to you, I m going to infuse some remains of Camellia Sinensis in a liquid compound of oxygen and hydrogen you will be like, what on earth are you talking about. If I say I m making you a cup of tea it makes more sense doesn t it. Both descriptions are right, but one makes more sense. Here is the point Just because science explains something with a greater comprehension or intellectual capacity, it does not mean that the simpler explanation is false. So, the scientific description of something is not the only way of description. There are other ways of describing the same thing depending upon the intellectual ability of the person receiving that description. 3. Scientific statements are not set in concrete, or they are not absolute Science is a set of observations of a particular setting, culture or context. History of science has numerous examples of scientific facts that have later been abandoned in the light of subsequent discoveries. The 2 nd century geographical astronomer Ptolemy believed that the other planets revolved around the earth. That was science for that culture and time. But later Copernicus proved him wrong. Isaac Newton s laws of motion and universal gravitation were previously universally applicable. But subsequently scientists have discovered areas where those laws are not applicable. It was once a scientific fact that ether filled all space and carried the pulling power between the planets. But later in 1887, the idea was abandoned and 2
prepared the way for the general theory of relativity by the great Albert Einstein. The fact of the matter is that the latest word of science is not the last word. It can change. II. Three Reasons why the Existence of God makes a HUGE difference. The apologist, C. S. Lewis once remarked that God is not the sort of thing one can be moderately interested in. After all, if God does not exist, there's no reason to be interested in God at all. On the other hand, if God does exist, then this is of paramount interest, and our ultimate concern ought to be how to be properly related to this being upon whom we depend moment by moment for our very existence. So people who shrug their shoulders and say, "What difference does it make if God exists?" merely show that they haven't yet thought very deeply about this problem. Let me mention just three reasons why it makes a big difference whether God exists. 1. If God does not exist, life is ultimately meaningless. If your life is doomed to end in death, then ultimately it does not matter how you live. In the end, it makes no ultimate difference whether you existed or not. Sure, your life might have a relative significance in that you influenced others or affected the course of history. Ultimately it makes no difference who you are or what you did or what you do. Your life is inconsequential or in other words your life is meaningless without a purpose. 2. If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope If there is no God, then there is ultimately no hope for deliverance from the evil and the suffering in this world. Although many people ask how God could create a world involving so much evil, by far most of the suffering in the world is due to man's own inhumanity to man. The horror of two world wars during the last century effectively destroyed the 19th century's naive optimism about human progress. If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering, and there is no hope for deliverance from evil. 3
3. If God does exist, then there is the possibility of coming to know God. Think of it! That the infinite God should love you and want to be your personal friend! This would be the highest status a human being could enjoy! Clearly, if God exists, it makes not only a tremendous difference for mankind in general, but it could make a life-changing difference for you as well. Now admittedly none of this shows that God exists. But it does show that it makes a tremendous difference whether God exists. Therefore, even if the evidence for and against the existence of God were absolutely equal, the rational thing to do, I think, is to believe in Him. But, in fact, I don't think the evidence is absolutely equal. I think there are good reasons to believe in God. III. Four Reasons for the Existence of God 1. God makes sense of the origin of the universe. When it comes to the origins of the life and the universe there are four big questions that we need to ask: Why is there anything at all? Why did the universe begin? Why are there living things and not just dead things? Why are there complex living things and not just amoebas? Now it is popular today to suggest that science has completely destroyed any argument for God s existence. However, it does not answer all our questions. When it comes to the four questions above, Science could only explain the third one. Take the question Why did the universe begin? Science has nothing to say on this matter. Science can answer the question, how did the universe begin, but when you ask the question why, Science is silent! Even take that question that science can answer how did the universe begin they say Big Bang! For a long time it was believed that the universe had always existed. But now we know that the universe began to exist and was not always there. This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. I have no problem in accepting Big Bang, but what made it go bang and why was it so big is my question? 4
What caused the big bang to happen? Whatever it is, that thing/being should be an uncaused being/timeless being/immaterial being/changeless being (because it created time) - That we call God! Science does not explain everything. In fact, the Big Bang theory confirms the Christian viewpoint that God made this universe. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 This is known as the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. 2. God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. During the last 40 years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the Big Bang itself. Our existence is balanced on a knife's edge. The laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, you find appearing in them certain constants, like the gravitational constant. For example, the physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10 100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. It is the same with the angle and the position of the earth. Now there are two possibilities for explaining the presence of this remarkable finetuning of the universe: Chance or Design. If it is chance, then it's just an accident that the universe is life-permitting, and we're the lucky beneficiaries. Students or laymen who casually assert, "It could have happened by chance!" simply have no conception of the fantastic precision of the fine-tuning requisite for life. They would never embrace such a hypothesis in any other area of their lives for example, it s like saying that by chance a helicopter appeared overnight in front of my house. The other alternative explanation is that there is an intelligent mind behind the cosmos, who designed the universe to permit life. The idea of a creator is coherent with the idea of a designer. This is known as the Teleological Argument for the existence of God. The Intelligent Design movement in science applies information theory to life systems and shows that chance cannot even begin to explain life s complexity. In fact, even single-celled bacteria are so complex that, without all of their parts working together at the same time, they would have no survival potential. That means those parts could not have developed by chance. 5
3. God makes sense of objective moral values in the world. If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. Now what do I mean by objective moral values - To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. Subjective moral values are those, if you think they are right then they are right, if you think they are wrong then they are wrong. Objective moral values are independent on your thinking. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II. But we must be very careful here. The question here is not: "must we believe in God in order to live moral lives?" I'm not claiming that we must. Rather the question is: "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?" I don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God, human morality is objective. After all, if there is no God, then what's so special about human beings? They're just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. On the atheistic view, some action, say, rape, may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of evolution has become taboo; but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, apart from the social consequences, there's nothing really wrong with you raping someone. Thus, without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience. Actions like rape, torture, and child abuse aren't just socially unacceptable behaviour they're moral abominations. Some things are really wrong. Similarly love, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good. This is known as the Moral Argument for the existence of God. 4. God can be immediately known and experienced This isn't really an argument for God's existence; rather it's the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing him. This was the way people in the Bible knew God, as professor John Hick explains: 6
They (people in the bible) did not think of God as an inferred entity but as an experienced reality. To them God was not an idea adopted by the mind, but an experiential reality which gave significance to their lives. Example: Paul who was called as Saul. Bibliography Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, Bantam Press: London, 2006 Geisler, Norman and Frank Turek, I Don t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Crossway Books: Wheaton, 2004 Harris, Sam, Letter to a Christian Nation, Knopf: New York, 2006 Hitchens, Christopher, God is not Great, Atlantic Books, 2007 McGrath, Alister, The Twilight of Atheism, Rider Books: London, 2004 Randall, David J., Why I am not an Atheist, Christian Focus: Ross-Shire, 2013 Robertson, David, The Dawkins Letters, Christian Focus: Ross-Shire, 2007 Strobel, Lee, The Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 Veale, Graham, New Atheism: A Survival Guide, Christian Focus: Ross-Shire, 2013 Zacharias, Ravi, The End of Reason, Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2008 Questions for Reflection: 1. Name two or three new aspects that you learnt in today s lecture. a. b. c. 2. Please discuss how these new aspects inform or impact your faith now? 7