In one of the opening scenes of a recent film about the famous Stephen Hawking, the young scientist meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist.
“What’s that,” she asks and he responds: “Religion for intelligent atheists.” “What do cosmologists worship,” she persists. “A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe,” comes Hawking’s reply.
Later on, Stephen invites Jane to his family for dinner and she challenges him: “You’ve never said why you don’t believe in God.” He says: “A physicist can’t allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator” to which she deliciously responds: “Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists.”
Some people still think that belief in God commits you to creationist views. This is quite unfortunate given the critically informed wisdom that has relentlessly been a mark of the ‘enlightenment’.
Some people still think that belief in God commits you to creationist views
Creationism is the view that the biblical account of primordial creation should be taken literally. By contrast, an intelligent reading of these myths will quickly remind us that the Bible is not primarily concerned with scientific accounts of the universe. We must leave that to the scientific community as it constructs, changes and improves upon the various languages and models that enable it to grope towards a scientific account of the origins of all that came to be, that is, that might possibly be or have been and that will eventually be.
The point of the Bible is a far, far simpler one. Its authors want to suggest that all that exists, in all modes of being, is ultimately the result of God’s creative act. The paradigm which shaped their account was in fact borrowed from currently available myths and which enabled them to make sense of their own primitive science.
They didn’t think that science is by definition incompatible with belief in a creator God. And that is still the reason why one need not perceive theism as a threat to what the science of the age teaches about the birth of this or other universes, if ever there were any.
Is that by itself compelling reason for one to come to believe in God’s existence? Of course not.
Whoever said, for that matter, that Christians, for instance, believe in God because they’ve irreversibly discovered God in the conclusions to their proofs for quantum computations?
That is different from claiming that science disproves God’s existence. No one would respectably say that. The reason is that, conceptually speaking, God is too elusive anyway.
Aquinas knew, for one, that his ‘proofs’ were pretty meagre attempts at pointing towards a vaguely understood beacon which one might feel bold enough to call ‘God’ in the end.
My argument is another one, however. For here someone might point out that we have now reached a type of scientific understanding that makes it ridiculous or irrational to believe in God.
This, in my view, is a false claim. For it is founded, no doubt, on the mistaken view of creation which reduces God to just another player in the very universe He is supposed to have created. This mistake was made by many Protestant philosophers when they consciously, or unconsciously, treated God as just another factor in their causally-closed Newtonian models of the universe.
Such is the case with, for instance, Paley’s famous watchmaker argument which is amateurishly targeted by Dawkins in his recent popular works.
Paley and all those who crudely view in a creator God a mere triggering cause which sets on the machine, or who is an immanent intelligence within nature, are inevitably vulnerable to such objections.
Not so with the Catholic view which treats God’s causal activity as operating on an entirely different level of being.
When you say God creates, God causes, God brings something into being out of nothing, you have to be increasingly aware that you do not really know what you are saying, apart from asking: yes why not, why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless?
Why should one presume that something as intelligible as an equation would describe the universe’s structure?
Why in the world would a scientist like Hawking blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there?
When scientists like Hawking turn their back on what he calls “a celestial dictator” we are indeed purged of an idol, a silly simulacrum of God and getting closer to affirming the true God.
Christopher Caruana teaches philosophy at the University of Malta.