By Revd Chrys M Tremththanmor
Many years ago I was at a
science fiction convention. The usual debates about religion and science came
up, late one night, as they often do after people have had a bit to drink. At
this time I didn’t attend church, but I still considered myself to be a Christian.
‘I could never be a Christian,’ said one young man to me. ‘How can you believe
in all that stuff about God creating the world in six days?’
‘But I don’t believe that,’ I told him. ‘I accept the Big Bang and evolutionary theory.’
‘But you can’t, if you’re a Christian,’ he insisted. I pointed out, politely, I hope, that it wasn’t for him, an atheist, to tell me what I did and didn’t have to believe to be a Christian.
We’ve had various bits of nonsense in the news this week. I found myself shouting at the radio about Tony Blair and William Hague. But the news item which proved that we’re in the ‘silly season’ for news was that Stephen Hawking had decided that there was no God because the universe could start itself off. That really made me shout. It’s like that conversation with the young atheist. I’m being told what sort of God I must believe in when the truth is far more complicated.
There is this popular
misconception that science and religion are at odds with each other. The
argument goes that, now that science can offer theories such as the Big Bang,
there is no need to have a God who started everything off. In other words, ‘chance’ was
the means by which the universe came into being. There was no plan, no creator.
It just happened, and in time scientists will be able to explain exactly how.
If a God does exist, he is simply the ‘God of the gaps,’ perhaps the one
responsible for the ‘Big Bang.’ And if you take away the Big Bang, as Hawking
was saying this week, then you don’t need a God at all.
But is it really that simple? No. If we look closer at what scientists mean by ‘it just happened by chance,’ you’ll see that it’s a bit more complex than that.
As I said earlier, popular culture sees the universe as simply arising. It just happened to be this way. Carl Sagan was one scientist who accepted chance as behind the emergence of intelligent life from a very limited range of natural laws. ‘...it is only by the most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this time come up with a universe consistent with us.’
But when you look at what scientists write about chance, this is rarely seen as ‘blind chance.’ There are guiding laws behind the universe which guide, for example, evolution so that human beings could arise, something which a scientist such as Dawkins calls ‘tamed chance.’ But what made those laws exist in the first place? Could such laws come from pure chance themselves? Or was there something behind those laws?
The idea that intelligent life is inevitable leads to the ‘anthropic principle’. The ‘anthropic principle’ states that the universe seems to be structured in such a way that intelligent life can emerge. If you look at our own planet, we are just the right distance from the sun, we have just the right amount of oxygen and water, the atmosphere formed in just the right way for us to exist. Was all that really by pure chance?
It would seem that creation is designed to result in intelligent life. But as I’ve said, there is only a narrow set of circumstances which allows intelligent life to emerge. Hawking wrote in an earlier book that God would have had a limited choice of which natural laws to put into motion to govern the universe.
...there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories... that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God.
This answers the atheists who want to know why, if God exists, he doesn’t stop floods in Pakistan or earthquakes in Haiti. God has had to accept a limitation to his choices if he wanted to make sure intelligent life arose. The universe did not need to be as it is; but it had to be this way for human beings to exist. Even as God cannot create a rock which he cannot lift, he cannot put into place natural laws which would not allow for the evolution of self-awareness if he wished to have intelligent life with which to interact. God can do anything, but God cannot do everything. He has to make choices, and then he has to be bound by those choices. So if he sets natural laws into motion to create the universe, he is then himself bound by those laws as creation develops and unfolds.
This could include the possibility that the laws chosen by God may not have resulted in intelligent life. So the further question is, does God work within those laws to influence the outcome? Is God a detached observer of the creation, or is he intimately involved in the ongoing creation of the universe? Up to now, everything I’ve said could lead us to a detached God, a ‘cosmic watchmaker’ who set up the laws of physics and then sat back to see what happened.
But as Christians we always come back to the Cross. Our belief in a God who was born, lived among us, and died tells us that God is not some detached observer. God became involved in the muck and mess of creation, God put himself into the pain which is part of creation.
The Cross is how God accepted the consequences of the pain in creation. I find myself thinking of that line from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.’ God set the physical laws into motion which resulted in the creation of the universe. The same physical laws which created our planet left us with earthquakes and hurricanes, floods and drought. These are natural occurrences, and which cause pain to humans and animals caught in their wake. The Cross tells us that God takes upon himself the consequences of the pain experienced by creation as the universe unfolds.
So science does not disprove the existence of God. But what science does point to is a God who is constrained to act in certain ways if intelligent, self-aware life is meant to result from the creation of the universe. And if intelligent life is indeed the goal of creation, then this in turn leads us to wonder if God is indeed the personal being which Christians have long maintained him to be. Perhaps only a personal being would set into motion the natural laws which would result in self-aware beings who would search for him. Amen.