The inextricable connection between mind and brain

Canadian radio personality Peter Gzowski was interviewing two neuroscientist-philosophers, the Churchlands - Paul and Patricia. During their dialogue, the inextricable connection between mind and brain was explained. Sounding startled, Gzowski said: "Does that mean I have no soul?" Their answer, in short, was unfortunately not. The assumption was plain: they had proved traditional religion totally false. Paul offhandedly mentioned that this showed that there was no God. "I like to go on long walks outdoors as my way of spirituality," said Patricia. Gzowski accepted this without much fuss and they moved on to more important matters.

Contents
Christians against Science
Christianity V Science
Evidence and Creeds
Limits of Science and Logic
Consciousness and Ethics
Freewill
A scientist speaks

Had a thinking person who valued faith pursued this, they would have found that religion was not so easily silenced. Theologians, philosophers and scientists have long been considering the implications of contemporary neuroscience for Christianity and have produced a number of totally orthodox views on the matter. A major strand has been the re-discovery of the Hebraic notion of psychosomatic unity, which is expressed in the Bible, and a questioning of the Hellenistic and Cartesian dualities that have marked some Christian thought. Jesus, after all, did not speak of some incorporeal soul, but rather, the resurrection of the body. Man is not given a soul in Genesis - he becomes one. Nevertheless, these scientists were sure they knew what Christians believed, and they knew it was false. No questions asked.

The lesson is this: Scientists are often lousy philosophers. While totally competent, even brilliant, within their field, they can display astonishing ignorance and prejudice about other disciplines. Further, a lifetime of specialization often leads on to apply the insights of one's field as rules for all other areas of inquiry. While this can yield interesting results, there is an imperial tendency among some scientists. This is why we have scientists attempting to collapse biology into chemistry, chemistry into physics, and sociology, anthropology and psychology into biology. As for theology, well, as E. O. Wilson, sociobiologist extraordinaire, wrote in his book Consilience: "Theology is not likely to survive as a separate discipline." This expert in insect biology contends that, like ants or bees, humans are almost completely controlled by their genes. Religion's truth-claims are elaborate illusions used to maximize reproductive fitness. John Polkinghorne, ex-physicist and Anglican priest, quotes Jeffery Wicken in his Science and Christian Belief: "Although scientists may officially eschew metaphysics, they love it dearly and practice it in popularized books whenever they get the chance," and goes on to comment : "If we are going to be metaphysicians willy-nilly, let us at least be consciously self-critical about it."

I recall coming across an essay in which Carl Sagan, science populizer and atheist, questioned the Golden Rule. (I'm afraid I don't remember the book this was in.) He showed an incredible lack of knowledge of what that rule was. He contended that, while everyone admired the Golden Rule, no one actually practiced it. However, the principle he mocked was actually "Do good to others at expense to your own well-being," not "Do unto others as you would have them do to you," which takes into account the enlightened self-interest he was recommending! After all, Jesus did not say: "Love others more than yourself, " but rather, "Love others as you love yourself." As Holmes Rolston III, professor of biology and of philosophy states: "After all, the Second Great Commandment urges us to love others as we do ourselves, and that presumes self-love as an unquestioned principle of human behavior and urges us to combine this with loving others."

In many cases, hostility to religion can cause and otherwise brilliant person to wear blinders. This is glaringly obvious in the case of Richard Dawkins, British evolutionary biologist and God's own atheist. An excellent writer and accomplished scientist, his unremitting hatred of all things religious colours all of his writings. His well-known "selfish gene" metaphor/theory is exceedingly interesting but is ultimately damaged by its muddled metaphysics, which seem to have been devised for no other reason than to make the idea repugnant to religious folk. In the end, his fulminations become somewhat baffling and a tad embarrassing because they are so angry. Like a bull charging a red flag, much dust is raised, but not much is accomplished - at least not on the part of the bull. In fact, Dawkins' attacks have done a great deal to encourage the dialogue of serious Christian thought with serious scientific philosophy. Paraphrasing Voltaire, it has been said that "If Richard Dawkins did not exist, the Christian community would have been forced to invent him." See thinkers like Michael Poole's exchange with him and Holmes Rolston's Genes, Genesis and God for excellent critiques of Dawkin's anti-religious arguments.

As with the Churchlands, what Sagan and Dawkins attack is not genuine Christianity, but a straw man: a flawed representation of Christianity constructed out of their own imaginations, so that they might have the pleasure of kicking the stuffing out of it. Let us be sure we do not fall into the same trap. No Christian should use the examples of a few hostile scientists to bash science or scientists in general. A religious person who uses Dawkins' hostility to Christianity to attack often-maligned (in conservative Christian circles) evolutionary theory is unwittingly allying with him, since he claims that science and religion are undying enemies. Nothing could be further for the truth. It is the duty of every committed Christian to be aware of what contemporary science has to say to religion and vice versa. In my next part of this article, I will consider the other side of the story - the mistakes and bungles which Christians have made which contribute to the perceived conflict between science and Christianity.

Part Two - Christians against Science

Christians believe in "God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth", whom, they assert, brought all things into being out of nothingness.

This means, then, that for Christians the universe is readable. It may be terrifyingly vast. It may be incredibly complex. It may even be subject to a large degree of chance and random circumstance. It will however, be intelligible, and rational minds, given enough time and information, will be able to discern its patterns. These patterns will not be figments of the perceiving minds. These are present in the universe itself, because it is the creation of a rational intelligence, and because it has existence independent of perceiving minds. (If a tree falls in the forest and there's no-one around, does it make a sound? Yes.) Further, God (Christians assert) is not the universe. The universe is not God. While God's sustaining power is necessary for its existence, it is distinct and separate from Him.

These beliefs constitute one of Christianity's great intellectual strengths - its cosmology and philosophy of nature. Modern science was born and raised primarily in Western Christendom precisely because of these ideas. Other cultures and systems of thought certainly contributed to the emergence of science, and had their own discoveries in mathematics or astronomy, but it was only in the intellectual matrix of Christianity that empirical and experimental science as we know it was established.

At this point someone invariably says: What about the Greeks? The ancient Greeks had a highly developed mathematical knowledge but did not go far in experimental science. Edward Gibbon claimed this was due to Christianity's repressive rise. A closer reading reveals that the Greek beliefs in Fate and in a myriad of fickle gods who altered reality at a whim partly undermined their ability to study the natural world. Some philosophers emphasized intangible spirit as perfection and matter as corrupt. Not only did Aristotle's natural philosophy state that a heavy object will fall faster than a light one, a vacuum is impossible, the universe is eternal and the earth is at its centre, but he went so far as to claim that these things had to be so. In fact, Aristotelianism (highly influential on the medieval scholastics) proved to be a hindrance to the development of experimental science in the West. The medieval debates about God's ability to create alternate worlds (Aristotle's teachings said no, the Church said yes) were not pointless theological nit-picking but in fact were highly significant to the birth of science.

So Christianity and science should be, theoretically at least, fairly compatible. However, there is a price to be paid. The corollary of believing in an intelligible universe, a rational Creator, and claiming to love truth is this: we must accept the results of unbiased scientific investigation, whether or not they fit our prejudices and particular theological presuppositions. This is where the problems begin.

All too often, Christians act as if we have a "get-out-of-jail-free card" when it comes to the natural sciences. We refuse to accept findings that perturb our neat and tidy interpretations of scripture and wave away things that make us uncomfortable. Ideas that would force us to return to the sources and develop a new understanding are pushed away with a "No, I don't believe in that, I believe in the Bible." This conveniently ignores the fact that scripture doesn't pretend to be a science textbook. "I believe in the Bible", in this context, often means things like "I believe in Milton's interpretations of scripture", "I believe in nineteenth century popular theology" or "I don't feel like thinking about this."

To be fair, all worldviews find certain facts difficult to work into their system. All belief systems encourage people to sweep things that don't fit under the carpet. However, Christians believe in one God who has created the entire universe. All truth is thus God's truth, and any honestly gotten information will somehow reconcile with all the rest. If it doesn't, this does not mean that it is false, but that our theology is not broad enough. Christianity includes within itself a self-critical truth-seeking imperative.

These issues are not new. Augustine had to counsel some of his fellow Christians about their attitude to natural science (what there was of it in those days). It seems that some uneducated Christians were speaking as if their faith and their knowledge of scripture made them experts in every field of knowledge. This caused their educated hearers to sneer and scoff at what they saw as Christianity's fairy tales. Augustine himself had left the Manichean religion because, as he writes in his Confessions: "I had read a great many scientific books which were still alive in my memory. When I compared them with the tedious tales of the Manichees, it seemed to me that of the two, the theories of the scientists were more likely to be true." He thus taught that scripture's primary purpose is to teach us about our relationship to God, not to explain the natural world. As Alister McGrath writes, he "argued for a twofold sense - a literal-fleshly-historical approach and an allegorical-mystical-spiritual sense, although Augustine allows that some passages can possess both senses. 'The sayings of the prophets are found to have a threefold meaning, in that some have in mind the earthly Jerusalem, others the heavenly city, and others refer to both.'"

Nevertheless, throughout Christianity's history, many believers have tenaciously taught theological ideas as scientific facts - turning many away from "the tedious tales" of the Christians! Luther, for example, had a very dim view of science. The contemporary Christian philosopher Peter van Iwagen writes in his section of God and the Philosophers: "A fundamentalist-turned-logical-positivist once called me a wishy-washy theological liberal because I read the book of Genesis in a way that was compatible with modern cosmology. I asked him whether he thought that Augustine was a wishy-washy theological liberal. "Yes," he said."

One reason that there are militantly atheistic scientists and "fundamentalists-turned-logical-positivists" is that sometimes Christians are massively, bone headedly, and dogmatically wrong in their claims to have absolute knowledge of the world. The condemnation of Galileo was a complex struggle that had more to do with politics than with religion. So was the Scopes trial. In both, a close reading of the historical context is necessary. Regardless, these were cases in which the church and large numbers of Christians used dogma and obscurantism to suppress scientifically gained truth.

Prince Charles spoke out in his Reith Lecture against the hazards of genetically engineered foods, an issue which, to be sure, is a legitimate concern. However, he based his arguments on a hazy theology of nature that had more to do with Platonism than Christianity. Scientists (especially Richard Dawkins in this reply) were not impressed and gave the impression that the two sides can only talk past one another.

One of the major causes of Christian misunderstanding of science is the God of the Gaps. This is a term coined by the devout Christian and chemist Charles A. Coulson to describe the way some believers mix science and theology. Anything which is currently unexplained or poorly understood by science is explained by saying "God must have done it." While this supposed proof of God's activity makes some people feel comfortable, it never lasts. Time and again, the sciences advance in their understandings and the gaps are squeezed shut, usually incurring emotional pain on the believers in question. They feel that their faith is under assault by an aggressively atheistic science. This attitude is based on an 'either/or' view of science and religion, wherein anything explained by science can have nothing to do with God.

One symptom of this are the 'urban legends' that circulate through the Christian community. A common theme of such stories is "science defeated or confounded by religion." They include "deep drilling operation breaks into Hell", "NASA discovers Joshua's missing day", "man swallowed by whale/shark survives for three days", "soul photographed leaving the body", and the popular and remarkably stupid sermon illustration "science unable to explain the flight of bees - only God's power can do that." On closer inspection these are all nonsense, but they are still circulated by those Christians who feel that science and religion are at war. The Ship of Fools website offers a light hearted examination of some of these stories.

There are atheists and skeptics dedicated to a vision of science as hostile to religion - and there are fundamentalist and dogmatic Christians who share that vision. These two extremist groups feed off of each other and, strangely enough, reinforce each other's paranoia. Is there a balanced middle ground to be found? Certainly, and a great many Christians are already there. They see theology and science as different ways of exploring and describing the same reality. Each field can shed light on the other. Science must respect its limits and function, and so must theology, and yet both have insights to share. This is essentially the view promoted by Pope John Paul II. As one Jewish writer (and lawyer) recently counselled, believers who are confronted with new scientific discoveries should take several deep breaths and then calmly think about the theological implications. Most often they are minimal.

It is also important that Christians keep themselves educated about science and its impact on the world and their worldview. In our time, when some postmodernists aggressively deny the existence of an objective reality, scientists and Christians have a great deal in common. There are many brilliant theologians and scientists writing on the relationship between science and Christianity who deserve to be read and discussed (as I hope my bibliography will demonstrate). In this way we can support both faith and reason - remaining faithful both to God and to the truth.

Christianity v Science

Back to contents

Has science killed God, or has it simply revealed that He never existed in the first place? In that clip from the movie Contact that we have just seen, did you notice the implicit assumption made by Jody Foster's character, Dr. Arroway? The assumption was that belief in God and belief science are fundamentally incompatible. Dr. Arroway does not argue for this position, she simply assumes it. She takes it as a given. Why? What exactly is it about science that conflicts with belief in God? Do they conflict? Is one more rational than the other?

On some levels, I can identify very much with the character of Dr. Arroway portrayed in this movie. Like her, I tend to have a skeptical bent towards many things. As a physics major, I am, like her, deeply interested in science. Unlike her, I am also a Christian. I have a deep and meaningful faith in Jesus Christ which is the most important thing in my life. Contact is one of my favorite movies, in part because the questions it addresses are close to many of the same questions that I have personally struggled with. Is there a conflict between my faith and science in terms of what each tells me about the world? If not a conflict in the realm of facts, is there, perhaps, a conflict in the methods and attitudes of each toward finding truths about the world? Must I, to be consistent, choose between my love of God and my love of science? Because of these and other questions, and my search for answers to them, I found myself adding an additional major to the physics major I started out with, a major in philosophy and religion.

The issues involved in these questions, I have found, are very deep and trace themselves back to some of our most fundamental beliefs about reality. Brilliant people spend their entire lives studying these questions and often come to very different conclusions. So what is it that makes me, just an undergrad at Truman like yourselves, qualified to stand up here and address this subject? That's a good question. The only answer I can give is that I believe that my own personal involvement with these issues, as well as what I have learned in both of my majors, gives me something of a unique perspective on the whole question of the relationship between science and Christianity. I often find that many of those who see a conflict between science and Christianity (on both sides) have what I call a sort of "tunnel vision" -- they often seem to be blind sided by a single perspective and are unable to see the bigger picture. Other than that, I don't claim to be any more qualified to address these issues than the rest of you. My purpose here, then, is not to give you some definitive resolution to this issue, but, hopefully, to give you some perspective that will help you think more about it.

It is my conviction that if this is a barrier in your spiritual search, it does not need to be, and there are answers.

That being said, I would like to begin addressing this topic by looking at what I believe to be three very common misconceptions about the nature of science and religion that often figure prominently in the whole "science versus religion" debate.

The first misconception is that the scientific method is the only reliable means of obtaining knowledge about the world.

This position is known as "Scientism," and it is one that many in our modern western culture, either consciously or unconsciously, assume to be the case. Often, for example, we use the word "scientific" as a synonym for the word "rational." Something can only be proven, we think, if it can be "demonstrated scientifically." In our culture, science is often regarded as the final judge in all matters of truth. To disagree with science, is to disagree with reason itself. Despite its popularity, however, this position is false, for two basic reasons:

First, it is false because it is self-refuting. The statement "the scientific method is the only reliable means of obtaining knowledge of the world" is itself a statement which can not be known through the scientific method. By its own standards, then, scientism is a position which must be accepted solely on the basis of blind faith, and one which cannot be known to be true.

Second, this position is false because it contradicts many things in our own experience. How do you know that you are in love with someone or that someone genuinely loves you? How do you know that things like racism and the killing of innocent people are wrong? How can you verify scientifically that life is meaningful and worth getting up in the morning for? None of these things are things that can be verified scientifically, but that does not seem to make any of them any less meaningful or less knowable.

Another misconception that many people have about science and religion is that science deals solely with the objective whereas religion deals solely with the subjective.

This is also false. I'll also give two reasons why I believe this to be the case.

First of all, science is not a wholly objective enterprise. Scientific research is guided by theories, working hypotheses, operational frameworks, and the like. Scientists not only make observations to formulate theories, they also use theories to guide them in making observations and to interpret what they are seeing, and these theories and the manner in which they guide observations, reflect the biases of the scientific community at the time.

An experiment I once did for a lab class, I believe, illustrates this point. I was required to measure the charge to mass ratio of an electron. Now, for you English majors out there, that means I had to figure out what number you get when you take the charge an electron has and divide it by amount of mass that an electron has. I did this by observing how a beam of electrons bends in a magnetic field. When I performed this experiment, I did not go into the lab with some "neutral" point of view, but with my mind all ready saturated by several theories which both guided me in doing the experiment and told me what I was seeing as I did it. This is clearly seen when we ask ourselves the following questions: "What's mass?" "What's charge?" "What's an electron?" "What's a ratio?" All of these things are highly abstract and theoretical constructs in themselves. Without these theoretical concepts to guide me, I would have had no way of making sense of what I was seeing, what I was measuring, or even how to go about doing the experiment or measuring anything. How did I know that that little glowing beam of light that I saw was the result of ELECTRON beam, for example, except for the fact that the THEORY told me that's what it was. Ultimately, the theory itself was justified by its ability to make sense of what I was seeing and in a broader context, its ability to make sense of other types of phenomena in my experience.

This illustrates how theories are not only things that scientists test, they are frameworks which condition what the scientist sees and how he or she goes about seeing it. They provide the scientist with a particular point of view -- with a BIAS, and because of our human limitations, this is unavoidable. There are no facts that don't involve some level of interpretation. All observation takes place in particular theoretical frame of reference. As they sometimes say in the philosophy of science, there are no theory neutral facts. All data is theory laden.

A second reason why it is false to maintain that science deals solely with the objective whereas religion deals solely with the subjective is that religion often has objective components to it. Those of us who are Christians, for example, believe that God has objectively revealed certain things about Himself in nature, history, the Bible, and primarily and most definitively in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and that because of this, those of us in the Christian community cannot just believe what we want to about God or whatever it is that feels right to us, but we must seek to conform our beliefs about God to what God has revealed about Himself through these sources. Just as the scientific community must "test" its theories against what nature reveals through observation, the Christian community is called to "test" what it believes about God against what God has objectively revealed about Himself.

Consequently, both science and religion often involve both subjective and objective components as well as a complex interaction between them.

The final misconception that I would like to address tonight is that science deals with matters of "fact" whereas religion deals solely with matters of "faith."

This is false because science, too, must rely on faith to make knowledge claims about the world. In order to claim that the practice of science leads to truth, one must have faith that certain fundamental claims about the world are true.

In fact, there is a view of science called "operationalism" or "instrumentalism" which denies that science really produces knowledge about the way that the world actually is. This view holds that science is merely us imposing our human conceptions of order upon the natural world; that science is merely a sort of human game of finding patterns that allow us to predict and control our environment, but that these patterns are just human constructions which reflect nothing about reality itself. I believe that this view is false -- I personally wouldn't care about science if I didn't as I'm interested in finding truth not playing games -- but, there is no way to "prove" that it is false outside of a certain faith that, ultimately, the universe makes sense and is understandable to us, and that there is a certain sense in which our minds resonate with the way the world actually is. Likewise, Christianity, as a view of reality, makes certain faith commitments about God and His revelation to us, and then works within those commitments to make knowledge claims about the world. I see no less validity in this approach than I do in the approach of science as both require that such faith commitments be made.

Now, having addressed these basic misconceptions, I would like to briefly take a look at three areas of potential conflict between Christianity and science and see if any such conflict really exists. Of course, we only have time to scratch the surface of each of these areas.

The first area that I would like to take a look at is the area of history. Historically, have science and Christianity been enemies of each other? At times, they have seemed to be. I'm sure that all of us are aware of what happened to Galileo, how he was ordered to be silent by the church for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, and placed under house arrest. Overall, though, many modern scholars believe that the answer to this question, despite the popular view that the church has always been in conflict with science, is no. Many famous scientists in the past were also devout Christians or at least held something close to a Christian worldview. This includes scientists like Sir Isaac Newton (who wrote more on theology than he did science), Galileo himself, Johan Kepler, Sir Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell, to name just a few. In fact, there was a time when it was not uncommon for a person to hold a duel appointment in both science and theology. Also, though the importance of the various factors involved in bringing about the scientific revolution is debated, it is likely no accident that it happened in the West, where Christianity dominated. Christianity emphasizes the beliefs that the universe was freely created by God and that human beings were created in God's image. Together, these two doctrines encouraged the belief that the universe is a rational place that can be investigated by human beings, but also, since it was freely created by God, something that had to be investigated through observation and not just through pure reasoning. This is because if the universe was freely created by God, then the logical possibility exists that it could have been otherwise, and so we have to look and see which way it really is. It was a Christian view of reality, then, that helped sow the seeds of the development of what we today would call the scientific method.

Well, if Christianity and science are not enemies of each other historically, then what about factually? Do they make conflicting claims about the world? At times, yes, they do. One of the earliest examples of a conflict between Christianity and science (or, rather, the precursors of science) occurred when the works of Aristotle found there way into Medieval Europe. A fundamental tenet of Aristotle's natural philosophy was that the world was eternal, that it had always existed and always will exist. This clearly conflicts with the Christian doctrine that the world was created by God a finite time ago and that it will someday come to an end. There were many scholars in that day who, though Christians themselves, maintained that Christianity was fundamentally incompatible with science and reason at this point. It would not be until the 20th century, with the advent of Big Bang cosmology, that science would completely abandon the notion that the universe had always existed. In fact Einstein, who did not believe in a personal God, even went so far as to fix up the equations of his theory of General Relativity which otherwise predicted that the universe must be either contracting or expanding -- just so he could avoid the implications of the conclusion that the universe had a beginning in time. When it was discovered that the universe is expanding, Einstein called this the biggest blunder of his life. Suffice it to say, scientists no longer believe that the universe has always existed and this conflict has dissolved itself.

Still another area of conflict came with the development of Newtonian physics. Newton's theories of gravitation and motion, though Newton himself did not believe this, seemed to suggest to many that the universe functions like a vast cosmic machine, which, once started off, runs on its own in a completely deterministic fashion. Put in the initial conditions, and Newton's equations predict exactly what will happen, like clockwork. God, if he existed at all, was thought by many after Newton to just be a sort of cosmic watchmaker who wound the universe up and then let it run on its own. Now, this flies in the face of the Christian view that the universe is constantly governed and sustained in its existence by God, that God is fully active in His creation at every moment. It also seems to violate the Christian view that there are creatures, such as ourselves, which posses freewill, creatures which are not completely subject to mechanical forces. Many suggested that Christianity was no longer plausible in light of these developments, that science had rendered it out of date. Suffice it to say, that with the advent of quantum mechanics, which has replaced Newtonian physics, we no longer believe in the Newtonian picture anymore. The picture of the universe given by quantum mechanics seems to allow for the possibility that nature is not wholly determined by mechanistic forces, that there is a certain room for freedom, and perhaps, causes for certain events which lie outside of nature itself. In fact, the physicist and philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington once remarked that, with the advent of quantum mechanics, the universe is starting to look more and more like a great thought than a great machine. Now, I don't want to make too much of this. In my opinion, quantum mechanics is often abused to argue for metaphysical claims that it doesn't really support and there are a number of ways that quantum mechanics can be interpreted. The point is that the so-called "problems" for Christianity created by Newton's physics have disappeared.

In both the above cases, the Christian community was right to hold on to the fundamental tenets of its beliefs, even though they seemed to be in conflict with the science of the time. Of course, I do not believe that it is always the case that the Christian community has been right in times of conflict with science. It was wrong for the church to oppose Galileo. Not all the Christians here will agree with me, and that's okay, but I also believe that those Christians who hold the universe is only six thousand years old are also wrong. I speak only for myself here, but I believe that both these incidents are the result of a misunderstanding and misapplication of the type of literature involved in Biblical texts and the type of information those texts are trying to communicate. Note though, that these matters involve things that are secondary to the Christian faith, not fundamental issues as in the previous two examples.

In any case, I think that we need to realize that both science and theology are fallible human attempts at interpretation, either of what we observe, or what God has specially revealed about himself. As such, both attempts are subject to mistakes that at times may bring them in conflict with one another, and this must always be kept in mind. It is my conviction that whenever such conflicts exist, it is because we have made a mistake somewhere, either in our theology or our science, and that further investigation into both will cause the conflict to resolve itself. And, we have already seen two examples of where that was the case.

Well, if not in conflict historically or in the realm of facts, perhaps science and Christianity conflict in another way. If not in what the say about truth, then perhaps in the way they go about discovering truth; perhaps they conflict on the level of methodology. Is there something about a scientific approach to discovering things about the world that is fundamentally at odds with a theological approach?

I believe that the answer to that question is no. It is true that science and Christian theology use different methods, but that does not mean that they use incompatible methods. In every field of human endeavor, the method must conform itself to the subject matter. You don't decide if a person will go out with you the same way that you decide the answer to a math problem, -- trust me, I've tried it before and it doesn't work out so well. We have already seen that the position that the scientific method is the only reliable way of obtaining knowledge of the world is self-refuting. Science confines itself to what can be empirically observed. As such, its domain is limited. Theology concerns itself with what God has revealed about Himself, and, according to Christian belief, this revelation comes, in part, through our observations of the universe God has made, but is not limited to that. This means that those of us who are Christians need to take science seriously, but that we need not limit ourselves to science and that we are free to move beyond it.

So, the short answer to the question as to whether or not, on the whole, Christianity and science are incompatible, is no. There is nothing at all inconsistent about maintaining both a scientific and a Christian outlook. In closing, I want to suggest that things do not stop there. I think that, in the midst of all the arguments over whether or not the two conflict, there is a deeper agreement between what science and Christianity have to say about the world, an agreement that is often overlooked.

Science, as we have seen, to be a means of finding truth, requires a certain faith that the universe manifests a deep rational order that we as human beings can understand. Christianity maintains that the universe was created by God to reflect His glory and that as human beings we have been created in God's image with the capacity to understand how it does so. And when we look at the universe from a scientific point of view, when we probe into the depths of reality, we find that the universe does seem to resonate deeply with certain structures in our own minds, such as mathematics and even some of our conceptions of beauty. We find that the universe is, in fact, a beautiful place, and that the laws which underlie it are both simple and eloquent. Einstein once remarked that the most unintelligible thing about the universe is the fact that it is intelligible. This amazing fact is perfectly understandable in light of a Christian worldview, however. And from a personal perspective, I can say that one of the things that draws me to science, is that through it, I acquire a new appreciation for the glory of God that manifests itself in creation.

Perhaps there are some of you here tonight that have felt the same way. You are convinced by the beauty of the world that there must be a God, but you do not know that God personally. You do not have a relationship with him. Perhaps you want to, but you are still not sure that it is possible. Might I suggest it is time that you try a little experiment. Take a step of faith, and sincerely ask God for that relationship. Ask Him to help you find answers to the questions you are seeking and for the strength to trust Him even when those answers seem unavailable. I think you will find, as I have, that God is faithful, and that if you earnestly seek Him, He will reach out to you.

Evidence and creeds

Back to contents

Othello: The end came very shortly after leaving university. I had a new girlfriend who found me out quite quickly. She poured scorn, not so much on Catholicism, but I on my refusal to examine what I had been told. So, I did try to reconcile real life with the bundle of beliefs I had carried around for so long. I couldn't do it and more to the point, no one even seemed willing to help me try. My parents wouldn't discuss the matter, my priest told me to follow my own heart and look to my conscience and all my friends seemed to have dumped the whole lot long ago.

Figaro: I imagine this often happens. When you need the information and the answers, they just aren't there. There seems to be so much counting against religion these days. What really struck home?

Othello: Perhaps the most powerful point counting against religion in general is what might be called the Argument from Many Creeds. Richard Dawkins put this very well in some television lectures he gave in the early nineties1. He produced a map of the world showing the distribution of the various religions of the world. India was Hindu, Islam stretched in a broad stripe from Morocco to Indonesia and Christianity covered Europe, the Americas and Russia. Dawkins explained that the main determining factor of one's religion was the religion of one's parents. Science, however, was a universal faith followed by everyone who had a sufficient grasp of the facts.

But the argument is stronger still. You and I can agree that some people believe in total codswollop - not even in an established religion. Astrology is plain daft but there was a US president who wouldn't go outside without first consulting it. The tragic events at Waco were caused by a group of people who sincerely believed in a man that we would instantly brand a lunatic. Scientology holds thousands of Americans in its grip, many of whom really should know better. After all, Scientology's founder, L Ron Hubbard, is on record as saying that if you really want to make money found a religion2.

In many cases, we cannot brand these people as nutters and yet we cannot take their beliefs seriously. It is very hard to work out why we are not expected to believe them but should believe the assertions of a man writing about his mystical visions nearly two thousand years ago. And how can we take a God seriously if He allows people to be totally misled about the truth because they were born to the wrong parents?

I felt a little anger at having been duped but then got on with my life. The rest of the family remains as devout as ever so I don't push the point. I suppose I must own up to feeling a bit superior to them, as I am no long in thrall to an ancient superstition. Instead, I no longer believe in God and so I must be an atheist.

Figaro: It sounds like when the crunch came and your doubts took over there was not a single line of defence for your religion. The sceptics had it all their own way. If you had tried to read some books then the argument might have seemed just as one sided. I suppose it is far easier to find works by Professor Dawkins or Carl Sagan in a bookshop than it is any of the leading Christian apologists like John Polkinghorne, Josh McDowell or even CS Lewis. Also, modern secular society is a powerful witness for atheism. The only mention of God in the media seems to be on Sunday mornings when any self-respecting individual is sleeping off a hangover.

In fact, the arguments against atheism and also for all manners of religions have been put eloquently through out history. It is just that today the debate is declared over and atheism seems to have won by default. I think we can lay part of the blame for that on science or at least the way it is portrayed as being the answer to all our problems. It isn't and people are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they may no longer be in control of it. In my opinion, this realisation is a generation too late. The present debate on genetics and cloning is provoking questions that the invention of the nuclear bomb did not. Perhaps it is the end of the Cold War that has finally led to a re examination of where science is going.

But I digress. The Argument from Many Creeds is a powerful, if rather unfocused, idea. It is empirical rather than logical and depends on a number of conceptions about what you think God ought to be. You must also admit that as an atheist, you are proposing your own metaphysic and that has to be measured against the same standards you use for the others.

The trouble is that no matter how much I show that the Argument is not self-consistent or even strictly reasonable, you will be left with a feeling that it still holds water. Therein lies its power and I do not for a moment deny it. But indulge me for a few minutes while I try to expose the inconsistencies.

Suppose that the letters A to Z represent all the world's different religions, metaphysical systems, beliefs or whatever. I'll follow your vocabulary and call them creeds. A is atheism, thinking of itself as up at the front, M is Anglican Christianity somewhere in the middle, and Z is the Zoroastrians which you don't see that much nowadays. I don't actually mean that the order of the different creeds should mean anything, so atheism could just as well be L or T.

Now let us consider what it is that differentiates A from B to Z. What is the special thing that atheism has and the others lack? It isn't that it does not involve believing in God. Buddhists have no use or belief in any sort of God. Nor do our Scientologist friends or many new age mystics (although some do). But the majority does believe in some sort of Supreme Being even if they couldn't agree very much about it. So on a democratic vote I suppose the atheist would lose.

Atheism might say that it takes the universe 'as is' rather than making particular claims that it cannot prove. But this is not true - the atheist says there is no God and that is as definite a claim as is ever made by Christianity, Judaism or any of the rest. What is more, that there is no God is no more provable than that there is one. One friend said he was an atheist because "There are countless different beliefs and claims in the world and I don't believe any of them." This is an attempt to hit the ball of evidence into the theist's court but as an argument, it just won't wash.

In fact, the Argument of Many Creeds is a good reason to be Agnostic. Many people who call themselves atheists decide they are really agnostic once the positive nature of the central assertion of atheism is made clear to them. Perhaps you fall into this category.

Atheists will often say that they have reason or science on their side. Another atheist friend is fond of calling me completely irrational just before he loses his temper. Dawkins uses this point well in the lectures you mentioned earlier. He says that he has faith in science (commendably he uses the word 'faith') but his faith is rational because science makes testable predictions he can rely on. He gives a graphic demonstration of this by releasing a pendulum from his forehead. The weight swings dramatically across the room and rushes back at him. But Dawkins doesn't flinch as the pendulum, obedient to Newton, stops millimetres from his face.

Dawkins is right to place faith in science but this has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence or otherwise of God. In fact the determined atheist will go through all the other creeds he comes across and seek to discredit them one by one. An agnostic must also do this because the question is just too important to be ignored. People who genuinely don't care one way or another are betting on atheism even if they don't quite believe it. This is a very bad wager.

Othello: There is no evidence at all for the existence of God. I do not think that I am an agnostic because I honestly believe that there is no God because anything like a Supreme Being would have to be more obvious.

Science makes testable assertions. Scientists encourage others to go out and try to do the experiment they have just done. Indeed, repeatability is everything. If a phenomenon cannot be recreated in the lab over and over again then it didn't happen. It was a cock up. Witness the fuss over cold fusion. There was a whole load of excitement but when no one else could do the same thing, it was dismissed as a mistake.

Religion does not allow for objective observation. In the old days when people trying to argue with it, they got burnt at the stake. So far, no one has been imprisoned for not believing that atoms are composed of neutrons and protons. It is not reasonable to believe something that is afraid of scrutiny and won't tolerate dissent.

Faced with the choice between a rigorous and logical explanation from science and a strange and undemonstrable claim from a religion any rational man will plump for the later. As your friend said, belief in God is irrational because it is not backed up by any evidence.

Figaro: I want you do a thought experiment. Are you still going out with the girl you mentioned earlier?

Othello: We're happily married.

Figaro: Congratulations. We really have been out of touch. Are you in love with her?

Othello: Yes.

Figaro: And is she in love with you?

Othello: Well, yes.

Figaro: Pleased to hear it. Now tell me how you would set about proving that scientifically.

Othello: I could ask her. I mean she did marry me.

Figaro: But how would you know she wasn't lying? The experiment would hardly be under laboratory conditions would it? In a scientific experiment, you need to be able to control all the variables. What if she was having an affair but depended on you for her standard of living. Or else, she might be worried about the children if you have any. In an extreme case, she may simply be afraid of you.

Othello: OK. I'd use a lie detector.

Figaro: I see. Well, if my girlfriend insisted on calling in the FBI's finest technicians to determine if I was telling the truth when I said I loved her I would want a new girlfriend. Besides, lie detectors are fallible and not even accepted as evidence in court here in the UK. Anyway, let's assume that you can come up with a scientifically rigorous method of testing your wife's love. The next question is have you ever attempted to carry out such a test.

Othello: Of course not. But I still have plenty of evidence. Just because I can't dissect her in a lab doesn't mean that I shouldn't believe her. You are not being fair to expect science to deal with things like love and friendship.

Figaro: You're right. I am trying to show you the very real limitations of the scientific method. You couldn't even scientifically prove what you had for breakfast last Tuesday. One of the disturbing trends in modern life is the attempts that are being made to reduce human nature to a set of rules.

Psychologists, psychiatrists and even social workers all like to claim scientific rigor in their work. But as their frequent failings show such rigor is not possible. I have always felt these people are setting themselves up for a fall. As long as they present a picture of themselves to the public as technicians, the public will, and not without reason, expect their works to be as reliable as a Volkswagen. So, when things go wrong, when there is a murder by a schizophrenic or misdiagnosed case of child abuse, it is not seen as an unavoidable mistake. Instead, the public looks around for someone to blame. They should admit to the fundamental limitations inherent in these fields and stop pretending that, if only the job is done properly, everything will work out fine.

Othello: I am not at all sure you are right about that but I have to be getting back now. We should continue again soon after I have marshalled a few facts.

The limits of science and logic

Back to contents

Figaro: Hi, how are you doing. We've managed to meet up much more quickly than last time.

Othello: Very true. I was keen to get back to you with a defence of science. You seemed to be trying to take it apart so you obviously see it as a threat.

Let's first consider what science has achieved. Five hundred years ago everyone who had an opinion followed Ptolemy and thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe. Although some ancient Greeks had come up with interesting metaphysical systems, notably Democritus with his atoms, they never based their thoughts on experimental evidence. It sounds brutal, but if there was anything that they got right it was probably because they fluked it. They had so many ideas that some of them had to have at least a grain of truth in them.

Ptolemy's important astronomical work is called the Almagest and in it, he details his geocentric system. Basically, he places the earth in the middle and everything else, planets and all the rest, goes around it. He knows the sun is much further away than the moon but not how far the planets are. He places the stars at a much further remove altogether and considers that they can be treated as simple points because they are so far away. Actually an earlier Greek had suggested a heliocentric system, but he was little noticed until Copernicus picked him up.

Science stagnated for over a thousand years until Roger Bacon, an English monk of the thirteenth century, started to think about experimental method. Later still, the Polish parson Copernicus suggested that the earth might go around the sun. But Copernicus too might have fluked it. His idea wasn't based on observation and he insisted that the planets must orbit in circles. The only reason he said this was that a circle was a perfect shape and so the universe should be based on it.

To be fair observations were not yet accurate enough to determine whether the Ptolemaic or heliocentric system was the right one. With the telescope, observations improved and by the time Keplar produced his treatise giving a nearly modern account of the solar system it could be shown to be right.

The Catholic Church was not very pleased about this. The Inquisition famously found Galileo, who had dealt a blow to the idea that everything went around the earth by showing Jupiter had moons going around it, guilty. He was forced to retract his work and was imprisoned for the rest of his life. Luckily, the reformation meant that Rome could no longer control what was thought in many areas of Europe and the enlightenment beckoned.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discoveries were made at an alarming rate. Newton produced his magnificent account of gravitation and mechanics, Harvey showed that blood was circulating in the body and Hooke worked on his springs.

In the nineteenth century the pace accelerated further. Faraday, Maxwell and others examined electricity and magnetism. Then Charles Darwin dropped his bombshell in three books: the Voyage of the Beagle, the Origin of Species and the Ascent of Man.

The church could do nothing but retreat further into its cocoon. It tried to ban the works of these thinkers; it declared them untrue but could present no evidence to the contrary. When Darwin destroyed the credibility of the creation story in Genesis, it was no longer possible to present the bible as unerring although for a long time, culminating with the infamous monkey trial, that didn't stop people trying.

Now, apart from some very odd individuals who seem to take up a lot of space on the Internet, no one is seriously arguing that God created the world in seven days in about 4000BC. Today's creationists are amusing and I suppose you could admire their determination. The rest of Christianity has left the battlefield completely.

The twentieth century saw science moving into areas even some scientists found difficult to comprehend. Quantum mechanics with its inherent randomness upset Einstein who insisted that God does not play dice. But through the work of Max Planck,

Ernst Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg this strange new idea took root. Its truth is demonstrated every time you turn on a computer. The workings of microchips are bound up inexorably with the strange world of inside the atom.

If anyone is interested, the contest between science and religion is still going on in a low-key sort of way. There are many sites on the World Wide Web where fundamentalist religious types go into combat against bemused sceptics. Sometimes the level of debate raises itself to quite a high level but in the end, the sceptics cannot bring the theists to accept reason.

One rather touching habit of theists is to postulate what is called a 'God of the Gaps'. This Being is inserted into any area of science that is presently incomplete. As science advances the gap is filled but luckily the God of the Gaps is infinitely flexible.

He is quickly reshaped and used to fill another hole. Of course, little do they realise that science will soon be able to expand into that hole too.

Science has won all its arguments with religion because it is logical, reasonable and backed up by fact. It may not have explained everything yet, but that is no reason to think that it won't manage to one day. Then there will be no more need for religion.

Figaro: I really must stop you there. The God of the Gaps was coined by Professor CA Coulson as an attack on unorthodox Christianity. It is seen as a trap that unwary theists fall into but mainstream theologians avoid like the plague. I expect that the debaters on the Internet make the mistake but please don't assume that it is a valid argument.

As for your point about science being logical, I am not sure you understand what logic is. In its pure form it leads to conclusions far too extreme for most people's liking and is certainly inconsistent with science. Let's have a look at logic before we move on.

Consider the following statements:

"All men are mortal; Othello is a man; therefore Othello is mortal."

If the first two statements are correct, the final statement follows surely, absolutely and inescapably. This is an example of Aristotelian deduction. There are other kinds of statements that have the same degree of certitude. Now consider this:

"All men born before 1880 have died; Othello is a man; therefore Othello will die."

This is an example of induction. Because something has always happened in the past, it is assumed that it will continue to happen in the future. You can see how science makes similar claims about the repeatability of experiments. In fact, as David Hume found in the eighteenth century, cause and effect can never be deduced from wholly logical principles. This doesn't make science unreasonable but it does prevent it from being totally logical.

By the way, mathematical induction is a bit different and is 'logical' in a way science isn't. It uses a generalised example to show that something must always be true.

Othello: You're clutching at straws. I'm not interested in these strange philosophical arguments that claim to show that my sofa doesn't exist. You just have to use a bit of something called common sense.

Figaro: Agreed. But common sense is hardly an incisive intellectual weapon. It is also easily confused with that terrible enemy of clear thinking - conventional wisdom.

But I want to go back to your rather bold claim that one day science will explain everything and do away with religion. There are several names for that point of view including 'nothing buttery' because you claim there is nothing but the material world. In academic circles, it is sometimes called materialism and I'll use that word if I may. I appreciate that labels should be avoided but I feel that this one is useful. In short, this philosophy claims everything can be described by physics, and so everything has to be physical. This has a number of consequences not always grasped which I think makes it as much an extremist point of view as denying your settee.

Materialism is not the same as atheism although nearly all materialists are atheists and vice versa. It is possible for the universe to contain non physical elements without there being a God to account for them.

May I assume that materialism and atheism together adequately describe your views?

Othello: Much as I hate to be put in a box, I suppose I must say that they do.

Figaro: Good. I certainly do not argue with your point that one day physics could be able to explain all the material workings of the universe. But it can never demonstrate that there is nothing else to be explained. The best analogy is of a man fishing in a very murky pond. He uses a net to trawl through the weeds and every time he catches a fish, he uses a ruler to measure it very carefully indeed. All his results are collated in a book. When he stops catching any more fish he examines all his results and attempts to draw conclusions. After not very much thought he declares that there were no fishes in the pond less than two inches long. He bases this thesis on the observation that not one of the fishes he caught was under that length.

Now I come along and claim that there may very well be fishes that he doesn't know about in the pond. He indignantly explains his faultless method and I point out the mesh on his net is two inches wide. Let me be clear, I am not pushing a God in the Gaps point here, I am saying that you cannot expect to explain non-physical things using physics.

Othello: But what non-physical things? Show me some evidence that they exist at all.

Figaro: Of course. But you are going to have to accept that we don't use science when we try to find them. You further need to understand that science is not the only valid tool we have when looking out at the world; another is our old friend, common sense.

What is your favourite piece of music? Let's try and be high brow and think about classical music.

Othello: No idea off hand. Perhaps Albioni's Adagio.

Figaro: A fine work. Why do you like it?

Othello: Well, it's very emotional, majestic and rather bitter sweet in a way.

Figaro: I don't really mean like that, although I understand what you mean. I meant a physical explanation. Sound is the manifestation of the molecules in air vibrating. They bump into our eardrums that in turn stimulate some hairs that are attached to nerves. But that purely naturalistic explanation tells us absolutely nothing about music.

Likewise a painting although an imperfect reflection of reality can inspire much stronger feeling than the original ever does. Any explanation from a material point of view would have to involve chemicals in the brain and other stimulation of nerve endings. This seems woefully incomplete as an explanation. I could understand sexual attraction or recognising things as being good to eat as being explanations for beauty but not for Michaelangelo's pieta that is supremely useless and supremely beautiful.

No other animal responds in the ways we do to a landscape or a nicely formed object or music. The attempts to put everything down to sex or genetics are almost embarrassing. My background as physicist means I tend to judge pseudo science by scientific standards and it simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Because the concept of beauty is so familiar, it is very hard to see just how strange it is in a material world. That human beings have evolved to appreciate it seems far-fetched. Surely, the animal with a purely sexual imperative is more likely to reproduce than the one starring wistfully at the setting sun.

The claim we are taught to distinguish beauty also does not wash. Who taught the teachers? We can learn about beauty but the concept itself is entirely intuitive. I know this from experience. When I was a very small child, only about three, and before my hard-pressed teachers had managed to implant very much at all in my head, my father took me to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is true that I found it very much less interesting than the Natural History Museum next door. But I knew perfection when I saw it. In the V&A, there are plaster casts of about seven or eight of Michaelangelo's sculptures. Among these is his David. As an educated and reasonably cultured adult, I can see it as one of the finest examples of art in the world. I have a framed picture of it in my flat. As a three-year-old I knew nothing at all except that this great white man was the single finest sight I had ever set my young eyes upon.

At this point, a Freudian would be dancing around shouting about latent homosexuality or something. He would be wrong. We can all ask ourselves that same question and the vast majority of us can be sure that we know that we don't find David a turn on.

Freud fails every scientific test you care to set him largely because he was a not a scientist.

Othello: I accept Freud was a bit of an embarrassment but that doesn't mean science will never come up with a rational explanation. It has, after all, done well so far.

Figaro: It is possible. But so far, we have no leads or clues. Even the great humanist Bertrand Russell, at the end of his History, said that there are things that lie outside science's province. To claim it can move into territory it presently has no presence in at all is surely a leap of faith. But you may right. And I don't think that a physical explanation for beauty will make it any less beautiful. I am not a proponent of the objection that scientific explanation is cultural vandalism.

It is getting late but when we meet up again I want to talk about consciousness.

Consciousness and ethics

Back to contents

Figaro: Self-awareness is a very, very odd thing. Thinking about it is liable to cause a headache at best. To say to yourself, I am nothing more than I collection of atoms arranged in a certain way and going about their business is hard to do. It doesn't really seem right. Descartes seemed closer to the mark when he defined our existence as the ability to think or reason7. And we can try to use logic to show just how difficult it is to think and reason if thought is just a physical process.

Think a thought along the lines of "I am thinking that my thought is just an arrangement of atoms." We know that the atoms in question have ended up the way they are by a process that is essentially a random one (so says quantum mechanics) but on a larger scale could be perhaps determined (by Newtonian mechanics). This means that your thought is either random or determined by something else. If random, it is of course entirely invalid. You cannot claim that a random thought has any right to be questioned as true or false and certainly cannot be called the product of reasoned thinking.

If your thought is determined in much the same way as the output on a computer is determined then the first thing that happens is free will goes out the window. I'll come back to that later. In the meantime, lets look at the events that determine my thought.

All the events that helped to form your thought are caused by other events. In a material universe the only possible cause of events are ultimately atoms and molecules doing their stuff. Now we know that what atoms and molecules get up to is not rational. They have no concept of truth or falsehood when they vibrate in the way they do. It follows that the consequences of their vibrations cannot be rational either. One of those consequences is your thought. This means that cannot believe your thoughts to be true because they have non-rational causes. In short, you cannot reason.

Othello: I would say that the brain is like a super advanced computer. If you give a computer data, it is able to order it and determine truths in a rational way. So, can our brains. Now I appreciate that a computer is man made and so not a fair analogy from your point of view. You would say it does have a rational cause - namely the human mind that you claim is not purely physical. This means that you accept that it can go about things in the reasonable way its creator desired.

Descartes uses a similar argument to prove God exists by claiming we had to have a rational designer as well. But the scientist says no. The human brain is a product of a very long evolutionary process. If it were wired in a way that produced illogical or unreasonable results then its owner wouldn't last long. Natural selection produced a brain that could think straight. As for that quirky human element that we call free will, well, that is the random quantum mechanical process being added to the mix. This gives an illusion of free will overlying a base of reason.

Figaro: I am not about to fall into the trap of saying a computer is rational. It isn't. A computer is just a glorified calculating machine that can do its sums very quickly. And mathematics is nothing more than deductive logic. There is nothing mystical about it, whatever the ancients felt. Maths is, if you like, just about syntax. Blaise Pascal said that a calculating machine does things that appeared more like reason than anything a mere animal can do but doesn't mean that a calculator has a will of its own8. I have no doubt that evolution has created a very advanced machine but our will and rationality must be something else because nature alone cannot produce anything except blind calculations. You would also need to claim that if a computer were advanced enough, it would 'attain' consciousness. This assertion has no basis whatsoever beyond being a necessary conclusion of materialism.

The final thing that I think lies outside the boundaries of science is morality and ethics. Some philosophers have also called it the natural law. In Mere Christianity9, CS Lewis makes it the central argument for the existence of God. I do not want to place that much emphasis on it but only show that it defies a materialistic explanation.

First, I hope that we can agree that we do have some sort of sense of right and wrong. We don't do certain things, whether it is to kick a puppy or mug a granny. Second this rightness and wrongness is usually learnt rather that known intuitively. For example, a child will happily pull the wings off a fly whereas an adult wouldn't indulge in such wanton cruelty. Yes, there are granny muggers and there are probably grown up fly tormentors too but most people would agree with my examples of right and wrong. Now, despite wide cultural variations, most human beings share this idea and seem to have done so throughout history. Many of the barbarisms of times past and around the world are thought of as necessary evils by their perpetrators rather than being wholesome behaviour. Exceptions to this rule we call evil.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that much of our sense of ethics is hard wired into our brains. It got to be the way it is by a process of natural selection. I find this hard to believe because we have to learn ethics. Also, elements of this natural law seem wholly at odds with what you might expect from a successful species. For example, we protect old people long after they have ceased to be useful. All other animals just leave them to die. We also feel a child should get a seat on the lifeboat, rather than a fully functioning adult, even though the child has much less value as no resources have been used on it yet. It is impossible to imagine why kicking a puppy has become the signature of pointless cruelty.

Likewise, if morality is a man made collection of rules it is very hard to work out where it came from. The process of society improving over time is meaningless without some sort of ethical ruler to measure against. The only natural ruler we have is natural selection, that is dominance over other species. Our sense of morality seems to be utterly divorced from that concept. It has more to do with protecting the weak rather than replacing them. Interestingly even our old friend Professor Dawkins has a problem with this point. At the start of The Selfish Gene10 he says a world where his genes are allowed full sway isn't one in which he would want to live. What he doesn't explain is where his desire for a better world comes from.

Any truly Darwinian ethic would be similar to that proposed by Nietzsche. Most people at the time found this horrifying and the events in the first half of the century have further shown the human race is not interested in 'scientific' morality. I will return to this when we look at free will.

My personal belief is that we have to treat others well because we are all empathic. Our ability to know what others are feeling is something that forces us to behave well towards them. This empathy might, I suppose, be an inherited characteristic that human beings have gained by an accident of evolution. But I doubt this is the case, as it would not seem to be a positive aid to survival. It doesn't seem to be essential to teamwork and many other animals co-operate perfectly well without it.

Othello: I think morality is simply a tool that has developed to allow mankind, a social animal, to live in societies. Our enormous brains mean that we are individuals and could not be expected to be blindly obedient like a worker ant. Put people in a situation where society's bonds can no longer constrain and all morality breaks down. I don't want to cite a fictional example but the Lord of the Flies11 is a good illustration of could happen. You only have to look at the way people in Germany and Russia were conditioned to carry out terrible atrocities to realise how weak morality is. More recently, the massacres in Rwanda were a graphic proof that even today man will revert to being an animal in the right circumstances.

I must also take issue with your point about these ethical standards being universal. They most certainly are not. What shocks us today was happening here once upon a time. The dreadful tortures we see in the London Dungeon were instruments of policy not three hundred years ago. For much of history, the majority of the populations were kept in abject slavery and even early Christianity sees no problem with chattel slavery.

Simply put, fairly soon mankind found that to live together you couldn't just do what you liked. We learnt that to be treated well you had to treat others the same way. Do unto others what you would have done to you. It is true that some aspects of morality do not quite seem to fit this template but man is a very complex animal and any one-dimensional attempt to explain him will fail. We can all make choices and if some of us empathise better than others do, we might choose to place a higher value on life. But most of us can be conditioned out of these responses in the right environment.

Free will

Back to contents

Othello: Last time we met the question of free will got rather kicked into touch while we were talking about morality. I have thought a bit about it now and I want to touch on a couple of points. Firstly, however, I think I should define what we mean by free will. I must confess that I have been doing some reading following our discussions so I hope I am better equipped to tackle this issue.

First - definitions: free will means the ability to make choices that come from within ourselves rather than being fully traceable to outside factors. This does not mean that our choices are not heavily influenced by stimuli of various shapes and forms. But we do have the ability to ignore some of that and do something perverse. We can also swim against the tide and do things differently for no better reason than we want to.

It is interesting to note that whereas I could, in theory, drop that pint of beer on the floor, I cannot make myself forget the dreadful argument my wife and I had on Sunday or believe that the moon is made of blue cheese. Up to a point free will really means I can make my body do what I want it to rather than control what I think and feel.

The ability to make choices necessarily means we have the ability to be wrong. Indeed, by my own admission, I often am. But this ability to make choices is only really the random element of our nature. Physics explains that atoms work by making random jumps between distinct energy states. If the brain is, in any sense, a quantum machine then it will sometimes act in a random way. But the randomness is channelled into paths by the determinist workings of the brain. The result is the ability to make decisions where the evidence is weighed up but the final tiebreaker is a random event. Hence, free will is quite possible in a materialist world and further my argument about where morality comes from is valid.

Figaro: You are right in your argument. By defining free will in such a way that it can be random, you allow it a place in a purely material universe. Quantum mechanics have long disturbed theists. In Miracles13, CS Lewis just cannot bring himself to accept it. Other thinkers feel that even if the transition between energy states appears random to us it doesn't seem like that to God. Likewise, they claim that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal does not hold if God is doing the measuring.

Having studied Physics at university, I don't have many problems with quantum mechanics. The randomness is a product of wave particle duality. A wave is spread out so when it has to behave like a particle it can do so in a variety of places. Most likely it will act near the middle of the wave where it is strongest but it could do so further out. The only metaphysical point I would make about quantum theory is that it seems to leave room for free will.

Going back to your definition, I suppose I must add "and is not arbitrary" to the first sentence. I think most people would accept that free will means some sort of volition. Furthermore, my objections to a universe without free will hold whether we behave in a random or deterministic fashion. Finally, I am unaware of any research that shows that decisions are partly driven by quantum mechanics. Until there is and the main body of scientists accepts it then your idea is a theory rather than a scientific explanation. And of course, for what it is worth I actually don't feel like I am acting arbitrarily.

Suppose you were left sitting by an unattended tray of chocolate brownies. They are not yours but smell very good indeed. There is no chance of your being caught if you pounce on one. Do you? If you don't then your moral principals have won and if you do then your lust for chocolate has come out on top. Neither of these results is arbitrary and but it is equally hard to say that they are determined. You have a free choice. Not only that, you understand that either choice is possible. It is this ability to see that we could have done things differently from what we did in fact do that makes us believe we are free.

This feeling of freedom is very strong de facto evidence that we are in fact free. Unless there is concrete evidence to the contrary, it is not reasonable to claim otherwise. If you continued to insist we were not free willed you would be like those people who still believe Genesis is the literal truth. They discount all evidence that the earth is billions of years old by saying it could have been made to look that way. Likewise, the materialist claims that however much we seem to make free choices we are actually the victims of an illusion that just makes us feel free. His conclusion is as much based on his predicate (that the universe is purely material) as the creationist's is (that Genesis is literally true).

But lets assume you are right and we have no free will. All our actions are determined either randomly or by external causes. All these causes are also either random or caused. There is, of course, a heated academic argument going on about where our personalities come from. Some, like the biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, claim that our brains are hard wired before birth and we are programmed by our genes. Others, like the old school of sociology, claim we are products of our environment. It's the old nature versus nurture debate. Let's just assume it would be some combination of the two. It hardly matters for the sake of my argument.

You said that we can make wrong decisions. In a purely material world, we need to find some sort of objective measure to determine right from wrong. Evolutionary theory provides a template where we can call a decision successful or unsuccessful but I would hesitate to say it gives us right and wrong. If our decisions are not the product of minds then any idea of responsibility disappears. Compassion becomes selfishness if the only reason for morality is that we want to be treated well ourselves. Most of the ideas that spring from extending survival of the fittest to psychology are rightly rejected as abhorrent. Scientific reasons for this rejection are rarely given. It is faulty logic to say the unpleasantness of the conclusion invalidates the premise. I would therefore expect a little more effort to explain these unwelcome consequences.

Let me mention just a few. I must make very clear I totally disagree with all these points.

Firstly, feminism would appear to be a big mistake. Men and women are adapted for different roles and any attempt to change them is against nature. So of course is homosexuality. Since they cannot have children, they are pretty close to useless. The same could be said of anyone who is infertile or celibate through choice. That these people offer something to society is not a valid Darwinian answer, as we would then have to destroy severely handicapped people who are only a drain of resources (and a big drain at that). How homosexuality or the desire for celibacy ever became so common in the first place is a question I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer to.

Since no one is responsible for their actions, it becomes pointless to blame them if they do wrong. Of course, their view of right and wrong is as valid as society's is but the stronger of the two wills prevails. It doesn't mean the miscreants shouldn't be punished but the factors determining that punishment will be harsh. We would want to deter others, ensure the criminal doesn't re offend and minimise the cost. Killing them quickly seems to fit the bill although perhaps re education through labour might be more effective.

You can see that I am describing what fascist and communist tyrannies are actually like. It comes as no surprise therefore, that both systems pride themselves on being rational rather than sentimental. For the later, atheism was the official 'religion'. I admit that fascists have found the Catholic Church useful at times but doubt they have much time for the philosophy of love. The Chinese persist in accusing human rights activists of imposing their own standards on matters they do not understand.

My view is that the Chinese communist party is evil incarnate and should be opposed in every way possible. The same is true of other rational tyrannies. I further believe human life is sacred and should be cherished in all its forms. But I believe in good and evil and do not hold they spring from nature's dark impersonal forces.

Othello: This is a typical attempt to make anyone who does not accept your point of view into a Nazi. I am a liberal minded person who objects at least as strongly as you do to what you have said. That is part of the reason I left the church in the first place.

Figaro: Stop. It is precisely because I know you find tyranny abhorrent that I present this case. What I am saying is that your materialist philosophy leads to conclusions that you do not hold. This means that your premise must be wrong or you are being inconsistent. If you have truly gained your human decency by a random mutation then it seems to me that you must at least believe that the human species would be more successful without it. Morality is just a mistake.

You are a contradiction because at an intellectual level, you think one thing but your humanity rejects the conclusions. I want to give one final example to reinforce my point.

The Second World War pitted two monstrous systems of government against each other. Had the USSR not been a police state of the most awful kind it would never have been able to withstand the initial onslaught of the German army. But because it was, both sides could fight until one was bleed to exhaustion. But in the case of France there was almost immediate capitulation. France was a reasonably free and liberal country and could not stand up to the Nazi machine. The rational country easily overwhelmed the emotional one. I do not doubt for a second that had the UK actually been successfully invaded we too would not have lasted long. From a purely mechanistic view point our respect for life is a weakness not a strength. But we are not purely mechanical creatures and our humanity depends on our remembering that fact.

Othello: I accept that I feel that I have free will and that there are aspects of human behaviour that cannot be adequately explained. That doesn't mean that the explanation will never be forthcoming. In the mean time it might be dangerous to push the scientific paradigm too far because presently it doesn't seem to provide us with the 'right' answer.

A scientist speaks

Back to contents

Columbus: It's always nice to get an email from one of my old students especially if it is suggesting a pint or two. How can I help?

Othello: Well, you're the closest I had to a science tutor and I was hoping you could clear some things up. I keep coming across references in the papers to weird and wonderful theories that are being dreamed up to answer the ultimate questions. I was hoping that you could give me a quick run through of the current state of play. Really, I'd like to be able to distinguish between what is scientific fact - orthodoxy if you like - and what is still just an idea being developed.

I've been involved in an ongoing discussion about what used to be called natural theology. I am hoping that physics might be used as a tool in that argument although I am not altogether sure which side it might be most useful to.

Columbus: I'm an historian rather more than a theoretical physicist but and I suppose I am also called upon to look into the philosophy of science from time to time. I certainly find it pays to know what is happening at the cutting edge of cosmology because that is where a lot of the philosophically interesting science is going on.

I am also of a rather conservative bent. I tend to see science as a process of discovery that is moving forward at an uneven pace. I don't have much time for some modern structuralism theories that talk in terms of paradigms. I also tend to avoid questions of metaphysics that take us beyond the physical world.

Othello: What is your opinion on whether or not physics helps us understand or believe in a God?

Columbus: I'm glad you didn't ask for my opinion on whether there is a God because I wouldn't tell you. The short answer to your question is physics can be and is used by both sides. However, it is the study of nature and not supernature. So, by definition it will not concern itself with any questions outside of the natural world. That is not to say that physicists don't themselves consider these questions but when they do, they are wearing their philosophical hats. Scientific fact tells us almost nothing about God or ultimate questions.

The argument is fuelled by mistakes made by both sides. The anti theistic camp has dug its own grave to a certain extent by resisting the idea of the big bang for what can only be described as theological reasons. Sir Fred Hoyle, one of our greatest astronomers, foolishly pushed his now defunct steady state theory of the universe precisely because he didn't want the universe to have a beginning. He felt that handed ammunition to the Creationists15. Scientists tend to frown on ulterior motives for presenting theories.

Othello: Surely scientists are entitled to let their world-view be reflected in their work.

Columbus: Most scientists would disagree and claim they should be entirely objective. The honest ones would then admit that being human; this ideal is never quite reached. Certainly, to reject a theory on philosophical grounds is foolish, but not nearly so foolish as hanging onto a theory disproved by experiment.

Othello: So is the Big Bang a fact? And does that mean that we really do have a beginning of time? I have heard about the idea that the Bang might be followed by a Big Crunch in a few billion years that would lead to another Big Bang. So, we have an infinite cycle.

Columbus: That is how easy it is to move from fact to speculation. The fact is that the present universe grew out of a tremendous fireball and has been expanding at the speed of light ever since. As it has expanded it has cooled down and formed into clumps that became galaxies and stars. The furthest back we can look is to about 300,000 years after what we might call the very beginning. The fireball gave off radiation that is today called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It has been studied very closely and we can already make out some of the lumpiness that will eventually turn into galaxies.

Now, we have some theories about how this fireball we can observe directly came about. But we can't test those theories or even look back any further. The only laboratory we have is the universe today. Does the theory explain what we see around us? If it does then it is a good theory although it may not be the only one. But we'll never be able to feel as sure about it as we do, say Newton's Laws or Quantum Mechanics.

There are two very real restrictions on how far back we can look called the particle and visual horizons16. There is an ultimate limit called the particle horizon beyond which we can observe nothing. It is further away from us than light could have travelled in the lifetime of the universe. More practically, the early universe was opaque so we can't see it directly. This limits our observation to the Hubble size. We can only detect neutrinos and a few other things from beyond that distance.

Othello: How come cosmologists are always talking about the first nanosecond or whatever if they can't know what was happening then?

Columbus: What we have to do is extrapolate our theories back. There are two very good theories - quantum mechanics and general relativity - that have been proved beyond reasonable doubt. We plug in numbers for what the beginning of the universe was like and find out what the theories say.

Othello: Before you tell me that, I feel all at sea the moment anyone mentions relativity or quantum theory. Briefly, what do they actually say?

Columbus: A good question. I'll see what I can do about answering it. First, general relativity says that a mass will distort space-time so that other things are attracted towards it. Imagine a rubber sheet. If you place a stone in the middle then it will depress the sheet so that any marbles you then put on it roll towards the stone. And because it's space-time itself that is distorted by mass, even light is attracted towards massive objects. The best experimental evidence that general relativity is true is that we can see that light is indeed bent around the sun and indeed around whole galaxies.

Now the accuracy of relativity that experiments have shown is amazing. So, we can plug numbers into the equations to see what comes out. We find that the whole universe would have started at a point - a singularity in the technical jargon - and that it is 'flat'. 'Flat' means that the amount of mass in the universe is exactly the amount balanced between the universe expanding forever and collapsing in on itself again - that is, the Big Crunch you mentioned earlier. In fact, recently an experiment was done to determine whether or not the universe really was flat and so will never fall back together. The experiment determined that, as predicted, it is indeed flat and so the Big Crunch is now a redundant theory. Some people found the infinite cycle idea comforting as it meant the universe was eternal whereas science seems to now be saying that it isn't.

The problem with the singularity is relativity might break down before we get there. The trouble with the flat universe, even though confirmed in other ways, is we still can't find enough mass. Neither of these points invalidates relativity in normal circumstances but do mean the theory is probably incomplete.

If general relativity deals with very big things then quantum mechanics deals with very small ones. When you solve Newton's equation of motion you can calculate exactly where the object in question is, was and will be. But solve a quantum mechanical equation of motion and the answer is not so simple. Instead, you get another equation telling you the probability of the object being in a given place. If you rearrange things so that you try to calculate the momentum of the object from its position you instead get an equation that describes the probabilities of different momenta. This means that you can never get an exact answer.

Very early in the life of the universe very massive objects would also have been very small. Gravity and the strong nuclear force would be about the same strength (currently the strong nuclear force is about 10³⁹ times stronger than gravity). This means that general relativity and quantum mechanics would have been working together. This is a problem because they are not compatible theories! In short, we need a new Theory of Everything to describe events right at the start. At the moment, we don't have one.

Othello: But aren't there new theories that explain these things? What about inflation?

Columbus: Inflation is a very good theory developed by Alan Guth17 and it does explain rather a lot. We wanted to find out why the universe is so even in all directions. Inflation says that it expanded so fast that it had no time to get very lumpy. What little lumpiness there is, accounts for the galaxies. We have measured this lumpiness in the cosmic background radiation using the COBE satellite. The results are consistent with what inflation predicts. But because we can never see inflation happening it remains very much a theory. It also makes suggestions about multiple universes of which ours is only one. You may have seen them reported in the press. But these ideas are highly speculative and their discussion constitutes metaphysics rather than pure science. It is hard to see how inflation could be proven at all given the restrictions on observations I mentioned earlier. If it ever could be proven, then Guth would undoubtedly get a Nobel Prize.

Othello: And super strings? That's the latest idea, isn't it?

Columbus: Yes. And it is another very good theory that is unproved. All super strings theory is now is a set of mathematical equations that no one can solve. The interesting thing about them is that the equations appear to be consistent with both general relativity and quantum mechanics. This is exciting but what we really want is some predictions we can test. We want the theory to say how something will happen. Then we can do an experiment and see if it really does happen. As yet, we are still waiting. Again, if it were proven more Nobel Prizes would be dished out.

Othello: The final point I have to ask is about evolution. No one really doubts that it is true but it still seems to cause tempers to fray. Could you reassure me that Richard Dawkins is right and that the challenges to evolution should be categorised with flat earthers?

Columbus: I'm a physicist and not a biologist so I cannot claim much authority on evolution. I have a sneaking suspicion that parts of the theory are not as cut and dried as its proponents would have us believe. On the other hand, any one who bases their ideas on the book of Genesis is no more a scientist than I am a fishmonger.

Evolution has not answered a number of questions and scientific challenges to it deserve to be taken seriously. After all, most great discoveries were made by an apostate from the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, Creationists have devalued the argument by dressing up daft ideas in scientific clothes. If they allow scientists to dismiss reasoned objections then they do no one any service at all.

Much of what Dawkins, Dennett and the rest have to say is metaphysics and not biology. The danger is they seem to be unaware of what the dividing line is. If you are really interested, I recommend you avoid the popular science shelves and instead try to look at textbooks. It is quite possible to understand a first year undergraduate book on Physics or Biology with maths O level and a pen and paper. Feynman's Lectures on Physics, Halliday and Reisnick's Fundamentals of Physics and The Theory of Evolution by John Maynard Smith are all very good value and will put you in the top 1% in understanding these subjects.

Next

Is it reasonable to believe in a god?

Bede's negative construction

In this debate, I will not be trying to prove the existence of God, as it is common ground that this is, for the present, impossible. Instead, I will try to show that the hypothesis that a deity (by which I mean a creator of the universe) exists is one that can be held by a reasonable man. Of course, there is no question that many reasonable men, such as the esteemed scientists Professor Kenneth Miller and Sir John Polkinghorne, do hold to just such a hypothesis.

A deity is a reasonable hypothesis because it has a high explanatory value and is consistent with the evidence available. Unfortunately, this evidence is either not direct - no one has seen a deity for quite a while - or too subjective to be convincing to a third party. Ultimately, to really believe in the God that I worship, it is necessary to experience Him first hand and no amount of philosophical argument can change that. Consequently I will not be touching on what a deity might be like, whether it is nice or nasty or even if it can be experienced by humans at all. In short, I will be arguing from the position that Cygnus used to occupy - that of a deist.

I will take for my evidence the facts of science that one can find in textbooks devoted to the subject. A scientific fact is not a philosophical certainty but it is something accepted by the community of mainstream scientists and forms part of what Thomas Kuhn famously called a paradigm. For this reason the mind stretching cosmological theories of Stephen Hawking, Alan Guth and others will not be on the table. Superstrings, for example, are an exciting area of research but they could very well end up in the same dustbin of history wherein we can already find phlogiston and aether (imaginary substances that formed the basis of eighteenth century chemistry and nineteenth century physics respectively). There is no direct evidence for superstrings even though they have a high explanatory value and are consistent with the evidence available.

Delving into physics textbooks we find that general relativity coupled with conclusive experiment tells us that the universe began fifteen billion years ago and that space and time were both formed together in that explosion. We further learn (confirmation of this being only recently published) that the universe will continue to expand forever at an ever slowing rate. This means there will be no big crunch and there is no cosmic concertina effect. Finally, we can see that the laws of physics depend on a number of constants that cannot change by very much without making the universe completely unable to support life-as-we-know-it. This is usually called the anthropic principle or 'fine-tuning'. Not all of the above is accepted by every working scientist but most is believed by most of them. The reasonable man can, therefore, subscribe to it all without in any way compromising himself.

A hundred years ago it was the atheist position that the universe was eternal and had no beginning. We find this in the writings of Russell, Teller and others. I have always felt this to be a very reasonable position as I can see no prior reason why the universe must have a beginning - scripture and the Kalam cosmological argument not withstanding. However, science has shown these atheists to be wrong and as the universe does have a beginning I feel it is equally reasonable that it must have a cause and that the cause itself must be eternal. This position is identical to that of Russell, a self confessed exemplar of reason, except the eternal, by necessity, retreats one step back.

Furthermore, as the universe is contingent and finely tuned, it does not seem at all unreasonable to ask why it is that it has the properties that it does and postulate a creator. While answering this question may itself lead to further questions, that is an attribute of nearly every causal explanation we ever suggest.

The arguments against fine tuning by an eternal creator usually fall along these lines:

a) Is not our universe all that can exist?

The fine tuning argument requires us to postulate both that the universe could have been different and that it had an outside cause. This requires that our universe is not all there is.

It is certain that our universe is the only one of which we have any knowledge but we cannot from this reasonably postulate that it is therefore all there is without at least some further evidence. Aristotle did insist that only our world existed and this was part of his worldview that Christianity successfully overthrew in the march towards modern science. For the atheist to claim that nothing else is possible, he needs to be backed up with rather more than the observation that there is nothing else he can see.

A more philosophically minded individual might claim that the fact we cannot know anything about outside the universes (with which I would agree from a scientific point of view) is tantamount to saying it does not exist. But this is a mistake. Firstly, it draws a bright line between knowable and unknowable that no one should countenance and secondly it assumes there is no difference between the proposition that nothing outside the universe is possible and that something is. The fact that we are even having this debate refutes the latter point. Regarding the former, it would be bold enough to take the view that only what actually exists can possibly be without going further out on a limb to proclaim that only what is known to exist can exist.

b) Is the universe not a just a brute fact?

Related to all this is the brute fact hypothesis. At heart it is the same as Carl Sagan's statement of faith at the start of his book Cosmos that the universe is all there is and all there ever will be. To look beyond it for explanations is pointless because it has no cause and came from nowhere. The Big Bang was creation ex nihilo without even a creator. My response would be that I will ask the question and like any good scientist I will assume there is an answer. Any other attitude would send us back to the stone age although I wonder why atheists seem to apply the brute fact argument to theists but not cosmologists.

c) Must not all universes be like ours?

Unlike the one above, this question admits that while other universes are possible they might, in fact, all have to have identical laws of physics to this one.

In his dreadful book Creation Revisited, Oxford chemist, Peter Atkins, suggests that the laws of nature might be reducible to logical principles that must hold true. In other words, any universe must have the laws of physics that ours does. Leaving aside that it is impossible to even reduce mathematics to a set of logical rules, Atkins would need to derive every physical constant and rule from, as he puts it, elegantly reorganised nothing. I am not the only one to consider this pie in the sky.

d) Is the universe really so finely tuned?

We cannot know that our particular set of physical laws and constants are the only ones that will produce a viable universe. There may be others and other possible universes. What we can say, however, is that the number of viable universes compared to the number of dead and desolate ones is probably infinitesimally small. Most thinkers recognise this and call the various factors that are just right for us to exist the anthropic coincidences. So although these coincidences represent a highly unlikely set of circumstances we do not need to claim that ours is the ONLY possible life supporting universe.

Another point put forward by the atheist is that we cannot imagine what strange life forms could exist in alien universes and hence we cannot make any judgement on whether or not they are likely. This is simply an appeal to ignorance (something theists are often accused of) and one can respond to it by saying that the fine tuning argument is valid according to the current state of scientific knowledge. We are all happy to modify our position if more information becomes available. After all, that is the only way to reach conclusions from the evidence.

e) Could there not be multiple universes and we just happen to be in the right one?

A popular alternative to a creator is the multiple universes hypothesis. It states that there could be zillions of universes, each with slightly different properties, and we just ended up with one in which we can live. After all, says the atheist, smiling disarmingly, if the universe were otherwise we would not be here to see it.

The problems with the multiple universe theory are manifold but the most important is that we have no evidence for them whatsoever. They are not necessary as a consequence of any other physical theory and there is no theory that predicts they might exist. For the multiple universe theory to help the atheist at all, the universes must all have different physical laws and no one has any idea why this might be. Although we cannot show any reason why our universe should have the physical laws that it does, we also have no mechanism as to how they could be any different either. This comes into play when one wants to postulate multiple universes with differing physical laws so that there is scope for one of them to be just right for us. There is a distinction between asking why our universe has the properties it does while not accepting that it had to be this way and asking how the postulated multiple universes all came to have the variations of those laws so that they can be an explanation for fine tuning.

Furthermore, the vast number of universes required seems to insult every principal of scientific elegance from Ockham's razor onwards. The atheist should realise that hypothesising multiple universe is metaphysics and not science. It is not a scientific theory because it cannot be experimentally verified or falsified and neither can it be considered superior just because it is naturalistic. Once we move into metaphysics the naturalistic assumption of science must be done away with as it is no longer either justifiable or useful. Indeed it is a metaphysical statement itself as it lies behind science but cannot be examined scientifically.

In summary the three schools of thought about the reason the universe is as it is are Chance, Necessity and Purpose. Chance, to be vaguely plausible requires a near infinite array of universes in order for there to be a fighting chance that a few will support life. We have no evidence for these universes, no theory that suggests them and no reason to hypothesise them except to support this theory. They must, therefore, be rejected. Necessity is the idea that the laws of basic logic will ensure that our universe is the only possible one. The trouble is that basic logic cannot even provide a strong enough foundation for mathematics, let alone the laws of physics. There is too much that is simply arbitrary and cannot be reduced to any intuitively obvious laws.

This leaves us with Purpose. We have already established that it is reasonable to hold that the cause of the universe is eternal. This means that a creator deity must be a reasonable hypothesis. I am not claiming proof but simply stating that a reasonable person could believe this was the best available explanation. It was the reason I ceased to be an atheist at college although it was many more years before I actually became a Christian.

Is it reasonable to believe in a god?

Cygnus's affirmative rebuttal

In reading the negative construction, I was awed by the continued references to well-known philosophers and scientists both living and dead. Nowhere in the construction, however, did I find any reason to accept that a god was a reasonable explanation for our current status or for the status of our universe. Nowhere did I find an argument that a belief in a god was indeed reasonable.

An appeal was made to the Big Bang Theory but I did not find any reason why a god should be responsible for this occurrence nor did I see a valid reason why this popular theory should be accepted as factual. That the Big Bang Theory is the most widely accepted explanation for the start of the universe is without question. I think that it should be important to note that it is still a theory and, as such, is not gospel. The possibility exists that an explanation exists that is more in line with what Russell, Teller and others held - that the universe is an eternal place with an ever-changing environment. Science has not shown these men to be wrong in the sense that my opponent suggests. It has merely moved on to a more popular theory. The difference here should be clear.

One of the main problems I have with my opponent's construction is that certain things are taken as true without any (or very much) support and then used as premises for his larger argument. For example, it is stated as a truth that the universe is contingent and finely tuned. Not only do I find both of these things in error but I find them to be two ploys used by people who push the argument for Creationism much like the misquoted and badly abused second law of thermodynamics. Let's look at these words and determine if they can be unequivocally pinned on our universe.

Contingent is defined, in this sense, as being determined by conditions or circumstances not yet known to us. A synonym for contingent is dependent. For the universe to be considered contingent we must have a clear definition of what it is dependent upon. We cannot say that the universe is contingent, as we do not know what it is contingent upon. We cannot use the statement "the universe is contingent" as an argument to find what it is contingent upon. This is known as putting the cart before the horse.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has something to say about the argument from contingency. After defining the word and how the argument is used, it goes on to say this: "The argument supposes, it is true, the real existence of contingent being and that existence is denied by many thinkers…" As can be seen, the way that my opponent has used this argument is backwards.

Finely-tuned is not as easy to define. This is really a subjective determination and one that is employed by Creationists like Hugh Ross more than any other. What would a finely-tuned universe look like? How could we ever compare the one universe that we know of to other universes when by my opponent's very reasoning, this is the only universe that we have any evidence for? It is not even possible to say that this universe is tuned, let alone finely-tuned, as this also implies that there is some force that has caused it to be so. This is, again, placing the cart before the horse. Let us first determine who or what is tuning and THEN determine if this tuning is of the fine or of the rough sort. To do it any other way is not practical and not logical.

In his closing remarks, my opponent gave three possibilities - chance, necessity and purpose - as to how the universe arrived at its current state. While I disagree with only three possibilities, I will address those and try to show why the one first cast off is the most likely.

I will start my response to these three by stating that I agree with my opponent that necessity is not likely as it is not falsifiable. We cannot say that the universe must exist because it is just as possible that the universe never exist than that it does exist.

Moving on, I would like to look at purpose. For us to accept purpose as the reason for the state of the universe, we would need to see at least some positive, tangible evidence for this possibility to be accepted as true over all others. Is there any such evidence? I believe not but it is possible. Was there any provided by my opponent? There was none that I saw. To my eyes, it was simply selected as the one of the three that best fit the preconceived notions of the observer.

The last possibility listed was chance. Chance was discarded by my opponent for what seemed to me to be all of the wrong reasons. For example, for chance to be accepted as plausible by my opponent, a vast array of universes must exist for life to have sprung up in this one. Is it not possible that chance alone could suffice as an explanation for life in this one universe? Regardless of how astronomical it might seem, the possibility that chance accounts for our existence is valid and must be done away with something a little bit more solid than the argument from incredulity which states that if something is hard to conceive then it must be impossible.

Chance may not explain how we got here. There are other possibilities. Without any evidence to support any other possibilities, however, it is the one that best suits the situation. As all that I have seen in the positive construction from my opponent is an appeal to emotion, I maintain that it is unreasonable to believe that a god exists and is responsible for our existence.

Related Articles

Logic

Fuzzy Logic

The Raven Paradox

The Prosecutor's Fallacy

Bayesian Probability

Bayes Theorem

Falsifiability

Boolean Algebra

Occam's Razor

Church's Lambda Calculus

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

Kolmogorov Complexity