Has Science Rendered Belief in God Implausible? Part 1

Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 1.” Edited for publication. See our store at jashow.org to order this entire series.

Dr. John Ankerberg: My guest is philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer. He has just published a brand-new book called the Return of the God Hypothesis. And it explains how recent scientific discoveries support belief in God, so it’s controversial. 

Stephen, you open your book here by describing something that hit my heart. I went to the University of Illinois. And I was sitting in a crowd of 200 in a science class, and this little op-ed piece hit my heart. You open your book by describing a prominent professor of evolutionary psychology, David Barash of the University of Washington. He authored a very startling New York Times op-ed. But this is so true. In it, he says, “I give them, my students, ‘the talk’.”

Dr. Stephen Meyer: The talk. Yes.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And he gives it every year to students, flatly informing them that science has rendered belief in God implausible. David Barash further explains to his students, as evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious belief has narrowed. And he says it has demolished belief in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. 

And you note that Barash follows in a long tradition. So the first chapter of your book talks about many powerful people in our culture down through the years make this same claim. In particular, right now we’re facing the New Atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss. I listened to both those debates that you had with them. They argue that science and religion conflict, and that science undermines the credibility of belief in God. That’s their argument. Stephen, tell us more about what the New Atheists argue, and the so-called conflict thesis between religion on one side and science on the other side.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Sure. And many of your viewers would have already encountered these arguments and ideas. Certainly, many of our students encounter them when they go through university. But the basic idea of the New Atheism is that science, properly understood, undermines belief in God. And therefore there is an inherent conflict between the evidence we have about the natural world as reported by scientists, and a belief in the deity. And Richard Dawkins perhaps explains this case best. He’s brilliant at framing arguments.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: And he says that up until the 19th century, there was powerful evidence for the existence of God, and that was in the evidence of design that we have in the natural world. But since Darwin, we know that that evidence of design is illusory. It’s merely the appearance of design, not actual design. And he says that because, according to Darwin’s theory, there’s an undirected, unguided process that can produce the appearance of design, the illusion of design, without there being a designing mind or intelligence guiding that process in any way. So we have design without a designer. That’s the Darwinian view. And so, since the 19th century, you’ve had the view that science and religion are in conflict. There’s no public evidence for God; and as Dawkins puts it, therefore, you can believe in God if you want to, but it’s essentially what he calls a delusion. He writes this book, The God Delusion.

Now, the New Atheists have gone further and said, well, not only are science and faith, or science and belief in God, in conflict today, but essentially they’ve always been in conflict. The scientific way of knowing and the religious way of knowing are completely different, and scientific evidence has always conflicted with religious belief. And so those are the two main propositions: They’re in conflict now; and they’ve always been in conflict throughout the history of science and its relationship with religion.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. And in your book you challenge this. You challenge the New Atheist narrative about the relationship between science and theistic belief. You do that by first showing how Judeo-Christian ideas—and people don’t know this—that first Judeo-Christian ideas actually crucially contributed, listen to this, to the rise of modern science. 

So let’s start where you do and look at their claims. Has science and religion always been in conflict? What do historians say? And this conflict thesis, in your book you argue that contrary to what the New Atheists claim, the scientific revolution was fueled by Judeo-Christian thinking. You talk about it like it’s the X factor, a transposition in thinking that was necessary for modern science to come about. I want you to tell the folks about what this X factor is.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, this is the big, untold story as to the history of science. And almost all prominent historians of science have come to see this: that ideas that came out of the Judeo-Christian worldview, indeed, even biblical ideas about the nature of God and the nature of the natural world, were essential to getting science going. And there’s a famous historian from Cambridge University, a historian of science named Joseph Needham, who argued that there had to be some X factor that could explain what historians of science call the scientific revolution. Roughly between 1500 and 1750 there was this great flowering of interest in the natural world and the development of very systematic methods for studying nature, which we now call scientific inquiry. Those methods were not used in other cultures. There wasn’t the same interest in the natural world.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes, we’re talking about Roman culture; we’re talking about Egyptian culture; Chinese culture. All of them…

Dr. Stephen Meyer: All of these very sophisticated cultures. The Chinese developed gunpowder and block printing; the Greeks had great philosophers; the Romans built aqueducts. But none of these even very sophisticated ancient cultures developed the systematic methods for studying nature that arose during this period of the scientific revolution. And historians of science have asked why. Why there in Europe? Why then? And what they have almost universally come to in their understanding is that the X factor, the thing that explains that difference, was the role of Judeo-Christian thinking, biblical ideas about the nature of nature and the nature of God. And there were three of those key, what they call presuppositions, that shifted the worldview of Western people in such a way to make science possible.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What were those?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, the first was something that scientists at the time called the intelligibility of nature.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: And that’s the idea that nature is the product of an intelligent mind, and therefore is endowed with rationality. And you can see that in the orderly concourse of nature; you can see it in the design of nature. And moreover, not only is nature the product of the divine mind, but we’re able to understand that. There is, in a sense, a secret that nature has to reveal about its orderly processes. And we’re able to understand that secret, we’re able to perceive the design and order in nature because our minds were made in the image of the creator of nature itself. So there’s a principle of correspondence. The British physicist Sir John Polkinghorne put it, “The reason built into nature matches the reason built into our minds.” There’s a connection. And so, because we have an intelligence that has as its source the intelligence that built the world, we can understand the world. So that was the first big presupposition that inspired modern science, and it’s really unique to the Judeo-Christian understanding of creation.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Second one was order.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, right. The idea that nature is orderly. Now, the Greeks believed that too. Many of the animist cultures and cultures in the East did not believe that, but the Greeks also believed in order. But there was a unique aspect of that belief in order in the Western Judeo-Christian mind, and that is that the order in nature that we now describe with the concept of the laws of nature, that order was a product of the divine mind, again, and that God was constantly upholding or sustaining those orderly processes that we observe. But also that the order could have been different, because God was a free agent, and He could have ordered the world lots of different ways. So the Greeks had the idea that the order in nature was the order that seemed most reasonable to us. So therefore, they thought they could sit and kind of do armchair philosophizing and figure it out.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: So, for example, they thought that the orbits of the planets were in perfect circles, because the circle was the perfect form of motion. And therefore the heavens, which were the quintessential realm as they called it, must embody that perfect form of motion. Kepler came along later and said, “Well, we’d better look and see and make sure.” And he found out that the orbits were actually elliptical. But that impulse to go and look and make sure was derivative of the idea that God could have ordered the universe in many different ways.

I used to, when I was teaching, I used an example with my students. I got four different types of paint brushes. They all have the same basic purpose, but each one is a little different, for a slightly different application. So the Greeks thought if you could figure out the purpose of something, you could then deduce how it was made. If you knew the final cause, you could deduce all of Aristotle’s other causes. But the scientists during the period of scientific revolution thought, no, God could have made the world differently. Newton came up with something called an inverse-square law, but it might have been an inverse-cubed law to describe gravitation motion.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: So you had to go and look and see. And as Robert Boyle put it, the great chemist during this period, he said it’s not the job of the natural philosopher—which is what they called scientists at the time—to deduce what God must have done. Instead, we must go and see what He in fact did do. So this idea of order, combined with the idea of contingency, that nature was contingent on the will of God, led to, first of all, the impulse to describe nature mathematically, but also to investigate it empirically, to look at it and study it carefully to see how God actually did make the world.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. That’s what contingency means. The fact is, is that there were many ways God was free to do it, and they believed that. And their job then was to figure out, what did He do, which…

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Go look and find out. Exactly.

Dr. John Ankerberg: …which was one of the presuppositions that gave us modern science. You have to investigate. But there’s other…

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes. So you have three in summary: the idea of the intelligibility of nature; the idea of the order of nature; and the idea of the contingency of nature. 

To be continued…