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August 18 - October 10, 2023
“What is the entity or the process from which everything else came?” Scientific materialists have traditionally answered that question by affirming that matter, energy, and/or the laws of physics are the entities from which everything else came and that those entities have existed from eternity past as the uncreated foundation of all that exists. Matter, energy, and physical laws are, therefore, viewed by materialists as self-existent.
Because materialists think that matter and energy are the foundational realities from which all else comes,2 they deny the existence of immaterial entities such as God, free will, the human soul, and even the human mind conceived as an entity in some way distinct from the physiological processes at work in the brain.
I have argued that certain features of living systems—in particular, the digitally encoded information present in DNA and the complex circuitry and information-processing systems at work in living cells—are best explained by the activity of an actual designing intelligence. Just as the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone point to the activity of an ancient scribe and the software in a computer program points to a programmer, I’ve argued that the digital code discovered within the DNA molecule suggests the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.
I found myself briefly describing three key scientific discoveries that I thought jointly supported theistic belief—what I call “the return of the God hypothesis”: (1) evidence from cosmology suggesting that the material universe had a beginning; (2) evidence from physics showing that from the beginning the universe has been “finely tuned” to allow for the possibility of life; and (3) evidence from biology establishing that since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen in our biosphere to make new forms of life possible—implying, as I had argued before,
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The properties of the universe and of life—specifically as they pertain to understanding their origins—are just “what we should expect” if a transcendent and purposive intelligence has acted in the history of life and the cosmos.
Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.
Professor Russell explained that the perception of a deep or inherent conflict between science and faith is a product of late nineteenth-century historical revisionism.
Barbour argues that “science in its modern form” arose “in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”
The Judeo-Christian—indeed, biblical—doctrine of creation helped liberate Western science from such necessitarian thinking by asserting the contingency of nature upon the will of a rational God.
Robert Boyle, one of the most important figures of the scientific revolution and the founder of modern chemistry, explained, the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.51
Thus, the assumption that a rational mind with a will had created the universe gave rise to two ideas—contingency and intelligibility—which, in turn, provided a powerful impetus to study nature with confidence that such study would yield understanding.60
two Latin coinages, which prima facie cut against each other: imago dei and peccatum originis. The former says that humans are unique as a species in our having been created in the image and likeness of God, while the latter says that all humans are born having inherited the legacy of Adam’s error, “original sin.”61
We should aspire to understand all of nature by proposing bold hypotheses (something of which we are capable because of the imago dei) but to expect and admit error (something to which we are inclined because of the peccatum originis) whenever we fall short in light of the evidence.”65
Calvin notes that the monotheistic worldview of the ancient Hebrews suggested a reason to expect a single coherent order in nature and thus a single, universally applicable set of laws governing the natural world.
By contrast, because animists, polytheists, and pantheists affirmed the existence of many spirits or gods, each possibly interacting with nature in different ways, they had no reason to think that natural phenomena would manifest uniformity and order.
Calvin, like many historians and philosophers of science, identified this belief in an order-loving monotheistic God as “the historical foundation for modern science.”34
Newton argued that the uncanny match between the optical properties of light and the structure of the mammalian eye suggested foresight and design.
“How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent?”84
This view misrepresents Newton in three ways. First, he rejected the idea that gravity—with its mysterious action at a distance—could be explained by any mechanistic cause. Second, Newton thought that laws of nature express God’s way of ordering “brute matter” through the constant action of his will and spirit. Third, Newton saw evidence of initial acts of intelligent design in the complex configurations of matter in both the solar system and biological systems.
the necessary first cause of the universe must transcend the physical universe (since a cause is necessarily separate from its effects)10 and must be personal (since only a personal agent can act discretely to initiate a new line of causation without its action being caused by a prior set of necessary and sufficient material conditions).
“Fine tuning suggests that, at the deepest level that physics has reached, the Universe is well put-together. . . . The whole system seems well thought out, something that someone planned and created.”32
Attempts to explain the evidence by invoking chance alone or multiple other universes (more on that in Chapter 16) seemed to him to betray a kind of metaphysical special pleading, even desperation. As Longley explained, the anthropic design argument “is of such an order of certainty that in any other sphere of science, it would be regarded as settled.” He continued: “To insist otherwise is like insisting that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare because it might have been written by a billion monkeys sitting at a billion keyboards typing for a billion years. So it might. But the sight of
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It turns out that the specific arrangements of bases in DNA, like the arrangement of letters in an English sentence or digital characters in computer software, do not just exhibit a high degree of mathematical improbability. Instead, the specific arrangements of the nucleotide bases (especially in the coding regions of DNA) enable the DNA bases to perform a function in the cell. The bases in DNA convey instructions for building proteins—and do so in virtue of their specificity of arrangement. As Francis Crick explained in 1958, “Information means here the precise determination of sequence,
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Today the question of how life first originated is still widely regarded as a profound and unsolved scientific problem, largely because of the mystery surrounding the origin of functionally specified biological information.
What needs explaining is not the origin of order—whether in crystals, swirling tornadoes, or the “eyes” of hurricanes—but the origin of information.26
Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem
follows that any entity capable of explaining the origin of the universe, to which these indicators attest, must transcend the space and time, matter and energy of the universe. Naturalism fails to explain the origin of the universe because it denies the existence of any entity external to nature,
The idea of reason itself requires that human thought is not wholly determined by impersonal material forces (e.g., by external physical stimuli or chemical reactions in the brain). If our thoughts were wholly determined by impersonal material forces or chemical reactions, we would have no reason to trust the reliability of our thoughts, since such forces and chemical reactions have no obvious relationship to the object of our thinking.
As the British biologist and philosopher J. B. S. Haldane once said, “If mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I [would] have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.”
the probability of a finite universe assuming theism is greater than the probability of a finite universe assuming naturalism. It follows that the evidence of a finite universe confers greater evidential support on theism than it does on basic naturalism and that theism provides a better explanation of the evidence for a finite universe than does naturalism.
any theory of the origin of life, whether purporting to explain the first life on earth or elsewhere in the cosmos, must account for the origin of the functional or specified information necessary to configure matter into a self-replicating system—something
to say that there is some as yet undiscovered general law of nature that will ultimately explain all the specific values of the fine tuning, without itself having to have finely tuned initial and boundary conditions and constants, again ignores the “nature” of natural laws and what they need in order to describe nature accurately.
naturalism, with its commitment to explaining everything by reference to the fundamental laws of nature alone, cannot explain the fine tuning of the universe—at least not without presupposing exquisite prior unexplained fine tuning of other contingent parameters.
basic naturalism lacks recourse to an entity with the causal powers to produce the effect in question. By contrast, theism and deism affirm the existence of a transcendent intelligent agent prior (either ontologically or temporally) to the beginning of the universe. Thus, theism and deism posit an agent with causal powers—the “right skill set”—to produce the fine tuning of the universe from its beginning, whereas naturalism does not.
Since in our experience fine tuning results from intelligent agency, and since naturalism denies the existence of any intelligent agent preexisting the universe, philosophical naturalists should not expect to observe a universe in which life depends upon exquisite fine tuning. Instead, they should expect a universe in which all phenomena can be explained by reference to the fundamental laws of physics. But, as we have seen, those laws themselves do not explain either the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe or the contingent features of the physical laws (the fine tuning of
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Thus, again, our present observation of a life-friendly universe with its improbable fine tuning contradicts what we should—in all probability—expect if the hypothesis of naturalism were true.
positing such an unobserved superintelligence to explain the fine tuning of the universe does not violate any principles of sound reasoning. Instead, it represents a natural extrapolation from our knowledge of the kind of finely tuned, information-rich systems that relevantly similar human intelligences produce. Similarly, positing a specifically transcendent intelligence to explain the fine tuning is warranted by the nature and the timing of the appearance of the effect itself—and by the attributes of the posited cause, namely, God.
The universe that Lamoureux and my philosopher friend at the conference were envisioning is a universe that would, like balls on a billiards table, unfold in a perfectly predictable and deterministic way.27 That depiction matches the early nineteenth-century understanding of physics championed by Pierre Laplace, who thought that if scientists knew the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics, they could calculate every subsequent state with precision. But it does not match the universe as described by twenty-first-century physics or information theory.28
of these two worldview hypotheses, theism provides a better overall explanation than deism of the three key facts about biological and cosmological origins under examination: (1) the material universe had a beginning; (2) the material universe has been finely tuned for life from the beginning; and (3) large discontinuous increases in functionally specified information have entered the biosphere since the beginning. Deism can explain the first two of those facts; theism can explain all three.
