Has Science Rendered Belief in God Implausible? Part 2
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. Stephen Meyer: And one other that kind of came to prominence during the period of the Reformation, where the reform thinkers rediscovered the doctrine of the fall of man and the realization that humans are fallen not only in their impulses, but in their intellect, such that we can easily jump to conclusions and have biases. And so they were aware that our theorizing needed to be checked against experience. We needed to make sure that our ideas were not a matter of subjective bias and that they really matched the world. So that also led to the impulse to investigate empirically.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And here’s the thing, is that people might say, “I’m not sure I believe that during the Reformation and during that time period way back then, that this is really true.” But you can prove it; anybody that goes to a library, all right? There were three metaphors that show up in books. They have pictures of them. And talk about the three metaphors that were just all over the place that these guys used in their writings; they put pictures of them; they talked about them. What are the three metaphors?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, this really hit me my first year as a graduate student in Cambridge when I was studying the history and philosophy of science. As I read the primary sources of figures like Robert Boyle the great chemist, or Johannes Kepler the astronomer, or Sir Isaac Newton, they continually used these metaphors that were clearly theological in character. And one of those was the idea that nature is a book, or like a book. Just as God has revealed Himself through Holy Scripture, the Book of the Bible, God has always also revealed Himself through the Book of Nature. And this metaphor implied, again, the intelligibility of nature: it’s something that we could read and understand. But it also implied that there was a divine source. And so, it also legitimated science as a separate realm of inquiry. Because if God had revealed Himself through the natural world, there were some questions we couldn’t answer just by reading the Bible, we had to look at the other book to understand what He was telling us. So that was one of the key metaphors that you saw over and over.
Another one was the idea of nature is like a clock, which implied that nature as a system was designed. And this was one that you found repeatedly in the works of Robert Boyle. He said that “Nature, ‘tis like a rare clock where all things are so skillfully contrived that the engine being once set moving, all things proceed according to the Artificer’s design.” So you have the idea that nature has a regularity to it, as clockworks does, and that regularity is a product of an aboriginal design of a great mind, namely the mind of God.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Paley and Boyle both used an illustration in different centuries about, if you were walking out in the woods and you found a watch, you wouldn’t think that, you know, it just grew up with the grass, or fell off of a tree or something. That would show you, the fact is, somebody that was intelligent had made that watch, and somebody had dropped it there. It didn’t just,… you know, it had design in it already.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you find that the early founders of modern science not only presupposed that nature was the product of a divine mind, but when they went and looked at nature, they saw evidence of that design that they talked about in their scientific works. One great example of that occurs in Newton’s famous book, The Principia. At the end of The Principia, which is the book where he makes his case for universal gravitation, he has a theological epilogue called “The General Scholium.” And there he argues that though the law of gravity can explain why the planets stay in their stable orbits today, the law alone does not explain how the planets arrived their delicately balanced positions in relation to each other at the very beginning of the solar system. And so there he develops a very elegant, what’s called an initial condition fine-tuning argument. And if you don’t mind, I’ll just read that passage.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Please do.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: It’s majestic.
Dr. John Ankerberg: What I love about this is that the people that were arguing, and you went back and you read the original to find out who was telling the truth. And you put up the Latin script in your book. And I thought, give me a break that, you know, you went back and read it in Latin? No, you got the English translation and you read it. So I was glad to hear that, but…
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, yes. Let me share this one passage. It’s fascinating. Newton, making a design argument right in The Principia, which is arguably one of the two or three greatest works of physics ever written. And he says, “Though these bodies,” referring to the planetary bodies, “may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, they could by no means have first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws. Thus, this most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Capital B.
So, right in The Principia, which is arguably one of the two or three great works of physics ever written, Newton made a design argument for the existence of God on the basis of the intricately finely tuned planetary system that sustains our life on earth. So you have this tradition of design arguments being made right in the scientific works of the great founders of modern science.
Which leads to the third great metaphor, Newton’s work does, and that is the metaphor of the laws of nature, the idea that nature is a lawful realm. And a great historian of science [Edgar] Zilsel, who’s investigated kind of the origin of this use of this term, has shown that applying the idea of the laws of nature to nature was unique to the period of the scientific revolution. And he says it was a juridical metaphor, a legal metaphor, of theological origin. It implied that the order of nature was the product of God’s constant sustaining power, as it says in Scripture. And Newton very much believed this, and believed that the lawful regularities that he described with mathematics, which were a product of God’s, as one of my Cambridge supervisors put it, “constant spirit action.” It’s God holding the universe together. And that explains the regularities that we see around us.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Also, the fact is, tell the folks that when Newton came out with this, it was mind-blowing even to the Christians that had these presuppositions. Because they had never thought about the fact of why is the moon up there, and why does it control the tides?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Oh, this was his,… the mysterious aspect of Newton’s theory was called action at a distance,
Dr. John Ankerberg: Because nobody can see what these,… what was holding it there.Dr. Stephen Meyer: The scientists at the time thought the best types of explanations involved mechanical pushing and pulling. That was the clock metaphor. But Newton slightly broke with that, because he described the gravitational attraction between the moon and the earth and other planetary bodies and the earth and the sun. But there was no pushing and pulling; that the force of gravity was transmitted through a distance with no mechanical action intervening in between. There was no,… the earth doesn’t push the moon or vice versa, but the force is transmitted through empty space. So how does that happen? And this was greatly mysterious. Newton publicly said, “Hypothesis non fingo” in the Latin, which is to say, “I don’t feign to know the cause.” But privately he acknowledged that what he thought was that this action at a distance was actually a manifestation not of a material cause, but of an immaterial cause, that is, the Spirit of God holding the universe together “by the word of His power,” as it says in the New Testament.
Ed. Note: Part 1 listed three key presuppositions that shifted the worldview of Western people in such a way to make science possible. We now continue that discussion. With a fourth presupposition.
