I’m reading Steve Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis as part of a self-imposed refresher course on science-faith matters. My reading follows directly on from another fairly lengthy book on cosmological fine-tuning, A Fortunate Universe, by Lewis and Barnes.
Both books are excellent, but today’s thoughts are prompted largely by the latter, which is clearly science-orientated in being pointedly dispassionate. That is to say, after a very deep dive into the whole science and scientific speculation of cosmic origins and fine-tuning the two authors, in a staged conversation, discuss the metaphysical implications. They do so very even-handedly, it seems to me. Barnes introduces the “God hypothesis” as pretty much the last suggestion, citing arguments from Aquinas to Swinburne, whereas Lewis agrees to differ by preferring the inflation-multiverse option. Barnes agrees it’s a big mystery, so we’re left not knowing whether he actually accepts theism, or was merely presenting it as an intellectual – or even a literary – option.
On reflection that’s a valid approach – the book presents hitherto undecided critical thinkers with the evidence and the alternative explanations in full, and leaves them to opt for the best hypothesis. That’s how the scientific mind works, when doing science.
Meyer’s book has a wider remit, covering the origin of life and species as well as CFT. But though careful in doing justice to all viewpoints, it nails its theistic colours to the mast, actively critiquing other views. Nevertheless, Steve is self-consciously restricting his task to proposing God as the best explanation for these scientific issues. In other words, the book is firmly in the camp of “natural theology.”
Now it is a valid criticism of the “God hypothesis” project that its scope is too limited, because natural theology is limited. After all, whilst Romans 1 tells us that God’s clear role in creation leaves men “without excuse,” intellectual persuasion of theism is not the gospel that saves. I don’t accept that as a criticism of Meyer’s book, because the field of Intelligent Design is a discipline of its own, requiring a particular kind of theological objectivity if it is to be an argument for God, rather than from God. It is distinguishable from evangelism or even apologetics, just as the work of Christians in a caring profession is a particular, though limited, witness to Christ without their necessarily handing a tract to every client.
Nevertheless, there is a real danger that making the case for God from creation alone risks the inquisitive scientist losing the true God, by focusing purely on his general work in nature. History shows it is all too common for scientists to accept either an impersonal deity, or a distant Deistic creator too intellectually brilliant to bother about individuals, especially uneducated unscientific individuals, let alone individual sparrows or lilies. But to see God as the solution to a partial differential equation is as dehumanising as to see the people around you as the product of their DNA sequences.
Almost as an aside, let me insert here my belief that Deism, in its “divine clockmaker” form, doesn’t do justice to current cosmology, because it favours God’s involvement at the temporal beginning of the universe over the rest of time. Yet if this God created space-time, the likely implication is that he is outside time and composed the whole “book of nature” in eternity. He would be uninterested in designing a perpetual motion clock to impress Laplace, or even the “spontaneous” universe of possibilities of the Open Theists. Rather he would rationally wish to be involved in his work at every stage in time, and since he is also independent of created space, at every scale.
This, of course, is the theistic (and Trinitarian) God of the Bible, who not only claims to hold all things in being moment by moment, but to deal with each person as an accountable creature in his own image. The “God hypothesis” alone, then, whilst of apologetic value, doesn’t even do adequate justice to creation doctrine, let alone salvation. A caveat on that is that those versions of ID that point to God’s ongoing role in the history of life are theistic, in a way that cosmological fine-tuning is not.
Scientists like Arthur Eddington and Werner Heisenberg were acutely aware of this, in that they both viewed the deep mysteries of physics not as the underlying truth to which everyday life must be reduced, but as the invisible working parts supporting the more important realities of trees, flowers, farming, families, and faith. It is through this mundane level of life that God focuses his communication and care.
Taking a lead from Donald McKay, I extended this idea to the analogy of a TV broadcast. It has taken a whole bunch of physics and technology to enable us to watch a cricket match, a Shakespeare play, or a Stephen Meyer seminar from the comfort of our arm-chair. And it’s quite right to laud the Marconis, Farnsworths, and Reiths who made the whole thing possible. But even the nerdiest scientists and engineers involved understood their work to be a means to an end – human communication.
Likewise no producer of a nature documentary, Prom concert or news bulletin regards the technology of television as anything but a means to the end of communicating ideas, for good or ill. Mind uses television to reach minds. And so whenever the case is made that the deep truths of physics, chemistry and biology point to a world fine-tuned for intelligent life, it is important to insist that those signs of teleology inevitably connect the “God hypothesis” with the plausibility of revealed religion. If a mind created the universe that makes minds, then communication is on the cards.
TV was not developed to transmit white noise.
