What Comes After Darwin?

Recently a computer scientist of some note, David Gelernter, made some waves by announcing that he no longer believes in Darwinism. He came to this conclusion by reading critiques of the theory from prominent intelligent design theorists. He has not embraced intelligent design, but its core critique of Darwinism seems cogent to him: that random chance plus natural selection is mathematically insufficient at the molecular level to account for all the genetic information in complex organisms. I, too, find these arguments very persuasive. Coupled with the fact that I believe absolutely in God as the Creator of the universe and everything in it I have no trouble identifying who the Intelligent Designer might be.

Of course, Darwinism is still the mainstream theory. In fact, “mainstream” doesn’t quite capture it. Rare indeed is the working biologist who doesn’t believe evolution by natural selection explains all life on earth. However, there are thorny questions, and even rumblings of doubt in some corners. If Darwinism is wrong (which of course is what I believe) then it stands to reason that further research would eventually cause increasing doubts, and one day perhaps a crisis leading to a paradigm shift. What theory would take its place?

The problem with intelligent design for most scientists is that it "reeks" of religion. Intelligent design advocates can claim that it is not a religious theory, but they conveniently choose not to address the question of who the designer(s) might be. Apart from theism, you are still left with the need to explain the origin of the designers, and if we couldn't have evolved, neither could they. A secular scientist will not see intelligent design as a viable alternative to Darwinism. Their worldview is materialism, the idea that space-time, matter and energy are all there is. If Darwinism fails what is their fallback position?

Interestingly, Gelernter has settled on panpsychism - the idea that all matter in the universe is conscious at some level. He thinks that natural processes might tend to favor the development of higher consciousness, which would explain how we seemingly evolved against impossible odds. This idea clearly needs significant development to get beyond the hand waving stage. Although it strikes most people as highly implausible, it does have its adherents. But if not panpsychism, what other alternative might the scientific community turn to?

A few secular scientists, in response to the mathematical difficulties of natural selection, have settled on the theory of panspermia. Prominent adherents include the late Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA. Panspermia is the idea that life originated on some world other than earth and was seeded here, accidentally or on purpose. It doesn't necessarily imply that the source was an intelligent species. It might have been microbes hitching a ride on a rock blasted out from some other planet and landing here as a meteorite. But, like intelligent design, panspermia doesn't remove the origin of life problem, it just relocates it. If evolution couldn't work here, how could it work anywhere?

As I was thinking about this today, it occurred to me that the next secular origin story is likely to be the simulation hypothesis, which posits that the universe we live in is actually a simulation. While this idea has been around for a while as science fiction (think The Matrix), recently it has been popularized by Elon Musk and others as a serious theory. It's a bit like intelligent design, but without the religious implication. If we live in a simulation it is not necessary to explain how we came to exist by natural processes operating in the universe according to the observed natural laws. Of course, you must still explain where the designers came from, but their universe might have different physical laws that make evolution plausible.

At first blush, this idea of living in a simulation seems even more wildly implausible than panpsychism and panspermia. Why is it becoming popular? How could anyone believe they are not actually real? Simply because many computer scientists can imagine one day building such a simulation themselves.

Many computer scientists already embrace the idea that a true conscious intelligence could be hosted in a computer. This is called strong AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the exponential growth of computer power over the past few decades and the advent of quantum computing, many thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil not only think AGI is inevitable but is something to be embraced. They even imagine transferring their own consciousness into a future computer system and achieving a kind of secular immortality. To a materialist this is an intoxicating idea – eternal life without a pesky deity who must be obeyed.

If AGI is possible it suggests that a simulated world is possible. But if you grew up playing immersive computer games and you believe AGI is just around the corner, it's not so great a leap to consider that maybe this has already happened, and we are in fact already artificial minds in an artificial world. Musk believes it likely that this has already happened thousands of times, and we are living in a simulation of a simulation of a simulation, ad nauseum – on top of a stack of simulated worlds built by simulated beings.

Should we be persuaded? What is the evidence? I am skeptical. First, no one has yet created an AGI, or has any idea how to do so. It needs more than computer power; it needs an understanding of consciousness and how it arises. Notwithstanding this fact, many people are confident they will succeed in creating an AGI. They consider the recent advances in computing power, neuroscience and so-called weak or narrow AI (facial recognition, etc.) to represent a trend that will naturally result in AGI. With a sufficient understanding of consciousness and sufficiently powerful hardware they are confident AGI will happen.

Second, underlying this confidence in AGI is the assumption that consciousness is nothing more than a computational process. This is more of a philosophical position than a scientific theory. It’s called the computational theory of mind, and it is a popular idea rooted in materialism. If we are nothing more than a complex physical system and we are conscious, couldn’t a different type of mechanism also be conscious? And if we are merely a mechanism, wouldn't it be possible to simulate that mechanism based on known physical laws?

It should be noted that I have glossed over an important question: would an AGI actually be conscious, or just simulating the effects of consciousness? For Kurzweil, this is important because he still wants to be “Kurzweil” after he transfers his mind into a computer. This question has been debated for decades (e.g., John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment), but most AGI proponents believe AGI would be conscious because, under their worldview, there’s really no difference between consciousness and a simulation of consciousness. Again, this is not science – yet anyway. It remains a philosophical question.

My own position as a Christian is of course that we are more than a complex physical system. We have an eternal spirit that will live beyond the death of our bodies. The mind is more than just a physical process. I have argued earlier that our conscious experiences and decisions are something more than just the brain activity they are correlated with. If I am right, a simulated brain would not become a conscious mind, and a conscious mind could not exist in a simulated world.

The common thread underlying Darwinism, panspermia, panpsychism, and the simulation hypothesis is materialism.  Each of these theories is, in some ways, more fantastic than the previous one. If Gelernter and others could hold their materialist philosophy more lightly they might be able to see that intelligent design is a plausible alternative. I would argue only that they consider the possibility that God exists and see whether the brute fact of our existence as conscious, intelligent, free moral agents is more plausible under the God hypothesis than under any other. I believe it is.

Born to Believe

I have mentioned before that belief in God is an almost universal element of human culture. As the pastor of my church has said, we are all born to belief. It takes years of training to become an atheist. When secular scientists note this tendency they remark at how evolution has disposed us to believe such things, and they debate the survival value of such beliefs. But I ask, isn’t it just possible that our first instincts are correct, and that they are instilled by God?

Now a new study has been published which says that humans may be naturally disposed to believe in Creation. More precisely, these psychologists have discovered that everyone has an instinctive tendency to ascribe a sense of purpose to the events around them. They have discovered (surprise!) that it is not normal to believe life is a random chain of natural causes with no purpose, no meaning and no direction. Again, they have found that the most highly educated people are the ones least likely to make this "mistake." Yes, they directly call it a mistake. You can almost hear the condescension dripping from their statements. We who are educated "know" that this is a foolish misconception. Naturally, they lump children, the religious and the uneducated together, noting that they are more inclined to this "erroneous" thinking.

I don't have access to the original paper, but in the New Scientist article I linked to above not once do these scientists speak to the possibility that the inborn belief in purpose might be correct. Nor do they realize when they have stepped outside of their field and are discussing philosophy and theology rather than science. It is a testament to their own indoctrination into a particular worldview that they overlook these things. It is more evidence, if we needed any, that the prevailing intellectual mindset today has completely confused natural science with philosophical materialism, according the latter an unassailable position as "fact" that it does not deserve.

Panspermia Expelled

If you saw the movie Expelled you will remember that Ben Stein had some fun at Richard Dawkins’ expense when Dawkins brought up the theory of panspermia. Stein took him to mean that aliens might be responsible for the origin of life on Earth and played it for a laugh. The theater audience at the screening I attended obligingly snickered and poked each other in the ribs. But panspermia is a serious scientific theory, although it has the misfortune to carry a name which evokes middle school giggles. I would suggest that if you don’t want people to giggle at your theories (e.g., intelligent design) then it is bad form to giggle at their theories. The irony is that advocates of panspermia, while admittedly few, are actually allies of a sort with creationists and others who doubt the plausibility of traditional evolutionary theories. This is one reason why panspermia is often greeted with derision by mainstream scientists. To admit this theory has any reason to exist is to admit there are doubts about evolution as normally understood. So let us examine briefly what panspermia is all about.

First let’s review a little background on the theory of evolution. It is important to realize that evolution is not actually a theory about the origin of life but the origin of species. It states that natural selection operating on random genetic variation will produce, over time, new species better adapted to their environment than previously existing species. This process requires self-replicating organisms on which to operate, so it cannot explain how life began. You need another theory for that. The first organisms would have been much simpler than current life forms. Exactly how simple is a matter of some debate, but they couldn’t be too simple because they would need some sort of genetic code and the ability to both replicate and mutate.

Since no one knows how simple a self-replicating organism can be, no one knows how long you might have to wait for one to form by spontaneous chemical reactions in the presumed primordial soup. And no one knows how many mutations would be required for it to evolve into the simplest single-celled creatures we observe today. Therefore, no one knows the time required for such a chain of events to occur by random processes. It seems undeniable, however, that it would take a very, very long time. It is therefore convenient that modern scientists believe the Earth is very ancient indeed – about 4.5 billion years old. Of course, if you believe in a young Earth based on Genesis there’s no time for anything but a miracle. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept the old Earth chronology since we are seeking to understand competing naturalistic theories of origin.

Geologists have discovered fossilized cyanobacteria in rocks which they estimate are 3.5 billion years old. This gives a window of about a billion years for the origin of life. However, it is thought that due to heavy meteor bombardment in the early years the Earth might not have been habitable until about 3.9 billion years ago. The very oldest sedimentary rocks also contain some chemical evidence of photosynthetic life forms existing about 3.8 billion years ago. This narrows the window considerably, to as little as 100 million years. That’s still a very, very long time, but it seems uncomfortably short when you contemplate how many improbable steps might be required to produce cyanobacteria. These bacteria are the simplest life forms in existence today, but they are still exceedingly complicated.

There are three possible responses to such a short window. You can either 1) take it as evidence that life spontaneously develops quickly and easily given the right conditions, 2) assume we got really, really lucky, or 3) start casting about for another theory. Most mainstream scientists accept some form of 1) or 2). Advocates of panspermia take the third position. They ask, “What if life originated elsewhere in the universe and was seeded here on Earth?” These scientists still believe in a naturalistic origin of life occurring somewhere in the universe. They just think the odds are low it happened here in only 100 million years. The universe is estimated to be about 13 billion years old. If life originated elsewhere then the window opens back up to almost 10 billion years. This hypothesis bolsters the plausibility of natural origins in two ways. First, it considerably increases the time available for life to originate, because there are presumably many solar systems in the universe which are billions of years older than ours. Second, it means that life only needed to develop on one planet out of millions or billions. Then it could spread to all the others.

Contrary to Ben Stein’s humorous questions, panspermia doesn’t imply intelligent aliens arriving in flying saucers to farm the ancient Earth. Rather, it hypothesizes that some forms of microscopic life were hardy enough to hitch a ride on meteors and cosmic dust. They survived for many millions of years before falling by chance to the Earth and finding here a hospitable environment in which to reproduce. This strikes most scientists as very far-fetched, but not quite as far-fetched as you might think. There is evidence that dormant bacteria and spores can survive incredibly harsh conditions for thousands of years. There is also evidence that rocks blasted from the surface of Mars and the Moon by meteor strikes have landed on the Earth as meteorites. However, it seems much less likely such material would wind up on Earth from a distant solar system, or that even a hardy spore could survive such a long trip. The times and distances are a million times greater.

So in the competition between origin theories, scientists have to decide whether it is more plausible that life originated and evolved on Earth in 100 million years, or that organisms traveled interstellar distances and survived millions of years. Most hold the former position. You can see now why panspermia proponents are in a strange way allies with creationists. They do repudiate the divine origin of life, but they also challenge the plausibility of the traditional evolutionary timeline, and on the latter point I am in complete agreement. At the present state of knowledge it is impossible to put evolution on a quantitative basis. A very large, unknown sequence of improbable events had to occur to produce complex life forms. Proponents of evolution are reduced to little more than hand waving when it comes to justifying the assumption that all these unknown events could reasonably have occurred by chance in the time available, or even in 10 billion years on one in a billion planets.

In the face of such uncertainty we must fall back on our presuppositions. If you are philosophically convinced that life must have naturalistic origins you say to yourself, “Gee, I don’t know the mechanism and I can’t calculate the probability, but it must have happened or we wouldn’t be here, right?” On the other hand if you are a Christian like me you have another alternative. I believe that God created life and created us. I’m not sure exactly how he did it but I know he wasn’t limited to naturalistic processes. So I can look at the postulated sequence of improbable events and comfortably conclude it is more plausible to believe in miracles.

[Update - July 4, 2008] This recent article reports the discovery of chemical evidence for life on earth as early as 4.25 billion years ago. Mineralogists have discovered ancient rocks in Australia which contain an anomalously high ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13, normally considered an indicator of organic matter. If true (and it's really only suggestive) this puts an even greater squeeze on the time available for life to have evolved on Earth.

Expelled

We went to see the movie Expelled this weekend. I enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Sometimes this sort of thing is too polemical for my taste, even though I might agree with the premise. I had read several reviews from the evolutionist perspective that were complaining about several aspects of the film. For one thing, some of the evolutionists who were interviewed in the film complained that the nature of the project was misrepresented and that they were quoted out of context. Well, I don’t know whether they were lied to or not, but perhaps if they had understood that this movie was going to be strongly pro-Intelligent Design they might have declined. On the other hand, from what I have read of their positions I don’t think their views were distorted at all or taken out of context. I can see they might be mad because interviewer Ben Stein sometimes tried to make them look a bit foolish, but nowhere near as bad as what you see every week on 60 Minutes.

Another complaint I read was about interspersing the interviews with old film clips. I was prepared to cringe at this, but I discovered that mostly it was done for humorous effect and so was not as annoying as I expected. The one exception was Stein’s use of the debating H-bomb: comparing your opponent to Hitler. The reviewers complained that being an evolutionist doesn’t make you a Nazi. And while that’s true, it is also true that evolution was the inspiration for the eugenics movement, which Hitler followed to its chillingly logical conclusion. Stein’s tour of the Nazi death camps and his interview with the curator at Hadamar were sobering. While the evolutionists are right to point out that the eugenics movement does not logically constitute a disproof of evolution, it is nevertheless a testament to the evil influence a bad idea can have.

I had also read a complaint that the film never even defines the terms evolution and intelligent design, much less musters any evidence for or against them. Actually, in the course of the film a pretty good one sentence definition of each term is given, but they are correct that no evidence is offered. However, that wasn’t the point of the movie. It specifically attempts to show that anyone who speaks favorably of intelligent design in the sciences is systematically denied tenure or even employment. Now you can debate the particulars of each case, but I doubt that evolutionists really want to be defending the right of intelligent design supporters to be tenured science professors. I’m fully prepared to believe that making statements in favor of intelligent design will engender a strong prejudice from most tenure committees. How could it not? They have defined intelligent design as “non-science” - or maybe “nonsense.” Why not let them study it? Why not let them try to get papers published about it? It rings hollow to complain there’s no peer-reviewed literature on it and then fire anybody who tries.

There is one event surrounding the release of this movie which was very poorly handled. One of the scientists interviewed in the movie, PZ Meyers, was not allowed to attend a pre-release screening of the movie. I don’t think it matters whether he was invited or not, or whether it was supposed to be a private screening or not. This was a really rude and stupid thing to do. Throwing him and his family out of the theater was against the very point of the documentary, not to mention lacking in Christian hospitality. Predictably, the evolutionist blogs have been having a field day with this event. I hope that somebody connected with the film will try to contact Dr. Meyers and apologize. It won’t undo the public relations fallout, but it’s the right thing to do.

I doubt this movie will contribute much in the long run to resolving the debate over intelligent design. It probably has about as much chance of changing the minds of university faculties as a Michael Moore film has of turning Republicans into Democrats. This is not a debate between theories, but a debate between worldviews. Such issues do not get resolved by scientific evidence.

Light into Darkness

Today is a special day for me. Of course it is Good Friday, which is special because on this day we commemorate Christ’s death for us on the cross. But for me, personally, March 21 is special for a different reason. This is the day when I remember God’s amazing grace that he showed in rescuing me, a scoffer and a blasphemer, from the path of destruction. This is the day when I was born again.

I was fourteen, which might seem a tender age to be considered a scoffer and a blasphemer. What can I say? In this respect I was quite precocious. I had always been interested in science. From the time I learned to read I devoured every science book and magazine I could get my hands on. I watched science TV shows, and whenever I had the chance went to science museums. When I attained the age of reason, which for me was about age twelve, I began to question the Christian upbringing my parents had given me. At that age, in seventh grade, I also came under the influence of a young and energetic science teacher. In my sheltered Bible Belt childhood, he was the first adult I ever met who freely admitted he didn’t believe in God.

Under these influences I decided I didn’t believe in God either. I became an agnostic. I wasn’t actually willing to state that God did not exist; I simply believed that it was impossible to know whether or not he exists. I had decided that I would only believe what could be scientifically proven. It seemed to me that if God exists he is by definition supernatural, so it is impossible by natural means to discover any evidence of his existence. You can’t see him. He doesn’t register on any scientific instruments. His existence is effectively undiscoverable. And though I didn’t say it explicitly, by implication his existence is irrelevant. What I did say, explicitly, is that anyone who does believe in God is a fool or an idiot.

My parents still made me go to church and Sunday School, although I argued with them about it. I also argued with my Sunday School teachers. Later, while sitting in the church service, I would occupy myself by looking around scornfully at all the foolish, and hypocritical, people around me in the pews. You probably have a pretty good picture by now that besides being an agnostic I was also an arrogant little twerp. It was a wonder I had any friends at all, but I travelled in a circle of friends who thought and acted just about the same way I did.

In ninth grade I had two godly women as Sunday School teachers. I was very rude to them. I told them I wouldn't believe in God without hard evidence. I ridiculed their faith, but they were very patient and loving. Their heart's desire was to lead each of us into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. One week they invited the class to attend a youth evangelistic service at another church. I only went because a couple of cute girls in the class asked me to.

At the service I saw hundreds of teenagers excited about Christ. The speaker presented the Gospel in a clear and moving way. He kept saying to give God a chance. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I despised hypocrites. So I quietly prayed, “God if you’re real, show me.” At that moment I felt an incredible rush of joy and ecstasy flow through my body. I was amazed. I realized that God had answered my prayer. Yet I began immediately to rationalize what had happened. I must be doing that to myself, I thought. It must be some sort of subconscious wish fulfillment. But the experience was so real and so obviously from outside of me that I could not easily dismiss it. So I prayed the same prayer again and it happened a second time – less intense, but accompanied by an absolute conviction that God is real, that everything the preacher had said about Jesus was true, and that my whole life had just changed. I was thunderstruck. I knew immediately that the foundations of my worldview had been overturned, not leaving a single stone on top of another. It was Sunday, March 21, 1971 at about 8:00 pm.

Tonight I remember that moment thirty-seven years ago, when the boundless grace of God miraculously rescued another miserable sinner, whom he loved even when I was unlovable.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:6-8 NIV)

Intelligent Design

I watched the Nova special on PBS last night. It was very interesting and helped me understand the Dover School Board case better than I had understood it from the news coverage of the time. It does seem fairly clear that some members of the school board were looking to balance the teaching of evolution with mention of some more faith-friendly alternative. As explained in the show, judicial precedent has determined such an intention to be unconstitutional. I don’t agree with that interpretation of the Constitution, but I’m not on the Supreme Court, am I? (Many of you are breathing a huge sigh of relief, no doubt.) That’s a topic for another post, perhaps. What I would like to do today is return to the issue of how we define science and look at where Intelligent Design might fit into that picture.

In an earlier post I wrote that science has not always been defined to exclude God as it generally is today. Modern science is about 500 years old. It was not until about 200 years ago, around the beginning of the 19th century, that a number of practitioners began to see it as a purely and essentially secular pursuit. That point of view did not completely prevail until near the end of the 19th century. Earlier scientists such as Newton saw themselves as explicating the wonders of God’s Creation. They saw the regularities in nature as reflecting the logical mind of God. In this view there is still plenty of room for the possibility that God might sometimes perform miracles that are outside the normal flow of natural events.

As I explained in a later post, the new idea that invaded science a couple of centuries ago is materialism, the philosophical belief that the supernatural does not exist. Nature is all there is, so all natural phenomena have a purely natural explanation. There are no miracles because there are no supernatural agents to cause them. It is sometimes granted that this idea is provisional: we proceed as if there were no miracles in order to avoid stopping too soon in our search for natural explanations. In this form the idea is termed methodological materialism and is even accepted by many Christians in the field of science. Judge Jones incorporated this principle explicitly in his Dover decision, citing testimony from Dr. Kenneth Miller (a Christian and an evolutionist).

My concern is with the possibility that we have erred in the other direction. We surely would like to avoid stopping too soon in our search for natural explanations, but how will we determine if we have gone too far? The problem is that philosophical materialism is not science any more than Christianity is. From the perspective of science it is simply a presupposition which informs how we conduct our science. If our presuppositions are wrong our conclusions may be, as well.

Let us consider what would happen if a modern scientist were seeking a scientific explanation for a phenomenon that was actually a miraculous act of God. There may be a number of potential explanations for the phenomenon, both natural and supernatural, but in this case the correct explanation is supernatural. The scientist who rigorously follows the dictates of methodological materialism will select the best explanation from among the potential natural explanations. It may be a poor fit to the data but it is better than the other natural explanations. There is no mechanism for science conducted in this way to recognize when it has made such a mistake. In practice, then, there is no important difference between the supposedly provisional assumption of methodological materialism and true philosophical materialism, i.e., the extra-scientific precommitment to the nonexistence of the supernatural.

I want to suggest that Intelligent Design theory might be at least a partial answer to this problem. I’m not talking about ID as a stalking horse for Biblical creation. I’m talking about the appealing idea that there may be some characteristics of the actions of intelligent agents which allow us to distinguish them from purely natural phenomena. From the criticisms I have read it seems that ID theory may not yet be formulated with sufficient rigor to be useful in practice for this purpose. I would like to suggest that instead of shouting the ID folks out of the room with cries of “That’s not science!” we let them attempt to work through the details and see if it can yield useful insights.

I see the bottom line as the need for a measure of humility in our scientific pursuit of knowledge. Are we willing to acknowledge there might be some limits to the knowledge that can be gained from science? We want to avoid stopping too soon in our search for natural explanations of the world around us, but this desire does not in itself justify the assertion that everything in fact has a natural explanation. If it is possible that God exists and that he is a worker of miracles, then it is possible that some events have no scientific explanation in the normal sense of the word. An open minded person must admit no less.

Theology of Science, Part II

Any system of thought requires certain axioms, or presuppositions, which cannot be proven within that system. Last time we saw that science originally rested on a set of presuppositions that arose from the Christian worldview. God is a personal, rational Being. He is the Creator of all things. We were created in his image as personal, rational beings. From this picture emerges the idea that nature is something which can be studied and understood by rational processes without fear of God’s wrath. Natural events can be described and predicted by natural laws which were ordained by the Creator. He pronounced his creation good and commanded us to exercise dominion over it, so he is pleased when we learn to understand and manipulate it.

These ideas about nature have been so thoroughly integrated into Western thought that few are aware of their Christian origins, or that there are other ways to look at the world. But about two hundred years ago a very different presupposition took root in science: everything that happens is presumed to have a purely natural cause which can, in principle, be explained scientifically. In other words, there is no such thing as a miracle. This is called methodological materialism.

It is important to realize that methodological materialism is an assumption. Popular opinion has it that science has proven miracles don’t happen, but the truth is just the opposite: science assumes miracles don’t happen. This assumption is so deeply entrenched among secular scientists today that most would say science is, by definition, the search for purely natural causes of every phenomenon. But this need not be how science is defined, and for most of the history of modern science it was not defined this way. This is not a small matter, because if our assumptions are wrong our conclusions will be wrong.

What is almost always completely overlooked is that methodological materialism is a purely theological concept. It is more a statement about the nature of God than about the nature of the universe. It says that God, if he exists, has never intervened in our world in any significant way. It should be obvious that if there actually is a God who has intervened in nature then methodological materialism will yield the wrong conclusions. The more striking the Divine intervention is, the more striking the error.

I am not saying that methodological materialism is always a bad assumption in every situation. Its applicability is directly proportional to our confidence that God will not somehow intervene and skew the results. In many cases we can be quite confident about that. For instance, even if you believe that God still works miracles to heal the sick, it seems likely this does not occur with sufficient frequency to skew cancer mortality statistics. And in the laboratory, scientists can readily repeat an experiment many times to verify the result, so one can be confident no miracle has occurred.

On the other hand, in the historical sciences such as geology, cosmology and evolutionary biology there is no way to repeat the experiment. We were not there to observe the past events we study. We have only the physical evidence which remains. In this situation the scientist must extrapolate backward using the physical laws we observe today. This extrapolation is based on the assumption that God has not intervened significantly in those events. I believe this assumption is completely unwarranted when extended all the way back to the origin of the world. Naturally, this belief is based on my own theological and philosophical understanding. An atheist would disagree. But that is a religious dispute, not a scientific one, and must be approached as such.

It is clear that science and religion are not separate spheres of human knowledge and thought. In fact, they are inseparably linked. Scientists must make explicit assumptions about religion in order to pursue their study of the natural world. These assumptions are not arbitrary. If they are wrong then the conclusions drawn from them may be profoundly wrong. There will always be a faith perspective implicit in the pursuit of science, especially in the historical sciences.

The Theology of Science

Creationists are fond of saying that evolution requires just as much faith to believe as creation. I don’t need to tell you how much scorn is heaped on such statements by evolutionists. I think creationists miss the point with this remark because secular scientists try very hard to be guided only by the evidence. On the other hand, I think many scientists fail to realize the extent to which science depends on a set of philosophical assumptions that are themselves unprovable scientifically. These include the idea that nature is objectively real, that it exhibits a dependable regularity, that it is understandable to the human mind, that it is worth investigating, and that it is accessible by the human senses. These ideas must exist prior to science and are the foundation on which it stands.

Logical deduction proceeds from premises to conclusions. There must always be a starting point which is not proved but simply assumed. Naturally, these axioms must be well chosen because the entire system depends on them being true. Since axioms cannot be proven, the best ones will be obviously true. The problem is that what seems obviously true to us is strongly influenced by the culture in which we were raised.

Modern science first arose in Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages. Those who study the history of science are in fair agreement that this was no accident. The Christian worldview provided the philosophical and theological framework for the scientific method. Pantheists (e.g., Buddhists and Hindus) believe that the Universe and God are one. Everything is part of the Divine. Individuality is an illusion. The material world is an illusion. In this view the workings of the world are mysterious. There is no expectation that they would be subject to logical analysis and experimentation. The spirits which inhabit rocks and trees and lightning might not appreciate our meddling in their affairs. Furthermore, pantheists see the Universe as eternal and all history as an endless cycle. Nothing ever really changes; there is no sense of progress in history or culture. There is only the individual quest to achieve Nirvana (extinction of self through oneness with the Divine) through countless cycles of death and rebirth.

Christianity is quite different. God is the Creator and he is separate from his creation. Since creation is not divine, it is not blasphemous to seek to understand and manipulate it. God has in fact commanded us to exercise dominion over his creation (Gen. 1:28). This world that God created had a beginning and will have an end. Therefore history is progressing toward a goal and the choices we make affect that future. Furthermore, since the Creator of all things is a personal, rational Being and we are made in his image, we can expect that creation is both orderly and understandable to us. Since we are finite we would not expect to completely comprehend all that God has made, but we trust that he has given us the faculties to carry out his dominion mandate. It is this Christian worldview that gave birth to modern science and nurtured it for centuries.

Ironically, about two hundred years ago the idea arose that science can stand completely on its own. Science has been so successful as a means of understanding and controlling the world around us that it is now seen as self-justifying. The Christian view of creation has been so thoroughly incorporated into scientific thinking that its origins are no longer recognized. But every building must rest on a firm foundation, and every system of thought must rest on a set of presuppositions that cannot be proven within that system. Science is no different. It rests on a set of assumptions that are philosophical and theological, not scientific. They arise naturally from a Christian worldview.

Of course, assumptions such as the regularity and rationality of nature are not particularly controversial. As I said earlier, these ideas have been so thoroughly adopted in Western culture we tend not even to realize there are other ways of looking at the world. But the secularization of science in the past two centuries has seen the introduction of another presupposition that is still controversial in some quarters. That’s what I’ll talk about in my next post.

Mind vs. Matter

We’ve been talking lately about the Apostle Paul’s contention that Creation reveals the existence of God. In my previous post I argued that the existence of the universe and the existence of life are both good reasons to believe in God. Now I want to talk about another reason to believe in God that I find even more compelling, although it is much more subtle and easy to miss. This evidence can be seen by looking inward: the fact that I exist as a thinking, feeling, volitional and self-aware being. To paraphrase Descartes, “I think, therefore God is.” Cogito, ergo Deus est.

I mentioned earlier that we are so steeped in the secular scientific worldview we can look right at the evidence and not see it. But scientific naturalism, the philosophy of secular science, has a huge problem. It requires us to suppose that all our thoughts, ideas, feelings and choices are just an illusion. What’s real is the intricate arrangement of molecules in my brain interacting in complex, but purely deterministic ways. You and I, as individuals, don’t really exist. The life of mind is an illusion. We are nothing but chemistry. A temporary pattern of atoms that evolves and persists for a few years, then dissipates.

If you grew up going to public school, or watching PBS and Discovery Channel, or reading National Geographic, you’re probably saying right now, “So what?” You’re so used to this worldview being stated as fact that you can’t see what a breathtaking leap beyond the evidence it is. But stop and think about this for a moment. The most real, persistent, and intimate experience of reality I have is my own thoughts and feelings. When I talk about “I” it is not usually my protoplasm I’m referring to; it’s my mind. I experience this inner self in a different way than I experience anyone or anything else in the world. Everything else I experience through my senses as they respond to physical stimuli. But my mind is something different altogether. It is self-aware. It seems, at least, to have an independent existence apart from neural substrate that supports it.

Neural scientists are excited today because they feel they are finally beginning to “unlock the secrets of the mind” – to gain some insight into how physical brain function relates to mental processes. But just because a certain part of your brain lights up when you experience anger doesn’t give me any insight into what anger is. Even if I knew every tiny detail of what happens electrochemically inside your skull when you get angry, it would tell me nothing about how you feel. I only understand what anger is because I experience it myself in my own mind. It may correlate with certain brain activity. You may even be able to provoke me to anger by stimulating a certain part of my brain. But I believe it is a category mistake to talk about this mental feeling we call anger as being equivalent to the physical processes of the brain.

In a similar way, we all know what it is like to make a decision. We make decisions almost continuously every day. But the scientific naturalist must insist that my sense of free will is an illusion. Consider also our sense of right and wrong. If I am nothing but a deterministic physical system, then morality is just another illusion. The physical laws that govern the biochemical processes of my body are deterministic. There is nothing intrinsically different in applying those laws to my brain chemistry as opposed to a high school chemistry experiment.

What I am trying to help you understand is how utterly counterintuitive it is to suggest that our thoughts, our feelings, and our choices are an illusion. Some would argue that our intuition is simply wrong. It is true, of course, that science has discovered many counterintuitive theories, such as relativity and quantum mechanics. It’s easy to see how our intuition can be wrong when it comes to physical realms far outside our experience. When it comes to a theory of mind, however, we are all intimately familiar with the data.

But this theory is not just counterintuitive, it is illogical as well. It’s fine for me to contemplate the possibility that your mind is an illusion. But it is self-refuting for me to contemplate the idea that my own mind is an illusion. The problem is that we have been so completely indoctrinated into scientific naturalism that we fail to see the contradiction.

How does this relate to the existence of God? The connection is this: physical processes can only give rise to other physical processes. But my mind is a different type of thing, and it must arise from something different than a physical process. The source of my existence is a personal Creator God, who made me in his image as a thinking, feeling, self-aware and morally responsible being.

Hath God Wrought?

In my last post I talked about Paul’s famous statement in Romans that unbelievers are “without excuse” because God’s eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen from looking at his Creation. The evidence for God is right before our eyes, so that he is justified in condemning us for rejecting him.

But some will object that we simply see what we want to see. You and I are watching a beautiful sunset. I believe in God; I see God’s glory in the sunset. You don’t believe in God; you see Nature’s glory. So how does nature prove God exists?

The short answer is, it doesn’t. If you’re looking for an airtight mathematical proof you will be disappointed, because we’re not dealing with mathematical concepts here. Very few things are actually provable in a formal, mathematical sense. Yet, there are still good reasons to believe in God.

The first reason is simply the fact that the universe exists at all. There is no reason to believe that the universe has to exist, but it obviously does. It makes sense that there would be a being whose existence is necessary, eternal and unchanging to explain the existence of a universe that is contingent, temporal and mutable.

An entire discipline of science, called cosmology, is devoted to studying the origins of the universe. It is fascinating that despite the triumph of secularism in academia, modern cosmologists came to the uncomfortable conclusion that the universe has not always existed and is in the process of “winding down” over the eons. This very inconvenient truth has caused many scientists to work hard at finding a new theory to avoid this conclusion. But to date there is absolutely no evidence for any of these new theories. The motivation for many of these scientists is pretty transparently to avoid the theistic implications of the current theory.

Another good reason to believe in God is the existence of life. There is currently no good scientific theory of abiogenesis, or how life formed from non-living matter by purely natural processes. You will no doubt caution me to avoid a “God of the gaps” mistake. Just because no good theory exists today doesn’t mean we won’t find one in the future. While that’s certainly true, in this case the gap appears to be pretty formidable.

The problem is that random processes would take essentially forever to produce something as complex as a single living cell. The simplest bacterium has about 500 genes. This is far less than humans or fruit flies, but it’s still a dern sight more than the goo at the bottom of Stanley Miller’s Erlenmeyer flask. Evolution doesn’t help you bridge this gap because mutation and natural selection can’t happen until a self-replicating organism exists on which they can operate.

Just as some scientists are busy looking for a new cosmology that avoids the need for a Creator, others are energetically seeking to prove that life will form spontaneously wherever the appropriate conditions exist. It may surprise you to learn that this is one of the main motivations and justifications for the U.S. space program. NASA spends billions of dollars looking for evidence of life, or even complex organic chemicals, in our solar system and beyond. That is the main goal of all the recent robotic probes and landers we have sent to Mars.

The irony is that, even if we find evidence of life on another world, it really doesn’t prove anything about whether God created life or it developed by natural processes. We would still be lacking a good theory to explain how you can get from a prebiotic soup of amino acids to a living organism without the intervention of deity.

There is yet another reason to believe in God that I find even more compelling than these two, but I will save that discussion for my next post.

No Excuses

As a former militant agnostic and devotee of scientific naturalism, I consider these verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans to be one of the most powerful passages in the Bible:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Rom 1:18-20 NIV)

In a nutshell, Paul is saying that nature itself is evidence enough for God’s existence, so that no one has any excuse for denying it. Before I became a Christian it seemed to me that just the opposite was true. I believed that the supernatural realm, if it existed at all, was beyond observation. Therefore I could only give credence to natural explanations. I was steeped in a secular scientific worldview. It seemed elementary to me that our eyes only give us evidence for the natural world. Surely all belief in God is just irrational superstition! When I looked at nature I saw the glory of Science, not the glory of God.

I remember when I first became a Christian and came across this passage. I had a hard time understanding it. I was still heavily under the influence of my former way of thinking about nature. It was only with considerable effort that I was able to appreciate what Paul is saying:

• When we see that the universe is vast beyond measure we know that the Creator is powerful beyond comprehension.
• When we see that the universe is orderly and understandable we know that the Creator is a rational being.
• When we see that the universe is intricate, varied, and exquisitely beautiful we know that the Creator delights in his creation.

In a recent sermon our pastor made the point that practically all cultures throughout history have shared two common ideas: belief in a god or gods and belief in life after death. The committed naturalist says evolution gave us these instincts. Is it not just as plausible that our Creator put them there? As our pastor said, we are all born to belief; it takes years of training to become an atheist.

Of course, our God-implanted instinct to worship the transcendent is not so easily eradicated. That is why even the committed secularists today tend to personify Nature, writing it with a capital “N” and speaking reverently of it. In his famous book and TV miniseries Cosmos, Carl Sagan personified and worshiped the universe in this way. His book opens with these words:

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Paul warned us of this as well:

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. (Rom 1:25 NIV)

But the glory of the heavens speaks to us of God’s glory so that, as Paul said, we are without excuse:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4 NIV)

People often ask, if God wants us to believe in him why does he hide himself? But Paul tells us that the evidence is right before our eyes. Indeed, it is written in our hearts.