Return Of The God Hypothesis Quotes

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth. Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!". If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down.

For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.

Augustine captured the two ideas in two Latin coinages, which prima facie cut against each other: imago dei and peccatum originis. The former says that humans are unique as a species in our having been created in the image and likeness of God, while the latter says that all humans are born having inherited the legacy of Adam’s error, “original sin.”61

As I thought of the leaders of the land and the populace in general, I wondered where our Washington was today. Where is the leader who will stand unashamed of his love and trust in God? Who will rise up and invoke the covenants of old? Who will lead the nation in shunning sin, promoting righteousness, and preserving that liberty God has granted? Where is our Captain Moroni? 'Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men' (Alma 48:17). We the people of this covenant nation need to find men and women like this. We need to engage them, promote them, elect them. We need to become them. And we need to do it quickly. In so many ways, it seems, we are falling further and further away from this ideal. ...Speaking of America and her covenant, President Gordon B. Hinckley declared: 'For a good while there has been going on in this nation a process that I have termed the secularization of America. . . . We as nation are forsaking the Almighty, and I fear that He will begin to forsake us. We are shutting the door against the God whose sons and daughters we are. . . . Future blessings will come only as we deserve them. Can we expect peace and prosperity, harmony and goodwill, when we turn our backs on the Source of strength? If we are to continue to have the freedoms that evolved within the structure that was the inspiration of the Almighty to our Founding Fathers, we must return to the God who is their true Author. . . . God bless America, for it is His creation.

Professor Whitehead points out that centuries of belief in a God who combined ’the personal energy of Jehovah’ with the ‘rationality of a Greek philosopher’ first produced that firm expectation of systematic order which rendered possible the birth of modern science. Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died; it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared— the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age. But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.’ The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute. The Being who threatens Nature’s claim to omnipotence confirms her in her lawful occasions. Give us this ha’porth of tar and we will save the ship. The alternative is really much worse. Try to make Nature absolute and you will find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. You get the deadlock, as in Hume. Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.

In a memorable conclusion to his book, Jastrow observed that the discovery of a definite cosmic beginning: is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. . . . The development is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.64

more reason to expect an opened lock in the case of an intelligently guided try than we would if the try was unguided

Newton thought that “knowledge of God’s power and wisdom could be inferred from the intelligence seemingly displayed in the designs of nature.

Intellectual historians and historians of science typically identify the shift away from the theistic foundations of modern science with three major developments in Western intellectual history: first, the Enlightenment idea that human reason could replace and function autonomously from religious belief;1 second, the increasing skepticism about the existence of God, or at least about the soundness of arguments for God’s existence, among many Enlightenment philosophers; and third, the rise of scientific materialism and with it both new norms of scientific practice and a worldview allegedly based on science that affirms matter and energy, rather than God, as the fundamental reality from which everything else comes.

What is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes?

Poe proposed that the universe was not old enough to give light sufficient time to get to the earth from the most remote regions of the vast night sky.17 And if it was not old enough, that meant it was not of infinite age.

Within a decade, Borde, Vilenkin, and a third physicist, Alan Guth, one of the original proponents of inflation, had come to a startling conclusion: the universe must have had a beginning, even if inflationary cosmology is correct.

How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent?”84

Consequently, Vilenkin argues that evidence for a beginning is now almost unavoidable. As he explains, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

As Paul Davies (Fig. 7.6) has marveled, “The really amazing thing is not that life on earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.

The fine tuning of these properties has puzzled physicists not only because of their extreme improbability, but also because there doesn’t seem to be any necessary physical or logical reason why they have to be as they are. Philosophers of science call such fine-tuning features “contingent” properties, since they could conceivably have been different without violating either the fundamental laws of physics or any necessary principle of logic or mathematics.

Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only “explosion” of new living forms. The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. Evolutionary theorist Eugene Koonin describes this as a “biological big bang” pattern. As he notes, “Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups . . . do not seem to fit the pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.

Many have also noted that this fine tuning strongly suggests design by a preexistent intelligence. As the British physicist Paul Davies put it in 1988, “The impression of design is overwhelming.”31 Similarly, astrophysicist Luke Barnes notes: “Fine tuning suggests that, at the deepest level that physics has reached, the Universe is well put-together. . . . The whole system seems well thought out, something that someone planned and created.

Over the years, as Hoyle thought more about the discovery of the exact resonance level of carbon that he had predicted, and especially about all the factors that had to be just right to make carbon relatively easy to produce inside stars, he became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature to make the universe life-permitting.

As the British biologist and philosopher J. B. S. Haldane once said, “If mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I [would] have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.”23

Burnham’s comment, offered in 1992, came in response to the discovery of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) by the COBE satellite, providing another dramatic confirmation of the big bang model and its implication of a beginning. Yet it is not only cosmology that has rendered the “God hypothesis” newly respectable. As one surveys several classes of evidence from the natural sciences—cosmology, astronomy, physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and paleontology—the God hypothesis emerges as an explanation with unique scope and power. Theism explains an ensemble of metaphysically significant events in the history of the universe and life more simply, more adequately, and more comprehensively than major competing metaphysical systems, including not only materialism and naturalism, but also pantheism and deism

Scientific materialists have traditionally answered that question by affirming that matter, energy, and/or the laws of physics are the entities from which everything else came and that those entities have existed from eternity past as the uncreated foundation of all that exists. Matter, energy, and physical laws are, therefore, viewed by materialists as self-existent.

Moreover, since nature had been designed by the same rational mind who had designed the human mind, the early modern scientists (or, again, “natural philosophers”)54 who began to investigate nature also assumed that nature was intelligible. It could be understood by the human intellect. The founders of modern science assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos, not a chaos.

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Charles Townes has said, “as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it’s remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren’t just the way

Another biblical idea influenced the development of an observational and experimental approach. Even as scientists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw human reason as a gift of a rational God, these same scientists, many influenced by the Protestant Reformation and ideas from the church fathers recovered during the late Middle Ages, also recognized the fallibility of humans and, therefore, the fallibility of human ideas about nature.

Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.

Müller’s talk echoed his earlier technical publications making the same points. In a provocative technical book, “Origination of Organismal Form,” Müller and biologist Stuart Newman argued that neo-Darwinism has “no theory of the generative.”12 In other words, neo-Darwinism cannot explain what caused new forms of life to arise. In this book, published nearly 150 years after the Origin of Species, Müller and Newman characterized the “origination of organismal form” as an unsolved problem for evolutionary theory. Yet, again, the origin of biological form is precisely what Darwinism, and later neo-Darwinism, claimed to explain. Other evolutionary biologists have echoed this concern. Many now repeat an old aphorism affirming that mutation and natural selection can account for “the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest”13—that is, small-scale variations, but not large-scale innovations in biological form.

The laws of nature not only reflected the past action of a divine creator who established the conditions necessary for orderly and regular natural processes, but the fundamental laws of nature also depend upon the ongoing and sustaining activity of a divine legislator.

The discovery of the fine tuning of the universe, like the discovery of the beginning of the universe itself, represents an effect that requires a cause with specific attributes, including both transcendence and intelligence.

Do we just have to accept some worldview or another as a presupposition through which we interpret reality? Or can we rationally evaluate different worldviews as competing metaphysical hypotheses and determine which, if any, is most likely to be true? And if so, can scientific evidence, perhaps even evidence about biological and cosmological origins, help us evaluate the likely truth of competing systems of thought (Fig

We apparently live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe,” where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right strengths, the contingent properties of the universe have just the right characteristics, and the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning exhibited just the right configuration to make life possible. These facts taken together are so puzzling that physicists have given them a name—the fine-tuning problem.

assumed both the capability and the fallibility of human reason.

Neither wanted to claim that these discoveries “proved” the existence of God. They cautioned that science cannot “prove” anything with absolute certainty.

the Christian monastic Anthony the Abbot referred to “created nature” as a “book,” one always at his “disposal” whenever he wanted “to read God’s words.

inwehnsdysk]ifhsnmcpew,m.sa Time and tide wait for no man. Clearly, there is a qualitative difference

the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.

The classic nursery rhyme speaks of a broken Humpty, whom not even “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” can reassemble into a properly organized egg. Similarly, Tompa and Rose have demonstrated mathematically that even having all the requisite parts for a cell will not ensure that those ingredients will self-organize into a living system.