by Tommy Karlas
Up until very recent times there has been a sort of myth in contemporary culture that science and belief in God are incompatible. While it is true that roughly half of all scientists are unbelievers, a select few say their unbelief is because of their science. And this still leaves half of them who do believe in God. However, those few unbelievers say that you don’t need religion because science tells us everything we could ever need to know. But can science really answer all the important questions? An MIT physicist, Ian Hutchinson, says in his book “Monopolizing Knowledge” that while science is really important, it is limited to it’s particular kind of knowledge. He calls this claim that science can answer everything “scientism.” Because when it comes to the big questions like: why are we here? what is our purpose? where are we going?…science has very little to say about these things. It’s not the right tool set for those questions.
So science is not contrary to religion, it’s complementary to it. Indeed, many of the people that founded and built up science believed in God like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. They started from their theistic, or deistic, belief that the universe was rational because it had a Creator. Why would we expect there to be any intelligence or order in nature from a purely materialistic, or naturalistic viewpoint? And in fact, many unbelieving scientists have come to believe in God because of science. One of the most famous and outspoken atheists of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, came to believe in God because of the incredible design and sophistication of DNA, and because of the extremely finely-tuned laws of the universe. Bill Gates said that “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” It has it’s own language in a four letter alphabet containing 3.5 billion bits of information in exactly the right order. Someone once said the chances of the very first single cell (which DNA was in) forming just by time + matter + chance is like a dictionary forming from an explosion of a printing press.
However, the biggest reason Flew, and many other scientists, have come to believe in God is because of the incredible fine-tuning of the universe. In the last several decades of scientific discovery, believing and unbelieving scientists alike have all recognized, and been astonished by, the finely tuned values of the 20 or so constants that govern the universe such as the force of gravity, the strong and weak nuclear force, the speed of light, and so on.
Picture a control board with 20 nobs that control the values of these constants. If you were to turn, or change, even one of these constant’s values in the teeny tiniest bit either way, no universe or life would exist at all. Stephen Hawking, in his book “A Brief History Of Time,” writes that the initial conditions for the universe—it’s density and its rate of expansion—would have to be very finely tuned for the formation of stars and planets and creatures like us. If the overall density of the universe were changed by even 0.0000000000001 percent, no stars or galaxies could have formed. Hawking adds, “If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size…It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
The Astrophysicist Michael Turner writes, “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bull’s-eye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.” Notre Dame professor Alvin Plantiga said it would be like a poker game where one person gets dealt 20 straight hands in a row of 4 aces. Maybe you couldn’t prove he was cheating, but he’s still going to get his butt kicked.
And it’s true that science cannot prove God exists the same way it can’t prove He doesn’t. But science does show that belief in God is not unreasonable. And there are all sorts of factors why someone may or may not believe which are not purely rational. But the idea that “only that which can be proven empirically is true” is false. Because even that statement cannot be empirically proven, so it falls under its own weight. And yet, that still keeps many from exploring the real merits and possibilities of Christianity’s truth.
I believe it's a healthy thing to have doubts. And we should not only acknowledge our doubts, but also the doubts of those around us. Even Christ had his moment of doubt on the cross when he cried out “My God, My God. Why have You forsaken Me?” But hopefully we can also keep an open mind and try to only be interested in what is true, and be able to challenge our beliefs at any age or stage. Because if there is a God, it will make a big difference how we live our lives and treat others and see our ultimate future. And if we were created by someone, then nothing could be more important than knowing the Creator.
