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Religion and Science (continued from previous page)
Atheists
not only deny miracles but typically also do not believe psychic phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP) or psychokinesis.
Articles in the Skeptical Inquirer, the journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal,
have claimed that there is no clear scientific evidence for such paranormal phenomena despite years of effort by sympathetic
psychologists to establish it. The situation may be changing, however. An article by Susan Blackmore appearing in that journal
in the summer of 1994 claimed that ganzfeld experiments were close to establishing ESP as a phenomenon within reach of science.
A year later in response to an article that claimed firm scientific evidence for ESP, Blackmore withdrew her support,
tentative as it was, because “… believing in the paranormal does not get us anywhere interesting.” This is a curious response
from a scientist for two reasons. First, if ESP is real, no scientist should want to hide the reality. Second, just because
one scientist cannot envisage where a field of investigation might lead, it does not follow that the whole community will
be similarly stymied.
Many scientists feel at least some pressure to reject the paranormal. Why? There are several
reasons, some of no greater significance than a tendency, a personal disposition, among people who work with numerical data
to look down on or avoid subject matter that is difficult to quantify. With some I suspect there is also a fear that, if
paranormal phenomena become established as real, the world goes from something that scientists have a good chance of understanding
to something they may have no ability to understand. Yet to reject the paranormal is tantamount to rejecting Christianity.
The stories of Jesus in the gospels present him as a master of both ESP and psychokinesis—though he’d not likely want
to be labeled such. Furthermore, every Christian’s knowledge of God as a person requires a kind of ESP, because a relationship
exists that involves none of the five senses. Christians perceive God but cannot explain the perception in terms of sensory
stimuli. We know God is there, but we cannot say how we know. I am convinced also that people sometimes perceive one another
in a similar way. Hence, if Christianity is valid, ESP is very common.
If ESP is common, why do psychologists have
such difficulty proving that it even exists? I cannot speak for those who have advertised their services as masters of paranormal
abilities, but the ESP that I know of personally and that I believe is common among Christians is simply not a suitable subject
for scientific investigation. In order to be suitable subjects for science, phenomena must be quantifiable and repeatable,
and different investigators must be able to obtain comparable results.
When I experience ESP, first of all the perception
is nearly always devoid of specific details or quantities. I become vividly aware of specific persons and feelings about
those persons but, most of the time, that is all. There is communication, but few or no verifiable quantities emerge. Second,
I am never fully in control of the perception. The other person—God, for instance—always has some control and sometimes almost
total control. Hence there is really nothing that is repeatable on demand, and psychologists trying to measure the phenomena
would go away frustrated if they hoped to obtain other than subjective, qualitative data.
Under just the right circumstances
I can imagine that certain peripheral aspects of ESP might become accessible to scientific investigation. But another obstacle
might well arise. At least in my case, the perceptions are not only personal and private but more often than not sacred as
well. I could not agree to subject even the peripheral aspects of my spiritual perceptions to scientific investigation.
•
Science has done marvelous things, and it has greatly enriched our lives. It has given humans unprecedented
power and control over their environments. Yet to one who loves God, it is inferior; it is from below. Despite its inferiority,
it has successfully challenged every creation myth and is well along in substituting a myth of its own.
The scientist’s
creation myth says that, somewhere in the range of eight to twenty billion years ago, matter sprang into existence in an incomprehensibly
intense explosion called the Big Bang. As the primitive matter or energy was impelled outward by the force of the explosion,
elementary particles emerged and combined to become light atoms, primarily hydrogen. Later this gaseous matter in huge clouds
collapsed under gravity into galaxies and individual stars. The larger stars by passing quickly through their life cycles
exploded in turn to create and release heavy atoms that made it possible for planets like Earth to form.
As early
as four billion years ago life got its start somewhere on Earth, perhaps as the ancestors of modern bacteria. The earliest
living organisms were very simple; but since about 550 million years ago, many complex life forms emerged. Early plants and
animals lived exclusively in the sea, while some of the later ones became adapted to life on land.
Organic evolution
was not linear. That is, changes in life forms did not conform to any human idea of steady progress. Looking back we can
see there was progress, but it was not steady; there were many side roads and detours. Sometimes species of great complexity
of form, such as ammonites with elaborate shell sutures, would emerge and then die out. Sometimes animals of great size,
such as dinosaurs, would emerge and then die out.
The history of mammals is of special interest, because humans belong
to that class of vertebrates. A hundred million years ago known members of this class were small, many roughly the sizes
of rats or house cats. Since then their sizes typically increased, a few becoming gigantic; but several then decreased in
size. Humans and their immediate ancestors have grown in body size and especially in brain size, with brain growth particularly
remarkable in the last half-million years or so.
Meanwhile, during much of this evolving, the Earth’s continents
were moving slowly relative to one another. Not just the continents moved but also huge slabs of rock under the oceans.
A portion of the Earth’s solid surface that moves as a unit is called a plate, whether it is made of continental rock, ocean
floor or some combination. By measuring magnetic properties of ocean-floor rock, it is possible in some cases to track this
plate motion in detail over many millions of years. The plates by colliding with one another, diving under one another or
breaking apart have, along with weathering, generated most of Earth’s surface features as we know them.
This creation
myth has elements of great beauty. The earliest stages involve theories of particle physics; then come theories of nuclear
physics, then atomic physics, then chemistry, geology, geophysics, biochemistry and biology. The farther back into the past
we go, however, the bolder the elements of speculation, so no one need put much confidence in the myth’s account of the earliest
times (that is, more than six billion years ago). The major selling points of the accounts of the earliest times, in fact,
are their beauty and ingenuity, not support from observation. Yet astronomers and astrophysicists with rapidly improving
telescopes are making progress in refining our understanding of early times through observation.
Because of fossil
evidence and radiometric dating, the history of life, though still full of holes, we know with greater certainty. That life
forms emerged over millions of years and underwent many radical variations in shapes, sizes and habits is not open to question.
I write this with a tinge of sadness, partly because the biblical creation story is beautiful and true as religion, and deep
down there is a part of me, the child part, that would like to go on believing that it is true also as science. I write with
sadness also because many Christians have agonized much over the need to decide between the two myths, some going against
their better judgment to hang on to the older of the two, and others suffering severe damage to faith in God or total loss
of faith.
This is not the place to debate the merits of the two myths at any length. I suspect that anyone who has
read this far will have already decided in favor of the scientific myth anyway. The fact is that, while theory of organic
evolution in its present forms may not account well for every scientific observation, it accounts for the vast bulk of observations
vastly better than any alternate theory.
Different scientists perhaps find different elements of the theory more
convincing, but for me the hardest evidence in its favor comes from the study of sedimentary rocks and their fossils, from
historical geology and paleontology. Without the fossils and the long periods of time that they represent, the evidence from
DNA, for example, would not be very compelling.
Earth scientists in the oil industry, myself included, know well
that sedimentary rocks are miles thick in many basins around the world, because oil and gas wells often penetrate miles into
those rocks. We also know that similar sedimentary rocks have been pushed up to form mountains sometimes miles high.
Paleontologists
have examined rock samples both from high mountains and from a great many depths in a great many deep wells and have found
fossils of organisms in a large fraction of those samples. These fossils are used for dating the rock, among other things.
Once it is dated, we can predict with confidence that other fossil-bearing samples of the same rock formation even miles away
will have fossils of the same age. Marine fossils occur in rocks that formed from marine sediments, and fossils of land plants
and animals, or of lake dwellers, occur in rocks that formed inland, away from marine environments. The theory of evolution
combined with theories on the formation of sedimentary rocks accounts well for the large bulk of these observations.
Still,
no knowledgeable earth scientist would claim that evolution and historical geology are without their unexplained mysteries.
They have many, as one can tell from reading texts on the subjects. Nevertheless, observations that seem inconsistent with
the theories do not come close to disproving them.
•
Fundamentalist Christians continue to oppose the theory
of evolution for reasons that miss the mark. Some say that evolution is “only a theory” and for that reason is not to be
taken seriously. But all the major intellectual achievements of science are “only theories”.
The word “theory” in
ordinary conversation often means something quite different from what it means in science, sometimes almost the opposite.
To a scientist in hard sciences such as physics, theory is often taken to be a kind of underlying reality. Careful observations
over a long period can undermine a theory; but, depending on specifics, if observations appear to disagree with an accepted
theory, the observations may be questioned initially more than the theory. If the observations become well established, they
may be interpreted so as to force a fit to the theory.
In ordinary conversation, on the other hand, people often
speak of theory as something to be contrasted with reality: A theory is a tentative explanation of questionable validity—a
“good guess”. In soft sciences such as sociology, and in other sciences when a theory is either novel or suspect, the meaning
of the word is closer to the conversational meaning.
In formal scientific usage the word “theory” refers to principles
and relationships that tie together bodies of phenomena. Theories are unifying concepts. They describe or define the reality
believed to underlie phenomena and their interrelationships, where a phenomenon is an object or event of nature, something
that can in principle be measured. A theory is a conceptual framework that enables scientists to make sense of existing
data and to see how to proceed with further investigations.
It is safe to say that no one ever proves a scientific
theory, and often it is very difficult to disprove one, also. Theories are consistent with and supported by facts, not proved
by them. No matter how well a theory seems to accommodate the facts, it is always possible that new discoveries will make
it untenable. Only if a theory successfully got to the mythical bottom of things, to the essence of physical reality, could
we regard it as proved. Scientists thus accept theories not because they are proved but because they are good or beautiful,
and they reject theories because they are bad or inelegant.
A good theory is one that explains and predicts many
observations accurately, while a beautiful or elegant theory is one that, with a few simple principles or equations, accounts
for widely disparate observations. Theories of quantum mechanics have been very good but often messy, while theories of gravitation,
plate tectonics and organic evolution are beautiful. None of the theories widely accepted by modern scientists is likely
to be disproved. Any of them could be abandoned at some future date, but only on one condition: Someone must discover a
theory that is better.
As long as no one comes up with a theory that explains more than these do, or explains just
as much in a more elegant way, we will continue to accept the theories we have even if we know of observations that we think
do not fit. The human mind is ingenious in its ability to accommodate facts within a theory, and it usually does so, even
if it must resort to inelegance.
Finding an intact human skeleton embedded in a massive, undisturbed Carboniferous
limestone might seriously challenge the theory of evolution, but no amount of digging is likely to come up with such a discovery.
Hence theories like the theory of evolution are acceptable theories not because they explain everything in their sphere, nor
because they are readily susceptible of disproof—which they are not, but because they explain so many things so much better
than any known alternate theory.
Even if a better theory than organic evolution comes on the scene, it must accommodate
all the observations that the present theory accommodates, including the millions of cubic miles of fossil-bearing sedimentary
rocks laid out oftentimes neatly in flat layers, at other times in underground hills and valleys, and sometimes also in high
mountains. And don’t forget the intact carbonate reefs full of fossils sometimes found a mile or two beneath the Earth’s
surface! It is practically inconceivable that any such improved theory would agree more closely with the biblical creation
story than the presently accepted theory.
•
So God appears to have lost. But all who know him know he does
not lose. Every loss he turns into victory. How will he do it this time?
One thing we know about the way God works
is that he has this brinkmanship tendency: He allows damage to grow and accumulate to the point where victory seems impossible,
and then he pulls it off. Abraham’s wife Sarah gave birth to her only son, Isaac, the one who inherited the promise of God,
only after she had passed menopause. And consider what Jesus’ ministry might have been had he come only a few decades later
than he did, so that his teaching, instead of taking place in the relatively tranquil period when it did, would have competed
with events preceding and possibly including the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.
I’ve come to see this apparent brinkmanship
mostly as another sign of his love: Whenever God acts boldly, he offends many. So, to offend the fewest possible, he holds
off as long as possible. Jesus captured something of this quality of God in his parable of the weeds among wheat. God lets
the weeds grow to avoid the damage that pulling the weeds might do to the wheat.
This tendency of God to let the
damage grow also has a very high value for me personally. As I point out later, I would have rejected God’s advances if the
world had testified powerfully of him when he came to me. I am his because, instead, he came to me with reputation thoroughly
damaged.
Now, in our time, to confront the powerful opponents we face requires a powerful response, some new revelation
of God.
•
In this chapter I have spoken of science as if science has been warring with God. In reality science
has not opposed God, but its findings have often made faith difficult for many of his people. And the piling up of success
after success in science has tended to make God look weak or unimportant by comparison. Individual scientists by denying
God and trumpeting their atheism as an ineluctable consequence of science have made matters worse. It is not that science
is fundamentally evil; it is not. It is rather that faith needs a new footing. Science is indeed from below, but so are
humans.
Now that I am more mature in my faith and perspective, I am confident that God has eagerly awaited the success
of science. I myself have been a scientist and, with my colleagues, used up some millions of corporate dollars in making
a contribution to my specialty. As a job, I highly recommend scientific research. Its methods are atheistic, but they do
not require its practitioners to jettison faith.
Scientists have learned an immense amount by leaving God out of
their investigations. The result is that humans now have a much clearer idea than ever of who they are in the world. We
have gained a degree of independence unimagined by our ancestors. As such free beings we are now ready to be bound to God
in deepest love. That is what God has been waiting for.
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Postscript on evolution
Organic evolution is
such a central teaching of the scientific creation myth and has such significance for the way we view ourselves that it warrants
further comment. Discussing it at greater length is important also because many even outside fundamentalism cannot believe
that we owe our existence solely to mechanisms such as natural selection.
It is helpful at the outset to distinguish
what we know from what scientists assert as part of the theory. What we know from fossils in sedimentary rock, independently
of the theory, is that vast numbers of organisms of a very large number of different kinds have existed on Earth. Those that
have existed in any geologic period have included some kinds that had not existed in earlier times and others that did not
survive into later times. The earliest kinds were relatively simple organisms such as bacteria. Those that followed were
more complex but relatively small. Intermediate kinds included members both complex and large but often very unlike organisms
living today. The latest kinds, starting about 65 million years ago, became more and more like organisms living today.
Given
these facts the question for scientists and everyone else is what unifying principle can best tie the facts together. One
principle might be that God created out of nothing a reproducing set of each of these diverse organisms. When we understand
that such arbitrary acts of creation would have had to occur millions of times over hundreds of millions of years, and that
few or none of the early kinds of created life forms survive today, this principle loses much of its appeal. It not only
makes God seem to use his creative powers capriciously but also gives the impression that he didn’t know what he was doing.
Such a theory of special creations does not stand a chance of widespread acceptance as a scientific theory even among
those willing to allow God into scientific formulations. It would be excluded on grounds of inelegance alone.
Another
principle might be that God in collaboration with the material world created each succeeding kind out of the existing kind
that most closely resembled the new kind. But this principle stripped of God’s intervention is simply the theory of evolution.
The unifying principle of scientists is thus that all later kinds of organisms in some way came forth from earlier
kinds. What most scientists further assert—and here I do not include myself—is that this evolving from one kind into another
happened because of purely random genetic mutations. The mutations gave rise to traits that gave the new organisms a survival
advantage.
I take exception to this view primarily because I cannot accept that anything of deep significance to
me, such as how I got here, happened as a result of purely random processes. Furthermore, as Phillip Johnson in his book,
Darwin on Trial, cogently argues, no one has demonstrated that random processes are adequate to account for observed life
forms.
The widely accepted statement that purely random genetic mutations can account for all observed life forms
hence is only speculation. There is no evidence that random genetic mutations account for any life form. This element of
speculation diminishes the theory of evolution as a scientific theory, but it preserves the theory’s compatibility with the
atheistic principles of the scientific method.
The mechanism of purely random genetic mutation has powerful scientific
appeal because it does not require intervention of God or other entities beyond the reach of the scientific method. The combination
of random mutation with natural selection provides a complete, self-contained mechanism for evolution and thereby makes the
theory scientifically satisfying. But powerful scientific appeal should not be confused with truth. Scientists will never
be able to prove that genetic changes down through time happened at random any more than I will ever be able to prove scientifically
that spiritual beings were acting.
Genetic mutations indeed probably do account for changes in life forms and the
overall variety of life forms, but if so, the mutations had to occur in just the right way. The problem many of us have with
genetic mutation as the mechanism for evolution is that, without guidance, it seems so unlikely as to be impossible. We therefore
believe that there was guidance, and God provided it.
How could the world declare the glory of God if God were not
involved in its creation? In other words, there are gaps that God had to fill in order to bring life forms to their present
state. But we cannot conclusively prove that there are such gaps. Just as atheists cannot prove that God does not exist,
we cannot prove that compelling support for the scientific mechanism for evolution will never emerge. We accept God’s role
on faith and because we recognize that the world testifies of him.
Still, we acknowledge that scientists who do not
accept God have been able to argue plausibly for a version of organic evolution that does not need God. Richard Dawkins’
books, River out of Eden, for example, are persuasive for many who do not recognize God. But the arguments, as they must,
rely heavily on plausibility, because they deal with how things might have happened in the past and not with observed events.
People like myself, for whom God is inescapable, find Dawkins’ arguments interesting and sometimes ingenious but fundamentally
wanting, fundamentally not compelling.
Such materialistic views portray a world without ultimate meaning. Dawkins
revels in this meaninglessness and implies that no discipline exists anyway that can provide ultimate meaning. It is true
that no such scientific discipline exists. But the scientific method is not the sole source of truth. Ultimate meaning can
come only from above, from God. Those of us who know God do not know all the details of the meaning he gives us, but that
he gives us meaning is evident.
God acting jointly with his creation has made all beings that live today as well
as those that have lived in the past, but he has not made each such being from dust or out of nothing. For example, we humans
have human parents. Neither has God made a reproducing pair of each kind from dust. Why would God, if he created each kind
from dust or from nothing, waste his time and energy making the vast array of organisms that we have seen emerge and then
die out over hundreds of millions of years when his ultimate goal is to fulfill himself in his creation? Rather, all the
different kinds of organisms have existed for a reason, and the reason is that God’s creative work has involved intimate but
gentle interaction with his world, as a husband with his wife, not as a toy maker with his toys. The creation has been an
active participant in its own development all along; the creation itself has helped to determine what forms its organisms
should take.
Exactly how has God acted in the world as creator? The evolutionists construct their plausibility arguments.
Can the people of God come up with comparable arguments? Our arguments cannot be as detailed or as specific, at least not
yet. Knowledge of God, after all, apprehends primarily the whole and only at much lower priority the parts.
Nevertheless
I perceive that God acts in the environment as the balancer, the equilibrator. He works subtly with all the parts simultaneously
to achieve the desired equilibrium, the desired whole. No part is too small or too insignificant to escape his attention:
“The hairs of your head are all numbered.” He achieves the desired whole by working intimately with all the parts simultaneously.
That is the impression he gives when he engulfs me.
God seems to operate more by feel than by carefully thought-out
schemes. He has a good feel for everything, and his intuition is beyond superb. What he seems to lack is good communication
skills. He is not very articulate. For example, the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah are often ambiguous and rarely
easy to interpret. Some scientists say that God is a mathematician. Perhaps he is, but I doubt he uses mathematical equations.
My impression so far is that it’s all by intuition.
The theory of evolution is at a disadvantage compared with most
scientific theories because it is concerned primarily with reconstructing and interpreting the past. Almost all of its important
phenomena have occurred already and cannot be duplicated today. No given effect from the prehistoric past can be attributed
unambiguously to a specific cause. No matter how many “missing links,” or transitional forms, the paleontologists find in
the fossil record, no one can conclusively prove that they really are links instead of just independent kinds of organisms.
The theory nonetheless is a beautiful theory because it conceptually ties all the fossils together as well as all organisms
living today and provides a rich source of hypotheses for further investigations.
People of God have an obligation
to themselves, if to no one else, to formulate spiritual views of the world that counter materialistic views. The apostle
Paul said (2 Corinthians 10:5), “We tear down reasonings and every lofty notion lifted up against knowledge of God, and we
lead every thought captive into obedience to Christ.”
Yet while we need to articulate worldviews that allow God to
operate, we need to be flexible. It is important that we not give too much emphasis to this or that failure of science.
In a few years or decades some of those failures could turn into successes. Does evolution seem implausible because there
are too few transitional forms in the fossil record? Some very likely would turn up if we were to excavate and sieve, say,
an additional well-chosen ten thousand cubic miles of sedimentary rock.
Constructing arguments that oppose a strictly
materialistic interpretation of the world is not an attempt to prove the existence of God but rather an undertaking that allows
us to be comfortable with spiritual interpretations of the world. Searching for proof of God in the gaps would be wrong.
It would have much in common with the Jews’ search for a sign in Jesus’ day. The emphasis would be wrong.
God proves
his existence to us by pouring himself into us. Let our desire for proof be for this kind of proof only. To seek a sign
outside ourselves is not appropriate. What is appropriate is to find words of God that enable faith to triumph in this war
of ideas against materialistic philosophies. We cannot find God in gaps, but we can exploit known gaps to come up with an
intellectually and spiritually satisfying worldview.
Addendum to the postscript
A possibility I did not consider
when I first wrote this postscript is that God could have provided his creation at the outset with properties that he knew
would lead inevitably to beings he could merge with in love. I got the idea from Paul Davies’ fond speculation that “…the
laws of the universe [may] have engineered their own comprehension.” That is, the physical properties of the world in many
ways seem fine-tuned to favor life. If that fine tuning further made the emergence of intelligent life inevitable through
natural processes, then God would not have had to guide organic evolution, and the evolutionists’ mechanism of random mutation
combined with natural selection would have been all that was needed. That’s a big if; but an advantage of such a scenario
is that we, the beings now basking in God’s love, would have arisen more truly independently of him and would perhaps be more
ideally suited as marriage partners than otherwise.
While this possibility would vindicate the evolutionists and
their mechanism, it conflicts with elements of the history of God’s people and of my personal experience of God. It is absolutely
clear to me that God has intervened from time to time in my life and in human history. As I indicate in several places in
this book, my personal knowledge of God includes the sense that he influences the whole of my environment. Ultimately I have
no reason to believe that he was not similarly involved with the world before his ancient people or I arrived on the scene.
We nevertheless can still be suitable marriage partners for him because God’s activities in the world have almost
always been very subtle. So subtle, indeed, that it is as if we emerged in the world independently of him.
God is
not the sort of person who would start up a universe, leave it alone to develop and then rejoin it only in our historical
times. The God I know is subtle but likes to be intimate with his world.
Furthermore, I am personally satisfied
that there is good fossil evidence that God was active in organic evolution. The evidence is that there are few or no partial
organs in fossils. That is, by way of crude example, if fish grew legs and lungs to become land animals, there would have
to be many intermediate stages because of the nature of random mutations, and these intermediate stages for the same reason
would have had to exist over long periods. So why don’t we see fossils of, say, fish with femurs and fins but no feet? The
evolutionists have their answers, but to date I have not found them convincing. What seems more likely to me is that God
speeded and smoothed the transitions and thereby largely avoided monstrosities.
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