I only mention this sordid chapter from my youth because I was reminded of it yesterday morning when I read the headline on Wade Burleson's blog, "When a Brilliant Scientist Sounds Brilliantly Stupid It's Both Bizarre and Sad." Like a number of Christian bloggers, Burleson was referring to Stephen Hawking's latest foray into the muddled milieu pseudo-philosophical scientific conjecture in which he makes the not so novel assertion that the universe essentially created itself without any assistance from some divine first mover, a.k.a. "God." "Brilliantly stupid" is a particularly appropriate term to describe Hawking's atheistic theory of "spontaneous creation" which requires, as Burleson says, "enormous, google-like faith." Several centuries after its first attempts to separate itself from religion and theology, "science" has come to this: a thoughtless exercise in dogmatism requiring maximum faith but minimum intelligence. Hawking, and those like him, including the "new atheists" who imagine themselves so intellectually superior to the ignorant masses, have become every bit the narrow-minded fundamentalists they so decry. It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic.
Going a step further, Greg Goebel explains how the "god" so often rejected by scientists is also the "god" rejected by classical theism.
The strange thing, to me, is the need for some scientist to debunk this miniature god of superstition. Why do they seem to refuse to actually try to understand and refute actual theistic belief? Theistic philosophers and theologians have long ago agreed with scientific theorists that god should not be invoked simply to avoid seeking to understand the mysteries of nature. And yet one wonders why Hawking and others are so driven to disprove this god? Why not simply seek to explain the or theorize the rise of organized, intelligent life through physical laws or patterns? One wonders if this need is driven by a religious zeal to convince the masses to disbelieve in the actual Christian God by substituting a lesser god as the punching bag.Stephen Hawking could have been a brilliant testimony to the grace of God enabling a man to overcome suffering and disease to make a lasting contribution to the world of science. Instead, he has become just another illustration of the utter meaninglessness and increasing irrelevance of an outmoded modernity. The brilliant scientist has, indeed, lost his brilliance.
Could the Christian God have organized the created world in such a way that it takes the shape which we now observe? Logically, the answer must be yes, even if one does not believe in the Christian God. The Christian God transcends our experience of the world and even of himself, and therefore cannot be observed in the same way that the universe itself can be. There is simply no scientific way to prove or disprove the Christian God. And if we take the scientific method seriously (what can be gained by observation and testing) we don’t even need to try to prove or disprove his existence. Its simply not a question that the scientific method was developed to address. At the point that a scientist begins to disprove the Christian God, he or she has moved into the realm of theology or philosophy, and is rightly addressed in philosophical or theological categories. You cannot have it both ways, calling a philosophy science but then rejecting philosophical responses to that philosophy. And yet the new atheism continues to debunk the “god of the gaps” and then claim victory for defeating “God”.
I wonder actually how many folks read these books or articles by the new atheism,which purport to be rational and scientific explanations of existence and meaning without God, and take them so seriously as to choose atheism. Ironically, people would then be accepting this worldview by faith, since atheism is at its core a philosophy or even a religion rather than a science (since God can neither be proven nor disproven by empirical study). At least religion calls faith what it is. The new atheism is not honest enough to speak of disbelieving in god as an act of trust in a philisophical construct which cannot be absolutely proven. And agnosticism is really not a “safe bet” which avoids either “extreme” as people are often wont to think. Instead, it is a faith based choice which puts the person in the position of rejecting the Christian God who calls humankind to believe in him. That is, to take the approach “no one can know for sure” is to adopt a faith based worldview, which denies other worldviews, especially the Christian worldview that God has revealed what we need to know of him in order to believe. There is no avoiding the question, and there is no way to turn the question of God into a strictly scientific one, whether to prove or disprove.
I think it takes a lot more faith to be an atheist or agnostic. If they are wrong, they are denying their creator. Contemplating that reality is enough to temper one’s confidence in one’s ability to know these things for sure, or should be. And observation of the complex organization of the universe or universes, to “look for god” or to “look for god’s fingerprints” assumes a certain kind of god. This assumption avoids the God who transcends nature, and in doing so requires a lot of faith that the universe is all there is. Instead, theism faces this aspect of our human awareness or even inherent sense that there is a creator or intelligent cause, asking what this creator must be like to have created a world or worlds such as this/these. The Christian answer to that question, of course, is found supremely in Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, and science was not designed to investigate that kind of claim. Therefore science is more limited than religion, requiring more faith in less resources.
