Is Science Replacing God?
Is God Becoming Irrelevant?
Recently, I saw a TV documentary called Bible Uncovered, in which scientists looked at whether the miraculous events of the Bible could actually have occurred.
An archaeologist was asked whether the exodus of Israel from Egypt could have happened in the way depicted in the Bible. She responded: 'A lack of physical evidence tells me that the exodus never happened; or not the way the Bible describes it. And if you're Jew or a Christian, you shouldn't need to have scientific proof; because faith doesn't need proof.'
I suppose she meant well. She was trying to let people of faith down gently. 'It probably never happened,' she was saying, 'but bless your cotton socks for believing in it anyway. After all, it's not important that faith is based on anything factual. As long as it comforts you, that's alright. Whatever gets you through the night…'
This sort of thinking relegates faith to the realm of harmless eccentricity. It promotes a dualism which says that while science is concerned with 'facts', faith deals with 'tall stories'. According to scientific empiricism, scientific discovery is the only valid and reliable measure of truth. What can't be proven scientifically can't be reliably believed. A corollary of this is that science and faith are often seen as being opposed to each other.
In the wake of scientists like Darwin, many people have grown up thinking of science as the bastion of atheism and naturalism; a realm of thought that allows no space for belief in God.
In 1937, German physicist Max Planck declared: 'Faith in miracles must yield ground, step by step, before the steady and firm advance of the forces of science, and its total defeat it is indubitably a mere matter of time.' Some people still believe that to be true, but they are behind the times. Today, increasing numbers of scientists are swinging toward a theistic view of life. In many cases, they're replacing a belief in random evolution with the concept some have called 'intelligent design'. This is not necessarily the same as a belief in the creation story of Genesis; but it does hold that the incredible complexity of our universe suggests the work of a creator of some kind. Lee Strobel sums this up well:
'Darwinism can offer no credible theory for how life could have emerged naturally from nonliving chemicals. Earth's early atmosphere would have blocked the development of the building blocks of life, and assembling even the most primitive living matter would be so outrageously difficult that it absolutely could not have been the product of unguided or random processes. On the contrary, the vast amount of specific information contained inside every living cell - encoded in the four-letter chemical alphabet of DNA - strongly confirms the existence of an Intelligent Designer who was behind the miraculous creation of life.'
Relatively new developments in science have pushed many scientists toward a belief in God, or at least a supreme power.
Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, taught that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that was the general scientific consensus for a long time. In 1915, though, a defiant young scientist called Albert Einstein upset the apple cart when he published his work on the general theory of relativity. When applied to cosmology, his theory suggests that the universe is limited but unbounded; that it is spherical and expanding, like a gradually inflating balloon. As scientists have delved deeper into the mysteries of the universe, they've found that Einstein's paradigm seems to fit the observable facts better than Newton's. Now, if the universe is expanding, it is likely that there was a time when this process of expansion started.
The Big Bang theory is one relatively recent attempt to describe the beginning of all matter and to explain the expansion of the universe. It says that all the matter in the universe began with a microscopic ball of energy, which was heated to 100,000 degrees Celsius in a split second - that's far hotter than the centre of any star. This small mass became so compacted and hot that it exploded, which is when 98 percent of all matter in the universe was produced - in under three minutes. Huge energy was released, pushing the matter apart and the universe filled with light.
This theory has reinstated God as a real possibility in the minds of many cosmologists. Previously, many cosmologists had believed in the 'steady state' theory, which says that our universe is eternal, without beginning or end. The evidence now seems to point to our universe having a definite beginning, at a specific point in time.
Whatever begins to exist must have a cause, and if we take this argument far enough back, we must arrive at one great 'uncaused cause'. Something or someone had to set everything else in motion; something or someone who did not 'come into existence', who is eternal. That someone is God. He did not begin to exist - he never came into being - so he doesn't require a cause. He is, as Scripture says, 'the beginning and the end' (Revelation 22:13).
Some scientists have now gone a step further, saying that the development of life after the Big Bang was so improbable that it suggests the work of a guiding hand. Looking at what happened immediately after the Big Bang, one British physicist concluded that the odds against the initial conditions being right for the formation of stars - and without stars, we would have no planets or life - is a one followed by at least a thousand billion billion zeroes. He also estimated that if the strength of gravity were changed by just one part in a 10 followed by a 100 zeros, life could never have developed.
In the end, even scientists who've been cynical about intelligent design have had to admit that many new developments point to the existence of God. Lee Strobel writes: 'Sir Fred Hoyle, who devised the steady state his theory of the universe to avoid the existence of God, eventually became a believer in an Intelligent Designer of the universe.' Hoyle wrote a book entitled The Intelligent Universe, in which he said that the idea that life originated through some random arrangement of molecules is, 'as ridiculous and improbable as the proposition that a tornado blowing through a junkyard may assemble a Boeing 747.'
Critics sometimes try to portray intelligent design as a relatively new concept within the scientific community, or one that's confined to a few scientific 'lightweights'. When you want to discredit someone's ideas, you might infer that they've not had time to be properly tested. In fact, many of science's greatest heroes through the centuries have believed in the existence of a higher power behind the natural universe.
Albert Einstein, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1921, wrote: 'Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we … must feel humble.' Einstein believed, he said, in a 'God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.'
Other scientists believed in the God of the Bible and took the Scriptures seriously; among them Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Linnaeus, Faraday, Kelvin, Lister, Mendel and many others…
Modern science was born out of a Christian worldview, three centuries before the rise of Darwinism. As C. S. Lewis once pointed out, people became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawmaker. In more recent times, at least since the Enlightenment, many scientists have tried to abandon the very thing on which science was founded. They're like people who've finished building their dream home, then try to rip up the foundations without disturbing the furniture!
For more on this, read my new book 'FIVE BIG IDEAS: Concepts That Shape Our Culture.'
This is a short extract from 'FIVE BIG IDEAS: Concepts That Shape Our Culture' by Mal Fletcher. To order your copy (paperback of various e-book formats) visit our webshop.
This extract © Mal Fletcher 2007. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced in any form.
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