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Can God and Science Co-Exist?

The head of the Human Genome Project is an evangelical Christian: Francis Collins. His new book is The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Steve Paulson interviewed him about contentions at the intersection of science and religion: The believer.

Hating on Atheism:

Collins makes a point which I believe presents an insurmountable obstacle to strong atheism:

Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.

I’m going to be dogmatic about this: if you think that the capacity to reason comes with the responsibility to be inquisitive, atheists are abdicating that responsibility. You can’t just shrug and say the Big Bang came out of nowhere, fin. How can the Big Bang just happen? In fact, saying the Big Bang came out of nowhere is embracing the same kind of ‘magical thinking’ at which atheists routinely scoff.

A routine response is that “asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what’s North of the North Pole.”

Nice try. The only problem with seeking what’s ‘beyond’ the North Pole is using a compass to do it. There’s a heck of a lot of space and sky enveloping the ground level at 90° North. Similarly, even if ’space’ and ‘time’ don’t make sense beyond the extent of our universe, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t something out there—maybe not before or surrounding but definitely existing.

Hating on Theists:

On the flipside, Collins rebuffs ‘God of the gaps’ argumentation, the sort that says, “if we don’t understand how something could happen, then it is clearly a miracle, and thus evidence of a supernatural force”:

When God is inserted in a place where science can’t currently provide enough information, then sooner or later, it does. My God is bigger than that. He’s not threatened by our puny minds trying to understand how the universe works.

It’s really puzzling when people attempt to suppress inquiry in the name of preserving religion, like school boards in America chipping against evolution. If your religion is true, then you should not fear inquiry—truth doesn’t suffer from attempts to establish its accuracy (I’m reminded of my Theory of Knowledge teacher who used to say something to the effect that truth is only made stronger by attempts to refute it. This notion is also part of classic First Amendment theory—that the Marketplace of Ideas can establish correctness.)

Obviously, ‘pure reason’ worries religious authorities because it culminates in an alternate moral path, effectively replacing religion altogether. But they should be humble when decrying advances in understanding as inevitably subverting the moral order. The Catholic Church didn’t let Galileo off the hook until 1992! From L’Osservatore Romano, November 1, 1992:

Certain theologians, Galileo’s contemporaries, being heirs of a unitary concept of the world universally accepted until the dawn of the seventeenth century, failed to grasp the profound, non-literal meaning of the Scriptures when they described the physical structure of the created universe. This led them unduly to transpose a question of factual observation into the realm of faith.
[…]

Galileo’s judges, unable to dissociate faith from an age-old cosmology, believed quite wrongly that the adoption of the Copernican revolution, in fact not yet definitively proven, was such as to undermine Catholic tradition, and that it was their duty to forbid its being taught.

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