Science Now Makes the Case for God

The Carina Nebula

For a long time the discoveries of science have been used to show up the biblical account of creation as extremely improbable. Certainly the timeline suggested in the book of Genesis could not be literally true, and in many other areas as well the accounts found in the Bible didn’t mesh with the physical world as we now understand it. In fact, since the 19th century science has been generally seen as a force tending to undermine the faith of religious people.

But this has changed markedly in the past few decades.

Contrary to popular belief, there is now a very strong scientific argument for the existence of an Intelligent Creator. And again contrary to what many people think, it has nothing to do with rejecting Charles Darwin.

As a Christian, I personally have never subscribed to Intelligent Design at the level of species, which is the way many researchers approached it. To do so is wrongheaded and unscientific. Of course Darwin was right. The myriad species that live on our planet were not "designed", rather they evolved. To try to make the complexity of certain features in current species into an argument for Intelligent Design is to start at the wrong end of the timeline. At the level of biological diversity, Intelligent Design is a fool's errand.

But at the level of cosmology, things look very different indeed.

The best science of the past couple decades is revealing our universe to be an environment fine-tuned for the existence of life. The chances of the four basic physical forces turning out as they did after the Big Bang are astronomically small. And they came out precisely right for life. Which is downright uncanny. It’s as if you had a bomb go off in a grocery store, and instead of blasting random ingredients in all directions, the explosion instead baked a perfect birthday cake. And there the cake sits on the sidewalk in front of the wrecked store. Frosting and all. “Happy 30th, Mike!” How explain it?

I’m not talking faith here. No. This is what the picture looks like in terms of physics and cosmology. This is what the hard sciences have discovered.

For those not interested in pursuing these developments in laborious detail, an article posted a few months back in the Wall Street Journal by Eric Metaxas sums up some of the basic points. Metaxas writes:

[A]strophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces--gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces--were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction--by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000--then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all "just happened" defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

But I don’t think the writer puts it quite right here. It’s not really a matter of the universe not existing at all, but rather the kind of universe we live in: with stars and planets and physical forces that make life and evolution possible. Set any of the four dials on the Cosmic Oven in a slightly different way, and the universe would still exist, but it would be a place where life could never have arisen. Why, then, were the dials set so precisely right for life? Secular scientists now all acknowledge: The universe had no “reason” to turn out like this, but it did.

The sheer weight of the unlikeliness of our universe getting baked to be the Precise Cake it is finally wears down what many secularists and atheists have referred to (often quite reasonably) as the “anthropic principle”. Given what science knows now, that principle can hold its own only if one insists on a multiverse theory, for which there’s not a shred of evidence.

In short, militant atheists can only wriggle out of the likelihood of our universe having an Intelligent Creator by spinning a mythology of their own: the multiverse.

Understand that I don’t post this today to persuade readers to recognize Jesus as the Son of God. No, that’s a specific doctrine of Christianity, and this article isn’t about that. This article does, however, roughly introduce the case that our universe was made to certain specs--namely, those that would allow life, and eventually consciousness, to arise. And that in itself is arguably a religious assertion, because if our universe was made, there was a Maker.

I will leave the ball in the reader’s court: Assuming there is a Maker, can we know anything about that Maker? What can we know and how? Have we had any glimpses of that Maker in human consciousness? What was the purpose in creating this universe, very possibly fine-tuned for life to arise in it?

Eric Mader

No ID Required: Why Darwinism and Christianity are Compatible

I'm neither biologist nor professional theologian. I'm a Christian writer with a longstanding interest in working through Christianity's place in the modern world: understanding social changes in our post-Enlightenment culture and advances in our scientific knowledge through a Christian lens.

For some years now I've understood the history of life in a way that is both Christian and Darwinist. But is this possible? Are these two encompassing views of reality compatible or not? (Note: I've titled this page "No ID Required". I mean it in the sense of: "No intelligent design at the genetic level." Intelligent design in cosmology and physics, however, is a different matter, as Francis Collins has argued: the universe is designed to give rise to life. Some of Collins' arguments presented here.)

In a nutshell, below, I present my Christian thinking on the processes of creation, evolution, and redemption. Of course anyone with more knowledge in either Christian or Darwinian thought is welcome to weigh in on what I offer.

Of course I'm well aware that the scenario I'm presenting is speculative. That it is laid out in declarative sentences shouldn't be taken to mean that I consider it in any way authoritative. And yes, my writing here is somewhat abstruse and perhaps a bit too condensed for its own good. But that is a result of trying to stay concise.

How, then, do the universe and consciousness arise? What role does evolution play in what is, nevertheless, a willed and intelligent creation?

Creation, Evolution, Bridging and Redemption
God creates the universe with certain fundamental laws that entail the possible rise of life. Given that the created universe is vast, the likelihood of life arising somewhere or other (or indeed in various places) is certain.

With the rise of life, in any given place, begins a process of evolution, which in turn may eventually bring about the rise of a creature capable of consciousness. Such a creature is capable of recognizing both the creation's origin in God and its own likeness to God.

The process of evolution, up to this point of recognition, is as Darwinism has it: it is entirely a matter of random mutations resulting in variation then subject to natural selection. People may call my thinking here deism if they like, I don't care, because once the creature "in God's image" (i.e., having consciousness) arises, God begins a process of bridging to this creature.

The initial stage of what I call bridging is the endowment of spirit, which Genesis figures as God's breathing in of "the breath of life" (an action described there only in relation to humankind).

The spirit, sensing its origin, begins to seek that origin and connect with it. Thus we have the history of religion(s). Then God sends his Word: initially the Word as prophecy and law; eventually the Word as His very own Son. Through the Word, in these two stages, the process of redemption is begun.

Note that in all of this I see no need for God's intervention in the natural process of evolution before the rise of humankind, that such extra-evolutionary intervention only begins with humankind through the gift of the spirit. It continues with the rise of religion (the spirit trying to make sense of its having been given) and finally advances through biblical prophecy (the election of Israel) on to the Christ. Four stages of intervention then: spirit; religion(s); biblical religion; Christ.

That the initial stages of spirit and religion(s) are paralleled by the acquisition of language (a crucial element of our ability to know God) is a wonder (the wonder of language) and provides an almost inexhaustible wellspring for study and speculation. We are in fact matter, spirit, and language--language mediating the matter and spirit in us and providing one of the crucial channels through which we relate to God.

Recap: Yes, the process of evolution took billions of years before consciousness arose. So what? And consciousness may never have arisen on this planet at all, given that evolution is a random process. Again: So what? God needn't be overly concerned with time, which I take is only an element in the creation of our universe, and likewise God needn't be concerned with the question of where consciousness may arise, since the whole of the universe is God's creation. In short: This way of thinking does not conceive God as a deist watchmaker.

The Creator God can let physical matter follow its own laws for eons, then can love and sustain the creature that has arisen in one or another place at one or another time. I believe this because here and now there is in fact a planet where consciousness has arisen, and God is in fact present among us not merely as creator (the one who set the laws of the universe) but as sustainer (the one who sustains us in being like unto Him).

Again, that I say he is present as sustainer shouldn't be taken to mean that I think everything in the universe is a direct expression of his pre-determining will. The three positions I do not subscribe to are atheism (obviously), radical deism (the God who creates then departs), and occasionalism (the God who is willing every physical event as it happens). My sense of God as creator and sustainer combines deist with orthodox thinking. Do I believe in miracles? Yes. Do I believe in natural selection? Yes. Are they the same thing? Well, except to the degree that Being itself is a miracle: No. Miracles and natural selection are two different things, but they needn't cancel each other out.

Have I been clear here in these various points? If clear, am I persuasive? Comprehending how this universe is both theologically and scientifically feasible, getting beyond the false dichotomy of randomness vs. divine intervention, is a matter of slightly widening and deepening the perspective. But the upshot of this combinatory view of reality is that I've come to accept certain basic givens: 1) There is and has always been a consciousness behind the physical universe. 2) There is here and now a consciousness in the physical universe. 3) The consciousness behind the physical universe has instilled in us a sense of its presence and communicated something of Itself to us. 4) We have thus been given, first, the gift of being and, second, the gift of sensing the Being in which we are grounded. 5) We have also been given the gift of a saving grace through God's Son, the Christ. 6) Redemption is now in process.

With the rise of the creature of consciousness, then, God's plan, gaining a foothold in this time and place, began to work its way forward in a more interventionist mode, in contrast to previously, the few billion years during which the earth was host to only a naturalist mode of evolution.

I do not see any conflict with evolutionary theory except vis-a-vis those evolutionists who subscribe to scientism, whose enthusiasm for their method has led them to insist that said method renders our experience of the divine obsolete. Neither am I convinced by any tendentious waving of Occam's razor, because I do not believe positivist science is our only, or even our most important, mode of knowing.

Eric Mader