Science and Religion_A Very Short Introduction

by Thomas Dixon

  We cannot expect the natural sciences to help us with the question of a first cause. Science is unable to tell us why there is something rather than nothing. Cosmological theories can try to explain how the something that does exist works and how it is related to other cosmic somethings that have existed in the past, present, or future, or even in numerous parallel universes or extra dimensions. That is what is attempted by theories about big bangs and big crunches, about superstrings and membranes, and about quantum fluctuations and multiple universes. But physical science cannot go beyond that to explain why the things that we call matter-energy and laws of nature ever came to be. Here we have an unclosable gap in our scientific knowledge, and one which all theists agree is filled by God.

  Atheists respond that even if we suppose the universe to have a creator or a designer, that does not answer the question of who created the creator or who designed the designer. This is true, but not very surprising. Every explanatory journey has a terminus. That terminus might be matter, or mystery, or metaphysical necessity. It might be a featureless first cause or it might be God. Wherever one decides to end the explanatory journey, there will always still be the possibility of asking ‘Why?’ or ‘But what caused that?’ The answer in all cases – whether religious or secular – is that something or other just is. A much more serious problem for the theist is how to close the large gap between positing a first cause for the universe and identifying that unknown cause with the personal God of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or any other religious tradition.

  Fine tuning

  For those who see God in the arrangement of the laws of nature rather than in their occasional violation, it is notable that the universe seems to be ‘fine tuned’ for carbon-based life. If the physical constants of the universe had been very slightly different, then such life (including human life) would not have been possible. If the Big Bang had banged only slightly more vigorously, for example, matter would have been blown apart too fast for stars and planets to be formed. If the force of gravity had been even infinitesimally larger or smaller, then life-sustaining stars such as our sun could not have come into existence. Does this show that, to quote the physicist Fred Hoyle, ‘a superintellect has monkeyed with physics’ and that ‘there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature’? Some think that this fine tuning is indeed best explained by supposing that a creator with an interest in producing intelligent life designed our universe. Others are more persuaded by the idea that our universe is just one of countless universes in a ‘multiverse’ or a ‘megaverse’. If that were the case, then at least a small proportion of those multiple universes would have the right conditions for producing life and, inevitably, we would find ourselves in one such universe.

  What people on both sides of this argument agree about, but which should not be taken for granted, is that there is something here to be explained – whether by God or by multiverses. Both sides start with the premise that the values taken by the fundamental constants in our universe are surprising, improbable, and in need of explanation. But how do we know the probability of any given configuration of physical constants? Surely any specified combination of infinitely variable constants is equally, infinitely improbable? How, in any case, can we be confident that these constants are free to vary in the way these arguments assume they are, and are not simply fixed by nature or linked to each other in a way we do not understand? And should the actual existence of trillions of other universes, as opposed to their merely possible existence, really make us any less surprised about the existence and physical make-up of our own? As the character Philo put it in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779),

  having found, in so many other subjects much more familiar, the imperfections and even contradictions of human reason, I never should expect any success from its feeble conjectures, in a subject so sublime, and so remote from the sphere of our observation.

  Not seeing and yet believing

  Hume was also the author of the most famous expression of rationalist scepticism about miracles. In a 1748 essay ‘Of Miracles’, Hume argued against miracles on the basis of the relative weakness of the evidence in favour of them. Since the laws of nature are, by definition, generalizations that conform as closely as possible to the universal experience of humanity, Hume said, then they are as empirically well grounded as any statement can be. However generous we wish to be about the strength of the evidence in favour of miracles – that is, the reports of supposed eye-witnesses to the events, such as those recorded in the scriptures and in lives of saints – that testimony will never be as strong as the evidence that supports the laws of nature. Which, Hume asked, would be the greater miracle – that the laws of nature had actually been overturned or that those attesting to the miracle (possibly even including yourself) were mistaken? A rational person, Hume concluded, would have to answer that the falsity of the testimony was the more likely option. In short, a rational person could not believe in miracles. To put this in terms of the different sources of knowledge discussed in Chapter 2, Hume’s argument was that collective sense experience trumps testimony.

  For those accepting the empiricist spirit of Hume’s approach, even if not his conclusions, the evidence of one’s own senses must indeed be the final court of appeal. No matter what your beliefs about physical science, the laws of nature, or the strength of the testimony of others to miracles, your own experience will override all of these. If you have never witnessed a miracle, that will probably be the most significant obstacle to your believing that such a thing can occur. If, on the other hand, you had witnessed with your own eyes St Agatha’s wounds being instantaneously healed, or a flow of lava suddenly and inexplicably changing direction when a veil was held up to it, you would have to admit that you had seen something truly extraordinary, which, in spite of Hume, you might well consider a miracle.

  Even then, however, there would be a gap between the observation that something had happened which was contrary to the normal course of nature, and the belief that you had witnessed a supernatural or divine event. A more scientific attitude would be to treat the event as an unexplained anomaly – like an experiment in the laboratory that does not produce the result predicted by your theory. Such anomalies might lead to new discoveries about how the natural world works, or they might remain recalcitrant and unexplained. They need not take on religious significance, however. It is the experience of remarkable and unexplained phenomena in a specifically religious context that turns an anomaly into a miracle.

  One religious response to the rationalist’s demand for better evidence for miracles is to suggest that religious truths are to be accepted not on the basis of empirical evidence but through faith. The importance of faith is strongly emphasized in the New Testament – most famously in the story of the apostle Thomas, who says that he will not believe Jesus has risen from the dead until he sees him in the flesh with the marks of the nails in his hands and the wound in his side. Thomas then encounters the risen Jesus, and believes. Jesus says to Thomas: ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ In his anti-Christian polemic The Age of Reason (1794), Thomas Paine remarked that if Thomas could refuse to believe in the resurrection until he had ‘ocular and manual demonstration’, then so could he, ‘and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas’. More recently, Richard Dawkins has described Thomas as the ‘only really admirable member of the twelve apostles’, because of his scientific demand for empirical evidence.

  7. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602–3)

  Divine inaction

  The rebellious and sceptical Ivan, one of the brothers in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), like doubting Thomas, demands evidence. He is disgusted by the human cruelty and suffering that he sees all around, and does not accept that the promise of a future life in which all will be well is a satisfactory recompense. ‘I want to see with my own eyes the li
on lie down with the lamb and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer’, Ivan tells his brother. ‘I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it has all been for.’ But until that happens, Ivan cannot believe that the suffering of innocent children at the hands of torturers and abusers can ever be made up for by any future heavenly rewards. If that is the price of eternal truth and of admission to heaven, Ivan says, then the price is too high, and ‘I hasten to return my ticket of admission.’

  Ivan’s rejection of Christianity is one that has been echoed by countless other critics of religion. If God exists and has the power to intervene in nature, and on occasion apparently uses that power, they ask, why does God fail to intervene in so many other cases of horrific injustice, cruelty, and suffering? Why, for example, did God allow Agatha to be tortured, abused, and mutilated before miraculously healing her through a vision of St Peter? Why would God allow some to be killed by volcanic eruptions and plagues, while bestowing special protection on the inhabitants of Catania? Why, in any case, does God need to use the powers of an object such as St Agatha’s veil to achieve this protection, rather than acting directly to prevent the eruption or the disease in the first place? More generally, why is one person miraculously cured while another of equal faith and virtue suffers and dies? We might say that God moves in a mysterious way – which certainly seems to have been the case if we are to believe the many religious tales of wonders and miracles through the ages – but is that a good enough response? If God created us and our moral sense, then why do God’s own ways of acting in the world seem to us not to meet our own standards of what is just and good?

  These are among the most difficult questions with which religious believers have to grapple. As Henry Drummond put it, ‘If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He comes upon the scene at special crises, He is absent from the scene in the intervals.’ Science and philosophy certainly do not require us to believe in determinism or to deny the possibility of miracles. However, the theologians’ dilemma will not go away: divine inaction is just as hard to explain as divine action.

  Chapter 4

  Darwin and evolution

  When the English naturalist Charles Darwin died at his Kent home in April 1882 at the age of 73, he was already a celebrity. Not only in Britain but around the world he was famed as the author of the theory of evolution that had transformed science and become the defining philosophy of the age. The news of his death was greeted by a campaign in the press for a funeral at Westminster Abbey. Despite lingering doubts about Darwin’s religious beliefs, it was soon agreed that no other tribute would be adequate. The great and the good would gather to mark the astonishing theoretical achievements, the patience and industry of decades of research, and the dignity and modesty of this unassuming English gentleman. At the funeral, the Reverend Frederic Farrar’s sermon compared Darwin’s scientific genius with that of his countryman, Isaac Newton, next to whose memorial in the abbey Darwin’s own final resting place would be. Farrar also explained that Darwin’s theory of evolution was quite consistent with an elevated sense of the actions of the Creator in the natural world. The funeral symbolized the acceptance by the Anglican establishment of Darwin and of evolution, just over 20 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.

  It was a somewhat suspicious and hesitant kind of acceptance, though. Not everyone in the Church of England, nor in society at large, was happy to ‘go the whole orang’ – the geologist Charles Lyell’s phrase for accepting that evolution applied to humans too. Indeed, it has always been human evolution in particular, rather than the evolution of bacteria, beetles, barnacles, or bats, that has really captured the imagination and unsettled the beliefs of the wider public. Religious ideas about the elevated place of humanity in the creation, and especially about the soul and morality, were the ones most directly challenged by the evolutionary science that Darwin’s career helped to establish as a new orthodoxy. Among those who have resisted Darwinism for religious reasons over the last century and a half, some have done so on the grounds of its conflict with a literal interpretation of scripture. For many others, however, their resistance has been to the theory of evolution’s apparent incompatibility with belief in free will, moral responsibility, and a rational and immortal human soul.

  In this chapter and the next, we will explore these and other reasons why the theory of evolution has been considered so dangerous, starting in this chapter with Darwin’s religious views, the reception of his theory, and its theological implications, before moving on in Chapter 5 to the modern American controversy about teaching evolution in schools. The figure of Charles Darwin himself continues to haunt these discussions. His image adorns not only the covers of countless books on the subject of evolution but also even the British ten pound note. The most frequently used pictures of Darwin are those from his old age in which his white beard and portentous expression conjure up images of biblical prophets, perhaps even of God. The theory of evolution by natural selection has become identified with this single iconic historical individual. Darwin’s own scientific and religious views are often discussed and sometimes misrepresented in polemical works about evolution and religion. It is important therefore to have a grasp of what this revolutionary scientific thinker really thought and why.

  8. A photographic portrait of Charles Darwin made by Lock and Whitfield in 1878

  Darwin’s religious odyssey

  In his early 20s, Darwin was looking forward to a career in the Church of England. He had embarked on medical training in Edinburgh a few years earlier but had found the lectures boring and the demonstrations of surgery disgusting. Now his father sent him off to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where young Charles signed up to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and set about studying mathematics and theology with a view to entering holy orders after graduation. But Darwin found that theology appealed about as much as surgery. His real passion at this time was for beetle-hunting rather than Bible-reading, and he had an early triumph when one of the specimens he had identified appeared in print in an instalment of Illustrations of British Entomology. In 1831 this enthusiastic young amateur naturalist was invited to join the HMS Beagle as a companion to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy, and to undertake collections and observations on matters of natural-historical interest. Perhaps he was not, after all, destined to become the Reverend Charles Darwin.

  The voyage of the Beagle lasted from 1831 to 1836. The primary purpose of the expedition was to complete the British Admiralty’s survey of the coast of South America, but its five-year itinerary also took in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Darwin’s observations of rock formations, plants, animals, and indigenous peoples were incidental to the purpose of the expedition but absolutely central to his own intellectual development. On board the Beagle, Darwin’s religious views started to evolve too. He had no doubt that the natural world was the work of God. In his notebook he recorded his impressions of the South American jungle: ‘Twiners entwining twiners – tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah.’ To Darwin, these jungles were ‘temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature’, in which no-one could stand without ‘feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body’. He even admired the civilizing effects of the work of Christian missionaries too, observing that ‘so excellent is the Christian faith, that the outward conduct of the believers is said most decidedly to have been improved by its doctrines’.

  Back in England, however, after the voyage, Darwin would start to have doubts. His grandfather, father, and elder brother had all rejected Christianity, adopting either Deism or outright freethinking unbelief. He seemed to be heading in a similar direction. His reasons were many. His travels had revealed to him at first hand the great variety of religious beliefs and practices around the world. All these different religions claimed to have a special revelation from God, but they could not all be right. Then there was his moral r
evulsion at the Christian doctrine that while the faithful would be saved, unbelievers and heathens, along with unrepentant sinners, would be consigned to an eternity of damnation. Darwin thought this was a ‘damnable doctrine’ and could not see how anyone could wish it to be true. This objection hit him with particular force after the death of his unbelieving father in 1848.

  There were two ways in which Darwin’s re-reading of the book of nature also gave him reasons to re-think his religion. He and others before him had seen in the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments evidence of the power and wisdom of God. But Darwin now thought he saw something else. Hard though it was for him to believe it himself – the human eye could still give him a shudder of incredulity – he came to think that all these adaptations came about by natural processes. Variation and natural selection could counterfeit intelligent design. Secondly, along with the silent beauty of the jungle he had also observed all sorts of cruelty and violence in nature, which he could not believe a benevolent and omnipotent God could have willed. Why, for example, would God have created the ichneumon wasp? The ichneumon lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, with the effect that when the larvae hatch they eat their host alive. Why would God create cuckoos which eject their foster siblings from the nest? Why make ants that enslave other species of ant? Why give queen bees the instinct of murderous hatred towards their daughters? ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write’, Darwin exclaimed, ‘on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!’