5-Part Series: Science and God | Marathons

Can you believe in God and science at the same time? So-called new atheists like Richard Dawkins and scientific materialists like Neil deGrasse Tyson certainly don't think so. To them, religion gets in the way of science. In their view, more science leads to less God. This is not a new position. It was first expressed over 100 years ago by English physician John Draper in a book titled History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. Draper, who was deeply influenced by Darwin's then-new theory of evolution, regarded organized religion as a direct and existential threat to the advancement of science. As he put it, Religion and science are absolutely incompatible. They cannot exist together. Mankind must make its choice. It cannot have both. So are science and religion inevitably in conflict? Have they always been? Well, not exactly. In fact, the giants who established modern science—astronomer Johannes Kepler, chemist Robert Boyle, physicist Sir Isaac Newton, and others—were deeply religious men. They didn't see any conflict between science and religion. On the contrary, they thought that by doing science, they were discovering God's design and revealing it to mankind. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that the Judeo-Christian religious tradition led directly to modern science. To back up this claim, Cambridge University historian of science, Joseph Needham, posed a famous why-there, why-then question. Why there in Europe? Why then in the 16th and 17th centuries? Why didn't modern science start somewhere else before then? After all, the Egyptians erected pyramids. The Chinese invented the compass, block printing, and gunpowder. Romans built marvelous roads and aqueducts. The Greeks had great philosophers. Yet none of these cultures developed the systematic methods for investigating nature that arose in Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. This realization led Needham and other historians of science, such as Ian Barber and Herbert Butterfield, to look for some other X-factor to explain why the scientific revolution occurred where and when it did. Here's the conclusion they reached. Only the Judeo-Christian West had the necessary intellectual presuppositions to enable the rise of science. So what were those presuppositions? We can identify three. All find their origin in the Judeo-Christian idea of a Creator God who fashioned an ordered universe. First, the founders of modern science assumed the intelligibility of nature. That nature had been designed by the mind of a rational God, the same God who made the rational minds of human beings. Thus, these men assumed that if they used their minds to carefully study nature, they could understand the order and design that God had placed in the world. Second, they assumed an underlying order in nature. This was best expressed by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who argued there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the order of nature, a conviction he attributed to belief in the rationality of God. This idea led to the unprecedented use of mathematics to describe the orderly processes at work in the world, and it inspired the invention of better instruments, such as telescopes and microscopes, to see that order. And third, these founders of modern science presupposed the contingency of nature. This simply means that God had many choices about how to make an orderly world. Just as there are many ways to design a clock, there were many ways that God could have designed the universe. To discover how he did, scientists could not merely deduce the order of nature by assuming what seemed most logical to them—that is, merely using reason alone to draw conclusions, as the Greek philosophers had tried to do. For example, the Greeks thought that since the most perfect form of motion was a circle, they assumed that the planets must have circular orbits— something that Kepler later refuted by careful observation. Indeed, because of their theological convictions, the new scientists realized that they would have to observe, test, and measure in order to understand God's design. To these men, nature was like a book—a form of divine communication, intelligible to human investigation. For this reason, they also developed the concept of the laws of nature, implying God's governance over the natural order. Science was a way to decipher that order. The idea that science and religion are in conflict is a popular belief today, but the history of science shows otherwise. All of us, laymen and scientists alike, owe a great debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Without that tradition, we'd be living in a much more primitive world, morally and scientifically. I'm Stephen Meyer, historian and philosopher of science at the Discovery Institute for Prager University. Was the universe always here, or did it have a beginning? If so, how did it start? From ancient times, philosophers and theologians have debated these questions. But it wasn't until the 20th century that a series of stunning scientific discoveries finally enabled us to get some answers. The story begins in 1912 when American astronomer Vesto Slipher observed that light coming from distant nebulae—clouds of dust and gas in outer space—appeared redder than expected. Why was this important? Here's where your high school science pays off. Remember learning about the Doppler effect? The frequency of sound, light, or other waves changes as the source and observer move toward or away from each other. To demonstrate this, your science teacher likely played a recording of a train whistle. The pitch of the whistle lowers—that is, the sound wave stretches out—as the train recedes into the distance. Well, the same thing happens with light. If a distant star or galaxy is moving away from us, the light coming from that object will also stretch out. Since in the spectrum of visible light, red light corresponds to the longest wavelengths, physicists say light that has been stretched out has been redshifted. This evidence of redshift suggested the nebulae were moving away from us. In 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble, working with a new 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in California, showed that Slipher's nebulae were not just clouds of gas around distant stars, but actually distant galaxies beyond our Milky Way. Soon after that, the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre correlated Slipher's redshift data with Hubble's measurements of the distances to other galaxies. Lemaitre showed that galaxies that were farther away were receding faster than those close at hand. That suggested a spherical expansion of the universe in all directions of space, as if the universe were expanding like a balloon from a singular explosive beginning, from a Big Bang. Oddly, Albert Einstein had earlier tumbled to this idea, but then dismissed it. Einstein's new theory of gravity, known as general relativity, envisioned massive bodies altering the curvature of space, like a bowling ball making a depression on a trampoline. Einstein's concept of gravity implied that space would contract in on itself unless gravity was continually counteracted by the expansion of space. For this reason, Einstein posited a constantly acting repulsive force, known as the cosmological constant, to counter gravitational attraction. But that implied a dynamic and expanding universe, and also a beginning. To avoid this conclusion, Einstein altered his own equations by arbitrarily assigning a precise value to the force of expansion to ensure that the strength of gravity and the repulsive force exactly balanced. Thus, he depicted the universe in a perfectly poised static state, neither expanding from a beginning nor contracting toward a collapse. But then with Slipher and Hubble's discoveries, the heavens talked back. In 1927, Lemaître informed Einstein, in a taxi cab no less, about the redshift evidence for an expanding universe. In 1931, Einstein visited Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory and viewed the evidence for himself. Later he announced, to his great credit, that denying the evidence for the universe having had a beginning was the greatest blunder of my scientific career. Throughout the 20th century, physicists proposed other theories that denied a cosmic beginning. One by one, new evidence showed each to be inadequate. By the 1990s, the Big Bang Theory had prevailed as the best explanation for multiple lines of astronomical evidence. So why was such evidence upsetting to Einstein and to many other scientists? Princeton University physicist Robert Dickey explained, an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past. And so it would. But if the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning, it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of a physical or material cause for the origin of the universe. After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy would have yet existed to do the causing. Consequently, whatever did cause the universe to exist would need to be immaterial and exist beyond space and time. To many scientists and philosophers, all this sounds an awful lot like the first words of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I'm Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute and author of Return of the God Hypothesis for Prager University. Does a design require a designer? Keep that question in mind as we look at some new scientific discoveries about the origin of life in the universe. Since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in 1859, many scientists have denied that design requires a designer. Darwinists have long claimed that the mechanism of natural selection could generate the appearance or illusion of design without being directed or guided in any way. Recently, however, even staunch Darwinists have acknowledged that living things may have certain features that display evidence of actual intelligent design. Though their ideas about who designed life on earth are, well, a bit out there. Some prominent scientists have proposed that space aliens designed and then transported life to earth. Evolutionary biologist and noted atheist Richard Dawkins has even floated this idea, suggesting that extraterrestrials may be responsible for a possible signature of intelligence in life. Indeed, no less a scientific genius than Francis Crick, who helped discover DNA, also proposed the idea that ETs seeded life on earth to set the evolutionary process in motion. If true, we have an intergalactic Johnny Appleseed to thank for starting the chain reaction that has taken us from inanimate matter to Shakespeare. So why have these scientists considered this seemingly far-fetched possibility? Because they have encountered a big mystery they can't explain. It turns out that even the simplest living cells aren't simple at all. And that discovery has made it extremely difficult to explain the origin of life. Recall from biology class that Crick and his partner James Watson discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. When they did, they also realized that the chemical subunits in DNA function like letters in a written language or digital symbols in a computer code. As Bill Gates has explained, DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created. Which kind of suggests a master programmer. Could such an intelligent designer have been an alien, as Crick and Dawkins have suggested? Perhaps. But there are problems with this explanation. Big ones. First, the spaceship theory does not actually solve the problem of the ultimate origin of life. In fact, it dodges the whole question of where this super smart alien came from. How did he evolve? How did the first life and the genetic information necessary to produce it first arise on his planet? But there is something else the E.T. hypothesis does not explain. Modern physics has revealed evidence of design in the very fabric of the universe. Physicists have discovered that the fundamental physical parameters of our universe have been finely tuned against all odds to make our universe capable of hosting life. Even the slightest alterations in the values of key factors, such as the strength of gravity or electromagnetism, or the masses of elementary particles, would render life impossible. We live in a kind of Goldilocks universe where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right balance and the properties of matter have just the right characteristics and configurations to make life possible. To illustrate this idea, the late Cambridge physicist Sir John Polkinghorne imagined a universe-creating machine with numerous dials, each representing some critical parameter. The various dials each have an almost infinite range of settings, yet all are set just right. Not surprisingly, Polkinghorne and many physicists have concluded that the improbable cosmic fine tuning of our actual universe points to a cosmic fine tuner. As legendary Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued, a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics to make life possible. Could this super intellect have been an alien? Not a chance. Cosmic fine tuning has been present from the beginning of the universe and thus cannot be explained by any agent that arises after the beginning. Instead, fine tuning is better explained by an intelligent agent outside the universe who could design its structure as a whole. To avoid this conclusion, some physicists have postulated another speculative hypothesis—the existence of a vast number of other parallel universes. This so-called multiverse idea portrays our universe as the outcome of a cosmic lottery in which some universe-generating mechanism spits out billions and billions of universes—so many that our universe, with its improbable combination of life-conducive factors, would eventually have to arise. Yet advocates of the multiverse overlook an obvious problem. All such proposals—whether based on something called inflationary cosmology or string theory—postulate universe-generating mechanisms that themselves require prior, unexplained fine tuning, thus taking us back to the need for an ultimate or transcendent fine tuner or designing intelligence. Many of us call this intelligence God. I'm Stephen Meyer, Discovery Institute senior fellow and author of Return of the God Hypothesis, for Prager University. Chances are, if you've heard anything about intelligent design, you've heard that it's a faith-based, not a science-based idea. Or maybe you've even heard it's religion masquerading as science. Is that true? Well, why don't you decide? According to evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, living systems give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. But that appearance is merely an illusion. Why? Well, according to Dawkins and his followers, undirected processes such as natural selection and random mutations can produce the intricate, design-like structures in living systems. In their view, natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without being guided or directed in any way. In contrast, the proponents of intelligent design argue that there are telltale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence. So what telltale signs of intelligence are we talking about? There are many, but let's focus here on just one, the digital code stored in the Along the interior of their famed double helix, they discovered a four-character code at work. They soon realized that sequences of precisely positioned chemicals, called nucleotide bases, store and transmit the assembly instructions, the information, for building the crucial protein molecules that cells need to survive. No protein molecules, no life. Crick later proposed that the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or digital symbols in a computer code. Just as well-functioning computer code depends upon precise sequences of zeros and ones, so too does the function of the DNA molecule depend upon the specific arrangement of chemical bases along the spine of the double helix. Famed biotech specialist Leroy Hood describes the information stored in DNA as digital code. Even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. But where did this information, this digital code, come from? Today this question lies at the heart of a great scientific mystery, the mystery of the origin of life. Building a living cell requires many proteins, and building proteins requires genetic information in DNA or some other equivalent molecule. Yet to date, no theory of undirected chemical evolution can explain the origin of the digital information needed to build the first living cell from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, the problem of getting life from non-life. Why is this a problem? There is simply too much information in the cell to be explained by chance alone. The probability of generating a section of DNA code capable of building just one functional protein by chance is vanishingly small, even taking into account the multi-billion year history of the universe. And even the simplest living cells require hundreds of proteins. Thus, the given-enough-time-anything-is-possible argument no longer works. Origin of life researchers agree. The chance hypothesis has failed. Chemistry doesn't help us either. Unlike basic chemical compounds, like a crystal of salt, the chemical letters in the DNA message do not arrange themselves as a result of mutual attraction. Saying otherwise would be like saying that the message in a newspaper headline could spontaneously emerge because of the way ink sticks to paper. Clearly, something else is at work. In this case, a newspaper editor. Yet proponents of intelligent design do not argue for the theory because all these other theories—chance, chemical laws, or some combination—have failed. Instead, they argue for intelligent design because our uniform and repeated experience—the basis of all scientific reasoning—shows that systems with digital information invariably arise from intelligence. DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know that information, whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal, always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life in even the simplest living cells provides strong grounds for inferring that a designing intelligence played a role in the origin of life. So, contrary to what you may have heard, intelligent design is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries. It is also based on the same method of scientific reasoning that Charles Darwin used—a method that relies on our uniform experience of cause and effect to guide our theories about what happened in the past. You may still wish to dismiss the theory of intelligent design. You're free to believe whatever you like, but you'll have a hard time doing so based on the science. I'm Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute and author of Signature in the Cell for Prager University. In a recent interview, while I was presenting some scientific discoveries that may point to the existence of God, a camera operator, a young woman whom I'll call Maria, began to weep visibly. Later, she told me the reason for her tears. Like many young people, Maria believed in God when she arrived in college. But while there, she repeatedly encountered professors who insisted that, based on the science, God was a myth—no more real than Santa Claus. Maria didn't feel equipped to challenge her professors. She eventually left college with nagging doubts about her faith and wondered whether life, including her own life, might be nothing more than a cosmic accident. Many young people share Maria's doubts. Indeed, powerful voices in the academy tell us that science makes belief in God and human significance untenable. Or as Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist from Oxford, has asserted, the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. But are we the product of such indifference—that is, purely materialistic processes that did not have us in mind, as another scientific atheist has put it? Does the universe have the properties we should expect if this all-there-is-is-matter vision of reality is correct? Perhaps not. Three major scientific discoveries contradict the expectations of scientific atheists and point instead in a distinctly God-friendly direction. First, the Big Bang. Discoveries in observational astronomy and developments in theoretical physics have revealed that the universe had a beginning. This is contrary to the expectation of scientific materialists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent, and therefore in no need of an external creator. This evidence for a beginning has instead confirmed the expectation of theists. Nobel laureate Arno Penzias helped make a key discovery establishing a cosmic beginning. He later observed, The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the And he's not alone. Cosmological evidence has led other prominent scientists, including former MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder and the great Caltech astronomer Alan Sandage, to affirm a transcendent creator beyond space and time as the best explanation for the origin of our finite universe. Second, fine-tuning. We live in what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely fortunate universe, where fundamental laws and physical parameters have somehow been fine-tuned with just the right strengths and values to make life possible. The incredible odds against this happening by chance has led even agnostic and atheistic physicists to marvel. As British physicist Paul Davies has exclaimed, The impression of design is overwhelming. Atheist physicist George Greenstein expresses similar cognitive dissonance. The thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency must be involved. Third, the complexity of life. Molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells of an exquisite world of informational nanotechnology. Digital code in DNA and RNA, tiny intricately constructed molecular machines, a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system that resembles but vastly exceeds our most advanced digital high technology. Not what anyone would expect to see as the result of blind materialistic processes. Dawkins himself may have conceded as much when he recently confessed to being knocked sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data processing machinery in the living cell. So what should we make of all this? For their part, scientific atheists have constructed ever more convoluted and fanciful theories. They posit alien designers to account for the code of life, multiple parallel universes to try to explain fine-tuning, and they've developed elaborate mathematical equations in an attempt to use physics to show how the universe could have begun from nothing physical. But what if the scientific atheists are just wrong? What if the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is an intelligent and purposeful creator behind it all? In my book, Return of the God Hypothesis, I argue that the And that raises a hopeful possibility that we are not the product of blind, pitiless indifference, but instead that we were made on purpose, that we were intended. British historian Paul Johnson has argued that the existence or non-existence of God is the most important question we humans can ever ask. Given the scientific evidence we now have, it might be time to consider or reconsider this question. I'm Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science at the Discovery Institute, for Prager University. Thank you for watching this video. To keep PragerU videos free, please consider making a tax-deductible donation.