“I sent the Dutch PDF edition of the book before publication to one of my acquaintances who’s professor of New Testament in Belgium and here is his initial reaction, after having only read the foreword and your introduction To get you started:

‘Wow! What an enthralling initiative! I have only read the first pages and not even the first chapters yet, but I am already won over! Yes, I would very much appreciate a copy so I can point others to this book!’

Since he’s professor at a Belgian university, I’m sure the book will also do well over there. Let’s hope so!”

Subsequently the friend in question e-mailed to say, “please feel free to use my name”. He is Professor Gie Vleugels whose details can be found at:

http://www.etf.edu/onderwijs/docenten/prof-dr-gie-vleugels

Of course, Prof. Vleugels could change his mind when he reads the rest of the book! But the encouraging thing to me is that the initial impression is such as to make him read on enthusiastically. Since the main target audience for Who made God? is the person-in-the-street who would not normally be concerned with the Christian message or biblical worldview, the initial engagement of the reader’s mind (whoever the reader might be) is vital to the book’s evangelistic purpose.

This article is Part 4 of a series covering the content of my out-of-print book “God. science and evolution” first published in 1980. Although inevitably out of date in some respects, its message is, I believe, just as important today as it was 31 years ago. In this chapter (chapter three of the original book) I examined the importance and feasibility of constructing a biblical ‘theology of science’, a theme that continues in the following chapter which I will post here in due course as Part 5. Added comments and updates are enclosed in [square brackets] in the text. References to my book Who made God? are abbreviated to ‘WMG’.

INTRODUCTION

Is it possible for an ancient book such as the Bible to provide the Christian of today with a philosophy of modern science? The answer given to this question in the two chapters that follow is a resounding ‘Yes’. A biblical view of science is not only possible but essential if the church is to refute effectively the largely materialistic outlook of our present age — an outlook that falsely claims the support of scientific evidence and knowledge. Without such a ‘theology of science’ we are unable to relate spiritual truth to the scientific view of nature and thus by default we allow atheism to claim science as its own. To the ordinary man, science represents the objective truth about the real world in which he lives. Layman though he be, he therefore tends to accept whatever world-view appears to command scientific respectability.

Chapters 3 and 4 [of the original book] set out the guidelines for a ‘theology of science’ which permits a biblical interpretation of science and all it reveals to us about the universe of which we are part. Originally given at the 1979 Annual Conference of the British Evangelical Council at Westminster Chapel, London, these lectures deal, firstly, with the idea of God as the universal Creator and Sustainer and, secondly, (in chapter 4) with the questions of miracle and divine providence in the physical world.

GOD IN CREATION

The middle ground

I want you to imagine two mountains with a plain or valley between them. The first mountain represents biblical theology and world-view, while the second represents agnostic, atheistic or materialistic philosophy. What I shall term the ‘middle ground’ between them represents the physical universe in which we live out our daily existence. This middle ground is disputed territory. There is a battle for its possession. Why should this be? Because a world-view which fails to encompass and account for the ‘real’ world around us is unlikely to capture the attention and allegiance of the minds of men. Whichever philosophy seems best to explain the physical context of human life is most likely to command man’s sympathies, for it is in the natural world that he perceives himself to ‘live and move and have his being’. Of course, the Christian understands that it is in God that we ‘live and move and have our being’ but the one who does not believe does not yet possess this insight. Yet it is to such people that the gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed and it is vital therefore that a biblical philosophy of nature should form an integral part of that gospel. The apostle John recognized this clearly in introducing his account of the life and work of Christ with a prologue which announces Christ as the ‘Logos’, the Creator of all things (John 1:1-3). We must therefore possess the middle ground in the sense that we offer a full and satisfying account of the physical universe (and of the science which so successfully describes it) in terms which are consistent with the biblical revelation. Otherwise that ground will be so overrun by materialistic philosophies, such as the evolutionary world-view, that men’s minds will be wholly closed to the importance of spiritual things.

We face a situation, I fear, in which Christianity has largely yielded the middle ground to its opponents in the battle for the minds of men. We have allowed currency to the belief that the physical universe and science are no concern of religion. We have implied that what is material is not spiritual and is therefore quite irrelevant to the Christian message of personal salvation. I want to say, with all the emphasis I can, that this is a very dangerous and unbiblical attitude to adopt. For if we are to reach men and women with the gospel, we must do so in the context of their real-life experience. Among other things, this means that we must take account of our present scientific culture if we are effectively to evangelize.

In yielding this middle ground to the atheistic and agnostic philosophies of our day, we have failed to develop a true biblical theology of science and nature. Instead we have espoused a simplistic ‘complementarity’ in which we have said, ‘The scientific description of the universe is valid and complete and self-contained, but, of course, you must also have a complementary theological description.’ We have hidden, if you like, behind this concept of complementarity, whether consciously or not, to avoid the necessity of forging a truly biblical account of science and nature. It has been a position of strategic withdrawal by which we escaped involvement in the conflicts between science and religion.

I am sometimes accused of being too hard on the principle of complementarity and those who espouse it. I want to say that there is a measure of validity in the concept, but I think its dangers greatly outweigh its benefits. For what it does, at least in the eyes of the world around us, is to concede a materialistic view of the universe and of nature. We protest that men must also embrace the complementary theological view but they say, ‘No, thank you very much, we are quite satisfied with the materialistic view. You are free to superimpose your theologies but we are satisfied with the self-contained naturalistic view of the universe which excludes God.’ Thus I say that the middle ground is vital. We shall not reach men’s minds unless we can offer an interpretation of the real world in which they find themselves. This is why I say we cannot evangelize effectively in our modern culture

without a biblical theology of science. We must have something to say about the nature of science and its interpretation of the natural world in which we live that demonstrates the necessity of a higher theological level of understanding.

Creatio ex nihilo

‘But’, you say, ‘where do we start? What is the starting-point in developing this theology of science?’ Well, the starting-point is really self-evident. We must start at the beginning and I want to suggest that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is the key to this whole subject. There is a tendency, I think, to take this familiar doctrine for granted and to consider it so self-evident that having defined it there is really nothing more to say. If someone attempted to preach a sermon on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo we might well fear that after five minutes he would have said all that could be said. To think in this way is seriously to underrate and underestimate the power of this particular doctrine, as I hope to show.

This is a neglected doctrine. I cannot remember ever hearing a sermon or an address or even reading a book about the subject; which is rather strange, because this doctrine is absolutely basic to any attempt to provide a biblical view of science and the world around us. It is a neglected doctrine, and like the key that lay in Pilgrim’s pocket all the time he languished in the dungeons of Doubting Castle, I believe we have here a key which will allow Christians to come off the defensive and take the offensive in this battle for the middle ground. It is a neglected doctrine and yet it underwrites the whole relationship between God and creation. This concept of the origin of the physical universe is the basis of all subsequent events and all subsequent relationships between God and His creation, including ourselves as human beings. To particularize this a little more, let me say that negatively the doctrine emphasizes the limitations of science, and positively it underlies a biblical concept of science. These are the two things that we shall look at in this essay. Furthermore, this doctrine legitimizes the miraculous, undergirds the idea of providence and even implies human responsibility, thus anticipating the gospel. These other things we shall take up in the following chapter.

Let us first of all see the doctrine of creation from nothing, creatio ex nihilo, stated in the Scriptures. These references do not in any sense constitute an exhaustive list, nor am I concerned here to expound these texts but rather to cite them. We must start, of course, on the threshold of the book of Genesis. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. Here is the clearest possible statement that there was a beginning. This was obviously a beginning of the physical universe, not the beginning of God, since He was the pre-existent One who effected this beginning. He originated the entirety of what we know as the universe, ‘the heavens and the earth’, not from some prior substance but in a pure creative act.

There are some who would take this verse and water it down. They do not do so in order to avoid the implications of an ex nihilo creation, but rather to substantiate the ‘gap theory’ in which an attempt is made to introduce into the Genesis story a sufficiently long time-span to allow for the processes of evolution. In so doing they attempt to translate this verse as a conditional clause, making it read something like this: ‘In the beginning of the creation of the heavens and the earth the earth became without form and void.’ The primary statement becomes that relating to the condition of the earth rather than the creation. This, of course, robs the verse of its primary impact and empties it of the creative content which I am ascribing to it. I am not a Hebrew scholar and do not pretend to understand in full the arguments against this [but see Hebrew scholar E. J. Young’s interpretation at http://www.christianbeliefs.org/books/genesis/gen-1.html.] I believe, however, that it can be demonstrated very clearly both from a theological argument and from the very form of the language that the traditional rendering is the correct one. Furthermore, to render this verse as a conditional clause is to introduce a circumlocution which is totally foreign to the crisp, straightforward style of the remainder of the chapter.

However, of course, we are not limited to Genesis 1. We come to Hebrews 11 and the third verse: ‘By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible’ (NASV). Here is as clear a statement as we could wish of the doctrine of creation from nothing. [To suggest that this anticipates atomic theory is a special plea too far; in any case atoms are visible en masse and the NT commonly equates ‘invisible’ with ‘spiritual’ as in 2 Cor. 4:18].

In the prologue of John’s Gospel we read that ‘All things were made by [Christ] and without him was not anything made that was made.’ By definition I think that must be a statement of this same doctrine, for if there had been anything material that pre-dated the physical universe as we know it, then it would have to be something that He had previously made and the argument only pushes the beginning back a little further in time. Revelation 4:11 declares, ‘You are worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for you created all things and by your will they exist and were created.’ Psalm 104, though highly poetic, is in many respects also appeals to this doctrine. One particular statement is that God has ‘stretched out the heavens like a curtain’. Poetic indeed, but nevertheless it embraces a significant truth and one compatible with modern cosmology. Finally, Nehemiah 9:6 states, ‘You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their host, the earth, and all things that are in them . . . and you preserve them all.’

So we have many Scriptures on which to base our exposition of this doctrine and I would like to see this done more vigorously than is usually the case. My purpose here, however, is not to expound Scripture, but to provide the philosophical framework in which that can properly and logically be done.

Let me put into modem parlance, into scientific terminology, just what this doctrine of creatio ex nihilo means. It means that by an act (or fiat) of pure spiritual power God brought into being both matter and energy, which together I will call the substance of the universe. He also brought into being space and time which, in scientific thinking, combine to form what is called the space-time metric, a four-dimensional continuum, to which all events and all existence in the universe are referred. Finally, in addition to these things, God brought into operation the laws and rules of the natural world which control both the substance of the universe and the space-time metric. It is an oversimplification to think of the ex nihilo creation simply as the creation of matter, as perhaps many of us do. We have to realize that the creation of all these other things was vitally and essentially involved: matter, energy, the space-time metric and natural law. It is inconceivable that matter and energy, space and time, could have been brought into being without those rules and laws by which these entities both exist and interact.

A little earlier I used a tautology, namely the expression ‘pure spirit’. It would have been sufficient to say that God is spirit, but I added the word ‘pure’ to emphasize that it was spirit and spirit alone that gave birth to the material universe. This then is a statement in modern terms of the doctrine we discover in the Scriptures quoted earlier, and this doctrine is a powerful weapon in our battle for the ‘middle ground’. I want to spend the remainder of this chapter justifying this statement in some detail.

The limitations of science

I said at the beginning of this chapter that the ex nihilo creation leads us, firstly, to an understanding of the limitations of science and, secondly, to a biblical concept of the nature of science. These are the two things we are going to look at now. I am going to present the limitations of science in a negative way (science cannot do this or that), but in doing so I am not really making negative statements. In pointing out the limitations of science I am emphasizing positively the essential role that the ex nihilo creation has to assume in our total scheme. When I say, therefore, that firstly science cannot explain origins, I imply the positive assertion that theology can explain them by means of the doctrine of creation.

The inability of science to explain origins is a direct consequence of the very nature of science, for it is the study of what ‘is’, namely, the physical universe as we find and observe it around us. Science cannot speculate about that which ‘was’. I am not, of course, saying here that science cannot describe past events. It can indeed do so, but only in so far as those past events were controlled by the laws that are now known to operate — only as long as they took place in a world such as the one we observe today. It is perfectly proper for us to extrapolate our scientific knowledge backwards in time, as long as the rules do not change or undergo a discontinuity at some past moment. It is quite impossible, however, to extrapolate backwards to a time when those laws did not exist.

The unbelieving world has been quick to recognize the implications of this problem. They have recognized the impossibility of explaining the origin of the basic stuff of the universe (matter, energy, space, time and law) in terms of present scientific processes. Attempts have been made, therefore, to avoid altogether the embarrassment of a beginning, and the best known of these attempts is probably the theory of continuous creation. This idea was advanced some thirty-five years ago by Bondi and Gold, and later developed by Hoyle and Narliker. The attraction of the idea lay clearly in its philosophical rather than its scientific content. Indeed the scientific content of this theory actually violated one of the most fundamental laws of science, namely the conservation of matter and energy.       But the proponents of the theory, and those who still support it (although it is largely out of favour today [that is, in 1980]), were willing to sacrifice the most cherished principles of science in order to gain their philosophical objectives, namely, to do away with the necessity for origins, to banish the idea of a beginning. Instead they would substitute a ‘steady state’ model in which there was no beginning and to which there is no ending of the universe. I say that this theory has been discredited, as indeed it has on purely scientific grounds. But I would warn you that the philosophical ambitions which promoted it are still alive. For example, in the context of the currently accepted ‘big bang’ theory of the origin of the universe, there is a variation of the steady state theory, namely, the idea that the universe may oscillate unendingly between explosion, expansion, collapse and rebirth in a fresh explosion. [this idea runs into a serious problem concerning entropy; see WMG p.119] Let us not imagine, then, just because scientific evidence has ruled out the former theory of continuous creation, that our materialistic philosophers have abandoned their attempts to banish the idea of an ultimate origin of the universe.

Some of you may have read a book by this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Steven Weinberg, entitled The First Three Minutes. In it he describes the ‘standard model’ of the universe, in which the beginning is conceived to have consisted in an explosion of unimaginable magnitude. The book then traces, by way of theoretical speculation, the development of that universe in terms of its content of matter and energy, its temperature and the processes which may have occurred, during the first three minutes of its existence. In actual fact, these ideas are pressed back to speculate on what happened within the first one-hundredth second of the existence of the universe. It may well be that some version of the ‘big bang’ theory is compatible with the biblical account of creation. I certainly do not rule that possibility out of court. But no matter how close to the instant of origin one may be able to press the scientific model of the cosmos, it remains impossible for such an explanation to be applied at or before the zero time point. Thus it follows that science, even at its most speculative, must of necessity stop short of offering any explanation or even description of the actual event of origin. It is at this point then that theology must enter the picture, not as an admission of defeat but rather on account of the very nature of science.

The second inherent limitation in science is its inability to explain scientific [i.e. natural] law. I have already suggested that the rules which govern and control the physical world are an implicit and inseparable part of the creation fiat. If this is so, it follows that scientific law can no more be explained by science than can the ex nihilo origin itself. Let me explain this in more detail. There is a certain arbitrariness about scientific law. For example, the law of gravity states that the gravitational force between two masses is proportional to the product of those masses divided by the square of the distance between them. It is quite conceivable that a universe could exist in which the gravitational force was proportional to the inverse cube of the distance, rather than the inverse square. Or, rather than the square or cube, it might even be the power 2.5 or 2.7, or some other non-integral figure. There is no reason that science can offer to explain why the law of gravity should be exactly what it is. There are an infinity of alternative laws that might have been. [the inverse square law actually follows from the 3-dimensional nature of space but this doesn’t change the basic argument. Why are there only three dimensions? Indeed modern string theory needs ten or more dimensions of space most of them ‘hidden’].

If, walking along a beach, I pick up a single pebble, I automatically reject in that very act a myriad other pebbles that might have been chosen instead. This is what God has, in effect, done in setting forth the laws of science. Each law, whether expressed in words or mathematical symbols, represents a choice from among an infinity of possibilities. Of course, if the laws were different, the universe in which we lived would itself be different, but provided the laws were not mutually exclusive or contradictory, that universe could exist.

If we ask science why the laws are such as they are, and not otherwise science can do nothing but shrug its mathematical shoulders and reply; ‘That question lies outside my terms of reference.’ Science must take the universe as it finds it, and this is one of its most profound limitations. The ex nihilo creation answers the question that science cannot. Why is the universe as it is? Simply because God chose that it should be so. His choice of one law over against the possible alternatives was a deliberate act which automatically excluded those other alternatives. Lest some should think that what I have just said is childishly simple, let me point out where lies the profundity of these statements. It lies in the fact that choice is an attribute or action of intelligence. Without intelligence there is no true choosing but only a response to the rules of chance. But before even those rules existed, a choice or distinction was made as to what they should be! The unavoidable conclusion is, therefore, that intelligence pre-existed the natural universe and the laws by which it functions. The only escape from this argument

lies in a total agnosticism concerning the fundamental nature of scientific law.

There is one other important thing that needs to be said here, and which leads to the subject that will be dealt with in the following chapter of this book. If it is true that the whole physical universe derived from pure spirit, it follows that we have in our present age a coexistence of the material and the spiritual realms. It is inconceivable that the prime mover, the pure spirit, should in some way vanish or disappear from the scene once the material universe had been created. So it is a logical necessity of the ex nihilo creation that we have in our present time a coexistence of the material and spiritual.

From this we may move forward to another conclusion, namely, that the doctrine of ex nihilo creation leads naturally to what I will call the doctrine of ‘universal sustenance’. I use this expression to indicate that the material universe is sustained by, and has a derivative existence from, the spiritual realm. We must not simply think of a coexistence of the two, but see a dependent relationship of the physical upon the spiritual. The apostle Paul said, ‘We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal’ (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Earlier this year I spent a few days in northern Italy, on the shores of Lake Garda. There, on that very beautiful mountain lake, there are many places where the cliffs rise sheer from the waters for a thousand feet or more. The massive rock plunges from snow-capped peaks and disappears below the surface of the lake, to re-emerge, of course, on the far side. One could argue from the superficial appearance that the land simply stops when it reaches the lake surface, but we know that this is not the case. The rock, although it plunges beneath the water, is still there. So important is its presence that if there were no rock beneath the surface, there would be no water in the lake! This is a faint picture of what I am trying to say about the coexistence of the material and the spiritual realms. It is not merely coexistence; it is a supportive and sustaining relationship between the invisible and the visible realms. As the hidden rock that forms the lake bottom supports and contains the visible waters, so the hidden realm of pure spirit upholds the material universe to which it earlier gave birth. The material world only exists because it is undergirded by the spiritual world.

Finally in this section, I would suggest that science cannot explain the phenomenon of mind.

What is mind? Either mind is self-existent, and therefore non-material in origin, or else it is the emanation or by-product of the physical brain. It seems to me that there is no alternative to these options. Either mind is a consequence of the electrical impulses and organization of an anatomical organ, or else it is a self-existent phenomenon which ‘rides upon’ brain function without deriving from it. A well-known philosophical argument points out that if thought is merely a by-product of brain function, then our thoughts and ideas have no validity, since they are simply the consequence of non-rational physiological and chemical processes which are not themselves endued with ‘meaning’. If this be the case, then these arguments are themselves meaningless and void of content and cannot be relied upon as true in any sense. We are thus forced either to accept that mind has a genuine existence apart from brain function or else we are locked into a circular argument that empties all philosophy of meaning.

The concept of self-existent mind is perfectly respectable, not only because it is the position we adopt intuitively, nor even because the alternative makes nonsense, as we have just seen. It is increasingly recognized, on the basis of what is called ‘information theory’, that information and concept may ‘ride’ upon matter, while at the same time being something other than matter. To give a simple illustration, I might take a number of symbols from our alphabet and set them down on paper. They may make sense or nonsense according to the way they are arranged. If I write down, say, three hundred such symbols, even if they are arranged in a pattern, they may still convey no meaning. I could, however, arrange the same symbols into words and sentences to spell out a communication full of significance for the reader. It is obvious that the message and the meaning are quite independent of the symbols. The same message written in a foreign language will require different symbols. I might even invent a new language to express my message and provided that you were taught the conventions of that language, you could read and understand what I was saying. Thus although the message has no manifest existence apart from the symbols (it ‘rides’ upon the symbols), it is clear that the symbols themselves do not equate with the meaning they convey. The symbols are arbitrary and may (by agreement between the writer and the reader) be varied without affecting the meaning.

So, by analogy, we may logically claim that mind has an existence independent of brain function, just as a message has an existence independent of the physical symbolism used to convey it. In physical terms you cannot separate the message from the symbols, of course, and, similarly, mind and brain cannot be separated. But our inability to effect physical separation in no way contradicts the claim that mind has an independent existence in the world of spiritual, non-physical reality.

Even from a scientific viewpoint, then, it is quite proper to assert the independent reality of mind, and this assertion is a logical requirement of the doctrine of ex nihilo creation. For pure spirit is mind, since it is impossible to conceive of spirit apart from the idea of mind. This is not to say that pure spirit is limited to mind but it must clearly possess a ‘mental’ dimension. Pure spirit is not form. It is not motion. It is not material. It must be perceived as intelligent or it must remain altogether incomprehensible to us. It should not surprise us therefore that, as creatures in the material universe, we can nevertheless identify a category of non-material existence that we call mind. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the ex nihilo creation and of the interaction between the material and spiritual realms inexorably associated with such an origin.

Going further, it follows naturally that the physical universe as we find it is capable of being codified and understood in terms of mental concepts, including such things as mathematics and scientific law, for this material world, like our own human minds, derives from the mind of God. The compatibility between our minds and the character of the created world (which alone permits that world to be described in rational scientific terms) is evidence that both human mind and nature flow from the same source, namely the eternal pre-existent mind that we call God.

The nature of science

So much for the limitations of science. Let us now turn to consider the nature of science. I want to suggest five propositions which are descriptive of science. I will set them down and then examine the impact upon them of the doctrine of ex nihilo creation.

1. Firstly, science is law. The laws that govern both the substance and the processes of nature can be comprehended in a single word, ‘interaction’. That is to say, the laws of science describe the manner in which matter and energy interact to produce the phenomenon we call the universe. ‘Science’ is, of course, something of a portmanteau word, but in essence science, both in its pursuit and as a body of knowledge, can be reduced to the study of these interactions. The corpus of scientific knowledge can therefore be expressed as a collection of laws, while the endless search of the scientist is for unity within the diversity of laws that describe the way nature behaves. The high object of science is to reduce our understanding of the universe to ever more fundamental principles, from which the great variety of interactions may be derived as so many special cases. This is illustrated by the 1979 Nobel Prize for physics awarded to two men who demonstrated that, at sufficiently high temperatures, two of the four known laws of force in nature merge into a single law. There is, then, a continual search for simplicity, a desire to reduce the plethora of different laws to a few basic general principles. The further this search is rewarded by success, the more truly can it be asserted that science is law.

2. Secondly, science is derivative from law. That is, what we know as science is a consequence of law, and not its cause. This is an important distinction because it is easy to fall into the error of thinking that science somehow creates the laws of nature. This is not the case. Science simply discovers and describes the rules by which the universe operates, and is thus derivative. It is not that the laws have somehow come into existence as a consequence of scientific endeavour. Rather, it is because the world is, in a physical sense, law-abiding that it becomes possible for us to pursue the activity we call science. If the rules of nature changed from day to day, or if the behaviour of matter and energy fluctuated in a random and unpredictable manner, it would be impossible for science to exist.

3. Thirdly, science is rational. We have already anticipated this point by recognising that the human mind, in its rationality, is alone equipped to practise science. The fact that we can express the laws that control the universe in terms that a rational mind can formulate, means that science and the underlying reality that it seeks to portray are both rational in character.

4. Fourthly, science is unified. We have already referred to the search for generality and basic principle, and this search is driven by the conviction among scientists that there exists an integrity in the universe, a harmony, a design. The world of nature is a single entity, controlled by mathematically expressible and interlocking processes. The universe is not, to the scientist, a rag-bag of fortuitous, meaningless and contradictory events. It is a system which exhibits a fundamental unity of structure and harmony of function. This alone justifies the pursuit of pure science.

5. Fifthly, science is universal in space and time. As far as we know, the laws of science are the same on earth, on the moon, in the sun and in the furthermost galaxies. The laws of yesterday are the same as the laws of today, and tomorrow’s laws will be the same as today’s. There is, in other words, a consistency in the structure and function of the universe, which is easy to take for granted, but which is not trivial in its implications.

The major point I want to make concerning the propositions is that science cannot find cause for these things within itself. These concepts, which describe the nature of science, do not arise from science itself and therefore must lie outside it. They are philosophical concepts for which science itself can offer no explanation and upon which science itself can throw no light. Far from ‘explaining’ the universe, science on its own begs all the essential questions about the nature of the physical world and, indeed, about its own nature. More generously, perhaps, we might say that science focuses attention on the necessity for a philosophical world-view, for, without such undergirding, science throws up more questions than it answers (specifically, why does science exhibit the characteristics outlined in my five propositions above?).

Universal sustenance

This leads us to the doctrine of ‘universal sustenance’ which, I maintain, provides just such a philosophical world-view and one which is derived wholly from the biblical record. The doctrine states that God not only created the universe at its origin, but that He actively, moment by moment, sustains the universe in all its manifestations, both in its substance and process. In particular, He does so in and through the scientific laws by which we choose to describe the world around us. (I realize that traditionally this idea would be considered part of the doctrine of providence, but I am deliberately separating this teaching from providence to bring it forward with greater clarity and force.)

This doctrine of universal sustenance is implied by the ex nihilo creation. This was the force of my illustration concerning the mountains of Lake Garda, namely that the coexistence of the spiritual and the material implies a dependence of the latter upon the former (‘The things that are seen are temporal but the things that are not seen are eternal’). This implication is greatly strengthened by a number of Scriptures. I like the Authorized Version translation of Revelation 4:11: ‘For thy pleasure they [that is, all things] are and were created.’ God has a purpose for this world and those who inhabit it, and just to state this is to grant that there must be a continual interaction between the material and spiritual realms. If God is to receive pleasure from His creation, He cannot be a remote and uninvolved figure. He must be active in the real world.

But we do not need to rely upon inference to uphold the concept of universal sustenance, for the doctrine is plainly stated in the Bible. Colossians 1:17 states that ‘He [Christ] is before all things, and by Him all things consist.’ The verb ‘is’ here signifies ‘exists’ and the clause that contains it therefore has a temporal meaning rather than denoting supremacy (although ‘before’ may well carry the additional meaning of pre-eminence, seeing that the whole passage is concerned with just that issue). Paul almost always uses the Greek word pro in its temporal sense, although Luke does use it in the sense of pre-eminence. Our Scripture therefore states that Christ pre-existed the material and, indeed, the angelic creation and ‘in Him’ all created things hold together. Everything derives its being and integrity from the presence and activity of the Second Person of the Trinity.

Earlier I said that all science can be reduced to law, and that law describes interaction. This interaction conveys just the same idea as the word ‘consists’, so that we may claim direct scriptural authority for the view that the entire physical world derives its being and behaviour from the present-tense activity of the triune God. The second reference I want to quote is Hebrews 1:3, where we read that Christ ‘upholds all things by the word of his power’. Just as the natural universe could be said to rest upon a framework of natural law, so equally it can be said to be upheld by the word of Christ’s power. Thus we may actually equate natural law (or rather the reality or principle that it imperfectly describes) with the word of divine power. We see again that the Bible explains something that science itself is not capable of explaining, namely the fundamental nature of scientific law. These laws of nature are none other than the direct commands of God, the instantaneous word of power that emanates from the creator Spirit, who alone is self-existent.

A third Scripture that is germane to our subject is Acts 17:28: ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being.’ Living and moving are redolent of process, the processes of the natural world which is the sphere of scientific investigation. These natural processes, then, operate ‘in Him’, echoing the same truth as we have already emphasized, namely that the existence of God and the spiritual realm is fundamental to the physical universe. In the clause that follows: ‘In Him we … have our being’, it is not so much process that is represented, as existence itself. The very substance of created things is here attributed to the sustenance of God. Thus, both in its substance and its process, the material universe is derivative from the being and intent of God.

What we are doing here is to re-enunciate the idea of the immanence of God, a belief that Christians have always held. God is present in nature, though not to be equated with nature as the pantheist would maintain. God is not nature; He transcends nature, and the physical world is not part of God but merely His handiwork. Nevertheless we must avoid the opposite error from pantheism, namely, the mistake of placing God completely outside of His creation so that the latter becomes no more than a machine, having an existence independent of God. God is transcendent, but He is also immanent, present, at hand in His creation, for ‘in Him we live, and move, and have our being’. But we have gone even further than to say that God is present in nature. We have claimed scriptural authority for the view that God’s presence is a sustaining presence. The physical universe in all its manifestations exists because God wills it to exist, moment by moment. It is not a self-existent creation, but is upheld at every instant of time by the immediate word of His power. Applying these concepts, then, to our five principles we come to the following conclusions.                              ;

Firstly, scientific law has an underlying character, for it is the word of God’s power. Secondly, the idea that science is derivative from law follows very naturally from the doctrine of universal sustenance. Science must be derivative because the creation that it studies is itself derivative from the spiritual realm. Thirdly, science is rational because the things it studies are the products of the mind of God and it is for this reason, and this reason only, that science is comprehensible to man and accessible to human reason at all. Fourthly, I said that science is unified, and we now see this as an inevitable consequence of the fact that the world is the product of a single purposive mind, the mind of God. It is not surprising, then, that we find, increasingly as our knowledge grows, that the laws and rules by which the universe operates are unified parts of a single grand design. Fifthly, we saw that within certain limits, science is universal. There is no a priori reason why this should be the case, but it is an immediate and natural deduction from our doctrine of the sustenance of God in nature. The universal and omnipresent Creator, sustaining the entire universe by the word of His power, bestows an intrinsic universality upon the processes of nature. His rule is uniform throughout His vast domain. Finally, the whole doctrine of the universal sustenance of God leads on to the more human, less philosophical concept of the immediacy of God. His immediacy in science has been the burden of this chapter; in the next we shall look at His immediacy in miracle and providence.

“The discussions are proving popular online.  The first one has already had 6,400 downloads and the second one is already hot on its heels!

You can access both the shows at the Unbelievable Webpage http://www.premier.org.uk/unbelievable

The direct links for both shows are:

• Unbelievable? 26 Nov 2011 – What created the universe? Prof Edgar Andrews vs atheist Robert Stovold
• Unbelievable? 3 Dec 2011 – Did man make God, or did God make man?” Edgar Andrews vs Lewis Wolpert

Each debate lasts 60 minutes; the first centres on the origin of the universe and the second on the theme “Did God make man or did man make God?” Lewis Wolpert last debated at a big public affair with William Lane Craig during the latter’s lecture tour of UK.

Very good book. In your opinion, what is the difference, if any, between religion and superstition?

Reply: Hi Louis

“Religion” may be superstition. But true religion is based upon a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ who said (speaking to His Father), “This is life eternal, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). If you want to know more I suggest you should read John’s Gospel in the New Testament.

Best regards, Edgar Andrews

From Louis

Thanks for your reply. I can think of millions of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and animists who would disagree with you. Are all their beliefs superstitions?

Regards, Louis

Reply: Hi Louis

Yes, of course, you are right. Every religionist will believe that his/her beliefs (assuming them to be sincerely held) are the right ones. But you have to follow through the logic of the matter. We really only have three options …

1) Either one religion is true and all contradictory religions are false (to a greater or lesser extent) OR

2) All religions are in some sense true, in spite of their mutual contradictions, but simply approach God in different ways (multi-faith approach; post-modernism is also a variation on this theme) OR

3) All religions are false (atheism).

Obviously there are many who support each of these options but the only one that is worth pursuing is (1) … since (2) and (3) are, epistemologically-speaking, dead-ends. That doesn’t mean they are wrong; simply that they put an end to effective enquiry. So if we wish to pursue the matter, how can we ascertain which religion (if any) is the true one? My claim for the exclusive truth of Christianity resides in the Person and teaching of Jesus Christ, supplemented by the remarkable historical prophesies that accurately foretold His advent, life, death and resurrection in the Old Testament hundreds of years before the event.

I became a Christian by reading the New Testament, not through my upbringing, religious books or the persuasion of any other person. In effect I “met” Jesus Christ as a living Person in the pages of the NT and that personal knowledge of Christ has continued through nearly 60 years of life and experience. At the end of the day, no one can prove to us the truth of a religion; we can only prove it to ourselves.

With kind regards, Edgar Andrews

From Louis: Hello Edgar

Thanks for the prompt reply. I think that logic and faith are mutually exclusive (zero overlap). I have developed a theory that all religions evolved from superstitious fear of the unknown over the millennia of human development, and that, as we developed knowledge about our environment, those superstitions gradually faded away, but our fear of death remains as the main supporter of belief in an after-life, and thus , belief in the religions (superstitions!!) that promise us just that. This might relate to your chapter on “The god of the gaps”?

Best wishes, Louis

Reply: Hi Louis

We clearly disagree but I would just point out that my book was written to demonstrate the remarkable level of agreement between the teaching of the ancient Bible and the established findings of modern science (I give scientific reasons for not regarding neo-Darwinism as established science). And far from fading away, theism is growing in influence world-wide … as documented in the book “God is back; how the global rise of faith is changing the world” by John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge. At very least this growth in religious belief contradicts your thesis that what you regard as “superstition” is fading away. A theory must account for the facts! I won’t pursue this conversation any further but thanks for the discussion.

Best wishes, Edgar Andrews

Professor Hood is an atheist who believes that our brains are ‘hard-wired’ with a ‘supersense’. Good news? Apparently not. According to Hood, this ‘supersense’ seizes on erroneous childhood beliefs and produces adult superstitions and equally groundless religious beliefs.

In his book Supersense: From Superstition to Religion — The Brain Science of Belief he claims that pre-school children are already ‘deeply committed to a number of misconceptions’ and argues that ‘adult supernaturalism is the residue of childhood misconceptions that have not been truly disposed of’. Odd that most of us grow out of a belief in Father Christmas but that many grow into a belief in God — as did the writer of this article when, as a nineteen year old university science student, he read the New Testament for the first time.

Perhaps Hood’s belief in a ‘supersense’ is itself a hangover from the common fantasy among children that they possess secret or magical powers like the ability to fly. Either way, it is clear that Hood’s ‘childhood misconceptions’ come in two flavours — those we abandon (such as Father Christmas) and those we don’t (such as God). Could the simple explanation be that one sort is indeed false but the other true?

Is creation a childhood fantasy?

Children, says Hood, tend to ‘explain the natural world in terms of purpose’ —for example, trees exist to provide shade and the rain to quench our thirst. Hood also asserts that someone with Alzheimer’s disease returns ‘to the teleological [purpose driven] thinking of the seven-year-old’. He continues; ‘It is because most religions offer a story about origins and purpose that ‘creationism [i.e., belief in a Creator] fits so well with what seems natural at seven years old’.

So there we have it. If you believe in God and creation you just never grew up. Sad that the great scientist Michael Faraday who actually founded the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures not only believed in God and creation but was a Bible teacher of some distinction!

And what does the Bible tell us about creation? That ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis 1:1) and that ‘the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things that are visible’ (Hebrews 11:3). That is, the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing) and not made from any pre-existent materials. And this agrees with modern scientific thinking! Less than a hundred years ago scientists thought that the universe had always existed and never had a beginning. As an undergraduate I heard the astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argue in favour of his theory of ‘continuous creation’ which, if true, would explain how an expanding universe could have existed for ever.

But in 1916 Einstein’s general theory of relativity revolutionised scientific thinking about space and time and cosmologists have become increasingly aware that the universe, as the Bible says, had a beginning. (The ‘big bang’ model is a popular expression of this now-accepted truth). How is it, then, that Professor Hood can relegate a belief in creation to the dustbin of childhood fantasy? If the universe had a beginning then someone or something must have created it. And if it was not created by the all-powerful Spirit we call God, what was responsible for its origin?

Explaining away creation

The distinguished cosmologist Stephen Hawking thinks he has an answer. In a recent co-authored book, The Grand Design, he writes; ‘Because there is a law [of nature] like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing … A spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going’. Notice that Hawking agrees with the Bible that creation came ‘from nothing’ but he replaces God by gravity.

But this is complete nonsense. Hawking’s ‘explanation’ of creation-without-God requires that certain laws of nature (like the law of gravity) existed before the universe existed. But the laws of nature are nothing but our scientific descriptions of the way the universe works! How could they exist before there was any universe to describe — and thus be available to create that universe?

It’s rather like saying that a painting could exist before the canvas exists on which it is painted. Of course, we could argue that the painting does have a prior existence in the mind of the artist and that is correct. Thus the laws of nature could have existed in the mind of God before the universe was created. No problem there. But what is not possible is that these laws existed in the absence both of the universe they describe and of any mind in which they could reside. Yet this is exactly what Hawking is saying.

What is reality?

But let’s get back to the Christmas lectures. Another of Professor Hood’s claims is that our minds are easily deceived. Not only does our ‘supersense’ trick us into thinking like a seven-year-old but it is ‘what makes us truly human and explain[s] how you create your own version of reality, what makes your brain decide what information to trust and what to ignore’ (so reads a press release). This is why pickpockets are so easily able to distract us and why we sometimes have false memories. Professor Hood’s ‘goal is to explain how everybody’s brain creates its own version of reality and how we have less control over our own decisions and perceptions than we like to think’ (The Times, 30 July 2011, p.19).

He declares; ‘One thing I guarantee is that I will leave the audience wondering if they can ever trust their brain again’. That only applies to you and me, of course; Hood himself clearly believes he can trust his own brain and its theories. It used to be said that ‘sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ but this no longer applies in the brave new world of evolutionary psychology. The psychologist is right and all we seven-year-old adults just need to grow up.

This idea that we create ‘our own version of reality’ in our minds is becoming quite fashionable. In the book cited earlier Stephen Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow spend a whole chapter explaining that what we perceive as the real world ‘out there’ is actually a somewhat distorted model constructed in our own minds from the data input by our five senses. When we look at a red hat what are we actually seeing? All that enters our eyes are light rays of a certain wavelength and an intensity that varies from point to point on our retinas. The information gathered by the retina is converted into electrical nerve impulses (brainwaves) that travel to our brain and only there do they create the impression of a red hat. Conclusion? There’s really no such thing as a red hat.

The problem with all this is that if ‘reality’ is manufactured in our brains rather than being a genuine property of the world around us, whose reality is real? In Hood’s reality God doesn’t exist while in my reality he certainly does (because I know him as a Person). Furthermore, science itself has enormous problems if reality exists only in our minds. Why? Because science is based on the assumption that there is a reality — the natural world — that is external to ourselves, which we can study objectively and which obeys natural laws about which we can all agree.

Why, then, do people such as Professor Hood cast doubt on what our minds are telling us? Because they want to dismiss a belief in God as childhood fantasy or fevered imagination. If there is no reality outside of our own minds then God is a figment of our imagination. But just as science tells us that there is physical reality outside of our minds so also the Bible tells us that there is a spiritual reality ‘out there’ as well. Indeed, it tells us that ‘in him [God] we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). As a scientist I have found the Bible is true to experience, especially the experience of being reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ. For me the Christmas message of a Saviour will always trump the Christmas lectures of a sceptical psychologist.

http://www.amazon.com/Who-made-God-ebook/dp/B005K17ARK/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315225252&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-made-God-ebook/dp/B005K17ARK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1315225314&sr=8-4

http://www.amazon.de/Who-made-God-ebook/dp/B005K17ARK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1315225360&sr=8-4

This post, the third in the series, contains Chapter 2 of this out-of-print 1980 book. Some updates have been added in square brackets where they seem necessary (references to my 2009 book “Who made God?” are denoted WMG) . However, the interesting thing is how little the subject has moved on in 30 years despite the enormous amount of research and comment during that period.

CHAPTER 2

Thinking man has only a limited number of options open to him as he seeks to interpret the meaning of his existence and the nature of his origins. In this chapter, originally delivered as a lecture at a division of Imperial Chemical Industries, UK, we first consider the evolutionary options, only to reject them on rational grounds. We then consider the biblical account of the origin, purpose and destiny of man — in which we find a satisfying answer to these vital questions and, additionally, the need for a personal response..

WHAT IS MAN?

The psalmist, addressing himself to God, asks, ‘What is man, that you are mindful of him?’ (Ps. 8:3-4). Most of us, at some time or another, repeat this question because it is only as we understand what man is that we really know how to address ourselves to life. Our interpretation of the world around us, our ambitions, our attitudes towards our fellow human beings — all these things are critically affected by what we believe about the essential nature of man.

What options are available to us? The four options which I am going to put to you encompass, in my view at least, the whole range of possibilities open to thinking man. There are two options which we may call evolutionary, and two which we may call theistic or creationist, and we shall look at these in turn.

The evolutionary options

The theory of biological evolution begins with a common observation, namely, that in any species of creature or plant there are continual variations. No human child is completely identical to its parent. No dog, no fish, no flower reproduces identically. This is a matter of common experience. It is also the first point where serious confusion arises, because changes from generation to generation can be produced by two quite distinct causes.

The first is the redistribution of the same genetic material. We can talk, if you like, about the ‘gene pool’ in a species. As members of that species interbreed, different genes in the parental chromosomes come into conjunction and produce certain characteristics in the offspring — blue eyes or brown eyes, different colours of skin, the height to which a person grows, and so on. These variations within a species are nothing to do with evolution. They follow from the basic laws of genetics which were spelled out by Mendel in 1859, and they demonstrate the immense amount of variety that can arise within a species. No matter how long that process of variation goes on, however, it is always convergent. That is, it always leaves you with the same species, whether it be a dog, a fish, or a chrysanthemum. Almost infinite variations can occur by recombination of the same genetic material, as animal and plant breeders have demonstrated time and time again. But these variations can never give rise to a change of species. This has seldom been made clear in the popular writings on the theory of evolution.

The changes that can give rise, in principle, to a process of evolution are known as mutations, where the genetic material is actually transformed by some external agency or by an accident during cell division. Mutations may occur spontaneously or may be induced by radiation, chemical treatment or some other means. Mutations take the system outside the existing potentialities in the ‘gene pool’ of a species. Typical effects of mutation include deficiencies in certain body chemicals, such as the haemoglobin in our blood, deformities, and the inability to manufacture pigment (albinism is the result of such a mutation.) Such mutations have been studied in the laboratory and the rate at which they occur can be measured in rapidly reproducing species such as bacteria. Mutations are almost invariably harmful or neutral in their effects on the viability of the organism.

But, says the evolutionist, mutation may on rare occasions give rise to an advantageous feature in the animal or plant. When this occurs the advantaged member of the population survives longer and produces more offspring. Thus ‘natural selection’ chooses out advantaged members which eventually come to predominate and so the species moves forward. Well, in theory that can happen. I have no quarrel with the basic ideas of mutation and natural selection as mechanisms which operate in nature. But in all the work that has been done since Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, there has been no direct evidence of any mutation that has produced long-term advantages for a species. It is an arguable point, but the rates at which such advantageous mutations occur, if they ever do, persuade many biologists that this process could not have given rise to the development of species or different phyla (the major life-form groupings) from some original ‘germ of life’. [This subject of ‘beneficial’ mutations is treated in detail in WMG chapter 13; ‘The mighty mutation — can mutations create?’]

Let me just give one or two quotations, because this may put things more succinctly. Dr R. Laird Harris writes:

‘For over half a century scientists at Columbia University have been studying the common fruit fly (Drosophila), with a view to observing or inducing changes by mutations in them. Flies have been raised in varying environments, differences in temperature, humidity and the like, treated with x-rays and nuclear radiation. There have been changes. But some of the changes have been fatal. Others have altered the colour or size of eyes, wings and bristle hairs. Certain scientists would affirm that new species have been formed. This depends heavily upon one’s definition of species. Undoubtedly new types of fruit flies have been produced. But whether anything has been produced which approaches an organism that shows any major difference has been denied also. They are still fruit flies. It appears that breeding of new varieties within certain limits is easily possible. Even producing new giant strains of plants by doubling the chromosomes is feasible. But to form a new major type of organism just has not been done. If one sticks to history, and avoids prophecy in this matter, one sees that evolution by the addition of small mutations has not been demonstrated. Changes do not proceed towards a different type, they cluster around the type of the original organism.’(1)

The unconvincing character of mutation plus natural selection as a sufficient mechanism of evolution is half admitted even in the most confident assertions of evolutionists. Thus Theodosius Dobzhansky writes; ‘The occurrence of the evolution of life in the history of the earth is established about as well as events not witnessed by human observers can be … The most pressing problems of evolutionary biology seem, at present, to belong to two groups — those concerned with the mechanics of evolution and those dealing with the biological uniqueness of man.’(2)

This ardent champion of evolution is forced to admit that the mechanics or mechanism of evolution still present pressing problems. (This is no less true in 1980 than in 1958.) [Or in 2011].

R. B. Goldschmitz, a geneticist at the University of California, writes; ‘Nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micro-mutations. In the best known organisms, like Drosophila, innumerable mutants are known. If we were able to combine a thousand or more of such mutants in a single individual this still would have no resemblance whatsoever to any type known as a species in nature.’(3)

Writing in his introduction to a 1959 edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, W. R. Thompson says; ‘There is a great divergence of opinion amongst biologists, not only about the causes of evolution but even about the actual process. This divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusions.’(4) [For a recent ‘take’ on this subject of debated mechanisms see What Darwin got wrong by evolutionists Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, 2010. Daniel Osherson of Princeton University calls the book ‘A formidable challenge to ... Darwinian orthodoxy in general’].

There are more fundamental objections to the Darwinian (or strictly, neo-Darwinian) mechanism of evolution by mutation and natural selection. In order to achieve advantageous changes there must have been a co-operative process which produced a number of compensating and reinforcing mutations at one and the same time. If we suggest, for example, that birds’ feathers arose by evolution from reptiles’ scales, we must postulate not one but a very large number of mutations, involving not only the physical form of the feathers but the controlling muscles, the oil-secreting glands and so on. Yet the advantage of feathers over scales, (which alone would enable natural selection to operate) could not emerge until the feathers had progressed to the stage of having a different function from that of the scale. The likelihood of the many reinforcing mutations necessary to carry forward the transformation all occurring before selection pressures could operate is remote. Take, as another example, the long neck of the giraffe. This is often given as an example of evolution. The giraffe was advantaged by having a longer neck because it could then eat food higher up in times of drought and famine. But the long neck of the giraffe could not have evolved without corresponding (and in evolutionary terms, quite independent) changes in the vascular system. This is because the difference in blood pressure between the ‘head up’ and ‘head down’ position is so great that the brain could not tolerate it without an intricate system which prevents this being a problem. It is no use just evolving a long neck. At the same time you have to evolve the appropriate anatomy and physiology to enable that long neck to give advantage to the animal. The chances of this happening by the coincidence of random mutations (in the various genes responsible for these different features of the animal) are incredibly small. On a more general note, one might also ask why all antelopes and related creatures did not evolve long necks if they were of such selective value to one species.

The first problem, then, is that the evolutionary hypothesis of vast change occurring by small mutations is quite inadequate to account for the development of entirely new forms of life.

The fossil record

The main building block of the theory of evolution, the fossil record, proves anything but the validity of that theory. Let me quote Professor Vialleton, a Frenchman, writing as long ago as 1924: ‘There is, then, when one considers evolution in the light of the real evidence, both great doubt and also exaggeration of its value, resulting in the idea that is very anthropomorphic, namely that everything has always begun very humbly and later has developed into very complex and lofty forms. Once again, one must say that this is not the picture presented by nature. One scarcely sees, throughout the geological ages, a gradual, slow multiplication of types of organisation. One does not at first find a unicellular being, then simple colonies of cells, then cellanturates, etc. On the contrary, Louis Agassiz remarked a long time ago in 1859, that in the first known fossils one finds, side by side, representatives of all the great groups, except the vertebrates, which seems to prove that the living world from its origin has been composed of diverse types, perfectly distinct one from the other, which have divided amongst themselves the various functions of life. Evolution has not begun from forms, truly simple in order to pass over into more complicated forms. The types of organisation one finds have always displayed their essential character initially. Genuine evolution, therefore, as one ascends the geological column from the first to the last representatives of any type of organisation, is trivial in sum and scarcely permits one to believe in the overweening power to effect biological transformation.’(5) [This is widely admitted today in 2011 by palaeontologists and is what led Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould to advance their theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ to explain the lack of gradual transitions in the fossil record].

One could multiply this kind of quotation. Coulter, a biologist, tells us that the construction of a family tree is troublesome because of the missing links. He writes (my italics); ‘Botanists construct as best they can an imaginary picture of the missing link so as to complete the sequence of steps in the evolution of the plant kingdom. Obviously such a practice is mainly guesswork, but like so many hypotheses has been very useful in organising subject matter and stimulating research. The record of the rocks reveals practically nothing of the earlier chapters in the evolution of the plant kingdom. For these, therefore, we must rely on types of plants still in existence plus a liberal measure of scientific imagination.’(6)

As you read this kind of quotation from the protagonists of evolution you begin to think, ‘What substance is there in the theory?’ The embarrassment is that in the early days of evolutionary theory much appeal was made to the incompleteness of the geological record. The links were missing. The expected transitional forms were absent but this could always be blamed on a lack of information; the fossil record was incomplete. But the argument has worn increasingly thin with the passing years. The biological record is so infinitely varied, the number of fossils and remains so fantastic, that if there were transitional forms they would most certainly have turned up. There are, of course, extinct life-forms which are unknown today, and some of these may have been transitional, but the number of such examples is very small, and who is to say that a given fossil was transitional and not simply another distinct species separate from the two other forms it is supposed to link together? Indeed, evolutionary relationships between fossil forms (or living ones for that matter) can only be inferred if one first assumes that evolution took place. For example, the celebrated series of horses, which is often claimed as proof of evolution, are simply remains that have been arranged in ascending order of size on the assumption that they are related by evolutionary succession!

In the writer’s view, the fossil record now constitutes a severe embarrassment to the theory of evolution and some biologists, recognizing this, are beginning to talk about a multiplicity of evolutionary trees, that is, they suppose that the basic groups of creatures arose from separate origins. This is a current theory and shows the desperate straits into which the original theory has fallen. [For an up to date treatment of the ‘tree of life’ controversy see http://www.biology-direct.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-6-41.pdf]

Evolutionary philosophy

I said at the beginning of this chapter that there were two evolutionary alternatives. Both of these have the same common origin which I have discussed already. In what way, then, do they differ?

If one believes that man is a piece of cosmic driftwood thrown up on the beach of time by a blind process of evolution, then rationally there is no meaning to life. Man is just an accident. There is no such thing as destiny, meaning or significance. One is forced into an existentialist philosophy; there is no meaning to our existence; ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ This is the position at which many people have arrived but to the majority of thinking people this nihilistic approach is intolerable. We just feel that there must be meaning, that it must matter whether I exist or do not exist, that mankind is not just a cosmic joke. The nihilistic and strictly logical attitude is not only very unwelcome but unacceptable to the majority of men.

So we are led to our other evolutionary alternative. Beginning with the blind biological process of evolution, some people (whose ideas are best known under the title ‘scientific humanism’) say; ‘Now we have reached this point, we refuse to give up and say the whole thing is meaningless. We must take advantage of the evolutionary accident we call mankind and forge for ourselves a destiny to which we can aspire.’

Now this is a noble viewpoint and one must respect the intellectual calibre of some of those who subscribe to it. Here is no nihilism but rather a willingness to accept the challenge. But I personally must reject this alternative for one basic reason — it puts far too much confidence in human nature. The only political group who tried deliberately to do what the scientific humanists tell us we should do were the Nazis in Germany, and they subscribed very fully to this opinion. You might also put certain contemporary racialist groups into this category, who keep alive the immoral dream of a race of men superior to their fellows.

Scientific humanists would throw up their hands in horror at the examples I have chosen. This destiny of man, they would protest, must be shaped by wise men, good and true. But their very evolutionary philosophy makes it difficult to define what you mean by wise, good and true, because it affords no ultimate or absolute moral values. Moral values, in their view, have just arisen in the course of history; they have no absolute significance. My definition of who is wise and what is good may differ from yours, it may differ from Huxley’s and Haldane’s and it certainly differs from Adolf Hitler’s. The problem is: who is to decide? Who is to take control? Can any intellectual elite be trusted to remain incorrupt? And even if we did find somebody whom everybody trusted, how capable is man of creating his own destiny, and then steering his ship safely home to its harbour? We have only to look around the world today and down the recent history of man to find that, with all his education, knowledge, science, culture and powers, mankind inspires little confidence as the arbiter of his own destiny.

Creationist options

(a) Theistic evolution

The two alternatives discussed so far I have called evolutionary — nihilistic existentialism and the scientific humanism which leads to an undue reliance on the human intellect and human nature. Both, surely, are blind alleys in our search for meaning in life and existence.

The third alternative, to which we now come, still retains the theory of evolution but sees it as a controlled or purposive process. I am going to shovel a lot of different philosophies into this particular sack! It covers an enormous range of ideas, from a Christian viewpoint which believes in a personal Creator who used the process of evolution to effect creation, to the mystical philosophies like the Bergsonian concept of the élan vital, the life force, in which the very process of evolution is endowed with a mystica, quality. It also includes the approach of Teilhard de Chardin, who generalized evolution from the biological realm onward into an evolution of consciousness, mind, society and finally spirit. This is a teleological theory, looking forward to a goal, a peak to which man is climbing. That peak of attainment, that total spiritual consciousness, de Chardin refers to as ‘God’. All these approaches have in common the retention of biological evolution. At the same time they avoid the philosophical dilemmas of the pure evolutionist and retain the idea of God or at least the concept of the spiritual.

I reject this also, first of all because it is building upon the foundation of biological evolution which I believe is scientifically unsound; and secondly, as long as biological evolution is retained, the spiritual dimension is just like icing on the cake. Let me explain what I mean by this. There is a philosophical principle derived from Occam’s Razor that forbids any explanation of a phenomenon that is more complicated than it needs to be. If an evolutionary paradigm is sufficient to explain the observed phenomena, namely the biosphere and ultimately the universe itself, why introduce concepts such as ‘spirituality’ or God? This is a very difficult question to answer.

A third most fundamental objection to theistic evolution is that although it appears to reconcile the evolutionary theory and religion it does so at a great cost, sacrificing some of the deepest insights of the Christian faith. I believe, for example, there is a basic conflict between the teachings of Scripture and theistic evolution and this theme is developed in detail in chapter 5.

(b) The creationist view

Why is the theory of evolution so popular? Why has not Einstein’s theory of relativity or Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory attained the same degree of popular acclaim? Why is our fourth and final option, which is a thorough-going creationist viewpoint, so unacceptable to the mind of modern man?

I would suggest that evolutionary theory provides a kind of escape route for the human mind. There is something rather uncomfortable and inconvenient to the human heart about the concept of God. Once you admit that God, a personal supreme Being of some kind, created the heavens and the earth — and that such a personality also created the human race — you immediately admit a relationship with that personality. And such a relationship of creature to a Creator automatically involves the idea of accountability. If l am a creature from the Creator’s hand, by whatever route, then I am in some way accountable to Him. The first chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans says that men ‘did not like to retain God in their knowledge’. There was something uncongenial about the idea of God and the inference of accountability. Somehow I have to answer to God, to my Creator, for the way in which I have used my life.

These thoughts are difficult for the human heart to accept. The Bible puts it even more strongly; ‘The carnal [that is, natural] mind is enmity against God’ (Romans 8:7). The natural mind is not only uncomfortable at the idea of accountability, but is positively rebellious against it. So a theory which enables us to dismiss God from the universe is a very acceptable and very comforting theory. I believe that this accounts for both the widespread popularity of evolution and the emotional tenacity with which it is normally embraced.

But evolution does not really solve the problem. If God did not create mankind and we evolved instead by processes of biological evolution following chemical evolution, stellar evolution, back to the primeval clouds of hydrogen, where did everything come from? ‘Well,’ you might say, ‘it could have all been energy before it was matter.’ Where then did the energy come from? You will see that sooner or later you reach a full stop. Now you may say, ‘All right, we admit to having no explanation of ultimate origins, but there is no particular advantage in adding one more step and saying God created the energy or the matter, because then you ask “Where did God come from?” and you are no closer to an answer.’ Let us accept for a moment that the idea of God may not help you at that point, but it does not hinder you either! [The big bang theory of the origin of the universe is discussed at length in WMG Chapter 7].

To me it is just as respectable, scientifically and intellectually, to claim that God created matter and energy, as it is to say that either matter and energy were always there, or simply to say we do not know where they came from. It is no more intellectually respectable to say that there is a process of continuous creation going on which we cannot study in the laboratory or know anything about — to claim that a process totally unknown to science — ‘must be going on because otherwise the alternative is God’. It is no more rational or objective to say that than to say, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’

However, there are other advantages about the concept of God, and very profound advantages. For example, the evolutionary paradigm takes for granted the existence not only of matter and energy but also of physical (natural) law. It does not ask about the nature or origin of the very laws of nature to which it appeals. Why are there four quite different laws of force: gravitational, electromagnetic and the forces that hold the nucleus together, the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ interactions? Why four, why not five, why not one? Science cannot answer that kind of question. The idea of God is a very satisfying hypothesis at this point. Not only do we identify God as the first cause and prime mover, the Creator, but we see Him throughout the universe as the sustainer and upholder of all things! There are two verses in the New Testament I would like to quote here. One says of Christ that He ‘[upholds] all things by the word of his power’ (Hebrews 1:3). The other, in Colossians 1:17, says, ‘By him all things consist.’ These verses state that the integrity of the physical universe as we know it, the laws by which it operates, can be equated to ‘the word of His power’. The laws of science are a present-tense moment-by-moment manifestation of the existence and will of God. If God were to vanish the universe and all the laws of nature would pass out of existence at that same moment. That is what the New Testament teaches and to me as a scientist it is an extremely satisfying hypothesis. To me as a Christian it is more than a hypothesis.

It leaves us with both a Creator and an ever-present cause for the whole of existence. Moreover, it takes the miraculous out of the realm of fantasy. If the operation of scientific law, of gravitational law, of electromagnetic law and so on, is simply the moment-by-moment ‘upholding of all things’ by the word of God’s power, then the suspension of those laws, or the introduction of some temporary new law which we may class as miraculous, is no more difficult to explain than the existence of physical law itself. They are both of the same kind. They are both the moment-by-moment will of an immanent and almighty God. We shall develop these ideas at greater length in chapters 3 and 4.

Conclusion

It has not been my purpose simply to attack the theory of evolution. I believe it needs to be attacked, if only because the popular impression is given that evolution is scientifically proven. This view is terribly biased and ignores the yawning chasms in the theory which make it unacceptable to me as a scientist. I was also anxious, however, to present something positive. The Bible is not on the defensive against the theory of evolution, but has a positive theory of being to propose to us. It accounts for the creation and the sustenance of the physical universe, whereas evolution, even if accepted and admitted, only tells half the story, since it cannot account for the existence of the very physical law upon which it leans so heavily. The concept of creation and a sustaining God is to me far more satisfying as a cosmic theory than anything the theory of evolution has yet produced.

Beyond all the scientific and philosophical arguments, however, lies the personal issue with which I began this chapter. If we follow evolutionary options in answering the question: ‘What is man?’, we reject all that is meaningful in life. We reject all hopes of heaven, all belief that the universe is ultimately rational. If, on the other hand, we see in nature the eternal power of God, we are led back to the concept of man’s accountability to his Creator. The questions of moral accountability and sin arise, and we begin to see that the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption from sin are inseparably linked together. The mission of Christ was to ‘seek and to save that which was lost’ (Luke 19:19), namely human beings like you and me. Here, then, is an option which not only proves to satisfy our questing minds, but comes to grips with our moral weaknesses and failures. It leads us not only to a unity of comprehension, but into personal contact with a forgiving God. Christ is not only the One who created all things (John 1:1-3) but also the Saviour by whom we ourselves may be created anew, for ‘If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new’ (2 Corinthians 5:17).

References

1. Laird Harris, R., Man; God’s eternal creation. Moody Press, Chicago, 1971, p.33.

2. Dobzhansky, T., Evolution at work, Science, vol.127, 1958, p.l092.

3. Goldschmitz, R. B., Evolution as viewed by one scientist, American Scientist, vol.40, 1952, p.94.

4. Thompson, W. R., Introduction to Origin of Species, Everyman’s Library No.811, 1956, p.xii.

5. Shute, E., Flaws in the theory of evolution, Craig Press, Nutley, N. Jersey, 1961.

6. Newman, H.H., (ed.), The nature of the world and of man, Garden City Press, New York, p.321.

Objection: “It has now been shown that the universe caused itself rather than having been brought into being by something else.”

Reference key at end of article.

The objection is necessarily false since the most that science could ever say about the matter is that “the universe might have caused itself …”. Whether or not it did actually do so is not open to scientific enquiry. However, even this ‘might have’ claim remains wholly unsubstantiated and is logically incoherent, as I will try to demonstrate below. But first let us be clear about the facts.

Until the early 20th century most scientists believed that the universe had always existed. But this view was shattered by two discoveries, one theoretical and one experimental. The theoretical development was Einstein’s general theory of relativity which implied that only an expanding (or shrinking) universe could be stable. Einstein, in fact, inserted an arbitrary ‘fudge factor’ into his equations to allow for a static universe but later retracted it [WMG p.100]. The experimental discovery was that the universe was indeed expanding, evidenced by the red-shift in the spectra of distant galaxies [WMG pp. 101-102]. This in turn implied that the universe did have a beginning which can be represented as a singularity (a situation in which certain physical quantities become infinite — in this case temperature and density). This implied singularity became known as the “hot Big Bang” origin of the universe and is now generally accepted by cosmologists. More recent observations of the all-pervasive “cosmic microwave background radiation” provided confirmatory evidence of this model of cosmic origins (or cosmogenesis) [WMG pp. 102-103].

Since that time, certain scientists have advanced ingenious theories (strictly, hypotheses) in an attempt to avoid the theological implications of a big bang creation — most recently Victor Stenger in USA and Stephen Hawking in UK. Basically, they claim that scientific/mathematical  ‘models’ can explain how the universe might have arisen spontaneously out of nothing (ex nihilo) by the operation of natural laws without the intervention of a supernatural creator [Stenger, Hawking]. However, their reasoning is seriously flawed in the following ways.

1. It is important to understand that science can explain nothing except in terms of the laws of nature. Science works by first discovering (by observation) laws that describe the workings of nature and then using this knowledge to seek out further explanations — beginning with hypotheses and then confirming these hypotheses by various tests, the chief of which must always be repeatable experimental verification. To offer a scientific explanation of anything one must always appeal to existing laws (or at very least plausible hypotheses). No laws, no science; it’s as simple as that.

2. To explain the origin of the universe scientifically, therefore, requires an appeal to laws of nature (established or hypothesized) that pre-existed the universe. But laws of nature are nothing more than descriptions of the way nature operates. No one has ever proposed a law of nature that does not involve existing natural entities, whether they be matter, energy, space-time or mathematical systems. (Note that mathematics are arguably philosophical rather than scientific in character and are only scientifically relevant when applied to natural realities — that is, the world as it exists).

3. This creates a dilemma; the laws of nature cannot exist without nature itself existing but the origin of nature cannot be explained scientifically without pre-existing laws. The logical conclusion is that science cannot, by its very nature, explain the origin of the universe.

4. The only alternative is that the laws of nature did pre-exist the universe but existed as a kind of blueprint in some non-material medium such as the “mind of God”.

5. Stephen Hawking falls into this dilemma by claiming that the universe was created as a result of quantum mechanical fluctuations (in a vacuum) which became stabilized by gravitational forces [Hawking pp. 131-135; Hawking review]. He thus requires the laws of quantum mechanics and of gravity to have pre-existed the universe. (He later seems to make the same claim for so-called ‘M-theory’). But what is the law of gravity but a description of the way material bodies interact — either with one another or with the space-time continuum? To claim that such a law existed in the absence of matter, energy, space or time stretches credulity and is incapable of demonstration. Only ‘mind of God’ and ‘non-material blueprint’ arguments remain and these are theological not scientific.

6. Victor Stenger seems to recognize this problem and attempts to overcome it by proposing that the laws of nature first created themselves out of nothing and then were available to create the cosmos. His actual words are; “So where did the laws of nature come from? They came from nothing! … [they] follow from the symmetries of the void out of which the universe spontaneously arose’ [Stenger p.131]. However, ‘symmetries’ are properties attributed by scientists to the laws and/or phenomena of the natural order; they have no existence apart from the cosmos they describe. Any void which possesses symmetries, therefore, must by definition lie within the universe and cannot give rise to it. For example, it could be argued that space-time has symmetries, so that a vacuum within the cosmos would also exhibit symmetries. But any void that lay outside of space-time cannot possess symmetries or any other physical properties — it certainly cannot be known to do so.

7. Conclusion; attempts to explain away the origin of the universe as a spontaneous event occurring in some pre-existing ‘void’ fail the tests both of science and logic.

References

‘Stenger’; Victor J. Stenger, God, the failed hypothesis (New York, Prometheus Books, 2007)

‘Hawking’; Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The grand design; new answers to the ultimate questions of life (London, Bantam Press, 2010)

‘WMG’; Edgar Andrews, Who made God? Searching for a theory of everything (Darlington, 2009)

‘Hawking review’; Edgar Andrews, God, black holes and Stephen Hawking (review of The grand design on www.whomadegod.org)

I continue here the serialisation of my out-of-print 1980 book God, science and evolution which is surprisingly up-to-date in a philosophical sense if not in technical detail. This was the original Chapter 1, a shortened version of my inaugural lecture as the first Professor of Materials Science (as distinct from metallurgy) at London University, UK. The lecture was addressed to a largely non-Christian audience and the apologetics are gentle but, I hope, clear.

CHAPTER ONE

Human knowledge is growing so rapidly, especially in the fields of science and technology, that an integrated view or philosophy of life is increasingly difficult to maintain. Fragmentation typifies the current state of thought and outlook — even among those scientists, philo­sophers and theologians who are supposed to be leading us into a deeper understanding of the universe and of our own humanity.In this chapter, which is a shortened version of the author’s 1968 ‘Inaugural Lecture’ as Professor of Materials at Queen Mary College (University of London), a plea is made for a return to a unified view of man and nature. The only satisfactory starting-point for such a world-view is, in the writer’s opinion, the biblical concept of a personal God who created and sustains the universe, and who reveals himself to those that seek. Although light-hearted in style, the lecture is serious in intent and sets the keynote for the weightier arguments that follow in later chapters.

Man, materials and materialism

A few days ago I received the following letter from a friend, who occupies the Chair of Engineering Materials at another university: ‘I regret I shall be unable to attend your inaugural lecture but look forward to reading it. I should like to have chosen your title for my own lecture, but thought I should have run into over-deep waters had I done so. It will be fascinating to see how you tackle it.’

     I am not sure whether, by this token, inaugural addresses should be classified as river, sea or ocean-going lectures respec­tively, according to the depth of the waters they aspire to cross, or whether the dangers of foundering are related in any way to those depths. I trust that I will not founder and that you who have done me the kindness of attending this occasion will, if not fascinated, be interested in what I have to say.

     Some, less generously minded than my correspondent, may observe that by my title I have pre-empted the whole of history, social anthropology, science, technology, philo­sophy and religion, and may feel this to be a trifle ambitious, even for an inaugural lecture. I hasten to put your minds at rest, for my concern is simply to put our subject, the science of materials, in context — the context, that is, of the society to which we belong and of the lives we each live.

     The phrase ‘the two cultures’ has passed into common parlance. I wonder if the phrase is sufficient, serious as its implications are, to describe the fragmentation of knowledge which already exists. Perhaps we already live in an intellectual multiculture. A few weeks ago I met that doyen of polymer chemistry, Arthur Tobolsky, in a San Francisco street. He recounted how he had recently shown a Shakcspearean quotation to a number of staff and students at Princeton University. Predictably enough, only a minority of scientists recognized its source. He then showed it to a similar selection of non-scientists. Their rate of success was hardly better than that of the scientists. He commented, ‘I don’t know about the two-culture society; it’s more of a no-culture society.’

     If the problem of fragmentation resides entirely in the size of the body of knowledge accumulated by mankind, all we can do is to make this knowledge increasingly accessible by such means as the computerization of information retrieval, and hope for the best. But I want to analyse the problem at a rather deeper level, because I think it has a deeper underlying cause — the absence of any substratum or philosophy to which localized areas of knowledge may be related; the absence of a world-view in terms of which our particular field of know­ledge and, indeed, our own personal lives take on significance. It has always seemed to me that the elegance and genius of science lay in its ability to unify apparently unrelated phenomena, and I shall always remember the excitement I felt when, as an undergraduate, I learned how space and time could be treated in a unified manner in, for example, general relativity or electromagnetic theory. The history of science bears record, of course, to the dangers of overgeneralization, the tendency to go beyond what is proven in an attempt to express everything in terms of some simple universal principle, but the dangers implicit in generalization should not discour­age us from seeking a proper ‘world-view’. The pitfalls do, however, suggest that this world-view or philosophy of nature, to which our scientific and other knowledge is to be related, is not to be deduced from the body of scientific knowledge itself, with its changing fashions and notorious fallibility. In the closing part of my talk I want to explain my own views upon this matter.

Man and his materials

Technology is the backcloth of human life on the material plane. This has been true of human society down the centuries, for every tool or device invented for the safety, survival, sub­sistence, comfort or pleasure of man is an expression of tech­nology, however primitive. The ox-cart and mud hut are as much the products of technology as are the jet aircraft and air-conditioned laboratory. It is by technology that man betters his adaptation to the environment and his powers over it; it is, more soberly, by technology that man has at the same time exposed himself to the possibilities of self-destruction on such a scale that, perhaps for the first time in human history, we have real reason to fear the very powers we have unleashed. However, for good or ill, like time itself, technology moves forward, for it is a self-generating activity. We cannot, nor should we desire to, arrest its motion; but its control is a matter of vital concern.

     As technology is fundamental to civilization, so materials are fundamental to technology. Without materials there would be no technology, for materials are the essential link between inventions and ideas and the products of technological effort. They are the media by which ideas are realized, by which the innovator’s dreams become tangible. They stand between the blueprint and the hardware, and, by the same token, set limits upon the achievement of ideas. Materials set the boundary conditions to technology and thus, indirectly, to the material aspects of civilization. It is no accident that the major epochs of human society (as materials scientists are wont to point out) are demarcated by such terms as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age (from 4000 B.C.) and the Iron Age (from 2000 B.C.).

     The role of materials in technology can be classified as follows. An invention or an idea for a new machine, device or process must first be reduced to realistic workable and attain­able form — this is the process of design. Here attention must be given to certain basic principles. The student howler of three mutually intermeshing gear wheels, for example, must be avoided. Wheels must be able to turn, ships to float and bridges to sustain their own weight. Not least, the principles of design involve the choice of materials available for the job. It is no use designing a structure which requires beams to carry loads of a million pounds per square inch, because no material exists capable of bearing such forces. Nor may we build ships of sodium metal, for all its lightness, because it reacts with water; or bridges of glass, for all its potential strength, because of its proneness to brittle failure. Such are trivial examples, but the obvious often goes unremarked and needs to be pointed out from time to time. It is remarkable that so little effort has, until recently, been devoted to train­ing engineering students in this aspect of design.

     Technology can advance only as fast as the available materials will allow. Frequently, in the past, it has advanced more slowly, retarded by factors unrelated to materials, but indications are that now, in some areas, the engineer is waiting on the materials which will enable him to design for greater efficiency, economy and potentiality than is yet possible.

Materials science — the impure art

Our next question must be: ‘What is materials science?’ The pedigree of even the humblest engineering material is impres­sive. The geologist prospects for and discovers mineral deposits from which most of our materials derive; the mining engineer wins the crude mineral from its ancient habitat and the extraction metallurgist or refiner produces from it a more or less pure material. Pure substances, however, seldom make good engineering materials and the process technologist and chemical engineer blend, mix and alloy until the desired combination of properties is achieved. It may appear from this that materials science (the study of the relationship between properties and internal or microstructure) is redun­dant, serving as nothing but a gloss upon the time-honored technology of materials. There is a humbling degree of truth in this, but fortunately for some of us, it is not the whole truth. The justification for materials science, as something more than an intellectual exercise, lies in the statement I made a moment ago — that few pure substances make good engineering materials. Pure metals, for example, are usually far too soft to be of use. Refractory substances are often far too brittle. Some pure materials are far too prone to oxida­tion, and so one could continue. Materials science could, in this light, be described as ‘the impure art’, for its raison d’etre rests largely in the important modifications to properties brought about by the admixture of ‘impurities’ or foreign substances.

     Improvements due to impurities usually involve the modi­fication in some way or other of the physical microstructure of the material, so that it is really more accurate to speak of the effects of heterogeneity rather than impurity, since to be useful the latter must manifest itself by giving rise to non-uniformity of structure on some scale. We all, I think, realize that concrete is stronger than mortar because it has a heterogeneous struc­ture but similar heterogeneity can exist on a much finer scale right down to the atomic level, where foreign or impurity atoms, dispersed in the crystal lattice of a pure substance, can give rise to spectacular increases in hardness. An intermediate example is the incorporation of carbon black powder in syn­thetic rubber, which can transform a cheesy, friable pure material into a tough, resilient tyre-tread.

     Another form of heterogeneity which is vitally important is the occurrence of regions of disorder in an otherwise ordered or crystalline solid. Dislocations are regions in which the order within a crystal is disturbed and the ability of such disorder regions to move through the crystal when forces are applied gives rise to the phenomenon of plastic deformation — a phenomenon which, for the user of materials, has both good and bad points. Grain boundaries, which inhibit plastic deformation at low temperatures but may enhance it at high temperatures, and atomic vacancies are also examples of disorder.

     Disorder is of primary concern in polymers, for these materials are composed of long chainlike molecules which become so tangled that the achievement of perfect order (crystallinity) is seldom possible. The plastics and rubbers so familiar in everyday life are therefore either wholly dis­ordered, like PMMA, polystyrene and PVC, or else semi-crystalline, containing 10% to 80% disordered material, like polyethylene, polyesters, nylon and so on.

     It is the task of materials science to describe the structure of materials, at all levels down to the molecular and atomic scales, and then to say how the structure governs the properties of strength, hardness, elasticity, corrosion resistance, electrical conductivity, or whatever else is of concern to the engineer and designer. In recent years materials science has also been increasingly applied to medicine and surgery, as in the use of artificial bone, joint and tissue replacement materials — and in understanding the properties and pathology of living tissue itself.

Materials and materialism

I suppose it is the ‘ism’ in my title which has excited most curiosity in anticipation and which to some represents ‘deep waters’ rather than ‘safe ground’. To me, however, its inclusion was no ‘gimmick’ to excite interest, but rather a necessity if I was to express satisfactorily my theme of materials in their context. I spoke earlier of the need for all of us, and particu­larly for us scientists, to have a world-view or philosophical substratum to which to relate our own areas of knowledge and experience. If we have no such philosophy, our science becomes nothing more than the handmaid of materialism, by which I mean a belief in the ultimate importance of things. For all its apparent piety, the sentiment that bigger and better, or shinier or faster, things make the world a better place to live is arrant materialism. Of course, our agricultural and medical colleagues have more cogent arguments, for their service to mankind is obvious. But they are driven, implicitly at least, to appeal to such non-scientific principles as the sanctity of human life and thus directly illustrate my point that a non-scientific (or, better, ascientific) philosophy is required to explain and underwrite the value of the activities in which they engage.

     What is ‘materialism’? I have already given one definition — a belief in the ultimate importance of things. I want to quote a more trenchant definition provided by St. Paul in the first chapter of the Bible’s Letter to the Romans. Speaking of the ancient world he writes that they ‘worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator,’ who is God. The word ‘creature’ can also be trans­lated ‘creation’ and probably bears this primary meaning. Now few of us today would admit to being ‘materialists’, the term being currently out of fashion. Nor would we confess, perhaps, to ‘worshipping’ anything or anyone. But if we take worship in its basic sense of ‘living for’, I think we must allow that many more people are materialists than would appear at first sight. In fact we must admit that we all devote ourselves to something; we either live for (that is, worship or ascribe ultimate value to) our personal pleasure, however subtly disguised, or ambition, which is the same thing by another name, or else find outside of ourselves some object worthy of our self-dedication. Whether we like the term or not, this object is our god, and our world-view (however ill-defined) is our religion.

     It seems to me that we each have but three alternatives: to worship things because they bring us pleasure, which is materialism; to worship mankind itself because we are involved and because we have a corporate desire to see our kind triumph over his limitations and errors, which is humanism; or to worship the Creator because both His nature and ours demand that we do so, which is theism. I have much sympathy for the honest humanist, because I believe his objectives are worthy. I am equally convinced of his error, because he pins his faith in human nature or intellect (both demonstrably imperfect and fallible) and, like the materialist, he cannot see beyond the material creation — though the humanist at least worships life rather than the inanimate!

     To me, however, there must be a ground of reality which lies outside the creation, and in terms of which creation, both in its scientific and general aspects, can be understood; St. Paul again draws a clear distinction for us: ‘We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal’ (2 Corinthians 4:18). Even from a scientific viewpoint, this is a remarkable state­ment, for the unseen world of elementary particles is indeed ‘eternal’ in comparison with the ever-changing and decaying world of visible things. Paul, however, was referring to a world external to the creation on any level, yet a world which co­exists and interacts with the creation as we know it, for (and I bring you one final quotation from the New Testament) it is said of Jesus Christ that  ’all things were created by him, and for him . . . and by him all things consist’ (Colossians 1: 16-17).

     In these brief words we see the Christian view of nature, of creation, indeed of science in all its aspects. It is not the view that God simply created the universe and left it to itself like some gigantic self-powered timepiece. In biblical terms God is not dead to our world and our experience, as recent theological obituaries seem to suggest. The view is rather that God is immanent in creation (though at the same time tran­scendent, being other than the creation), and that the laws of science and nature are an expression of his immanence. He is not the ‘God of the gaps’, a convenient explanation of what we do not yet understand. If he were a stop-gap God his expulsion from the universe would be just a matter of time and, unlike the Cheshire cat. he would vanish by stages leaving not even the grin behind. On the contrary, He is the ground of all experi­ence, including that branch of experience we call science, ‘for in him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).

     In these days it may seem strange for a scientist to espouse the cause of Christ. I would therefore remind you of men — more eminent than your present lecturer is ever likely to be — who in the past have held similar views; men like Johann Kepler, who is reported to have exclaimed, on discovering the laws of planetary motion, ‘Oh God, I am thinking thy thoughts after thee,’ or Isaac Newton who stated that his scientific work was directed to those discoveries ‘that would most work with reasoning men to a belief in the Deity’. Michael Faraday, on his deathbed, was asked, ‘Mr. Faraday, what are your speculations now?’ and replied, ‘I have no speculations — I know that my Redeemer liveth’— a quotation, of course, from the book of Job. Clerk Maxwell, the father of electromagnetic theory, would have said ‘amen’.

     If to this we are tempted to reply that these men, great scientists though they may have been, were in this matter simply children of their ‘superstitious’ age, we should remember that we, too, are children of our age — our materialistic age — replete perhaps with unrelated knowledge but, could it be, less well equipped with wisdom, which is a very different thing?

]]> http://whomadegod.org/2011/08/god-science-and-evolution-part-2/feed/ 0 http://whomadegod.org/2011/07/god-science-and-evolution-part-1/ http://whomadegod.org/2011/07/god-science-and-evolution-part-1/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:48:46 +0000 Edgar Andrews http://whomadegod.org/?p=517 [please note that further chapters will appear only at intervals of 2-3 weeks; I have to scan them in and in some cases update the content]

In 1980 I published a book entitled “God, science and evolution” which has long been out of print. Re-reading it recently however I was struck by the fact that it seems just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago, and possibly even more so. I have therefore decided to make it available on this website as a series of articles (one per chapter) that I plan to post at intervals. This offering (“Part 1″) is the introduction to the original book.

Introduction

 The divorce between science and religion is one of the most significant aspects of our modern philosophical scene. The unity of truth and knowledge, which has always been a prime objective of thinkers down the ages, has been all but aban­doned by our Western culture. It has been replaced by a schizophrenic world-view which divorces the ‘real’ pragmatic world of science (the material universe) from the insubstantial thought-world in which philosophy and religious belief are permitted to function, like birds imprisoned in a cage of sub­jectivity.

      This dichotomy between our inner and outward lives is bound to introduce serious tensions on both the per­sonal and social levels. The ‘real’ world of social intercourse and political decision is no longer regulated, as it once was, by considerations of a philosophical and religious character. Legislation and morality alike are guided by a doctrine of blind pragmatic convenience rather than by moral absolutes, however dimly perceived. We do not today mould our social and political institutions by reference to God’s moral laws, or even to the nature of man as a being created in the image of God. All is empirical and the only guiding principle we recognize is the law of cause and effect

      It is quite unfair, of course, to blame this state of affairs upon ‘science’. Rather, science has merely provided an excuse for the rejection of spiritual principles and a belief in the moral authority of God. The founders of modern science actually saw the new ‘natural philosophy’ as demonstrating the order and harmony of creation and thus the existence and power of God. Today these same scientific disciplines are used by many to urge the redundancy of the spiritual dimen­sion and banish God from His own universe. The god of evolution has replaced the God of creation and revelation.

      That this has been allowed to happen is the fault of religious leaders rather than of scientists. In our own ‘Christian’ society the churches have themselves largely rejected the concept of objective revelation and a belief in the authority of the Bible, in favour of pragmatism. They have tried to carry over the scientific method into theology, not realiz­ing that empiricism, which is a proper basis for physical science, is entirely inappropriate in our approach to God. This is not to say that Christianity is not experimental. In­deed, it is. But, unlike the physical world, God cannot be known by a humanistic methodology which begins with our­selves and our unaided senses. His transcendent nature together with our human blindness to spiritual truth require God to make Himself known, that is, they necessitate revelation, a concept both unknown and inappropriate to scientific endeavour.

      Other Christian leaders, while clinging to biblical authority, have erred by withdrawing from the real world of practical experience into subjectivism. By confining the gospel of Jesus Christ to the purely personal realm, they have inadver­tently underwritten the very dichotomy between the natural and spiritual worlds upon which materialism thrives. Admit­tedly, Christianity is a personal issue, involving the reconcili­ation of the individual sinner to God through the death and resurrection of Christ. But it is more than a personal matter since it involves a unified world-view in which man, nature, society and God are set in their proper relationships to one another. Starved of this philosophical unity, the Christian message becomes emaciated and the individual believer is forced, by default, to accept an essentially humanistic and even materialistic interpretation of the ‘real’ or natural world in which he has to function day by day. The tension between his inner beliefs and his practical life can become well nigh unbearable and may lead to demoralization and tacit with­drawal from the warfare of faith.

      Perhaps I have overdrawn the picture, but the problems described are undoubtedly genuine. It would seem, then, that those who are both scientists and Christians have a special responsibility to do all in their power to correct the mistakes that have been made in these matters. Negatively, they must expose and reject the misuse of science as a handmaid of materialistic philosophy. They must refute the claim that science demonstrates the irrelevance and subjectivity of religious faith. They must argue that materialistic and evo­lutionary world-views are just as much philosophies as are Christian and religious world-views, that science no more authenticates the one than the other. They must show that science of itself is incapable of providing a complete philo­sophy of life and being; indeed, that science can only be understood in terms of ultimately spiritual principles. Posi­tively, they must present an alternative biblical philosophy of nature and man that is true to both science and revelation and that will enable ordinary men to appreciate the essential unity of truth, both religious and scientific. They must offer a framework of thought in which the glories of God and man (as His special creation and the object of redeeming love) may be appreciated and in which also the individual, sinner though he be, may discover a dignity, liberty and purpose which materialistic humanism denies him absolutely.

      This book is offered as a modest contribution to the fulfil­ment of these responsibilities. A collection of lectures and essays is not, perhaps, the best means of doing this, since it runs the risk of being disjointed and incomplete. On the other hand, the lectures and writings reproduced here have proved helpful to the few who have received them and may therefore be of value to a wider audience.

        The chapters have been arranged to give a progression, from statements of broad principles and options, to much more detailed arguments on the nature of science and creation and the interpretation of miracles and providence in an age of science. Next the question of theistic evolution is considered and rejected as a means of reconciling biblical teaching with a scientific view of origins. The positive alternatives are then brought forward once again. Finally, almost as a postscript, there is an essay on the age of the earth, a subject fundamen­tal to the evolutionary world-view which is so totally inimical to the biblical outlook.

]]> http://whomadegod.org/2011/07/god-science-and-evolution-part-1/feed/ 0