Science Stopped Backing Atheism

KEVIN HARRIS: Newsweek magazine is not exactly a conservative publication. So it is interesting to see this article that they published by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute.^[1] Before we get to it, have you had much interaction with Stephen Meyer and his work?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I have. Steve and I actually go back a pretty long ways. When we were still living in Belgium, he invited me to a conference at Queens’ College at Cambridge University where the founders of the intelligent design movement were collaborating with one another. It was at that movement that I met Phillip Johnson, met Steve and got to hear about his work and his collaboration with Bill Dembski. I think Michael Behe might have been there. Over the years I have been at conferences with Steve, most recently at the Evangelical Theological Philosophical Society meeting where he attended our Reasonable Faith dinner. He and I were on a panel discussion together on the book Theistic Evolution. And I read some of his books like Signature in the Cell. So we are colleagues and friends.

KEVIN HARRIS: Stephen begins this article,

Headlines lately have not been encouraging for the faithful. A Gallup poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe in God has fallen to 81 percent—a drop of 10 percent over the last decade and an all-time low. This accelerating trend is especially pronounced among young adults. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 18-29 year-olds are disproportionately represented among so-called "nones"—atheists, agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated.

Pastors and other religious leaders have attributed this trend to many factors: young people being raised outside the church, an unfamiliarity with liturgy and church culture, even COVID-19.

Maybe you can offer some speculation. You and I have discussed off the air an article that found that the biggest decline was among liberals and Democrats and that the Republicans have actually come up. And religiosity, according to this poll, is a major determinant of political divisions in the U.S. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, going opposite directions according to this poll. Any speculation?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. One would really like that to be true that there would be Christians who are liberal or progressive in their politics and that we would break this caricature or stereotype that Christians are all right-wing political conservatives. But, as you say, the polling – the demographics – seem to show that there is a lot of truth to this stereotype and that it has been primarily among Democrats and progressives that belief in God is plummeting. Now, the interesting question sociologically which I'm not equipped to answer is which way does the cause-effect relationship go? Is it because of their political positions that they decline in their religious belief, that their atheism or agnosticism is a result of their politics? Or is it quite the reverse – that their politics are the result of their secularism and unbelief? That would be a really interesting question for some sociologists to explore. But nevertheless the trend is apparently real and I find very disturbing. Those of us who are in Christian ministry have got to try to figure out ways to reach out to this disaffected group of people among whom religious belief is sharply declining.

KEVIN HARRIS: Stephen Meyer continues in this article,

We found another answer in our national survey to probe the underlying reasons for this growing unbelief: a misunderstanding of science.

Perhaps surprisingly, our survey discovered that the perceived message of science has played a leading role in the loss of faith. We found that scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life have, in particular, led more people to reject belief in God than worries about suffering, disease, or death. It also showed that 65 percent of self-described atheists and 43 percent of agnostics believe "the findings of science [generally] make the existence of God less probable."

Any thoughts on those findings?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think that this underlines a point that I have often made that our Western culture remains deeply modernist at heart. We do not live in a postmodern culture. People are relativistic and subjectivistic about ethics and religion but they are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, technology, engineering, and so forth. I do think that this presupposition of scientific naturalism does underlie a lot of the secularism in Western society. The view is that science alone is the arbiter of truth, that science will give us ultimately the facts about reality, and that matters like religion and ethics are just expressions of personal taste or the results of societal conditioning that don't really have objective truth. I think that this Discovery Institute survey is probably onto something here in thinking that this misperception of modern science – this scientific naturalism – does indeed underlie a good deal of secular belief.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Meyer continues,

It's easy to see why this perception has proliferated. In recent years, many scientists have emerged as celebrity spokesmen for atheism. Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Michael Shermer, the late Stephen Hawking, and others have published popular books arguing that science renders belief in God unnecessary or implausible. "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if, at bottom, there is no purpose, no design... nothing but blind, pitiless indifference," Dawkins famously wrote.

Yet, between message and reality, there is a major disconnect. Over the last century, important scientific discoveries have dramatically challenged science-based atheism, and three in particular now tell a decidedly more God-friendly story.

You could talk (as you have many times) about scientism here, and so could Stephen in this article. But he's saying that even the typical view of science is offering pointers to God, that is given the atheist’s own definition of science.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's a good point. Even if you did think, incorrectly, that science is the sole arbiter of truth and that any metaphysics that we do needs to be an extension of our best physical sciences, the fact is that since the beginning of the 20th century there has really been a series of scientific revolutions that have made belief in God more credible than at any time in recent memory. The sort of 19th and 18th century view of the world which promoted atheism and a kind of absentee God, I think, has been undone during the 20th century, and now in a number of different areas I think physics shows itself to be more open to the existence of a transcendent creator and designer of the universe than at any time in recent centuries.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article continues,

First, scientists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning. This finding, supported by observational astronomy and theoretical physics, contradicts the expectations of scientific atheists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent—and, therefore, in no need of an external creator.

Evidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists. Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, has noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. "The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses...[and] the Bible as a whole," writes Penzias.

I'm thinking that you have a whole lot to say about this first one.

DR. CRAIG: I have said a lot about this. When I did my doctoral work back in the 70s at the University of Birmingham in England, I wrote on the so-called kalam cosmological argument. This is a very ancient argument that argues for creation and for the existence of a transcendent creator on the basis of the finitude of the past. Medieval proponents of the kalam cosmological argument had no scientific evidence whatsoever to suggest that the universe is not past-eternal. Indeed, since the ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, the universe was assumed to be eternal in its existence and never to have begun to exist. This view dominated Western thinking apart from the Judeo-Christian tradition right up until the 20th century. But I was vaguely aware that modern cosmology had developed a model of the origin of the universe called the Big Bang theory and that this was in contrast, for example, to the steady state theory which posited an eternal past. As I was doing my doctoral studies I thought I needed to look into this in greater detail. So I began to read the physics literature, and the deeper and deeper I got into this literature the more astonished I was at the way in which modern astrophysics confirms the prediction that the universe is not past-eternal but had an absolute beginning a finite time ago before which literally nothing existed. There was not anything prior to the beginning of the universe. I included this material in my doctoral thesis and submitted it to John Hick. After reading it, he came back to me and he said, “I took your thesis to one of the physicists here at the University to review and he got back to me and said, ‘Well, yes, everything that your student has said is absolutely correct.’” And I said, “Yes, I know it is.” And Hicks said to me, “Why don't the theologians know about this?” I couldn't answer that question. But there was this great gap between what contemporary science was saying and what the theologians were saying, and sadly that gap still apparently persists because I think this is a dramatic development in science that makes belief in a transcendent creator certainly rational.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing the article, Stephen writes,

Second, discoveries from physics about the structure of the universe reinforce this theistic conclusion. Since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe are finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life. Even slight alterations of many independent factors—such as the strength of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe—would have rendered life impossible. Scientists have discovered that we live in a kind of "Goldilocks Universe," or what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely "Fortunate Universe."

Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable fine-tuning points to a cosmic "fine-tuner." As former Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued, "A common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics" to make life possible.

OK, Bill, go to town on this one!

DR. CRAIG: This is the famous argument from the fine-tuning of the universe for a cosmic designer. What scientists have discovered is that the constants and quantities which appear in the laws of nature appear to fall within an extraordinarily narrow life-permitting range of values. Were any of these constants or quantities to be altered by almost incomprehensibly tiny amounts the universe would have been life-prohibiting instead. For example, an alteration in the force of gravitation would have resulted in the universe expanding too rapidly for stars and planets to congeal and form where life might evolve. On the other hand, if gravity were too strong the universe would have long ago recollapsed into a catastrophic cosmic black hole before life could evolve. Luke Barnes, whom Steve mentioned in the quotation – I was just reading an article by him this afternoon in study for my systematic philosophical theology where I'm covering the fine-tuning argument. Barnes lists a number of these fundamental parameters of the universe and the improbability of each one falling within this exquisitely narrow life-permitting range. He comes up with a combined probability that all of these would fall into the life-permitting range by chance alone is on the order of one chance out of 10 to the 135th power, which is simply an incomprehensible number. So this fine-tuning of the universe does cry out for explanation. Basically there are three options in the literature on fine-tuning that are vying for the status of the best explanation. One would be that these constants and quantities are all really physically necessary. If we really understood the laws of nature we would see that these are not free parameters that can vary but they all are necessary in their values. Virtually no one believes that. The more scientists explore the laws of nature the more they are able to see that these constants and quantities are not determined by the laws themselves. This is very helpful because it means that you can describe other possible universes governed by the same laws but with different values for the constants and quantities and because they are governed by the same laws you can predict what those universes would be like. And what they discover is that the results would be catastrophic. There wouldn't even be chemistry, there wouldn't even be matter in these other worlds without these finely tuned constants and quantities. So in order to defend the hypothesis that this is due to chance many theorists are adverting to the so-called multiverse hypothesis which says that there is an ensemble of universes like ours (preferably infinite) which vary randomly in their constants and quantities so that life-permitting universes would appear somewhere by chance in this infinite ensemble. And since you can only observe universes that are fine-tuned for the existence of observers we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in such a universe. This is really where the debate lies today. The debate today over fine-tuning is a contest between these two metaphysical hypotheses: the multiverse hypothesis and the hypothesis of a divine designer. I think that there are good reasons to prefer the hypothesis of divine design over the multiverse hypothesis. One of these has been explained well by Roger Penrose, and that is that if we are living in a multiverse of randomly ordered worlds then we have absolutely no basis for thinking that our perceptions of the external world are indeed accurate. In other words, there are observable worlds in which you have sort of freak observers. These are sometimes called Boltzmann Brains – brains that simply fluctuate into existence out of the thermal vacuum with illusory perceptions of the external world. On the multiverse hypothesis there is no way to know that we are not just one of these freak observers. So if you believe in the multiverse hypothesis you cannot rationally believe that you have a body, that you're surrounded by a real external world, that you actually have other friends and acquaintances. In fact, and here's the real irony, you can't even rationally believe the multiverse hypothesis because if all of your sense perceptions are unreliable then how do you know that the empirical evidence on which you believe the multiverse hypothesis is reliable and not simply any illusion of your brain? So it turns out that this hypothesis is seriously self-defeating and cannot be rationally affirmed. That's where this debate over fine-tuning lies today. It is a very animated and important debate, and a good many philosophers and physicists are defending the hypothesis of divine design as the best explanation.

KEVIN HARRIS: Steve then says in the article,

Third, molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells of an exquisite world of informational nanotechnology. These include digital code in DNA and RNA—tiny, intricately constructed molecular machines which vastly exceed our own digital high technology in their storage and transmission capabilities. And even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like" — implying, it would seem, the activity of a master programmer at work the origin of life. At the very least, the discoveries of modern biology are not what anyone would have expected from blind materialistic processes.

Evidence of design in biology. Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Whereas I've worked on those first two areas that Steve talked about (namely, the origin of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life) Steve is the one who has worked most on this third area of evidence of intelligent design in biology. He claims that the information that is contained in the cell itself bespeaks of intelligent design. The argument here is that even if we are evolved from lower life forms, nevertheless this cannot be explained solely in terms of random mutations and natural selection operating on these random mutations or other factors in embryonic development, for example. The best explanation would require some sort of intelligent design behind the process even on an evolutionary scenario. You have a number of these intelligent design theorists, like Michael Behe, who are quite willing to accept the thesis of common ancestry – that all life is evolved from some primordial organism – but they will deny that this biological complexity can be plausibly explained by the usual mechanisms offered in evolutionary biology.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article concludes,

All this underscores a growing disparity between public perceptions of the message of science and what scientific evidence actually shows. Far from pointing to "blind, pitiless indifference," the great discoveries of the last century point to the exquisite design of life and the universe and, arguably, to an intelligent creator behind it all.

Bill, your conclusions on the article?

DR. CRAIG: I think Steve's conclusion is quite justified. I think that in light of the evidence that we've talked about today it is at least reasonable to believe in a transcendent creator and designer of the universe. And so today's Christian does not find himself fundamentally at odds with modern science as these polls seem to suggest. Rather, I think the person who believes in a transcendent creator and designer of the cosmos finds himself situated very comfortably within contemporary mainstream science.

KEVIN HARRIS: And, by the way, we just have to talk about the Webb telescope images as we wrap up the podcast today. Steve mentioned Luke Barnes earlier. He said about these images, Imagine you're lying on your back looking up at the stars and these images zoom in and in and in until it's the same size in the sky as a grain of sand held at arm's length. And we've zoomed in enough so that in that spot we can see thousands of galaxies. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, a grain of sand if you held it at arm's length – we just examined that portion of the universe and that's what we see.

DR. CRAIG: The universe is incomprehensibly large. I think these images from the telescope underline the biblical psalmist’s words, “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”^[2]