Is What We See All We Get?

QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Is the universe all there is? Read Chuck Colson’s response below, taken from Answers to Your Kids' Questions: Our teenagers may ask questions such as, Is what we see all there is? Or, Our scientific understanding of the cosmos doesn’t leave any place for God, does it? These questions open up one of the most important topics of our time: evolution. First, let’s address the broad topic and then explore related questions that are often answered in ways that undermine Christianity. Many scientists do believe that the universe is self-existent—that God is not necessary—and that life is the result of chance occurrences. They believe this, not for scientific reasons, but for philosophical ones. They are committed to a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism seeks to understand the world and life itself through natural cause and effect alone. In fact, naturalism argues that only things that can be empirically verified—known with the five senses—are real. God, goodness, beauty, even human consciousness itself (as more than a series of electrochemical reactions) simply go out the window. The bonus for scientists is that they decide on what’s real and what’s unreal because they believe that they are the only ones who have the right method to investigate reality. Their presumption on this matter becomes clear in the debate over whether creation and evolution can be taught side by side in science classrooms as competing theories. The scientists who are dogmatic naturalists will have none of this. They say they know what’s real: Naturalistic science is real; religion is simply wishful thinking. But these judgments are not scientific; they are philosophical, even religious. They are also wrong. To argue against naturalism, we first have to point out its prejudices and presumptions. Next time you’re in a bookstore, browse through the science section for some startling titles: The Mind of God, Theories of Everything, and Dreams of a Final Theory. These books promise that physics is on the brink of finding a supertheory capable of explaining everything in the universe. In other words, many scientists are urging us to find ultimate truth, not in religion, but in physics. Consider Stephen Hawking’s runaway bestseller A Brief History of Time. Hawking promises that science will eventually give us “a complete understanding of . . . existence.” A big step toward that goal is finding a unified theory of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and gravity. Many physicists believe that the four fundamental forces were unified in the earliest moments of the big bang, when the universe began. If you assume that the universe is a closed system of natural causes and effects, then those initial conditions determined everything else that has ever happened in the history of the cosmos. A theory explaining those initial conditions would, thus, be the key to explaining the entire cosmos by purely natural causes. Then physics could finally dispense with supernatural causes—such as a divine Creator. In Hawking’s words, a unified theory “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” Hawking doesn’t believe in God. What he really means is that humans would then attain godlike omniscience; we would prove to ourselves that we are qualified to replace God. (Does this sound familiar—reminiscent of Adam and Eve’s Eden temptation: the serpent’s promise that eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make them equal to God in knowledge? This temptation is still a powerful force.) Supplanting God is often the motivation in the search for a unified theory. In Reason in the Balance, Berkeley professor Phillip Johnson says that such a theory would be so highly theoretical that it would be impossible to confirm by experiment—which means it would, strictly speaking, not be scientific at all; its appeal would be philosophical or religious. The question at the core of science today is whether God exists or whether nature is all there is. British physicist Paul Davies puts it bluntly in his book The Mind of God. There, Davies says that Hawking’s theories could well “be quite wrong.” But so what? The real issue, Davies explains, “is whether or not some sort of supernatural act is necessary to start the universe off. If a plausible scientific theory can be constructed that will explain the origin of the entire physical universe, then at least we know a scientific explanation is possible, whether or not the current theory is right.” Did you understand what he’s saying? Davies is admitting that for him it doesn’t matter whether a scientific theory is right or wrong; it matters only whether the theory gets rid of the supernatural. This amounts to admitting that even a myth is acceptable, as long as it’s a naturalistic myth—as long as it reassures scientists they don’t have to worry about a divine Creator. When your children start asking about the origins of the universe, start answering their questions by pointing out that many basic “scientific” judgments are not scientific (they cannot be proven). They are philosophical judgments, even religious ones. The idea of a self-existent universe is a prime example. This is not a conclusion of science. It’s a presupposition—a starting point—of the atheistic philosophy of naturalism. Naturalism is a metaphysical doctrine, which means simply that it states a particular view of what is ultimately real and unreal.—Phillip Johnson, "Reason in the Balance."

08/15/07