Is Science removing the 'Creator God'?

By Salvatore Scevola

Introduction

Science and religion, in the minds of many in the early years of the twenty first century appear to be like two contradictory poles of knowledge on opposite ends, each with its own set of methodologies and traditions, vying for our collective beliefs and making opposing claims about us and the world. In other words, they are fundamentally different. The very fact they have had a close, if not tumultuous relationship, is not quite so well acknowledged (since at least the beginnings of what would later be termed the scientific revolution, in the seventeenth century) and shows how the public today have been easily swayed by knowing only the superficial distinctions, the circumstantial evidence, the confirmatory biases. Notable members of the scientific community, many of whom are atheists and whom feel the need to assert themselves onto the world stage, have infiltrated several important public offices and have embarked on a revolutionary public relations movement to discredit God once and for all, basing their methodologies on what they term rational science. That Rationalism and God have a long history, dating back to St Thomas Aquinas and even before, is a fact that many today either are not aware of or perhaps purposefully neglect. Thomas, living in the medieval Europe where science (particularly medicine) was actually more harmful than good, showed in his Five Ways, how in a rational manner appropriated, the existence of God as a truth that is not just possible but is also necessary. According to Thomas, there are no atheists, as all knowledge-seeking enterprises aim to seek the ultimate truth, and therefore philosophy and science must be open to religion. In this paper I discuss in detail the composition of Thomas arguments as contained in the Five Ways, the nature of contingency (as expounded by Avicenna) and several recent movements in Thomism. Thomas Aquinas answers the question “Why anything at all?” in a rational way, concluding that the nature of God is beyond our comprehension as His action is His being. We arrive at the conclusion that modern science, despite its achievements and progress, has not convincingly undermined the need for a creator God, and all such arguments devoted to such fall under their own weight of misunderstanding about the nature of God, necessity and proof.

Delimitation of Science

The essence of modern-day empirical science is founded upon a base of rationalism (the ability to make use of reason) and scepticism (suspension of belief, or questioning all knowledge). Throughout much of the period after the Enlightenment up until the twentieth century, scientific method was built on the principle that a theory could be proven to be true if it could be verified, in other words if the body of knowledge conformed to the observations. This method of confirmation was rejected by the great empiricist Karl Popper, who knew very well the fallacy used by many pseudo-scientists, that of confirmation bias (any person can assert a theory and find facts that confirm it, behaving like a “proof” but leaving out evidence that contradicts the theory)[1]. A much stronger criterion was to say that unless a theory can be shown to be falsifiable then we must accept its status as valid. Not even a billion confirmations of observing swans being white can be proof enough that the next one will not be black.[2] Thus, the very notion of the existence of God as creator even as a purely formal hypothesis, not even taking into account other interpretations of God as sustainer, cannot be refuted unless falsified in a rigorous and convincing manner.

This task has yet to be achieved, and it is the very fact that science uses the scientific method to arrive at truths that is the cause. Scientific method (mathematics/logic and empiricism), when come under scrutiny under its own set of rules, shows that the validity of science itself cannot be proved internally, that is, modern-day science poses a question that it itself cannot answer, namely that of its own validity. Science, with its emphasis on logic and empiricism (the scientific method of observation, hypothesis and experimentation), should be blind, outcomes in any given experiment must not be known in advance, the element of surprise (or not knowing) guides science to new knowledge. Yet how can science be both blind yet seek to cast light on what we know.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems for example show that there are truths to be found in all branches of mathematics that cannot be proved neither true nor false.[3] This is true for even the most elementary arithmetic. Now, we live in an age where religion and the very idea of God’s existence have come under increasing attack from all angles. Most of this change can be attributed to Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ and many if not most of the Darwinian scientists say that ‘evolution by natural selection, leaves no room for a creator God’. Attempts to remove God from modern discourse, whether political, economic or scientific have been primarily motivated to eliminate the need for any thing to be necessary. Is this the case? Is everything merely possible? In examining this question, we recognise the importance that Avicenna made in making a fundamental distinction between essence that is necessary and essence that is contingent. I argue that God is indeed necessary, and articulate this fully with respect to Thomas Five Ways.

Contingency

Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to make the science of Being the apex of inquiry, and therefore proper study of metaphysics. He considered that God is substance existence existing in its own right; not contingent on any thing. Furthermore, he also argues that God is the unmoved mover, and cause of change.

Avicenna then, writing in the 11th Century[4] made the fundamental distinction between essence that is necessary and essence that is contingent.

In looking at the Universe, Avicenna saw the distinction between truths that depend on the truthness or falsity of something else, and that of necessary truths, truths that could not have been otherwise.[5] That the Earth revolves around the sun can be seen to be contingent on the forces of gravity keeping the Earths position in place. However, this did not need to be so. It is because it is contingent, not because it had to have been so. The Big Bang theory is, at the end of the day, a theory. It is the theory that (at present) best matches the facts as we experience (measure and observe) them.

Now looking at the philosophy of science from an empirical perspective we find that all the time theories come and go, being replaced over time as information from outside existing theories challenge existing notions and in time dismantle the status of previous one and thus changes our perceptions of the universe.

Now the nature of contingency provokes the natural question that arises from this explanation of what would cause a Big Bang to happen in the first place. If all causes are not caused of their own accord, science faces the dilemma of how a universe of causes and effects, potentials and actuals, of space, time and motion, came into being. Observationally, we find nothing in nature that is at once both a cause as well its own effect. Thomas’s explanations cast considerable light on the discussion, providing compelling arguments that God is the ONLY necessary thing, inasmuch as God can be called a thing (which He cannot). He elucidates this to us in his so-called Five Ways.

Thomas’ Five Ways

The interesting thing to note about Thomas is that he applied human intelligibility and rational inquiry in an era predating the Enlightenment of the 18th century or even the scientific revolution of the 17th century by several centuries. In his analysis Summa Theologiae, Thomas reformulates or compiles five distinct yet related arguments to prove the necessity of God.

The proofs fall under different types of categories, including ontological, from the word of the meaning of God, cosmological, related to the nature of the physical Universe, and teleological, from how the world is. They are stated as follows.

(1) Motion is only explicable if there is an Unmoved, First Mover

(2) The chain of efficient causes demands a first cause (first cause argument)

(3) The contingent character of existing things in the world demands a different order of existence (cosmological argument). In other words, something that has a necessary existence must exist. If everything that exists is contingent on something else existing, why does anything exist at all? Some thing is necessary for all else that which exists, a different order of existence.

(4) The gradations of value of things in the world require the existence of something that is most valuable, or perfect (degrees of perfection argument)

(5) The orderly character of events points to a final cause, or end to which all things are directed, and the existence of this end demands a being that ordained it (design argument)

Thomas overcame onto-theology by insisting on the ineliminability of mystery, that is by refusing to try to explain everything. In a world consisting only of contingencies, where nothing is necessary because everything is possible and some things that are possible are not to be true, Thomas arrives at the unlikely but logically coherent conclusion that if all things are contingent they rely on something outside themselves for existence. Everything is a cause and an effect, yet if something is an effect it cannot also be its own cause. The fertilization of an egg with a sperm cell causes an embryo, so in this case the embryo is the effect and the union of the sperm and egg cell are the causes.

As a result of Thomas’s work a number of eminent philosophers have attempted to build upon Thomas’s foundations, some of the movements connected with re-interpreting him include :

• Neo-Thomism: rationalism; separation of natural reasoning and faith.

• Existential Thomism: intuition of existence and contingency

• Heidegger, Martin. Twentieth century German existentialist. Says that it is difficult to say anything about Being as such. Therefore people have in effect replaced anything about Being with peoples own consciousness of their place in the world, or of what the world is for them.[7]

• Transcendental Thomism: dynamism of intellect towards Infinite Being

• Analytic Thomism: closer links to science and logic

Thomas says if you take a group of things that are all effects, the group itself will be an effect. Thomas says that God is not said to be not existing as if He did not exist at all, but because He exists above all that exists; inasmuch as He is His own existence. Hence it does now follow that He cannot be known at all, but that He exceeds every kind of knowledge; which means that He is not comprehended.

On another front it is not just science that is undermining the need for a creator God, but also the modern movement of free democratic societies. A recent Supreme Court decision in the United States deliberating on the right of a women to seek an abortion of an ‘unwanted’ child said this “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe and the mystery of human life”[8] if free societies can indeed make such statements and propagate them under the guise of ‘liberty’ then according to such law makers there are no objective truths about anything at all. This to me presents the greatest danger religion in the modern era.

Conclusion

Whilst the achievements in modern science have benefited most human societies immensely, describing facts about the universe, saving lives, prolonging life expectancies and promoting higher standards of living than have ever been achieved before, the arguments for science negating the need for a creator God (science disproving the existence of God) have so far been inconclusive.

Science versus religion is the real delusion, manufactured by certain elites of the scientific community who feel that the only way to feel proud of the fact that they are atheists is to make religious people feel inferior. It is their pathological hatred of religion and of religious persons that clouds their analysis, and like evidence that has been tampered with, jurors cannot make informed decisions based on false or misleading information. They are pursuing the need for themselves to assert themselves in a world that more and more people are questioning.

Richard Dawkins, one of the most well-known opponents of God today, attacks the design argument (the fifth of the five ways) in a vehement fashion, but his arguments are weak and inconclusive.[9] Albert Einstein, that great astrophysicist and landmark personality of the twentieth century, once remarked that when you increase the amount of light in the Universe, you increase the surface area of darkness. In a way, he was perhaps pointing to the possibility that ultimatelyscience by shedding light on all that we may, or will know, will only serve to enhance the uneliminability of mystery, as Thomas himself affirmed many centuries ago. In my own personal view, Socratic die-hard that I am, I like saying “the more I know, the more I know that I don’t know”.

Authors such as Christopher Hitchin’s and Richard Dawkins maintain that ‘God is a ‘delusion’. Predicating this stance says that mankind was a deluded creature right from the very start of collective knowledge, and this must simply be rejected. Ever since the desire for universal and reliable logical knowledge appeared, so did a form of scepticism. This healthy scientific sceptical enquiry has led us to the point we are at today, where the science tells us that the planet is heating and humanity as we know it could face extinction due to our own insatiable thirst for more and more that we actually do not need. The science tells us only that it is a moral question, do we collectively do something about it? Or face certain ruin? Reason predicates choices, choices demand decisions and decisions demand actions.

Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas build on a whole concise metaphysical system that is held up by explanation. At least Aristotle and Aquinas build on a formidable cosmological argument grounded in the logical explanation of potentiality and actuality. This has God as the unmoved mover or ‘maker of the big bang’. Thomas rightly says that philosophy is open to God as it is the search for the ultimate truth, something that humanity as a whole can never abandon.

Religion explains the why, not the how. They are parallel discussions based on different interpretations of experience. God is the everything beyond everything, an absorbing Being that explains the mere possibility of a Universe. If science and religion were so opposite then you should not expect so many scientists and mathematicians to hold a belief in God – yet we have some of the most brilliant thinkers in history that maintain exactly that. In an implicit and counterintuitive way, Einstein was implying that the course of science, in spite of its many great progresses, is ultimately to lead us into a great area of the unknown, that is, unknowable in the sense of modern science is or claims to be.

REFERENCES

[1] Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ‘Popper, Karl Raimund’ (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)

[2] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, ‘The Black Swan’ (Penguin Books, London, 2007) P xxv

[3] Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ‘Gödel’s theorem’ (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)

[4] Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ‘Avicenna’ (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)

[5] Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ‘Necessity’ (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)

[6] Aquinas, Thomas (Summa Theologiae, Class Handbook 2009) book 1 3.11

[7] Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ‘Heidegger, Martin’ (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996)

[8] US Supreme Court (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa v Casey, 505 U.S.833)

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion, accessed 16/11/09