Catholic and Enjoying It!
One of my readers objects to something I never said and replies with this red herring:
The beauty of the God hypothesis is that it explains every single thing that can be observed. Everything. Take shared junk DNA between humans and chimps. “That’s just the way God did it.” The complex inner workings of the immune system. “Isn’t it amazing what God has done.” Even evil and suffering. Take the holocaust. “I guess God just wanted to give the Germans the opportunity to sin so exquisitely that in the end his glory would shine through.”
So when science hits a roadblock the Christian spots his chance, rushes in and says “Ah-hah. Since you can’t explain this (right now) this is the perfect place to insert God, because God explains everything.”
Is that really helpful? An unobservable entity that really is a universal explanation for every single thing?
Scientists are speculating. They don’t pretend they can prove that “Nothing” exploded. But they do offer conjectures, and they see those as worthwhile conjectures, whereas the “Godidit” conjecture isn’t regarded as helpful. But that’s not unreasonable. Christians have always inserted God into the currently unexplained, but sciene has caught up and pushed God out. So the Christian goes to the next thing. And again science shows that natural causes can explain it. Now Christians have been pushed to the outer reaches. The start of the universe, where distinctions like “before” and “after” don’t even make sense as time merges with space. Put God there where he’ll be safe. For a while.
Where to begin? Where to begin?
One sometimes gets the impression that responses like these are more in the nature of a pre-recorded message than an actual act of reasoned thought, as though the author just hits a macro on his computer and it spits out “Atheist response 156: God of the Gaps Talking Points”. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what I said, but it’s the closest fit he could find to his polemical needs, so that’s his story and he’s stickin’ to it!
My reader managed to not only misunderstand my point, but to falsify history. The sciences grew up in Christian Europe precisely because Christians believed that a God who revealed himself had created a nature that was intelligible. That’s probably why, when challenged:
When has the Church overall (as opposed to specific clerics or Christian rulers) rejected a scientific explanation in favour of simply saying, “This is a mystery of God, no more can be known about it,” only to suffer tangibly for being incorrect?
…he backed off and tried instead to ratchet back his rhetoric to the mere claim that I was invoking the god of the gaps.
But this is rubbish too. My point is not “We can’t explain it so God did it.” My point is that the universe is, by its nature, contingent and contingent things *have* to borrow their existence from something non-contingent. Science is about measuring time, space, matter and energy once they exist and are held in being by God. It relies on certain acts of faith like “The universe is intelligible” and (in the actual historical foundations of science in the West) on the conviction that the universe is intelligible because the God who made it makes it so, because he himself is a God who reveals himself. You can, as many moderns have done, go on making an act of faith in the intelligibility of the universe while forgetting about the act of faith in the Intelligible Being who makes it so–for a while (though I suspect our faith in the intelligibility of the universe may decay too one of these days.) But rubbish about lightning and germ theory as somehow relegating God to “the gaps” is (Benjamin Franklin and Pasteur were both theists, by the way) is just sloganeering from the atheist Creation Myth agitprop dept. Once you have uncovered every last physical process and described how it works, you have not come one inch closer to answering the question, “Why is there anything at all?” Once you have conclusively demonstrated that electricity is generated by hydroelectric turbines turned by water going over a dam, you are not one inch closer to answer why water runs downhill, why electricity exists at all, why there is anything there to behave as it does. You’ve merely figured out that it is there and is doing all these weird things. You are blind to the utterly gratuitous nature of things. They didn’t have to be here, much less act as they do. But they are and they do. And they can give no account of themselves by themselves. They are contingent.
Science can only go to work when there is time space matter and energy to measure. It can’t touch the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” because that’s not a scientific question. For the same reason, it can’t say “Why not be cruel?” Also not a scientific question. However, many atheist materialists possess only a hammer, so they treat every problem like a nail.
And, and by the way, the universe would be contingent even if there had been no Big Bang at all. St. Thomas saw no particular reason why the universe could not, as Aristotle thought, have been here eternally, held in being by God. He accepted the idea that it had been created because the Revelation told him it had. Scientific verification of the Big Bang and a universe with a beginning was still rather remote in the future in his day.
This means, among other things, that if the sciences someday show that the universe goes through a series of Big Bang/Big Crunch phenomena, nothing has really changed. The question “Why is there anything?” still obtains and the universe still goes on being contingent.
But then, if you’d just read my piece, my reader would have known that before hitting the macro:
This argument is what undergirds most attempts to back up the New Atheism with a gloss of scientism. It goes like this: People once thought lightning was the Wrath of God and disease was caused by evil spirits. Now we know the physical laws behind a lot of phenomena. Therefore, there is no Legislator of those Laws, and he cannot alter those laws or feed new data into his creation because that would interfere with the philosophy of a lot of tenured people.
Put briefly, you propose a huge metaphysical hypothesis that Absolutely Everything popped into existence 13 billion years ago with the help of Nobody, but loaves and fishes cannot pop into existence 2,000 years ago with the help of Jesus of Nazareth, despite the eyewitnesses who inexplicably chose to die in torments proclaiming He did. The trick to establishing this hypothesis as dogma — when the odds currently stand at 10137 to 1 against the fine tuning of the universe — is to take a particular methodology that, by its nature, only looks at time, space, matter, and energy and have thousands of people repeat “Only what our methodology can measure is real!” for two centuries over millions of loudspeakers. Voila! The words of C. S. Lewis’ Mr. Enlightenment become the Received Wisdom of an entire culture:
Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact.
If people still are troubled by those 10137 to 1 odds, just wave your hand like Dawkins and say there are probably lots of universes, so ours was bound to turn up. Admittedly, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever for that claim. But if you invoke “string theory” and mention Stephen Hawking’s name you can generally intimidate people into silence.
If this d
oesn’t work, you can, like Dawkins, argue that “any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself.” Have another New Atheist named Dennett declare this argument “unrebuttable.” Then quote Dennett quoting you and declare him spot on. You might also want to throw in something about how much more science knows about the complexity of universe today than in St. Thomas’s day. Don’t play up the fact that medievals knew as well as anybody else with two eyes that the universe is a really complex place. And, in particular, don’t discuss the fact that St. Thomas addressed your brand new unrebuttable objection nearly 900 years ago in his Summa Theologiae (Part I, Question 3, Article 7).
Most of all, overlook the fact that the question you are supposed to be attending to is “whether God exists,” not “whether God is complex.” Ignore the fact that all a theist has to do is show that creation is contingent and therefore necessarily depends on what is not contingent for existence. Do not remind yourself that the theist is not obliged to say he or she understands that non-contingent Being, merely that such a being exists. If all this fails and your reader still thinks St. Thomas is getting the better of you, call your reader a creationist in the same tone of voice you’d use to say, “You left your used Kleenex on my coffee table.” Or, if you are Hitchens, just compare him to Osama bin Laden.
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