IS GOD THERE

The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.

The same is true of any miracle — and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it — an estimate that may change as more information comes in. The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against 'intelligent design' creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution.

But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently.

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On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other. Richard Dawkins's Edge Bio Page. America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world.

It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.

The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency. Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised? My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg.

What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education — and hence the whole future of science in this country — is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity' Judge John Jones's immortal phrase of 'intelligent design' continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency.

For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban.

Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement' school focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease 'moderate' or 'sensible' religion not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do.

Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased. The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to the point of muddying the waters.

The philosopher of science Michael Ruse wrote:. We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists.

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Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins's response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:. To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time from college bull sessions to learned treatises: We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference.

God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis — by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation? Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared.

To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions.

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You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies. If, by 'God', you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck's constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked her professor whether he had a view about me. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives sins, wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises you from the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied.

As the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said, "If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal. When Einstein said 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe? Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a personal God.

But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason. Unless we are able to explain satisfactorily how each of these things exist, without resorting to a supernatural force, and find empirical evidence to support our conclusion, a Creator is default.

Furthermore, any derived conclusion must be within the bounds of natural law, as natural law is a part of the universe and remains unbroken within the universe.



The burden of proof rests upon atheism to validate its position. This is the accepted theory today. It is a wonder how this theory came to be accepted, as it violates two of the three Laws of Thermodynamics , and the Law of Cause and Effect. Furthermore, as retrograde motion is observed throughout the universe, even within our own solar system, the Big Bang violates the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum.

Beyond these violations of natural law, the Big Bang is unable to explain uneven "voids" and "clumps" throughout the universe. Plus, there remains the question, "where did the Big Bang come from? A few atheists hypothesize that the universe is eternal and only appears to have had a beginning. This contradicts quite a few empirical evidences and observations, as well as violating natural law. The question that seems most perplexing is, "why are we determined to explain away God? But even if that should prove possible, the discovery that minds are machines would still offer no evidence in support of atheism, since computers are not random creations but the product of conscious design.

Without their human creators, they would not exist. If atheism cannot account for the nature and operations of the human mind, is it any more successful in explaining the existence of conscience? I hardly think so. All its varied attempts to do so misrepresent and explain away our moral experience because they ignore the peculiar nature of moral obligation and moral values.

For example, are our moral perceptions instincts aiding our survival, and therefore a form of learned behaviour preserved and extended throughout the human race by a social process analogous to natural selection? But why do we make this choice? Because of our moral perception that the life of another human being is as precious as our own, and we have a duty to save it if we can. There is another reason for dismissing the idea that our moral faculty has evolved because it helps us in the struggle for existence.

It is contradicted by both history and our own experience. Why else are there so many dictators and criminals? What about the other commonly held view, that it is the long-term interests of society which determine and explain our moral values, rather than our own immediate interests? The problem with that is that it fails to explain why we should care about society as a whole if we can have a better or happier life by ignoring, as many do, its wider interests.

In the end, unless we are nihilists who deny the existence of all values, we are forced to admit that our moral convictions about the preciousness of life, truth, justice, mercy, and so on, are self-evident axioms. How can we attach any importance or authority to our moral perceptions if they are only, as we are, the accidental product of a random and purposeless universe?

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The fact that we recognise an objective standard of Right and Wrong which exists whether we live or die, obey or disobey it, can surely only mean one thing: In short, it is the moral argument for the existence of God. The failure of atheism to make sense of human consciousness is symptomatic of its overall inability to provide a credible explanation of the origin and development of life. The first important question it fails to answer is why does anything at all exist?

Is the universe self-explanatory? The fact that scientists can study life and the universe without having to even ask, let alone answer, this question, does not make it any less interesting or relevant. To anyone searching for truth, it is a meaningful inquiry to ask whether Nature has an Author or is self-sufficient, for one very compelling reason. Something cannot come from nothing — a common sense observation rooted in both logic and experience. To underline the obvious, it is not only self-evident that the absence of something cannot at the same time account for its presence , but this is a truth confirmed by everything we observe and know.

Babies do not materialise from nowhere and works of art do not create themselves. But if it is the case that nothing cannot produce something , what are the wider implications? For anything to exist, it must either be self-existent from all eternity, or else the creation or effect of something else that is.

Does our knowledge of the universe, then, suggest that it is self-existent? Surely not, since all organic life has a beginning and an end animals and humans are born, live, and die , and inorganic structures and processes are subject to constant alteration and change. Why does change occur at all? Who or what brings it about? The answer to the riddle of existence, therefore, stares us in the face if we are open-minded enough to see it.

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There is a self-existent Creator. One reason for this arises from the belief that since the quantum theory of modern physics suggests that sub-atomic events have no apparent cause, the universe does not need one either. The problem with this argument, however, is that no physical investigation can prove the absence or presence of causation, since the concept of causality is a metaphysical one, whose truthfulness can only be challenged philosophically, not scientifically.

If, therefore, we are correct in thinking that something cannot come from nothing, the most that any scientific experiment can establish is that in some particular instance it was not possible to identify the causal agent involved in a certain process or chain of events. There is another equally powerful objection to all scientific attempts to question the reality of the causal principle: Unless they already believed in the causal principle, scientists could not draw general conclusions from particular experiments and observations, and consequently could not formulate or discover any scientific laws.

Following in the 18 th century footsteps of Hume and Kant, they either attribute our belief in causality to habit — we only believe the sun rises in the east because we see this every morning — or else they deny the implication that just because we see causality at work within Nature, therefore we are justified in believing that it operates between the universe as a whole and something outside it. Nor can we be sure that even if causation is objectively present within Nature, the universe as a whole has a cause.

However dominant this atheistic scepticism may be in the philosophical departments of modern Western universities, its intellectual foundations are extraordinarily weak. It does this because it establishes a causal connection between our observations and our belief in causality.

But how can the causal principle be used to explain away causality?

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It involves an absurd contradiction. Secondly, it is not true that our belief in causality is only supported by habitual observation of external events. It is also rooted in our own internal mental experience. We are, for instance, immediately and intimately aware of the fact that our acts of will determine and control our subsequent behaviour. We know that our decision to go to Paris for a holiday results in our booking a flight to the French capital and our presence on the appropriate aircraft. We similarly perceive that there is a causal connection between our invention of a fictional character and our presentation of him to the outside world in our first novel.

It is therefore extraordinarily perverse to claim that we cannot prove the reality of causality. Its objective presence in our experience is manifestly self-evident. Furthermore, the significant fact that we have direct and intimate knowledge of the causal principle in our own creative experience, offers the strongest possible support for the cosmological case for the existence of God. If writers like Tolkien can create imaginary worlds which would not otherwise exist, why is it unreasonable to argue that the real world has a Creator?

Why should we think it plausible that the creative and causal principles operate within Nature and throughout human experience, but not between Nature and God? The onus of proof in justifying his position surely rests on the sceptical atheist rather than the philosophical theist. The first point to make is that Darwinism not only fails to explain the existence of the universe in the first place; it also cannot account for the existence of any scientific laws.

Why is the universe a cosmos and not a chaos? Is it not extremely improbable that a few simple laws of physics would underlie all phenomena in a random and accidental universe? What are we to make of the strange but interesting fact that the structure and order of the universe can be understood and described so perfectly in terms of mathematics?

When we turn our attention to living things, the evidence of purposeful intelligence, and the questions it prompts, only multiplies. Why, for example, is the human body equipped with an immune system to combat disease? Why do birds have an instinct to build nests for the accommodation of their young, or to escape the coming of winter through migration? Why are bees able to make honey and what explains the fantastic organisational activity of ants? Does not this evidence of purposive design suggest the existence of a Designer, as William Paley, using the analogy of a watch, famously argued in the 18 th century?

Has not this evidence, moreover, been vastly reinforced by the progress of science since his time? Is it really credible, instead, to attribute all this fantastic complexity to chance? Darwinian scientists like Richard Dawkins, answer triumphantly in the affirmative.

As he attempts to argue in his best-selling book, The Blind Watchmaker , the theory of evolution — properly understood — offers a perfectly satisfactory explanation of how complex life forms and biological structures have developed by chance from simple beginnings. All that is required is the action of natural selection working on admittedly random mutations. Mutations that increase the survivability of organisms and creatures simply accumulate and spread throughout the relevant populations, thus allowing ever more complex and well adapted forms of life to emerge without any conscious design or Designer.

Despite the skill and confidence with which Dawkins and other Darwinists state their case, it does not stand up to closer examination for a number of reasons. The first problem is that many Darwinian scientists already disbelieve in God before even beginning their scientific investigations. As a result, they have a strong predisposition towards accepting the theory of evolution, since it is hard to imagine how else life could have developed in the absence of a Creator and Designer. Richard Dawkins, for instance, describes the idea of God as "a very naive, childish concept," and has explicitly expressed his relief that Darwinism enables him to be "an intellectually fulfilled atheist.