Christianity, Science, and the Celebrity Atheists

An address by Rogers Redding
Danford Thomas Lecture
Georgetown College
March 2, 2010

The dialog—many would characterize it as a conflict or disconnect—between science and Christianity is very old. It goes back at least to Copernicus who in 1543 just before his death published his “revolutionary” conclusion that the experimental data about the known solar system could be more readily and logically explained by placing the sun at the center rather than the earth. Copernicus’s ideas were very much at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Church. Man created in the image of God as the crowning achievement of creation must be at the center of things. Copernicus had the great good sense to wait until he was on his death bed before putting out such a heresy!

Even more controversial were the ideas of Galileo, who was born some 20 years after Copernicus’s death. His views of nature and his discoveries about the universe in the mid-1600’s were strongly repudiated by the church, and Galileo spent the last part of his life under house arrest by the church. So this is not at all a new topic.

But I feel led to speak about it, out of my own personal experience, because of the recent spate of books by several writers within the last few years, three in particular—I call them “the celebrity atheists.” These authors: the biologist Richard Dawkins (Oxford), who has written several books of the genre, the most notable recent one “The God Delusion”; critic and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” and Sam Harris, who has degrees in philosophy and neuroscience, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason.”

These folks have received a lot of attention in the popular press, and by the way have become quite well off in writing these books and keeping the flame of the debate burning brightly. Dawkins in particular writes in such angry terms that one wonders if he doesn’t have some kind of vitriolic personal agenda.

In response there has grown up almost a “cottage industry” of responses—books, editorials, reviews, essays, etc.—many in support, but very many in opposition to what they have to say. As is usually the case, these rebuttals have not gotten the same popular press notice as the three books themselves, but they are important contributions to the dialog.

In my time this morning I hope to be able to do three things:
• Share with you my own personal perspective as we consider what these authors have said
• Discuss what they have written and some responses to them around such topics as faith, scientific proof of God’s existence, and the Mind of God
• And along the way provide some assurance that it is “OK” for an intelligent, rational, twenty-first-century American thinking person to believe firmly and passionately in a personal God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ:
That is, you don’t have to check your brain at the door when it comes to Christianity.

Personal Views
My interest in science and Christianity is probably not surprising given my educational and career path and my lifelong immersion in the Christian faith. Let me begin by telling you my own personal belief so that you will know the perspective that I bring to the table:

I believe in God the creator who is also a personal God, made incarnate through the person of Jesus Christ, the God-man, our Lord and Savior who was crucified, three days later was raised in a bodily resurrection, and lives today.

Despite what you might be led to believe, based on the popular press and just “common knowledge,” I am in pretty good company. There are plenty of scientists who believe in the one almighty and personal God.

One of the most prominent today is Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the “human genome project.” Within the last year he has been named by President Obama to be the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is a former atheist whose study of science and some deep personal experiences have led him to become a very committed follower of Jesus Christ. And of course as a result he and the President have come under some withering criticism—some of it by our three celebrity atheists—for daring to have an evangelical Christian lead the federal government’s highest profile science agency. Dr. Collins’s book “The Language of God” is one that I commend to your reading.

The Celebrity Atheists: What Do They Say?
The writers mentioned earlier—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—have popularized some or all of these ideas:
that you cannot be an intelligent person and believe in the existence of God, let alone in miracles, most particularly the resurrection of Jesus;
that it is silly--perhaps even dangerous--to believe in God;
that the only way to know anything is to know it scientifically;
and that science has proven that God does not exist.

What do these writers claim? (I am indebted to the author John Haught for this synopsis in his book God and the New Atheism):
1. Apart from nature, which includes human beings and our cultural creations, there is nothing. There is no God, no soul, and no life beyond death.
2. Nature is self-originating, not the creation of God (obviously from the first premise, since there is no God according to that statement).
3. The universe has no overall point or purpose.
4. Since God does not exist, all explanations and all causes are purely natural and can be understood only by science.
5. All the various features of living beings, including human intelligence and behavior, can be explained ultimately in purely natural terms.
(These five are often referred to as “scientific naturalism.”)
Further, they add these:
• Faith in God is the cause of innumerable evils and should be rejected on moral grounds.
• Morality does not require belief in God, and people behave better without faith than with it.

Faith
Listen to what the three celebrity atheists have to say about a key element of the Christian Life (and indeed of most world religions), namely, Faith:

Dawkins: “If one must have faith in order to believe something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or validity is considerably diminished. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, a lack of evidence. Faith is the principal vice of any religion.”

Hitchens says this: “Faith is an evil--precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”

But now consider the question of where these men say that morality comes from. Altruism, for example—what Collins calls “the truly selfless giving of oneself to others” with no expectation of a reward. How does scientific naturalism account for such a moral impulse?

Listen to Harris on this: “There will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments at the level of the brain.” He continues, “There is every reason to believe (note the choice of that word—believe) that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force convergence of our various belief systems, in the same way that it has in every other science.”

Writing in the New York Times, Stanley Fish asks,
“What gives Harris this confidence?
What gives him 'every reason to believe' (note the turn of phrase)?
What are his reasons?
Where is the data?
Well, not from a record of progress, as it turns out.”

Harris acknowledges that “little convergence has been achieved in ethics,” partly because “so few of the facts are in”

Fish observes that “one conclusion could be that the research will not pan out because moral intuitions will not be reducible to physical processes---maybe that’s why so few of the facts are in!”

So, the atheist Harris is saying that we will “undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness and our modes of conduct”—but he doesn’t offer any evidence in support.

Dawkins shows the same kind of thinking. He believes that ethical facts can be explained by the scientific method in general, in particular by Darwinian evolution. That is, he claims there are good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous and moral towards each other—he claims that such reasons arise out of an unconscious desire to preserve the gene pool, or to advertise dominance.

Here is where Fish weighs in: Dawkins cites “good Darwinian reasons.” But remove the natural-selection hypothesis from these ideas, and they are seen not as reasons, but as absurdities. Dawkins says, “I believe in evolution because the evidence supports it.” But, counters Fish, the evidence is evidence only because Dawkins is seeing it with Darwin-directed eyes.

On the one hand Dawkins derides an imagined opponent “who can’t see the evidence or who refuses to look at it because it contradicts his holy book.” But obviously Dawkins has his own “holy book” of whose truth he is convinced, and it is within its light that he looks forward in hope (his word) to a future he does not now experience but of which he is fully confident.

Fish points out that the language that Harris and Dawkins use: “hope,” “belief,” “undoubtedly,” “there will come a time” and the reasoning in which they engage, sound a lot like the description of faith in the great “faith chapter,” Hebrews 11, “The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Thus what is and is not seen will vary with the faith of the person making the observations. Fish says that Dawkins is of a different faith community than those who do not accept an evolutionary accounting of moral impulses. I like Fish’s use of the term “faith community” here, because science requires faith before it can have reason—faith in the experimental scientific method, faith in the axioms on which mathematics is founded.

Think about the fact that while we rightly hold that mathematics is true, remember that it is based on a set of axioms that we believe in without any proof that they are correct. John Haught puts it this way: “Trusting that the natural world is intelligible and that truth is worth seeking is essential to getting science off the ground in the first place.”

Evidence will point people in different faith communities to different conclusions. It is not the science that leads Dawkins to an atheistic view of the world—the science does not do that. It is the other way round: his atheistic outlook leads him to make metaphysical statements that sound like science but in fact are faith-based observations—a passionate faith that there is no God.

Stanley Fish puts it this way: “Whatever differences there are between religious and scientific thinking, one difference that will not mark the boundary between them is the difference between faith and reason.”

The Mind of God
I turn now to some ideas about the Mind of God, and for that I cite the contributions of John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne is a scientist and theologian—he began his professional career as a nuclear physicist, was professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge and did some of the early work in understanding the structure of the nucleus. He later became an Anglican priest, was president of Queens College at Cambridge, and is now Canon theologian of Liverpool. He is one of the clearest thinking writers who brings strong credentials from both sides of the science-Christianity debate. His book “The Faith of a Physicist” is one to which I keep returning over and over again. He has also written a number of other books on science and Christianity, and I strongly urge you to read him carefully.

Here is Polkinghorne: “Scientists work in a world that is characterized by a wonderful order —at the largest scale of the cosmos and to the smallest of subatomic particles—that can be expressed in concise and elegant mathematical terms. “

Paul Dirac was a famous physicist, one of the heroes of 20th-century physics, who did some of the early theoretical work on quantum mechanics. Dirac was not a religious man at all. But when asked what he believed in fundamentally, he said that the laws of nature should be expressed in “beautiful mathematical equations.” His fundamental discoveries came about by his dedicated pursuit of mathematical beauty.

There is no a priori reason that beautiful equations should be the clue to understanding nature. This is an acknowledgement of value, made by people, and it cannot be accomplished by just checking items off a list. What is involved is not just a matter of private taste—beautiful equations being superior to messy ones. It is a way of gaining insight into the reality of how the universe is made. In making these connections I believe that we are encountering the divine—that the rational beauty of the universe reflects the Mind of God.

Another famous physicist, Eugene Wigner, often remarked on what he called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in uncovering the structure of the physical world. That is, why should it be that abstract mathematics—algebra and calculus, for instance, that are manipulations of symbols according to particular rules—should have anything to do with the laws of nature—gravity, for example, or electromagnetism?

This, I believe, is a hint of the presence of God the Creator. The order and fruitfulness of the universe seem to imply something beyond itself--there is more intellectual satisfaction in attributing its existence to the will of a self-sufficient agent than in treating it as a fundamental brute fact.

Note carefully that this is certainly not a proof or logical demonstration of the presence of God. It is a statement of metaphysics, and such certainty is not available to either the believer or the atheist—but Polkinghorne calls it “a coherent and intellectually satisfying understanding.”

Another aspect of this idea—that there is a mind behind the universe and a purpose for it—what is called the Anthropic Principle:
The universe we live in is one that must be very finely tuned in order that we are able to inhabit it.

That is, among the array of universes potentially available, the one we call home has just the right temperature range, gravitational field size, abundance of water, speed of light, etc., to support carbon-based life—that is, us. In all, there are 15 physical constants of the universe whose values cannot be predicted by theory. They just seem to have the values they have, and they are just the “right” ones for us to live on this planet, but these values cannot be developed from first principles or derived mathematically

For example: If the gravitational force were just slightly greater than it is, the universe would have never expanded from the original Big Bang. And if it were just slightly smaller, the universe would have long ago expanded so quickly that planets (and we) would have never formed.

Another example: If the strong force that holds the nucleus together were only a tiny bit weaker, then only hydrogen would have formed in the universe. And if it were only a tiny bit stronger then all the hydrogen would very quickly have converted to helium after the Big Bang, rather than only about 25%, with plenty left over for burning to the heavier elements—of which our bodies and all of living beings are made .

One might assume, as the atheists do, that this is just a happy accident—just dumb cosmic luck; but--it is just as rational to account for what we see by claiming that there is a creator who has a purpose for his creation.

It is important to understand that these arguments certainly do not prove that the universe results from creation by God. In fact, they are not even logically compelling. Indeed, it is beyond the capability of science to fashion such a proof. But this belief deserves serious consideration as an intellectually satisfying understanding of what is otherwise unintelligible good fortune—in other words, just dumb luck.

Atheists argue that the world as we see it is a product of chance, a happy cosmic accident. But note very carefully that theirs also is not a scientific argument. It is a metaphysical argument, as is the argument that there is a divine purpose to the universe. Science has nothing to add to either of these positions.

Polkinghorne puts it this way: “Science rejoices in the rational accessibility of the physical world, and science uses the laws of nature to explain particular circumstances of cosmic and terrestrial history, but it cannot offer any reason why these laws have the particular form that they do…or why we can discover them through mathematics.”

Proof of God’s Existence?
One of atheism’s favorite attacks is to say that science has not proven that God exists, and in fact that science has proven that God does NOT exist.

Here is Stanley Fish on this idea: By definition, God as the creator of the universe is beyond human measure. So to demand proof that God exists makes no sense, because the machinery of proof, whatever it is, could not extend itself far enough to apprehend him.

We could prove that God exists only if God were an item in his own field—that is, only if he were the kind of object that could be measured or seen with a large telescope or powerful microscope, or any other measuring machine. However, if God exists, then he is not in the universe; instead, the universe is in him, and therefore there is no perspective, however technologically sophisticated, that could “look” at him. Since God is that which encompasses everything, he cannot be discerned—in the scientific sense of being observed--by anything or anyone—simply because there is no possibility of achieving the distance away from him that discerning him would require.

So the atheists’ criticism that you can’t demonstrate the existence of God is no criticism at all; for a God whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn’t be a God; he would just be another object in the field of human vision.

Terry Eagleton has written a very interesting book called Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate that is a scathing denouncement of the celebrity atheists. He says this: “God in Christian theology is not the mega-manufacturer; he is rather what sustains all things in being by his love….Creation is not about getting things off the ground. Instead, God is why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity at all. Not being an entity himself, he is not to be measured up alongside these things, any more than my vanity and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. That is, God and the universe do not make two.”

Here is Dawkins’s view of the universe: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Note with care that however Dawkins arrived at this bleak point of view, it is not through science alone. It is not Dawkins’s knowledge of genetics that leads him to this statement. Rather it is his metaphysical judgment on the significance of the scientific story that is presented to us. In fact it is science that is blind—it is a self-defining strategy of methodology. So it has closed its eyes to the possibility of discerning evil or good or justice or intention. The Dawkins school of atheism starts with the belief—note the word—that there is no God, and then uses this fundamental premise to construct metaphysical arguments to interpret the physical world that science presents to us. The believer, on the other hand, starts from the assumption that God exists and then uses that belief to construct metaphysical arguments to account for the same world.

Here is Eagleton again: “Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science. He thinks it is a kind of bogus theory, a pseudo-explanation of the world….Dawkins thus makes a category mistake—he imagines that Christianity is either some kind of pseudo-science or that it dispenses with the need for evidence all together. “
Hitchens makes somewhat the same mistake; in God is Not Great he claims that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. This is rather like saying that now that we have the microwave oven, we have no use for Shakespeare! This is obviously silly, since the two have nothing to do with each other.

Still with Eagleton: “In Christian theology there is no need for the world at all. God created it out of love, not need…Creation out of nothing is not testimony to how devilishly clever God is, but to the fact that the world is not the inevitable culmination of some prior process, the upshot of some inexorable chain of cause and effect. Any such preceding chain of causality would have to be part of the world, and so could not count as the origin of it. And since there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws of physics from a priori principles, but instead we need to look at how the cosmos works—this is what science does. Thus there is a curious connection between creation out of nothing and the professional life of Richard Dawkins as a biologist. Without God, Dawkins would be out of a job. It is thus particularly churlish of Dawkins to call into question the existence of his employer!”

Miracles
Let’s now turn to the idea of miracles. And this gives me a chance to encourage you to read C. S. Lewis, whose book on this topic is simply titled “Miracles.” Lewis’s Mere Christianity should be required reading for all Christians. Miracles, particularly the resurrection of Christ, are especially troublesome for the atheist. The atheist position is that because resurrection is not physically possible then it simply cannot happen.

An important writer on these matters is Timothy Keller, pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. His book, The Reason For God, is framed around questions that he gets from New Yorkers—principally students and young professionals living or working in Manhattan. In discussing the evidence for the existence of God, and in particular the question of the resurrection of Christ, he says this: “It is one thing to say that science is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any other. It is quite another thing to insist that science proves that no other causes could possibly exist. When studying a phenomenon the scientist must always assume that there is a natural cause. But it does not follow that science has proven that there can’t be any other kind.”

Keller continues. “There is no experimental mold for testing this statement: ‘No supernatural cause is possible for any natural phenomenon.’ This is thus a philosophical proposition and not a scientific finding.”

The atheist argument seems to be this: “Science by its nature cannot discern or test for supernatural causes. And therefore these causes do not exist.” Following that line of argument, anyone who believes in scientific naturalism would say that the very practice of science requires us to reject the idea of God raising someone from the dead.

This brings to mind the old joke about the drunk staggering out of the bar at night and has lost his car keys. A bystander notices that the drunk is looking for them only under the street lamp. When he asks why, the drunk says, “because the light’s better there.” Keller points out that Dawkins and the others would go the drunk one better: They would say that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark they therefore must be under the light! It would not be possible—rational—for them to be where they could not be seen, and thus they must be under the street light.

To insist that miracles are impossible is to insist that the Creator God does not exist. But this is an act of faith, since the existence of God can be neither proven nor disproven.

Other Ways of Knowing
The notion that science is the only route to knowledge is held strongly by most atheists, since most hold to a belief in scientific naturalism. But interestingly enough, not all atheists take this view. Thomas Nagel, also an atheist, doubts that every experience of humans (e.g., moral intuitions) can be reduced to purely science-related reasons. As quoted by Keller, Nagel says: “The reductionist project (that is, the attempt to reduce everything to science) usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so analyzed. I believe the project is doomed, because conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth, are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts.” Nagel continues that Dawkins is wrong to insist that, to be scientific, we must embrace “scientific naturalism—that the ultimate explanation for everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the natural world is composed.”

The late Stephen J. Gould was a Harvard botanist, a very prolific popularizer of science, and a committed atheist. But he could not accept Dawkins’s scientific naturalism. He was willing to concede that science might not be able to account for everything about human experience. Listen to what Gould has to say (quoted in Collins’s “The Language of God”): “To say for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth time: Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm or deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists….Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors such as God in other spheres (the moral realm, for example). (He goes on to list several famous biologists who were or are committed Christians.) Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid or else science is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism.”

Just a couple of quick examples: I know that my wife and my kids and my grandkids love me, and they know that I love them. Can I prove this? Can I measure evidence for it? Can I subject it to some kind of scientific or mathematical analysis? Of course not. The idea itself sounds silly. In fact, the only way that I can explore the subjective depth of another person is to abandon the objective-based methods of scientific analysis.

Music is another example. As a physicist I can explain music as vibrations of a physical object which in turn lead to undulations of air molecules that in turn lead to activity in the brain. And I can dazzle you with a very engaging explanation of how adding higher overtones makes middle C on the trumpet sound very different than middle C on the piano. But that in no way can represent the power of music to inspire, to effect emotional response, to transport one to great heights, to touch us deeply in ways that are simply not accounted for by a cold, impersonal and lifeless universe. We cannot escape the truth that ours is a value-laden universe, and any metaphysical account that does not acknowledge this is simply inadequate.

Concluding Comments
“There is an old hymn that tells us that “The Lord moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.” Perhaps the celebrity atheists have unwittingly done Christianity a favor. Even though their writings are a “People’s Magazine” approach to atheism (what someone has called “atheism on the cheap”) and reveal a vast ignorance of God as we know him, much less any serious theology, they have generated considerable conversation and discussion about the relationship between science and religion.
The apostle Paul was commenting on the Dawkins of his day when he says in Romans 1:22, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for natural things.”
Let me close with some comments again from Francis Collins: “It is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit. This war was never really necessary. Science is not threatened by God—it is enhanced. God is certainly not threatened by science—He made it all possible. So let us together seek to regain the solid ground of an intellectually and spiritually satisfying synthesis of all great truths.”


REFERENCES CITED
Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006)

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)

Stanley Fish, The New York Times, “The Three Atheists,” June 10, 2007, “Atheism and Evidence,” June 17, 2007, “Is Religion Man-Made,” June 24, 2007

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004)

John Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008)

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007)

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in and Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008)

John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Princeton University Press, 1996)



SELECTED OTHER SOURCES
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1952)

C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1947)

John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in the Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)

John Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter With Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)