“Abiogenesis” or “biopoiesis”, theories of how life arose from inorganic matter by natural processes, likewise reduce the change from non-living to living matter to a question- begging gradual process.31
The “primordial soup” theory, which claimed that passing an electric current through the right mixture of water and gases would produce life. The well-known Miller-Urey experiment of 1952 tried this, but to no effect.32
Panspermia, the theory that life on earth came from somewhere else in the universe, essentially kicks the problem upstairs in much the same way as religion kicks the problem of reward and punishment into the afterlife. The panspermia theory also begs the question of how life in that other galaxy arose in the first place.33
The simplest explanation of the origin of life is to attribute it to a supernatural super-intelligent Designer, an impersonal God who is not interested in the day-to-day affairs of the world, does not answer prayers and does not dole out rewards and punishments — an impersonal deistic God, as distinct from the personal theistic God of conventional religion. As we shall see later on in this chapter, belief in an impersonal deistic God as the creator of life on earth is compatible with Darwinian evolution by natural selection by incremental steps after the creation of life — much more compatible than theism is with evolution by natural selection. Interestingly enough, as Professor John Lennox, the mathematician and Christian apologist, relates: in a debate with him in Oxford in October 2008 Dawkins publicly admitted “that a case could be made for a deistic god”.34
Does atheism, theism or deism offer the most credible explanation for the origin of the universe itself? I deal with this in the next section of the present chapter.
That still leaves the question of the explanation of evolution, of the mechanisms for change and variation in living organisms, on which see Chapter 3.
Stephen Hawking
Hawking’s Unintentional Joke
In his book The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking, one of the best-known modern scientists, confidently asserts:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.35
Is this a joke? Everything here appears to hinge on the law of gravity, which apparently existed before the universe. But how can the law of gravity operate in a vacuum? Doesn’t gravity need matter to work? Hawking’s proposition will simply not stand up to logical scrutiny.
Even Hawking refers to gravity as a “law”, but whose law? Presumably a law of nature. But, as Darwin recognised, a universe governed by “fixed laws” is a universe based on “Design”. (See the discussion of Occam’s Razor in Chapter 2.) Whether the intelligent designer is labelled “God”, “the Creator”, “the Designer”, “the One” or “Nature” makes no difference. Which brings us back to deism.
The 14-Billion-Year Wait
In a recent talk Hawking threw out this supposedly witty (intentionally so, this time) remark: “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”36 In a 2012 debate with Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Dawkins similarly posed the rhetorical question: “If there was a God, why would he have waited 14 billion years before man came along?” Sacks did not try to counter this, but contented himself with the remark, “Because that’s how long it took.”37
Misconceived Point
The point made by Dawkins and Hawking is a serious one, but completely misconceived. The rather comical picture of God “waiting” for 14 billion years presupposes that if there is a God he must be a personal God. This is a totally anthropomorphic view of God — of a God created in the image of man, with or without a long flowing white beard. Dawkins and Hawking are making the point that once the existence of a personal God is shown to be improbable — which is not difficult to do — that means that God does not exist at all. However, there is a completely different type of God, an impersonal deist God, creator or designer of the universe who is not involved in the day-to-day affairs of the world, who is not receptive to prayer, who does not work miracles, and for whom the concept of 14 billion years would probably have no meaning. (For more on this see Chapter 3.) Setting up a personal God as the only type of God, as Dawkins and Hawking do here, and then knocking it down again like an Aunt Sally at a fairground is an example of the Straw Man Fallacy.
Religion offers no answer to the question of how God came into existence. Instead, God is always spoken of as “eternal”. But, if this is a problem with religion, it is no less a problem with the Big Bang “something from nothing” theory.
Hoyle’s Party Girl
The term “Big Bang” was actually coined not by a proponent of that theory but by the distinguished Cambridge astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001), who was implacably opposed to it. Hoyle believed in a “steady-state” universe with no beginning and no end. He rejected as pseudoscience the belief that the universe had a beginning, which he labelled the “Big Bang” theory and compared it to “a party girl jumping out of a cake”.38
The point is that at the beginning of time there was no “party” and no “cake” for the girl (i.e. matter) to jump out of. The Big Bang theory is a rejection of the ancient philosophical idea that “nothing comes from nothing” (or, in Latin, ex nihilo nihil fit) first expressed by the Greek philosopher Parmenides 2,500 years ago. This theory is still with us today in the form of scientific laws. There is the law of the conservation of mass propounded by Antoine Lavoisier in 1785, which states that “matter is neither created nor destroyed”, and the law of the conservation of energy, now called the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that “energy is neither created nor destroyed”. On the basis of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity these two laws were merged into the Law of the Conservation of Mass-Energy, which holds that “the total amount of mass and energy in the universe is constant”.39
Hoyle, who was actually an atheist, also wrote: “I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.”40 In other words, the laws of nuclear physics (and presumably therefore all other scientific laws as well) are the product of conscious design.
Hawking’s Curious Logic
Stephen Hawking rejects this out of hand:
At the time no one knew enough nuclear physics to understand the magnitude of the serendipity that resulted in these exact physical laws. But in investigating the validity of the strong anthropic principle, in recent years physicists began asking themselves what the universe would have been like if the laws of nature were different… Change those rules of our universe just a bit, and the conditions for our existence disappear!41
In other words, according to Hawking, it is now known that the laws of nuclear physics are so fine-tuned that the slightest change in those laws would have prevented the coming into existence of human life on earth. That is surely an argument in favour of design, not against it! For, the more complex and precise the laws of nuclear physics had to be in order to support human life, the less likely it is that it would have come about by pure chance, or serendipity.
It is worth noting that the “strong anthropic principle” is rejected by many scientists. A version of it by leading proponents of this theory is to the effect that “The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage of its history.”42 This would appear to be tautologous, because if the universe did not allow life to exist we would not be here to discuss it.
Aren’t the Laws of Nature God’s Laws?
In his unintentionally comical belief in the primacy of the law of gravity Stephen Hawking does not even try to explain how the law of gravity came about in the first place. If the law of gravity arose out of nothing,
that is hardly different from saying that the law of gravity was made by God. In the same way, all natural laws are God’s laws: Boyle’s law is God’s law, the Mendelian laws of inheritance are God’s laws, the laws of Thermodynamics are God’s laws, and so are all other scientific laws, with the exception of tongue-in-cheek “laws” such as Parkinson’s law, Murphy’s law or Sod’s law.
Hawking’s purported “explanation” of the something-from- nothing “spontaneous creation” of the universe rests on the law of gravity. But that begs the question: where did the law of gravity come from? It is just one of the myriad laws of nature, which Einstein in his genuine humility attributed to (an impersonal) God.
Pope and Monkey
In 1951, soon after the Big Bang theory was first propounded, Pope Pius XII, who was not exactly a liberal theologian, embraced it enthusiastically as proof that the universe had a definite beginning, which chimed in with the Catholic concept of creation.
Pius XII of course believed in a personal God, but the Big Bang itself could equally, and indeed more easily, be identified with an impersonal God. The atheists’ constant rail against that is that sticking the label “God” on the Big Bang is completely superfluous, as it does not add anything but is only question-begging. The rejoinder is that the alternative of something-from-nothing is a non-explanation as well and is equally question-begging: what was it that enabled something to come out of nothing? The idea of the Big Bang rests on the so-called “cosmological principle”, which is an unproven axiom embodying the working assumption or premise that the distribution of matter in the universe is “homogeneous and isotropic” when viewed on a large enough scale. Sir Karl Popper (1902–94), the famous philosopher of science, criticised the cosmological principle on the ground that it makes “our lack of knowledge a principle of knowing something”. Popper summed up his attitude to Big Bang as follows:
I once was an enthusiastic admirer of Big Bang. I am now a disgusted opponent. As to the ‘steady state’ theory, it is insufficiently developed, and Ryle’s criticism insufficiently discussed. And the ‘cosmological principles’ were, I fear, dogmas that should not have been proposed.43
Genesis and Science
Once creation is attributed to God — whether personal or impersonal — the course of creation after that follows a similar pattern in the Bible to that propounded by science. In both accounts the universe appears first, then the earth, then water, followed by plants, fishes, birds, terrestrial animals, then mammals and finally man.
The two big differences between the scientific and Biblical accounts are:
The time-span involved; and, above all
The issue of human descent from apes.
Fundamentalist Christians or Jews who take the Biblical account literally and believe that the world really was created in six days cannot find any evidence for that belief in fact. And the same applies to the belief that flows from it that man has existed for less than six thousand years (as reflected in the Hebrew calendar, in which 2015–2016 becomes the year 5776). There is just too much physical evidence that the earth is a lot older than that — several billion years older — and that earliest form of man (the genus Homo) probably appeared more than two million years ago.
Less extreme religious people are prepared to accept that the biblical account is mythical and is not intended to be arithmetically correct. What is remarkable, though, is that the stages of creation as described in the Book of Genesis correspond so remarkably with the stages propounded by science.
Does this mean that the Bible was written by God, as fundamentalists believe? No, whoever wrote the Book of Genesis was clearly human — and the account of creation in that book bears a certain family resemblance to creation myths from other cultures, especially those from Mesopotamia. Although the Book of Genesis itself was written about 2,500 years ago, it probably draws on a creation tradition going back a lot further.
Evolutionists’ belief in human descent from apes — or “monkeys” as some of its detractors refer to it — has caused much more of a rift with creationists than any disagreements about chronology. But evolution does not claim that man is “descended” from “modern” apes or monkeys. It claims rather that man shares common ancestors with modern apes. Genesis of course says nothing about this, but by identifying a similar chronology of the stages of life forms to that posited by evolutionists, it leaves ample room for natural selection. In other words, there is no intrinsic conflict between religion and science on creation. But is the Creator of the universe the personal theistic God of conventional religion or the impersonal God of deism? We shall discuss this a bit later in the chapter.
Some Leading Religious Views
Intelligent Design
The term “intelligent design” is used in several different senses, but in general the argument from design, the argument from intelligent design, or the teleological argument, as it may also be termed, may be summarised as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer. The argument was first presented in this form by the Roman Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in the “fifth proof” of the existence of God in his Quinque Viae (”Five Ways”). The argument was more fully developed by William Paley in his Natural Theology, published in 1802, which greatly impressed the young Charles Darwin before he developed his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Paley is best known for his “Watchmaker Analogy”, based on the supposition that he had found a watch lying on the ground:
This mechanism being observed, the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer: who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.44
Paley compared the watch to features in nature with the same appearance of deliberate design, such as the human and animal eye, animals’ muscles, the stomach, the spine and the shoulder joint.
“Intelligent Design (ID)”
The “Intelligent Design” (ID) movement, which came into existence in 1984, put forward an updated version of Paley’s theory, notably in a school textbook titled Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, published in 1989. Although the ID movement tends to avoid religious language and does not identify the “Intelligent Designer” with the Christian God or any other specific agent, their writings have been attacked as a thinly veiled version of creationism, or the belief that the universe and living organisms originate “from specific acts of divine creation”.45 Like creationism, ID is based on the idea of repeated miraculous interventions in nature.
The ID movement has attempted to place their ideas on a scientific footing by introducing such concepts as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”. “Irreducible complexity” was first posited by the biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box published in 1996. Using the analogy of a mousetrap, Behe identified the eye and other biological mechanisms as examples of “irreducible complexity”. However, biologists have offered evolutionary explanations for all Behe’s examples.46
“Specified complexity”, a term borrowed from information theory, was used by the mathematician, philosopher and theologian William A. Dembski to refer to anything with a less than 1 in 10150 chance of occurring by natural chance. ID protagonists argue that when something is both complex and “specified”, then it can be inferred that it was consciously designed by an intelligent agent rather than being the result of natural selection. This idea has met with a lot of opposition in the scientific community, who, among other arguments, assert that Dembski’s theory is tautologous: in accordance with Dembski’s own definition complex specified information cannot occur naturally by definition.47 Dembski explains his theory like this:
A single letter of the alphabet is specified
without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified.48
However, Dembski has come out quite openly as an advocate of Christianity, which has not assisted his attempt to seek scientific credentials for his theory:
Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don’t have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ. And: I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.49
It is apparent from this that Dembski’s argument is not really evidence-based but has a theological starting point.
The God of the Genome
One of the fiercest critics of ID is the committed Christian, Dr Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, who is on record as claiming that “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral and in the laboratory.”50 This remark could have been made by a proponent of ID. But Collins’s position is quite different. He labels his theory “theistic evolution” or “BioLogos”, which he summarises as the belief that “evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God.”51 An alternative definition of this theory is as follows: “Theistic evolution, which accepts that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God.”52
God Without Religion Page 3
