God: The Failed Hypothesis (30 page)

Things might have been different, and this is important to understand as it justifies the use of science to address the God question and refutes the frequently heard statement that science can say nothing about God. If scientific observations had confirmed at least one model god, then even the most skeptical atheist would have to come around and admit that there might be some chance that God exists.

Consider the following hypothetical events that, had they occurred, would have favored the God hypothesis. The reader is invited to think of her own “might have been” scenarios that would force even the most dogmatic skeptic to reconsider his atheism.

Hypothetical Observations That Would Have Favored the God Hypothesis

1. Purely natural processes might have been proved incapable of producing the universe, as we know it, from nothing. For example, the measured mass density of the universe might not have turned out to be exactly what is required for the universe to have begun from a state of zero energy, which we assume is the energy of nothing. This would have implied that a miracle, the violation of energy conservation, was required to produce the universe.

2. Purely natural processes might have been proved incapable of producing the order of the universe. For example, suppose the universe were not expanding but rather turned out to be a firmament (as the Bible says it is). The second law of thermodynamics would require that the universe always had total entropy less than maximum in the past. Thus, if the universe had a beginning, that beginning would have to be one of order imposed from the outside. If the universe had no beginning but extended indefinitely into the past, then we still would need to account for the source of the ever-increasing order as we go back in time.

3. Purely natural processes might have proved incapable of producing the complex structure of the world. For example, the age of Earth might have turned out to be too short for evolution. Simple processes might not have been able to produce complex structure.

4. Evidence was found that falsified evolution. Fossils might have been found that were inexplicably out of sequence. Life-forms might not have all been based on the same genetic scheme. Transitional species might not have been observed.

5. Human memories and thoughts might have provided evidence that cannot be plausibly accounted for by known physical processes. Science might have confirmed exceptional powers of the mind that it could not plausibly explain physically. Science might have uncovered convincing evidence for an afterlife. For example, a person who has been declared dead by every means known to science might return to life with detailed stories of an afterlife containing information he could not possibly have known and is later verified as factual, such as the location of the nearest planet with life.

6. A nonphysical channel of communication might have been empirically confirmed by revelations containing information that could not have been already in the head of the person reporting the revelation. For example, someone in a religious trance might learn the exact date of the end of the world, which then happens on schedule.

7. Physical and historical evidence might have been found for the miraculous events and the important narratives of the scriptures. For example, Roman records might have been found of an earthquake in Judea at the time of a crucifixion ordered by Pontius Pilate. Campsites might have been found in the Sinai Desert.

8. The void might have been found to be absolutely stable, requiring some action to bring something rather than nothing into existence.

9. The universe might have been found to be so congenial to human life that it must have been created with human life in mind. Humans might have been able to move from planet to planet, just as easily as they now move from continent to continent, and be able to survive on every planet without life support.

10. Natural events might follow some moral law, rather than morally neutral mathematical laws. For example, lightning might strike mostly wicked people; people who behave badly might fall sick more often; nuns would always survive plane crashes.

11. Believers might have had a higher moral sense than nonbelievers and other measurably superior qualities. For example, the jails might be filled with atheists while all believers live happy, prosperous, contented lives surrounded by loving families and pets. But none of this has happened. The hypothesis of God is not confirmed by the data. Indeed that hypothesis is strongly contradicted by the data.

What Gods Remain?

Now, a believer is certainly free to argue that “none of these Gods is my god.” I have nowhere claimed that I can rule out every conceivable god, just those with the selected empirically detectable attributes. If a believer’s god does not have any of those attributes, then I have no quarrel with her.

For example, we might imagine a god who created the universe but does not interfere with it or interact with its inhabitants in anyway. The deist god of the Enlightenment (the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence) created the universe with completely deterministic natural laws and thus has no need to ever step in. For this god, everything that happens is already written.

However, this type of deist god is probably ruled out by a fact drawn from most interpretations of quantum mechanics. Based on our best current knowledge, nature is not deterministic. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics implies that the motion of a particle cannot be predicted with absolute certainty, that much that happens in the universe is random. Furthermore, the latest developments in cosmology imply that the universe began in total chaos and so retains no memory of any creator. This still leaves open the possibility of a deist god who created the chaos and left everything else to chance. But, such a god has no observable effect and is functionally equivalent to nonexistent as far as humans are concerned.

In
Has Science Found God?
I mentioned those contemporary theologians who are making serious attempts to reconcile science and the supernatural
³
. I called them the “Premise Keepers,” which perhaps was a bit cute but I did attempt to treat them with some sympathy. Their main concern is evolution, which they readily accept as well established. The problem they must deal with is the apparent accidental evolution of the human species.

Some propose that God “poked his finger” in the historical process, so that humanity would appear. However, this is essentially intelligent design applied perhaps just once in evolution but applied nonetheless and contradictory to the essence of evolutionary theory.

Despite accepting the evolution of the human body, we saw that the Catholic Church insists that evolution does not apply to the mind
⁴
. While stating that he would change his Buddhist beliefs should science demonstrate any of them to be false, the Dalai Lama still insists that humans cannot be “reduced to nothing more than biological machines, the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes, with no purpose other than the biological imperative of reproduction
⁵
.”

Some Premise Keepers are willing to accept the now apparent fact that humans are indeed biological machines that are products of chance. If you were to start the universe up again, we and every other species on Earth would not reappear in the same forms.

Humanity is an accident. However, in the view of evolution theism, God can achieve his ends, whatever they are, by any of the count-less pathways that become possible when no restrictions are placed on how matter may self-organize into complex systems.

Physicist Howard van Till imagines a “possibility space” of all potential life-forms. By means of random variations, God explores and discovers (in contrast to creates) novel life-forms that actualize his intentions in the course of time
⁶
. Einstein thought that God did not play dice with the universe, but the Premise Keepers say he does.

However, Phillip Johnson, the Christian lawyer who initiated the intelligent design movement, protests strongly that this is not Christianity but simply an updated deism, with God “exiled to that shadowy realm before the Big Bang” where he “must promise to do nothing that might cause trouble between theists and scientific naturalists
⁷
.”

Obviously, neither the deist god nor the van Till god is the God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Their God plays a primary, moment-by-moment role in every phenomenon, from atomic collisions in the farthest galaxy down to the chemical reactions in each cell in each of the 1030 or so bacteria on Earth. And, of course, he reads every human thought. I have argued that such a God should have been detected by now, if not from casual observations, then surely from the precision data on every aspect of the world that have now been gathered by science. Like the chaos deity, a God with no observable effect is indistinguishable from one who is nonexistent. Certainly worshiping such a God serves no useful purpose.

While many laypeople have been led to believe that science has found evidence for God, this is simply not the case. If it were true, the news would have made simultaneous headlines in every newspaper in the world, using the “Second Coming” font reserved for stupendous events. Indeed, the Second Coming would provide the needed evidence. But it is now two thousand years overdue, Jesus having assured his disciples that he would return before they died.

As I have mentioned several times, there is no basis for the claim that science dogmatically refuses to accept the evidence for God, although some national scientific organizations, terrified of losing taxpayer support, have tried to distance science from religion. If scientific evidence for God turned up that passed the conventional tests applied to any extraordinary claim, then scientists in every field would be happily busy writing research grant proposals to study his nature. Instead most, even those who attend church on Sunday, go about their daily professional duties without ever bringing in God.

Serious theologians not committed by faith to their own dogma have gradually begun to accept the absence of objective evidence for God and have been forced to conclude if a god exists, he must purposely hide himself from us. I fully admit that possibility. God could simply work through natural processes and, indeed, may have reasons to hide himself from us. Let us see what kind of god that might be.

The Hiddenness Problem

In the fall of 2004, I attended a conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder on “The Hiddenness of God” sponsored by the Theology Forum of the Department of Philosophy. The attendees were mostly theologians, philosophers of religion, and other religious scholars, many from theology schools and mostly confirmed believers. They were seeking to find a rational explanation for what most seemed to readily accept as a fact: no empirical evidence for God exists.

One of the attendees was philosopher John L. Schellenberg, who opened the meeting with a presentation of what is called the
argument from hiddenness
for the nonexistence of God. He published this argument in a 1993 book,
Divine Hiddenness
_ and
Human Reason
⁸
.
Stated formally, the argument is as follows (as quoted from Schellenberg’s handouts):

The Hiddenness Argument

1. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationships with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God are in a position to participate in such a relationship that is, able to do so just by trying to.

2. No one can be in a position to participate in such relationship without believing that God exists.

3. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists (from 1 and 2).

4. It is not the case that all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists: there is non-resistant nonbelief; “God is hidden.”

5. It is not the case that there is a perfectly loving God (from 3 and 4).

6. If God exists, God is perfectly loving.

7. It is not the case that God exists (from 5 and 6
⁹
).

In short, a perfectly loving God would not deny knowledge of his existence to any human who is not resistant to that knowledge.

The empirical fact that many humans are open to knowledge of God and still do not believe demonstrates that such a God does not exist.

This argument is similar to the
argument from nonbelief
of philosopher Theodore Drange, which Drange states as follows:

The Argument from Nonbelief

1. If God were to exist, then there would be no avoidable nontheism in the world.

2. But there is avoidable nontheism in the world.

3. Therefore, God does not exist
¹⁰
.

These arguments serve to answer the objection theists make to the argument from lack of evidence (see chap. 1) that God simply chooses to remain hidden from humanity. As Schellenberg puts it, “Why, we may ask, would God be hidden from us? Surely a morally perfect being—good, just, loving—would show himself more clearly. Hence the weakness of our evidence for God is not a sign that God is hidden; it is a revelation that God does not exist
¹¹
.” Conference participants agreed that the hiddenness argument is also connected to the problem of evil. For example, both concentrate on attributes that seem contradictory to the assumed moral character of God. I have only briefly discussed the problem of evil in this book (see chap. 8), since it is not a scientific argument and hardly original with me—although the existence of unnecessary suffering in the world is an empirical fact. However, the problem of evil remains the strongest argument against a beneficent God, one that theologians have grappled with for centuries without success
¹²
.