Atheist become Apologist

The story of Alister McGrath has become increasingly fascinating to me, and chp 7 of his book The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind tells his story. In essence he tells an insider’s story of how he shifted from seeing a war between science and faith to see them as friends. Perhaps they don’t always see eye to eye, but they are not at war.

Can a scientist, on the basis of scientific observations, pronounce whether or not God exists or doesn’t exist? I say “No.” What say you?

What do you think of #2 below? Make sense to you?

As a precocious youngster he took the plunge into the dismal world of radical atheism, a world that lacked meaning and purpose. He was smug and knew he was superior, and what happened was that he learned about the philosophy and history of scientific study. What he learned was that explanation is what science offers but it cannot explain everything, and that it operates on certain bases that cannot be surrendered — and neither can they tell the whole story. I hope you can read this chp someday; the first half is simply a wonderful story. What he learned was that science, at its best, is neutral and makes no claims outside of what it can speak about — testable empirical realities. He learned that atheism itself was a belief system.

His conversion entailed an understanding of natural theology, one that did not

…deduce the existence of God from a cold, detached observation of nature, but rather as the enterprise of seeing nature from the standpoint of faith, emphasizing the importance of belief in God in explaining the “big picture” (108).

He pondered the intelligibility issue and the anthropic phenomena, but what’s best in this chp is a powerful sketch of the challenges he gives to typical atheistic observations about faith:

1. There is no battle between science and faith except on the part of those who don’t understand the other.

2. A failure to understand the Christian concept of God. Dawkins thinks of God as an “entity” in almost empirical terms and here’s why: he argues that empirical data do not exist for God. Therefore, God doesn’t exist. But what this shows is:

God can’t be shown by empirical sciences; therefore, God doesn’t exist. But this proves not that God does not exist but that God cannot be proved by empirical sciences or that God is not empirical, which is just what Christians do believe: that God is not one of us but outside the empirical reality. Furthermore, this shows that atheists are locked into both belief that God must be empirical and they believe only in knowledge from the empirical sciences. It is a circular argument.

3. The smuggling of metaphysics into science. So much of what the new atheists say is actually metaphysical, which is outside the field of sciences. He’s got a powerful illustration of this between Dawkins and Denis Noble.

4. Science and religion exist in explanatory competition: new atheism is positivism and science itself has come to see that is not enough. Science can only explain phenomena that are in the world, not anything else. There are other explanations even within the scientific world and each explanatory system has its value and limits.

5. Belief in the “memes” has been proven to be wrong and inadequate. McGrath says scientists see the “meme” idea as a “flaky idea.” The intellectual case for many new atheists depends on a theory scientists do not accept. Some have said there must be a “meme for believing in memes.”

Science is not an enemy to faith. Christian faith goes where science cannot go.