Don Page - Can Science Talk God？

Don, you are a quantum physicist, you deal with cosmology, and you have a whole other life as a believer. Do these two worlds in which you live come into conflict? They must to some degree. You must have some doubts at some point driven by your science or by your thinking about the world from a scientific way of thinking, which may be philosophical but based on your science. What are some of the conflicts that you face as a full-blown theist? Well, I would like to understand as much of reality as possible, and there's many things that I don't. I don't fully understand the problem of evil, but I have a tentative answer that maybe God loves the elegance of the universe so much that I even wrote, I think, in an email to you and Thomas Nagel that maybe God loves elegant existence or glee. That might possibly explain why our universe has so much elegance, even though it does have a certain amount of suffering and evil in it. But there is an objection, which partly I thought of, and then the philosopher Thomas Nagel, raised that, well, can't God choose what he finds valuable? Couldn't God choose what he wants? And so this does raise the question, if I think the world is the best possible, well, this is of course relative to the nature of God and so on, but why is it that there aren't so, why is it the case that God and all other conscious creatures are just supremely happy all the time? It at least seems logically possible that we could, everybody could be just supremely happy all of the time, and maybe you wouldn't even need a universe or God to have an elegant universe. So there's a bit of a question when I'm trying to explain the existence of God as making the universe the best possible, there is a point that I can't explain, which is why God has the nature he has. When you talk about God's nature, that brings up some issues. You believe God is all good, that means there's a lot of things God can't do, and God has restrictions, so maybe God is not free, and God doesn't have freedom. Now that seems to contradict the independent sovereignty of God. Well, in a sense, I think God is free to do what he wills, but there is the question of whether God is free to will what he wills. I think in one sense, he does will what's the best, but now I'm asking the question, what is... Then he's not free. Then he's constrained totally in some arbitrary calculus to determine what's best, and God has no choice, and he has to do... Well, you could view it that way, but I think if you do what's the best, you could say... People have traditionally argued that if a being is free, and if God knows everything and knows what's the best, he will do what's the best. You might say, in that sense, his choice to do the best, you could say, well, he couldn't have done otherwise, because then he wouldn't have done... But then you just say he's not doing his choice. In some sense, you could say whatever his choice is, you could say, well, in some sense, that was determined. I mean, it's determined by God. So it's a little bit... I mean, it's whether God has this constraint or not. What in your scientific career has caused you to wonder, even for a few seconds, about does this affect my total belief in God? I suppose the fact that I do know quite a lot of intelligent people that don't believe in God. So I do know that my arguments for the existence of God are certainly not proofs. They're making assumptions that maybe other people wouldn't have used. In fact, have you ever convinced one of your scientific friends who don't believe in God through your arguments that now do believe in God? I'm not sure. I mean, I have had a couple of fellow students that I helped lead to Christ, but I think they probably believed in God, but just weren't really following. Yeah, I'm not really sure that I have, whether there's anybody that I've actually convinced. I think it takes the work of the Holy Spirit in somebody's heart to show them that. I mean, I'd like to give reasons so that people can be comfortable with their faith, or if people are searching, and if they just think it's nonsense to believe in God, I would like to show reasons that I think it's not nonsense. I can't prove that God exists. I don't believe that there's any proof that uses axioms that everybody agrees with. But I do think it's a quite reasonable faith. I'm not 100% certain about it, but I've got a very high confidence that God exists, and I'm putting my life on the line and trying to follow what Jesus says. Although I fail, and I sin, and I do things that are wrong. I don't always do what I believe is right. I believe I should do what helps other people the most, but a lot of times I'm selfish and do what benefits me more than others. Okay, I mean, that's quite normal. I'd be shocked if that were not the case. But through your scientific career, there must have been moments when something you thought about or did through your science caused you to just doubt for a little bit. Well, it's more... I mean, I certainly had doubts, and I think the afterlife awareness problem that I don't have time to recount right now was one that gave me some doubts, at least about some elements of Christian theology. I've more or less come to peace with that. I think if I come to more doubts, it may be over more issues that I wish there were more direct evidence about, for example, the resurrection. I mean, I think the evidence is quite high that the disciples believed they had seen Jesus alive, and most of them were put to death for their faith for which this was central. So I think if they didn't really believe it, they wouldn't have persisted to the death in this. And it seems to be the most natural explanation for this belief, that they actually saw Jesus resurrect. So Jesus was resurrected. But of course, it is a very remarkable claim. And so, you know, I can sometimes have doubts because this is something so extraordinary. Of course, it's quite admitted to be extraordinary. It's a central tenet of the Christian faith, and it's recognized to be a complete miracle by God. So I'm not expecting it to have a natural explanation. But it is so remarkable that, you know, sometimes I will have doubts about it. So I'll have doubts about things that maybe arise from historical or that sort of things or the problem of evil. And usually that's more than from things that come from science. I think this afterlife awareness thing, which is really more from the philosophical thing of John Leslie and Brandon Carter than science. Yeah, but from your science, from your work in quantum physics, and the more you understand the universe, you don't feel that that's more than the more you understand, the less you need God. Because some people have said that the more we can explain naturally, the less we need a supernatural explanation. Right. I think God is the origin of the whole thing. It's not a God of the gaps and he just explains the things we don't understand. I think he explains the things we don't understand and the things we do understand. What was it? Jacques Mouneau that wrote Chance and Necessity. And I just see it. That's just dividing the world into two parts. The chance is the part we don't understand. Necessity is the part we think we understand. I mean, I can think that God created both. He created what we don't understand and what we do understand.