Has Science Disproven God?

1. Has Science Disproven God? Tom Rudelius

2. Some Say Yes… • “Science flies men to the moon, religion flies men into buildings.” - Victor Stenger • “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” – Richard Dawkins • “The argument is finished. The debate is over. We’ve come to a conclusion. Naturalism has won…Go to any biology department, go to any neuroscience department, go to any philosophy department — people whose professional job it is to explain the world…no one mentions God.” - Sean Carroll [1]

3. Some Say No… • “Do not be afraid to be free thinkers. If you think strongly enough, you will be forced by science to the belief in God.” – Lord Kelvin • “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” – Isaac Newton • “When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a theist.” – Charles Darwin [2] • “There are proportionately as many atheistic truck drivers as there are atheistic scientists.” – Richard Bube [3]

4. Science vs. Scientism • Strong scientism: There are no truths apart from scientific truths. • Weak scientism: There are truths apart from scientific truths, but such truths are inferior. There are virtually no limits to science. • Began with success of natural sciences in the early 1800’s [4] • Continued with logical positivism /verificationist principle of 1930’s-1960’s: anything that can’t be checked by your five senses is meaningless. • 1966- Time magazine asks, “Is God Dead?”

5. The Death of Scientism • Strong scientism and the verificationist principle are self-defeating. [5] • Weak scientism is still too stringent-art, politics, law, history, philosophy, ethics lack the reproducibility necessitated by the scientific method. [6] • Logical positivism is “dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes.” – John Passmore [7] • “I suppose the most important [defect]…was that nearly all of it was false.” – A.J. Ayer (one of the foremost supporters of the movement) [8]

6. The Birth of Science • Both theistic and atheistic philosophers have started to question whether or not our thoughts can be considered rational if they are solely products of unguided naturalistic processes. [9] • “Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it.” – C.S. Lewis • “Neither model can be said to be more real than the other.” – Stephen Hawking on young-earth creationism vs. standard big bang cosmology [10]

7. God of the Gaps: Continuation of Scientism in the Public Sphere • “The results…were clear cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. What a surprise.” – Richard Dawkins [11] • “It is inconceivable from a scientific perspective that God could continue to intervene without introducing some material trace of his actions.” – Lisa Randall [12] • “Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.” - Nikita Khrushchev

8. Christian Response • “God is not competing with science any more than Henry Ford is competing with the laws of internal combustion and engineering with a Ford Galaxy motorcar.” – John Lennox [13]

9. Christian Response (cont.) • C.S. Lewis famously pointed out that Gagarin looking for God in outer space would be like Hamlet looking for Shakespeare in his attic. • “If God exists, then he must be outside the natural world, and therefore the tools of science are not the right ones to learn about him” – Francis Collins [14] • The only way we can know whether or not our story has an author is if the author writes information about himself into it. [15]

10. The Word Became Flesh • God has not merely written information about himself into the story…he has come himself! • “That Jesus' followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.” - skeptical NT scholar E.P. Sanders [16] • “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” – atheist NT scholar GerdLüdemann [17]

11. Questions for Discussion • Why do you think God has stayed relatively hidden, rather than revealing himself through science or by showering us with miracles? • Do miracles contradict science? Why or why not? • Almost all scientists adopt a “methodological naturalism” when doing research-that is, they do not appeal directly to the supernatural in any theories. What bearing does this have on the issue of scientism?

12. References [1] Carroll, Sean. “The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion?” [2] Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwin’s God. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. [3] Schaefer, III, Henry F.. "Scientist and their Gods." Institute for Religious Research. 1 Oct. 2010. <http://www.irr.org/scientists-and-god.html>. [4] Hayek, F.A., The Counter-Revolution of Science. [5] Moreland, J.P. and William Lane Craig. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. 2003. Pg. 157. [6] Hutchinson, Ian. Monopolizing Knowledge. Belmont, Mass.: Fias Publishing, 2011. [7] Passmore, J., 1967, “Logical Positivism”, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Volume 5), P. Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan, 52–57. [8] Ayer, A.J. Men of Ideas. Interview with Brian Magee, 1978. [9] Keller, Timothy. Noah and the Reasons of Faith: Faith as Understanding. Sermon, 1994. [10] Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. United States and Canada: Bantam, 2010. [11] Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. [12] Randall, Lisa. Knocking on Heaven’s Door. 2011. [13] Lennox, John. The Veritas Forum, Duke University, 2012. [14] Collins, Francis. The Language of God. 2006. [15] Keller, Timothy. The Reason for God. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. [16] Sanders, E.P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. [17] Lüdemann, Gerd. What Really Happened to Jesus? trans. John Bowden. Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p. 80.