God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, & Society

8. The Case for God

8. The Case for God god and science Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century science cast itself as the great antithesis of religion. For a while this looked rather convincing. What intelligent person could seriously prefer religion, with its superstitious beliefs in God, grace, the soul, and life after death, to science, with its clarity and light? From this point of view it was clearly desirable that science displace religion as the guiding force in people’s lives, so as to put existence on a completely “rational” basis—which usually meant nothing more than placing it under the dominion of reductionist materialism. Today science itself is divided on the meaning and implications of its discoveries. The British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane can be taken to speak for those who read science through the lenses of atheism. Once asked what he deduced about the nature of the Creator from his creation, Haldane replied: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”1 The urbane derision of this remark marks a skepticism quite at odds with the attitudes of other eminent scientists who are at least able—in good scientific fashion—to keep an open mind on whether or not there is a God. Einstein said that with every advance, the physicist finds himself “astonished to notice how sublime order emerges from what appeared to be chaos.”2 This is not something the scientist reads into the universe; rather it reflects the inherent reality of the cosmos. Who or what is God?This is a question that has exercised the minds of the best—and the worst—philosophers, scientists, and 126 The chapter was originally an address to the Faith and Reason Society of the University of New SouthWales, Sydney, Australia, 5 October 2000. 1. Quoted in Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present (London: Picador, 1993), 107. 2. Quoted in ibid., 44. theologians for millennia. One of the best, Professor Russell Stannard , summarized some of the issues involved in this question with his characteristic lucidity in a series of articles in 2000, published in the English Catholic magazine The Tablet. Stannard rightly points out that God is not an object that exists , in the way we might speak of an apple existing. If this were all God was—an existent object—it would not shed much useful light on anything.Things have to be brought into existence, and to speak of God as an existent thing is only to raise the question who created God. Instead, we speak of God as the source of all existence , that which is responsible for the existence of things, the creator and sustainer of all that is. God is not the divine watchmaker of the deists, who sets everything going and then steps out of the picture. “He is involved at first hand in everything that goes on,” not just a the first moment of creation.3 To ask “who created God?” is, strictly speaking, meaningless, because it confuses things that exist with the source of existence. Likewise, to try to think of God before space and time came into existence, before the Big Bang, is to make the mistake of assuming that God exists only in time. Certainly God can be found in time—every time we pray, in fact—but God is also beyond time. This is what we mean when we say God is eternal, although we are likely to become confused on this point if we make the mistake of thinking that eternity simply means limitless time, rather than the realm that transcends time.4 Being clear on these points is important for understanding the arguments made for God from the design of the universe. There are a weak and a strong version of this argument. The most probable basis of life is carbon, and for carbon to go through the processes that finally produce life, an immense span of time—which also means an immense expansion of the universe from the point of the Big Bang—would be required. In short, the universe has to be the size and age it is to support the existence of creatures such the case for god 127 3. Russell Stannard, “God and the Big Bang,” Tablet, 22–29 April 2000. 4. Ibid. as ourselves. This is known as the “weak anthropic principle,” and it is reasonably uncontentious among scientists, although important nevertheless. It invites us to wonder about the way the universe...