THE GOD OF QUARKS & CROSS bridging the cultural divide between people of faith and people of science
WHY A WORKSHOP ON FAITH AND SCIENCE? The cultural divide between people of faith and people of science* continues to grow. In the minds of many an Evangelical Christian, this rift creates a chasm between the Good News of Jesus on the one side and the good news of modern man on the other. This crevasse stretches wide enough both to swallow an alarming number of those brought up in the faith and to preclude countless others from even hearing the gospel. Evangelical Christians feel their voices becoming increasingly lost in the void, and their seeming impotence to speak to the culture around them stirs frustration, anger, and fear.
WHERE DID THE FISSURE BEGIN? While some argue that the divide in America between church and laboratory owes to the 1859 publication of Darwin s Origin of Species, the cultural clash between people of faith and people of science originated more proximately with the celebrated Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 and its highly publicized pitting of evolution(ists) against creation(ists).
THE GAP WIDENS Reeling from the Pyrrhic victory of the trial, fundamentalists (the embryonic form of modern American Evangelicals) built defensive walls against the encroachment of science. Against their supposed enemy, and before a watching world, they lobbed such bombs as creation vs. evolution and faith vs. science. Swept up in the iconoclasm of the roaring 20s, wider American society learned to view faith and science as mutually exclusive propositions. Choosing to embrace and defend the tenets of the gospel, many figured, required that the brain be checked at the door of the church.
BRIDGING THE CHASM After nearly a century of cultural retreat, let s work to repair the breach between people of faith and people of science. Building a bridge across the cultural divide will require that both sides abandon a bunker or two.
BRIDGING THE GAP FROM OUR SIDE People of faith will need to remind themselves of the following: All truth is God s truth, for He is truth s sole source. Extra-biblical truths, such as the verities of mathematics, are no less true because non-scriptural. Truth bears a moral imperative: it calls us to believe it. To deny truth is to deny the One who is truth. God reveals truth both in nature, or God s world, and in the Scriptures, or God s word. All revelation of God is infallible, because its source is divine. Sidebar: Let s rid ourselves of such expressions as the Bible vs. science, and here s why.
BRIDGING THE GAP FROM THEIR SIDE People of science will need to disabuse themselves of the following: Scientism a worldview whereby science is either the only reliable method or the most dependable method for obtaining truth or knowledge. (CSF) Positivism a philosophical system that ➀ holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof and that ➁ rejects metaphysics and theism, consequently. (NOAD) Philosophical naturalism a worldview that says the world can be explained entirely by physical, natural phenomena and laws. (CSF) Materialism a more specific category of philosophical naturalism, in which matter, the stuff you can touch and feel, is the one ultimate reality. (CSF)
COMMON GROUND IN SCIENCE? There is a real, physical world and an objective reality. The world is not a mere product of our imaginations. The natural world is rational; that is, events can be described by reasonable relationships, such as cause and effect. Our minds are capable of comprehending some of this rationality, at least in part. There is consistency in the observed patterns in the natural world. (CSF)
COMMON GROUND IN EPISTEMOLOGY? A probable belief doesn t make a certain truth. The former might be otherwise; the latter cannot be. But neither does a less-than-certain proposition make for an improbable one. Certitude isn t certainty. The latter is narrow and objective; the former, broad and subjective. Human uncertainty is the domain of faith and not merely among the religious. In this sense the object of faith is whatever we cannot ascertain through reason or experience alone.
OBVIOUS PLACES TO START OUR BRIDGE-BUILDING Are creation and evolution truly mutually exclusive? Can the former not be framed within the context of efficient causality; the latter, instrumental? Doesn t cell theory require either an infinite regression of biological viability or abiogenesis (i.e., spontaneous generation)? How are the clockwork order and predictability of nature at Newtonian scale reconcilable with quantum realities of unpredictability and uncertainty? Further, what re the implications for the modern scientific doctrine of determinism?
OBVIOUS PLACES TO START OUR BRIDGE-BUILDING Doesn t the Big Bang logically entail everything s having come from nothing (or, in other versions, from everything)? Does the anthropic principle imply design intelligence? If not, then does it not entail the ultimate meaninglessness or irrelevance of human inquiry into the anthropic principle? Doesn t chaos in natural systems (or the Schrödinger wave function of quantum mechanics) obviate the argument against Christianity from ostensible randomness in nature?
THE MYSTERIOUS bang!
THE MYSTERIOUS BANG If the universe began with a bang some millions of years ago, then what was here before? If nothing, then how did everything burst forth from it? If the universe banged into existence by cause of some prior matter and energy, then what about their beginning? What accounts for it? If we regress infinitely, then we ve a couple of problems: ➀ the universe is self-causing (although nothing else in nature is), and ➁ it offers no ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.
THE ARGUMENT FOR GOD from efficient causality
THE ARGUMENT FOR GOD FROM EFFICIENT CAUSALITY Every effect requires a cause or set of causes behind it. No existence or action or condition can cause itself, and this holds for causes and sets of causes, too. Every cause turns out itself to be an effect of some other cause or set of causes. But this chain cannot regress infinitely. If every Z requires a Y behind it and every Y an X and so on, then everything that is (i.e., everything, taken as a whole) requires for its existence that something else exist, something outside the natural chain of cause and effect.
THE ARGUMENT FOR GOD FROM EFFICIENT CAUSALITY Naturalistic worldviews cannot solve this conundrum. We Christians can, however, and this something else, this First Cause, we call God. Yes-but sidebar: Why must causal relationships be linear? Why can t they be circular, or system-dependent? Imagine a loop on which are a hunter, a fox, and a rabbit, all equidistant from one another. If the hunter won t start running until the fox does, nor the fox until the rabbit does, nor the rabbit till the hunter, then none will move, ever.
THE ARGUMENT FOR GOD from design
THE ARGUMENT FOR GOD FROM DESIGN Nature displays an intricately beautiful regularity, both within organisms and systems and without. Even apparent randomness proves (or is presumed) ultimately to fit into complex systems of order. This intelligible order arises either from intelligent design or from pure chance. [Sidebar: Defining pure chance begins in contradiction and ends in unintelligibility.]
THE ARGUMENT FOR GOD FROM DESIGN That order arises from chance is either patently impossible or extremely highly unlikely. Chance cannot give (nor can anything) what it does not have, nor (as significant point of comparison) does any rational person ever infer chance from the objects or systems of human creation. Even when man s production of a good arises from serendipity, the fortuitous occurrence is so because revealing a previously hidden order or design. Therefore, the intelligible order of nature arises from intelligent design, and if from intelligent design, then from an Intelligent Designer.
THE COSMIC welcome mat
THE COSMIC WELCOME MAT In order for the universe to be as it is and to sustain the life that it does, more than a dozen physical constants (as examples, gravity and the strong and electro-weak forces) must have precise, or infinitesimally limited, values. The probability of these constants aligning by chance is statistically infinitesimal so unlikely, as to be nearly impossible.
THE COSMIC WELCOME MAT What accounts for a universe so finely tuned as not merely to provide for life but also to promote it? Some scientists and philosophers suggest that our finely tuned universe is but one universe among a plurality of real or possible universes, but at least two problems remain: ➀ where s the evidence for multiple universes and ➁ how does this notion solve this universe s statistical unlikelihood?
THE SO- CALLED CLUE-KILLER that turns out to be a clue itself
THE CLUE-KILLER Some maintain that religious belief derives merely from its past advantage in evolutionary adaptation. Because once advantageous to the survival of our ancestors, such beliefs have clung to our DNA. Listen carefully to the argument s linchpin: evolution is interested only in preserving adaptive behaviors, not true belief (from Dawkins s God Delusion).
THE CLUE-KILLER So, we re to distrust those adaptive behaviors that lead to religious belief, but trust those that lead to the conclusions of strong rationalism? If evolution s not interested in true belief, however, then how can we trust either? Said differently, if naturalistic evolutionism is correct, then we have no solid reason for believing it true.
THE CLUE-KILLER Inversely, if we posit that God exists, that He created the world and all in it, and that He fashioned man in His likeness, then we have ample ground to believe that our cognitive faculties can form true knowledge. Without a Creator man has no reason to believe either that He exists or that He doesn t; acknowledging a Creator, however, we have reason to believe all that we do about ourselves and the world.