Has Science Killed God?

The Faraday Papers on Science and Religion

Denis Alexander, Dennis Alexander

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780281081332
• eBook ISBN: 9780281081356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

World-leading experts tackle challenging issues of science and faith.

Here are 20 papers from the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, which is a UK educational charity, and a member of the Cambridge Theological Federation which is an affiliate of Cambridge University. In addition to academic research, the Institute engages in the public understanding of science and religion by means of courses, conferences, lectures, seminars and the media.

The Faraday Papers provide the general reader with accessible and readable introductions to the relationship between science and religion, written by a broad range of authors who are expert in the field. They are intended to be read by those without a scientific background. Here they are collected for the first time into a single volume.

Contributors include:
Has Science Killed God? - Prof. Alister McGrath FRSA
The Science and Religion Debate, an Introduction - Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS
Why Care for the Environment? - Prof. Sir John Houghton FRS
Ethical Issues in Genetic Modification - Prof. John Bryant
The Age of the Earth - Prof. Bob White FRS
Creation and Evolution not Creation or Evolution - Prof. R.J. Berry FRSE

Part 1

THE SCIENCE AND FAITH DEBATE

1

The science and religion debate: an introduction

JOHN POLKINGHORNE

Science and theology have things to say to one another since both are concerned with the search for truth attained through motivated belief. Important topics for the conversation include natural theology, creation, divine providence and miracle. This paper provides a brief overview of the current status of the conversation.

Participants in the debate between science and religion employ a number of different strategies, depending on whether they are seeking confrontation or harmony, but for an initial introduction the first task is to survey the actual issues that comprise the agenda for discussion.

The natural debating partner for science is theology, the intellectual discipline that reflects on religious experience, just as science reflects on human investigation of the physical universe. Both science and theology claim that they are exploring the nature of reality, but they clearly do so at different levels. The object of study for the natural sciences is the physical world and the living beings that inhabit it. The sciences treat their subject matter objectively, in an impersonal mode of encounter that employs the investigative tool of experimental interrogation. Nature is subjected to testing, based on experiences that are, in principle, repeatable as often as experimentalists may require. Even historical sciences, such as physical cosmology or evolutionary biology, rely for much of their explanatory power on the insights of the directly experimental sciences, such as physics and genetics. The aim of science is an accurate understanding of how things happen. Its concern is with the processes of the world.

Theology’s concern is with the quest for truth about the nature of God, the One who is properly to be met with in awe and obedience and who is not available to be put to the experimental test. As with all the forms of personal engagement, encounter with the transpersonal reality of the divine has to be based on trusting and its character is intrinsically individual and unique. Religious experiences cannot simply be brought about by human manipulation. Instead, theology relies on revelatory acts of divine self-disclosure. In particular, all religious traditions look back to foundational events from which the tradition takes its origin and which play a unique role in shaping its understanding of the nature of deity. In relation to cosmic history, theology’s central aim is to address the question of why events have happened. Its concern is with issues of meaning and purpose. Belief in God the Creator carries the implication of a divine mind and will lying behind what has been going on in the universe.

These differences in the characteristics of science and theology have led some to suppose that they are completely detached from one another, concerned with separate, and indeed incommensurate, forms of discourse. If that were so, there could be no real science and religion debate. This picture of two disjoint languages has been popular with those scientists who do not want to be disrespectful to religion, understood as a human cultural activity, but who do not want to take seriously its cognitive claims to knowledge of God. If this stance is adopted, a comparison between science and theology is then frequently made in terms that are, in fact, unfavourable to religion. Often, science is held to deal with facts, while religion is supposed to be based solely on opinion. This is a double mistake.

Twentieth-century analyses of the philosophy of science have made it clear that the scientific search for understanding is based on something much more subtle than the unproblematic confrontation of indubitable experimental facts with inescapable theoretical predictions. Theory and experiment intertwine in intricate ways and there are no interesting scientific facts that are not already interpreted facts. Appeal to theory is necessary in order to explain what is actually being measured by sophisticated apparatus. For its part, theology is not based on the mere assertion of unquestionable truths derived from the utterances of an unquestionable authority. Religious belief has its own proper motivations and its appeal to revelation is concerned with the interpretation of uniquely significant occasions of divine disclosure, rather than to propositional truths mysteriously conveyed.

A number of considerations show that a thesis of the mutual independence of science and theology is too crude a picture to be persuasive. ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ are questions that may be asked simultaneously of what is happening and often both must be addressed if an adequate understanding is to be attained. The kettle is boiling both because burning gas heats the water and because someone wants to make a pot of tea. The two questions are certainly logically distinct, and there is no inevitable entailment linking their answers, but nevertheless there must be a degree of consonance between the forms that these answers take. Putting the kettle in the refrigerator with the intention of making tea does not make much sense.

Theology has to listen to science’s account of the history of the universe and determine how it relates to the religious belief that the world is God’s creation. If there were seen to be a total misfit, some form of revision would be called for. Religious fundamentalists believe that this revision would always have to be on the side of science, while scientistic fundamentalists believe that religion is simply irrelevant to a full understanding of the cosmos. These extreme positions correspond to a conflict picture of the relation between science and religion: one side or the other must achieve total victory in the debate. Surely this is a seriously distorted aim that fails to recognize the complementary relationship between these two forms of the search for truth. A better balance of views is that both accounts deserve to be scrupulously assessed in their relationship to one another, which is an activity that furnishes a creative agenda for the debate between science and religion.

Both science and theology have been subjected to postmodernist assertions that their metanarratives are simply made-up tales, communally endorsed. Both respond by appeals to the experiential motivations for their beliefs and both claim that what is called critical realism best describes their achievements. This means that neither attains exhaustive knowledge – for the exploration of nature continually reveals new and unexpected insights, and the infinite reality of God will always exceed the grasp of finite human beings – but both believe that they achieve verisimilitude, the making of maps of aspects of reality that are adequate for some, but not every, purpose. In making these critical realist claims, science and theology exhibit a degree of cousinly relationship, and that in itself is sufficient to encourage dialogue between them.

Science has purchased its great success by the modesty of its ambition, restricting itself to impersonal encounter and seeking to answer only limited questions concerning process. The fact is that science trawls experience with a coarse-grained net. Its account of music is framed in terms of neural response to the impact of airwaves on the eardrum. The deep mystery of music – how a temporal sequence of sounds can speak of an eternal realm of beauty – totally eludes its grasp. An important element in the contemporary debate between science and religion is the recognition of the importance of ‘limit questions’, which refer to issues that arise from doing science but which go beyond science’s self-limited power to answer. These limit questions have been the basis of a new kind of natural theology, largely developed by scientists themselves, including some who are not adherents of any faith tradition.

Natural theology

Natural theology is the attempt to learn something of God from general considerations, such as the exercise of reason and the inspection of the world. Its classic form was associated with thinkers such as Aquinas (thirteenth century) and William Paley (1743–1805). They spoke in terms of ‘proofs’ of God’s existence and often sought theological explanations of the functional aptness of living beings, understood as having been designed by the divine Artificer. Contemporary natural theology is more modest in its character. Its aim is not logical coerciveness but insightful understanding, and the claim being made is that theism explains more than atheism can. Natural theology’s relationship to science is one of complementarity rather than rivalry. It acknowledges that scientific questions may be expected to receive scientific answers and so the new natural theology focuses on addressing those limit questions that arise from science but go beyond its explanatory scope. Two of these metaquestions have been particularly important.

The first concerns the reason why science is possible at all, in the deep and extensive way that it is. Of course the evolutionary necessity for survival can explain why humans are able to make rough and ready sense of everyday phenomena. Yet it is difficult to believe that our ability to understand the subatomic world of quantum physics and the cosmic realm of curved space–time – both regimes remote from direct impact on everyday events and both requiring for their understanding highly counter-intuitive modes of thought – is simply a happy spin-off from survival necessity. And not only is the world deeply rationally transparent to scientific enquiry but it is also deeply rationally beautiful, time and again affording scientists the reward of wonder as a recompense for the labour of research. In fundamental physics, it is a proven technique of discovery to seek theories whose expression is in terms of equations possessing the unmistakable character of mathematical beauty, since it has been found that only such theories turn out to have the long-term fruitfulness that persuades us of their verisimilitude. Why deep science is possible, and why its success intimately involves the apparently abstract discipline of mathematics, are surely significant questions about the nature of the world in which we live. Science itself is unable to offer an explanation of this profound character of the laws of nature, for it has to treat them simply as the unexplained basis assumed for its explanation of the details of process. Yet it seems intellectually very unsatisfactory to leave the matter there, as if science were simply a happy accident. A religious understanding renders the intelligibility of the universe itself intelligible, for it says that the world is shot through with signs of mind precisely because the Creator’s mind lies behind its wonderful order.

That order is not only beautiful; it is also profoundly fruitful. The universe as we know it started 13.7 billion years ago, essentially as an expanding, almost uniform, ball of energy. Today the universe is rich and complex, with saints and scientists among its inhabitants. Not only might this fact in itself suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history beyond what science can tell but also science’s understanding of the evolutionary processes of that history has shown that, in a real sense, the cosmos was pregnant with the potentiality for carbon-based life from the beginning. The given character of the basic laws of nature had to take a quantitatively specific form for life to be possible anywhere within the universe. This ‘fine-tuning’ of fundamental parameters is usually called the ‘anthropic principle’.¹ A world capable of producing self-conscious beings is a very particular universe indeed. This cosmic specificity raises the second metaquestion of why this should be so. Anthropic fine-tuning came as a shock to many scientists. They tend to prefer the general to the particular and so they were inclined to suppose that there was nothing very special about our world. Natural theology understands anthropic potentiality to be the gift of the Creator to creation. Those who refuse this insight are either driven to regard fine-tuning as another incredibly happy accident or to embrace the extraordinary supposition that there is, in fact, a vast multiverse composed of very many very different universes, all but one unobservable by us, with our world just by chance the one in which circumstances permit the development of carbon-based life.

Creation

The doctrine of creation is not primarily concerned with how things began, but why they exist. God is seen to be the ordainer and sustainer of the cosmos, as much its Creator today as in the epoch of the Big Bang. The latter event is interesting scientifically, but not really critical theologically. This understanding leads to the picture of creation as a continuously unfolding process in which God acts as much through the results of natural process as in any other way. A fruitful dialogue between science and religion has to be based on this understanding of creation.

Science has much to contribute to the interdisciplinary conversation, through the account that it can give of the process and history of the universe. Its most important insight is the evolutionary concept of the emergence of novelty in regimes where lawful (anthropic) regularity and contingent specificity interact. The interplay between necessity and chance ‘at the edge of chaos’ (a domain of process characterized by the intertwining of degrees of order with an open sensitivity to small influences) has operated at many levels, from the cosmic evolution of stars and galaxies to the familiar biological story of the developing complexity of terrestrial life.

There is a distorted version of intellectual history that portrays the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species as being the final parting of the ways between science and religion and the end of any real debate between them. As a matter of historical fact, not all scientists immediately accepted Darwin’s ideas, nor did all theologians immediately reject them. All had to struggle to take on board the full extent to which the past had been different from the present, and the need, therefore, to understand that present in the light of its origin in the past. Two Christian thinkers, Charles Kingsley and Frederick Temple, soon coined a phrase that neatly encapsulates how religious people should think about an evolving world. They said that no doubt God could have brought into being a ready-made world, but it had turned out the Creator had done something cleverer than that in bringing into being a world so endowed with fertility, creatures were allowed ‘to make themselves’, as that potentiality was brought to birth through evolutionary exploration.

A very important theological idea is connected with this insight. It concerns how God may be understood to relate to the creation. Christian theology believes God’s fundamental character to be love. Such a deity could not be supposed to act as a cosmic tyrant, pulling every string in a creation that was no more than a divine puppet theatre. The gift of love must always be some due form of independence granted to the object of that love. One of the most illuminating ideas in twentieth-century theology has been the recognition that the act of creation is an act of divine self-limitation – an act of kenosis, as the theologians say – on the part of the Creator in allowing creatures truly to be themselves and to make themselves. This implies that, although allowed by God, not all that happens will be in accordance with positive divine will.

A kenotic understanding of God’s relationship with the world affords theology some help as it wrestles with perplexities about evil and suffering – surely its most challenging problem. A worl...

Table of contents

• Has Science Killed God?: The Faraday Papers on science and religion
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface: Denis Alexander
• Introduction: Alister McGrath
• Part 1: The Science and Faith Debate
• Part 2: Science, Faith and History
• Part 3: Science, Faith and Theology
• Part 4: Science, Faith and Philosophy
• Part 5: Science, Faith and Humanity
• Part 6: Science, Faith And The World