As a preliminary I suppose we ought to begin by asking whether there is a shortcut to belief in God. Without having to call on any tangible evidence, is it possible by merely thinking very hard, to prove logically that there simply has to be a God? I have in mind the kind of proof of Pythagoras’ theorem: ‘ The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.’ All of us are happy to accept that this is true. We might not be able to prove it for ourselves. It is many years since, as a schoolboy, I was taken through the proof, and am not sure I could readily reproduce it again today. Nevertheless we all accept its validity. One of the beauties of geometry is that everything is so clear-cut. From a few straightforward assumptions that one is happy to take for granted – such as the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and parallel lines don’t meet – one can prove the theorem to everyone’s satisfaction.
It is therefore not surprising that, down through the ages, philosophers and theologians, starting out from a few self-evident statements, have sought an equally convincing proof for the existence of God. Distinguished names figuring in this quest include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz, Aquinas, and so on.
We shall not spend time going through their various arguments. Suffice to say they failed. Obviously so, otherwise we would all believe in God in much the same way as we all accept Pythagoras’ theorem – and there would be no need for this book. But we don’t all believe in God. Furthermore, one might add that if such a proof were possible, Jesus would presumably not have come as the son of a humble carpenter, spending his time with ill-educated fishermen, but instead might have been better employed coming as a famous Greek professor, debating the issues with fellow academics and writing books for posterity setting out the proofs of God’s existence once and for all. But that, as we know, was not the nature of his mission. He adopted a different approach, and so must we.
So let us begin our quest by adopting a scientific approach – one in which we seek experimental evidence from nature for God’s supposed existence. It is to be evidence that is available to all, and for which there can be no other explanation than the work of God. That is the line of investigation a sceptic would consider to be the obvious one. We need to explore how far it might take us before perhaps looking at other approaches.
So how does one normally come to accept the existence of something? Through our senses. You believe the book in front of you exists because you can see it. You can feel it and smell it. Indeed, we have become very good at extending our ability in this regard. With microscopes we can see things too small to be seen with the unaided eye. Likewise, the telescope allows us to learn of the existence of astronomical objects too distant to be seen normally. X-rays and other scanning techniques permit us to see right into the interior of our bodies. Such techniques have proved to be a rich source of knowledge.
But, of course, they are of no use in our search for knowledge of God. The God we seek is not one who can be seen, or can be discovered by any of the other senses. We encounter a dead end.
Not that our beliefs about what exists in the physical world are confined to what presents itself directly to the senses. Recall the poem by Christina Rossetti:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
It reminds us that we can learn about the existence of things that are in themselves invisible by what we see them doing to things that are visible. The wind is but one example. In the autumn, those trembling leaves fall to the ground. We attribute this behaviour to gravity, despite no one having ever seen gravity – not the gravitational force itself. Like the wind, it is sufficient to see what it does to those things that can be seen. Then there are electric and magnetic forces. We fully accept that they too exist and help shape the world in which we live – a conviction we hold without our ever being able to see such forces directly. It is considered sufficient to observe how a rubbed balloon sticks to one’s clothing, or to watch how the needle of a compass moves. Likewise, the place where you are currently sitting is permeated throughout by radio, television and telephone signals borne on electromagnetic waves. In order to demonstrate their existence one observes their effects on the appropriate electronic equipment.
There thus arises the suggestion that perhaps God, though himself unseen, might make his presence known through his actions in the world. Indeed, there was a time when it was felt that God did indeed make himself known in this way, and in no uncertain manner. Thunder and lightning, for example, were regarded as direct manifestations of God’s wrath. Plagues and other diseases were regarded as signs of God’s displeasure. The coming of rain to water crops was likewise a sign of his blessing. In those days there was so much going on in the world that was not understood. It was all too easy to attribute them to the workings of God.
But then came the dawn of the scientific age. Thunder and lightning were shown to be nothing more than manifestations of electric forces in the atmosphere. Disease was seen to be the work of germs and viruses. The development of cloud physics made sense of weather patterns. Increasingly one came to understand the workings of the world through the formulation of laws of nature. And with this advance of scientific understanding, the gaps in knowledge became progressively fewer. This led to the hope, indeed expectation among atheists, that one day all the gaps would be closed, leaving the so-called ‘God of the gaps’ with nothing left to do.
A relic of that earlier thinking about God can be found in the wording of certain insurance policies for property damage that exclude ‘acts of God’ – meaning ‘An event that directly and exclusively results from the occurrence of natural causes that could not have been prevented by the exercise of foresight or caution’, as a policy I hold states.
One is reminded of a famous comment attributed to the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. When asked where God fitted into his scientific description of the world he replied, ‘I had no need of that hypothesis.’ Not that this necessarily meant Laplace denied the existence of God, only that God did not intervene in this way.
With God being apparently unnecessary for explaining the normal running of the world, we move on to ask whether God might be revealed to us through one-off miraculous occurrences.
When speaking of miracles one has to be careful. For a professional theologian a miracle is defined as any event that is specially revealing of God. As such it does not necessarily entail some law of nature being suspended. Indeed, this loose way of referring to miracles is often encountered in daily life. A news item, say, might be about a so-called ‘miraculous’ escape from a car crash. The newspaper reporter is not necessarily claiming that a Divine intervention has interrupted the normal workings of nature. It is merely a way of describing something astonishingly unlikely. For many the incident is just a matter of luck. There is no need to bring God into it.
What interests us, however, are ‘miracles’ in the narrower sense of events that would indeed have required a suspension of the normal workings of the laws of nature. Surely this would be evidence for the existence of God. And the Bible is full of accounts of events which, if taken at face value, would appear to be Divine interventions of this kind.
In tackling such miracle accounts it is important to appreciate the mindset of people living in pre-scientific biblical times. In those days, people took a positive delight in tales of wondrous happenings. One has only to examine some of the apocryphal writings that failed to get into the accepted canon to see just how vivid ancient imaginations could be. There is, for example, the story of a man who was turned into a donkey by witchcraft, only to be restored to human form when the infant Jesus was placed on his back. Jesus, as a schoolboy, once made a clay model of a bird, which promptly flew out of the window. Or there was the occasion when a school companion bumped into him, Jesus cursed him, and the boy fell down dead – but happily was brought back to life again by Jesus. Then we have the Apostle Peter engaged in a debate with a magician who impressed the crowd by rising to a great height above the city. Peter called on God’s assistance, whereupon the magician fell to earth, was stoned to death by the onlookers – who were instantly converted to Christianity!
All pure nonsense, of course. I suppose it was their equivalent of modern-day science fiction. Good fun, but not to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the existence of these clearly invented stories that lie outside the writings that make up Scripture does raise the serious question of whether something of the same sort might be going on in the writings that did succeed in being included in the Bible.
An indication that this might well have been the case is the observation that miracle accounts seem to proliferate with time. One can see this if the writings of the New Testament are placed in chronological order – the order in which they were written. They appear in the Bible in the familiar order: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, followed by Paul’s letters. But they were actually written in the order: Paul’s letters first, followed by Mark, then Matthew and Luke and finally John.
Paul mentions no miracles – not one – apart from the resurrection of Jesus. Mark, who was next, describes several miracles as well as the resurrection. Matthew and Luke, who both used Mark as a source, include most of those miracles, plus some more of their own. And John’s Gospel – the last one – has even more miracles. Put in the order of writing, it does indeed appear that the number of miracle stories might be increasing with time.
Let’s take a specific example of the possible generation of a miracle story: Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. According to Mark, one of Jesus’ followers cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant. And that’s it. He cuts it off. When we come to Luke’s later account of the same incident, we find that the ear is cut off, but then Jesus miraculously puts it back on and heals it. A miracle. But if that’s what actually happened – a miraculous healing – why no word from Mark about it? Why miss out the punchline? Presumably because, at the time Mark was writing, there was no punchline.
This tendency towards proliferating miracle stories is one reason for being cautious over accepting them at face value. Another is that when approaching one of these accounts, a prior question is whether there might be a perfectly natural explanation of it. Take, for example, the parting of the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to escape from Egypt. It has been suggested that it might have been due to freak weather conditions – a very high wind forcing the water to retreat. Or how about the casting out of devils? That today might be regarded as the work of a good psychiatrist.
Then one has to ask whether the story might have been generated through a misunderstanding of some sort. Take, for example, Jesus walking on water. We read that the disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee and they see Jesus walking on the water. Peter gets out of the boat in an attempt to go to him. Compare that with another story of how the disciples are in a boat when they see Jesus, but this time Jesus is on the seashore. Impetuous Peter again is described as getting out of the boat, this time to swim to Jesus. The two stories are very similar, the only important difference being that, in one, Jesus is walking on the water, and in the other he is walking on the seashore. Biblical scholars have pointed out that if you go back to the original account, written in Greek, one finds an ambiguity. The phrase ‘walking on the sea’ has another translation: ‘walking by the sea’. So one has to ask whether Jesus was simply walking by the sea – on the seashore – and not on the sea. Has someone, during the telling and retelling of this story, got hold of the wrong end of the stick?
But having said that, not many miracle stories can be accounted for as misunderstandings. So what about all the others?
What we have to note is that there does appear to be a qualitative difference between the biblical miracle accounts and the apocryphal ones. Most of those found in the Bible are not just displays of Divine power performed to impress people, but serve as concrete illustrations of deep spiritual truths. When, for instance, Jesus cures the man born blind, he speaks of the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees who were looking on. At the feeding of the 5,000 he speaks of himself as the bread of life. And so on. We are left wondering whether these accounts were merely stories trying to convey rather abstract spiritual ideas in concrete form, or whether Jesus did in fact perform such actions. One thing is certain. Two thousand years after the event we have no way of deciding the issue in any definitive manner to everyone’s satisfaction.
Which prompts us to ask whether miracles occur in our own time. Is it possible to have direct experience of a miracle today? There are many claims that this is so. We hear of people who, after prayers have been offered, or a pilgrimage has been made to a place like Lourdes in France, recover from a condition that had been pronounced by the medical profession as incurable. I know of one such incident myself. But such occasions do give rise to the concern that perhaps there was a misdiagnosis. The condition had not been incurable as originally thought.
One thing is surely true and that is that there cannot be many people, if any, who believe in God purely on the basis of having experienced a miracle. Acceptance of a miracle might well provide confirmatory evidence of one’s prior belief in God. We shall have much to say on that subject later. But miracles do not constitute the fundamental roots for that belief. We must move on.
Another attempt at trying to establish God’s existence is that based on design. In this regard, the eighteenth-century clergyman and philosopher William Paley is often quoted as pointing out that if you were walking on a heath and you came across a watch lying on the ground, you would immediately conclude from its complicated mechanism and how it all worked together that it must have been designed by someone. Something as intricate as that could not just happen unaided. So, in the same way, he argued, everything about the human body (and the bodies of other animals) is so beautifully fitted to fulfil its function that it must have been designed for that purpose. And that calls for a Designer.
The rug was pulled from under that reasoning, at least as a knock-down proof of God’s existence, by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. We shall have need to refer to Darwin’s theory many times in this book, so it is important that we should be clear about its main features.
The basic idea is that offspring resemble their parents through sharing the same genetic material. This is in the form of the famous DNA molecule. It consists of a sequence of smaller molecules, the order of which constitutes a code that governs one’s physical characteristics. The offspring’s DNA is made up from copying those of its parents. However, in the copying process, there are liable to be mistakes leading to variations. There might also be mutations caused by background radiation, which is always present. Some of these mutations give rise to physical characteristics that lead to an enhanced chance of the individual surviving and mating in what can sometimes be a hostile environment. In order to survive we have in mind the need to avoid or defend oneself against predators, the ability to find food, shelter and a mate. In order to meet these conditions, the advantageous characteristics might be the possession of a tough protective skin, sharp claws or teeth, good eyesight and hearing, the ability to run fast, the ability to fly or swim, the use of camouflage as a means of avoiding the attention of predators, and so on. In the case of humans, we have developed a superior intelligence, which has allowed us to find alternative ways of fending for ourselves in a competitive environment. The important point is that the possession of such advantageous mutations to the genes increases the chances of one surviving to the stage where one can mate and pass on those favourable genes to the next generation. Less advantageous or deleterious variations work against the survival prospects of the individual. There is, therefore, less chance of such individuals reaching an age where they can pass on their less effective genes. Consequently, these latter genes have a tendency to die out over time, leaving only the advantageous ones. Whereupon the process is all set to repeat itself, thus giving rise to yet further improvements in terms of survival value in succeeding generations. These incremental improvements progressively build on each other to create the highly sophisticated ‘survival machines’ we know as humans and the other animals.
The theory of evolution indeed goes further than simply accounting for our physical characteristics and those of today’s other animals. There is little use in possessing, for example, sharp claws if you do not know what to do with them. Take, for example, a cat confronted by a bird a little way off. Suppose it did not immediately recognize that it was faced with a potential meal. Instead, it had to painstakingly work out that under those feathers their might be something to eat, and it would thus be a good idea to pounce on it and use those sharp claws to capture and kill it. Such a cat is unlikely to make a kill because, in the meantime, the bird would have flown. On the other hand, a cat that recognized the bird and instinctively pounced – such a cat would be more likely to have a meal, and in the process increase its chances of surviving. There would be great advantage, therefore, in possessing such an innate tendency. And indeed, part of the cat’s DNA coding does precisely that: it tells the cat to pounce immediately – without thinking. And that is why today’s domestic cat, having had its fill of cat food to the point where it could not eat another mouthful, on seeing a bird in the garden, will instinctively pounce and kill it if it can. We call this tendency genetically determined behaviour. Indeed, the animal kingdom offers countless examples of such patterns of behaviour. The way a newborn kangaroo will instinctively climb up the mother’s fur and find its way into the pouch waiting to be its new home is but one of countless extraordinary examples one might cite.
Which, of course, raises an interesting question: if we see such genetically determined behaviour in the animal kingdom, and we ourselves are animals who have evolved in a similar manner to them, might not we also be subject to such behaviour patterns? Are we inclined to act without thinking in certain ways? And if so, in what ways? It seems only reasonable to conclude that we probably are subject to such tendencies. We are inclined to adopt behaviour patterns that, for our ancestors, were conducive to their survival. Not that we need regard ourselves as genetically determined. To a much greater extent than other animals, we are self-aware. We are able to reflect on what we are doing. There is no need to act as blind robots. We can go against inherent, instinctive behaviour if that is what we decide to do, perhaps in response to some higher demand. Nevertheless, the tendency to behave in the way indicated by our DNA coding will be there. It will take a positive decision on our part to act otherwise. Our behaviour is not genetically determined, but there can be little doubt that it will be genetically influenced.
Entering the world with already-formed tendencies to behave physically in certain ways, it is only to be expected that our minds will also, to some extent, be pre-programmed. They will exhibit the thought patterns associated with those behaviour traits. We are not born with minds that act merely as blank sheets of paper ready to be written on by whatever experiences we subsequently have. What thought patterns? This takes us into the realm of evolutionary psychology, about which we shall have a great deal more to say later.
So that is the basic idea about evolution by natural selection. It is based on random changes to the genetic material, some being beneficial to its owner and others not. These are then subjected to a systematic selection process whereby the beneficial ones are preferentially preserved for future generations, while the others fall by the wayside.
Actually things can get a bit more complicated than that. What we have to recognize is that what matters most in this process is the survival of the gene. In most circumstances that is synonymous with the survival of the individual hosting the gene. But a mother and her offspring share to a large extent the same genetic material. Under circumstances where it is a case of either the mother or the young being killed by a predator, provided the young are old enough to be able to look after themselves, it is better for the survival of the gene if it is the young who survive. The young can go on and eventually mate themselves, so passing on the gene further. The mother, on the other hand, has already served her purpose. So as far as the gene is concerned, it is advantageous if the mother has built into her a code that compels her, if required, to sacrifice herself for her young. And that indeed is the behaviour we see when a nest is being attacked by a predator such as a hawk. The mother bird is sometimes observed to leave the nest, thus deliberately attracting attention to herself and away from her young.
How far back does the evolutionary process go? It is believed to go right back to inanimate matter. Living creatures developed from matter that was not living.
Which raises the question as to what we mean by ‘living’. It is certainly not some magic ingredient that has to be added to the mix. Something is classified as ‘living’ if it satisfies certain criteria. Among these is the ability to reproduce. To be blunt, living creatures can be described as self-reproducing chemical machines. The copies of themselves that they produce can exhibit random variations from the original. As we have said, it is upon these chance differences that the process of natural selection gets to work, thus producing in successive generations versions of the original that are better adapted to meet the challenges posed by the environment in which they find themselves.
Elaborating further on what distinguishes living from non-living matter, one can add further criteria to be satisfied. There has to be nutrition – the ability to take in substances by way of food to promote the body’s functions. One needs to excrete unwanted substances. There must be growth, both in size and changes of shape. Respiration is another requirement, that is to say, the ability to break down complex molecules to provide the energy needed for the body’s activities. Finally, one needs to be responsive to the environment.
Ordinary inanimate matter might satisfy one or more of these criteria. Iron responds to the environment by going rusty. Crystals can grow in solution. Chemicals can react exothermally with each other to release energy. It is the combination of criteria that defines what is meant by ‘life’.
As already mentioned, with this rather mundane definition as to what constitutes life, there is no need of a magical extra ingredient – one that can only have a supernatural origin. This in itself undermines a further argument sometimes deployed in order to justify belief in God. One does not need God in order to account for the existence of life.
The evidence in favour of evolution is strong. There is the fossil record, anatomical comparisons, DNA comparisons and the observation of evolution taking place today (insects gaining immunity from pesticides designed to combat them, being one such instance). Throughout this book we shall be accepting evolutionary theory as having been unquestionably established.
All of which stands against the creationist stance, which holds that man was formed directly and instantly by God in the form of Adam, and that woman was fashioned from a rib taken from Adam’s side. This is claimed by creationists as cast-iron evidence for the existence of God – God being the necessary Designer of today’s complex biological creatures. But as we have seen, such an argument is countered by the highly plausible alternative offered by evolutionary theory.
A more serious contender as an argument from design is known as Intelligent Design (ID). Unlike creationists, adherents of ID are perfectly happy to accept that evolution has taken place as proposed by Darwin. However, they claim that in the process of going from inanimate chemicals on the surface of the Earth to a fully developed human, there are steps along the way that are so great that they could not have been negotiated alone by the mechanism of natural selection working on random genetic changes. They point, for example, to the formation of the first cell, the appearance of the first multi-celled creature and the formation of complex structures such as the eye and ear. They hold that only by the direct intervention of God could such hurdles have been negotiated. Essentially, ID is a modern form of a God-of-the-gaps type of argument.
One cannot help but have some sympathy for this point of view. There is no doubt that some of these gaps in the evolutionary chain do seem somewhat daunting. And yet evolutionary theorists are coming up with possible scenarios whereby, for instance, something like the eye might have developed. It involves a series of small incremental changes, each of which confers some slight advantage in terms of being able to survive. These then get incorporated permanently into the genetic structure, ready to be further built upon by later advantageous mutations.
Take, for example, the case of the eye. It might have started out as merely a patch of skin that was sensitive to light. A shadow falling on it could be a signal that a predator might be approaching, so prompting an avoidance reaction. But if one is to take flight, in which direction should one go? The shadow by itself does not indicate in which direction the danger lies. For all one knows one might be fleeing straight into the arms of the predator. But what if one’s skin were subsequently to develop a dip, and the sensitive patch were to find itself in that hollow? Now, by noting which part of the patch was registering the shadow, one would get a fix on the direction in which the possible predator lies, this prompting an escape in the opposite direction. However, the trouble with a hollow is that it is likely to collect dirt. So it would be a further advantage if a transparent jelly-like substance were to fill the hollow so keeping out the dirt. This jelly in turn could develop into a spherical shape, which would then act as a lens. Now the sensitive patch – later to be called the retina – can register not just a shadow, but an actual image. Now one can see what exactly is causing the shadow. It could well be that it is being cast not by a predator to be avoided, but a potential prey to be chased and eaten. Further elaborations could then consist of a means of reducing the light being received if it is too bright, and increasing it when it is growing dark – hence the pupil. Then there would be yet further advantage in protecting the eye (with eye lids) and washing it when dirty (tear ducts).
This then is one possible scenario by which the eye might have evolved its intricate structure. It is a process involving small incremental changes, each conferring some marginal benefit. Building inexorably on what has previously been achieved, there eventually emerges a sophisticated final product that could not have been formed in one go. That is how the evolutionary scientist argues.
Of course, there is no way of proving that this is actually how the eye developed. We are, after all, talking about possible events taking place long ago, with there being no way of going back in time to verify that they did indeed occur in that manner. That’s not the point. What is being offered here is simply one way in which the gaps might have been bridged in a perfectly natural way – one that did not require the intervention of God. How plausible one finds such speculations is up to the individual to decide. I myself find them persuasive.
But one thing is certain: Intelligent Design, as a variant of the God-of-the-gaps type of argument, fails to serve as a proof of God’s existence. There is an alternative way of negotiating the gaps. When trying to understand the workings of nature one is surely better advised to seek possible scientific explanations rather than falling back on Divine intervention.
So far we have taken it for granted that the world we live in is one suitable for the development of life. It had to be or we would not be here. And certainly conditions on Earth are very conducive for life to evolve. However, when we look beyond the Earth, things look very different. The universe is vast. It has taken 13.8 billion years for light to reach us from the depths of space – even though it travels at 300,000 kilometres per second. Those depths are unbelievably cold. The most prominent objects in the sky are the Sun and stars, each star being a distant sun. These are great balls of fire. The Earth is a planet, and certainly there are other planets, but most of them are either too hot or too cold for life, depending on how far they are from their respective suns. Not only that, most do not have the right kind of atmosphere, if they have one at all. The inevitable impression we gain, therefore, is that generally speaking the universe is hostile to life, the Earth being an exception. It is surely not the kind of universe you or I would have designed if we were God intent on producing a home for living creatures.
But we must beware of jumping to conclusions. Things are not what they seem. On closer inspection it turns out that the universe seems to have been at great pains to accommodate us. Indeed, the universe appears to have been fine-tuned for the development of life – an observation known as the anthropic principle.
To see what this is about, let me give a brief rundown on how the universe comes to be the way it is. As I am sure everyone knows, it all began with a Big Bang. It was so violent only the smallest atomic nuclei emerged, anything bigger being broken up. So we get essentially just hydrogen and helium nuclei, with slight traces of other elements, together with electrons. As they travelled through space, the nuclei and electrons were subject to an electrical attraction, which led to the formation of atoms. Then, through the operation of gravity, those regions of the hydrogen and helium gases with a somewhat higher density than the average acted as centres of attraction. The gaseous medium, which originally was pretty uniform, became increasingly lumpy. These clumps squashed down and in doing so became very hot (in much the same way as air squashed down in a bicycle pump becomes hot). Due to the resulting violent movements, the atoms split up once more into their constituent subatomic parts. Nuclei began fusing together to form the nuclei of heavier elements, this process being accompanied by the release of vast quantities of energy – the nuclear fusion energy one gets in a hydrogen bomb. This is how a star is born.
Eventually the star will run out of nuclear fuel. It will then no longer have the ability to hold itself up against its own gravity and so collapses. Modest-sized stars then end up as burnt-out cinders. The fate of massive stars is very different. On collapsing, there can be a great explosion called a supernova. This ejects some of the newly created heavier elements out into space. These can then subsequently come together to form rocky planets circling later generations of stars. Prior to supernovae, the only planets were those entirely made up of balls of hydrogen and helium gas. So this is how the Earth formed. It is essentially a ball of stardust circling the Sun – the Sun itself being a later-generation star. The scene is now set for evolution to take over and produce life – a lengthy process taking 4.5 billion years before we humans put in an appearance.
It all sounds pretty straightforward. Except that it is anything but. Take, for example, the violence of the Big Bang. Had it been any less violent than it was, the mutual gravity acting between everything would have eventually brought the expansion to a halt. With gravity still operating, everything would from then on start coming back together again. This would lead to a Big Crunch, all this happening before life could have enough time to develop. Alternatively, had the violence of the Big Bang been any greater, everything would have been flung apart so rapidly that all the material would have dispersed before it had time to collect together to form stars. And without any suns there would again have been no life. In other words, the violence of the Big Bang had to be just right – and it was.
What matters here is the density of the matter coming from the Big Bang. If the density were greater than a certain value it would be Big Crunch; if it were less than that value it would be a case of expansion for ever. The borderline case is known as the critical density – a density that would give an expansion that eventually came to a halt, but only in the infinite future. So what is the actual density? It turns out to be exactly the critical value. A coincidence? Not really. Scientists have a good explanation for it. They believe there was initially a period of exceptionally fast expansion called inflation. And it is the nature of this special type of expansion that ensured that the density ended up with the critical value. This solves the problem of how we come to have such a fortuitous rate of expansion, but in turn raises its own kind of question: why should the start of the universe have incorporated a process like inflation? Who ordered that?!
So much for the expansion. How about the strength of gravity? Make it any weaker than it is and the temperature rise on squashing the hydrogen gas down will not reach the 1 million degrees necessary to light the nuclear reactions. That would mean there would not be any suns. As we have already said, no suns means no life. On the other hand, make gravity stronger and you will, of course, get stars, but now one has so much gas squashed down that one gets only giant stars. Such stars have more fuel at their disposal than a medium-sized star like our Sun, so one might think their fires would last longer. In fact, the reverse is the case. The squashing becomes so pronounced that they reach higher temperatures, and that in turn leads to the fuel burning much faster. The result is a larger, but short-lived star – one incapable of supporting the energy needs of evolution on a nearby star for the lengthy time required. The evolution of intelligent life takes so long that it can be successfully accomplished only if served by a slow-burning star like ours – a medium-sized star produced by the kind of gravity operating in this universe. So in order to get life, the strength of the gravity force needs to be what it is.
As for the production of the heavier elements in stars, even that is not as straightforward as one might think. In particular, there is a problem in getting carbon to form. Carbon is essential for the subsequent building of molecules of biological relevance. But it would seemingly require three helium nuclei to stick together, and getting three nuclei to collide at more or less the same time is as difficult as getting three billiard balls to collide simultaneously. Two colliding yes, but not three. Fortunately the three helium nuclei do manage this trick, thanks to what is called a nuclear resonance. How big one moving nucleus appears to another can depend on their approach speed. At certain speeds there can be a resonance such that the target nucleus looks exceptionally large and so is easier to hit. And that is exactly what happens in the process whereby three helium nuclei fuse together to form carbon. First, two of the helium nuclei collide to form an unstable form of beryllium. Then, because the resulting nucleus looks large to an approaching third helium nucleus, they are able to collide and fuse before the beryllium has a chance to spontaneously break up. Thus we get carbon. And it was all due to that fortuitous resonance. Or was it just fortuitous – a coincidence?
Then there was the slight problem of location. It was all very well producing the heavier elements by nuclear fusion, but where are they? They are in a star at 1 million degrees – hardly a suitable environment for evolution to take place. They have to be got out into space. As we have just seen, that was done by supernova explosions. But how can an implosion caused by the attraction of gravity lead to an explosion? The mechanism of supernova explosions remained a mystery for a long time. It has now been solved satisfactorily. The material is blasted out by a burst of subatomic particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are well known for hardly interacting with anything. They can pass quite easily right through the Earth from England to Australia without hitting any of the intervening matter. And yet it was these elusive particles that ejected all the material that goes to make up the Earth and our own bodies. What a relief they were not even more elusive.
What else? Well, there is the matter of how many spatial dimensions there are in this universe of ours. One would think that a universe could presumably have any number of spatial dimensions. Ours has three. And that was lucky for us. It is only in a space that has three dimensions that planets can have stable orbits. Perturb the orbit of the Earth somewhat and it is no big deal; it simply settles down into another nearby stable orbit. But with additional dimensions that would not be the case; there would be no stable orbits. And without orbiting planets able to keep a safe distance, while at the same time being warmed by the Sun, evolution would not be possible.
We can sum up this discussion by saying that the universe, far from being hostile to life, has seemingly bent over backwards to accommodate us with a whole string of . . . what shall we call them? Coincidences? Nor is this list exhaustive. Indeed, the closer one has examined the structure and working of the universe the more it seems to have been fine-tuned for the production of life. This state of affairs is what we call the anthropic principle.
How are we to account for it? Was it in fact consciously fine-tuned by some agency with us in mind? Certainly, on the face of it we seem to have been handed the father and mother of an argument for the existence of a Designer. So is this the knock-down proof of the existence of God we have been seeking?
The short answer is No. There is an alternative interpretation: the multiverse. This is the suggestion that our universe might not be alone. There might be others – a great many others – perhaps an infinite number of others. They all exist in parallel with each other. The whole ensemble is known as the multiverse. All of these individual universes are envisaged to be running on different lines, each with its own characteristic values for the strengths of the forces, the masses of its constituent parts, and so on. In the vast majority of these universes there is no life because one or more of the conditions necessary for its development are not satisfied. It is only in the very occasional freak universe that all the conditions, purely by chance, happen to be met. It is only in these that life is able to get a hold. We ourselves, being a form of life, must obviously inhabit one of these freak universes. That way there is no mystery about the universe matching our needs so exactly.
Naturally it is hard to see how one could ever verify the truth of the multiverse hypothesis. Other universes, by not being part of the known universe, almost by definition are unobservable. I say ‘almost’ because there could be an exception. A variant of the theory is that the multiverse, instead of being made up of absolutely separate parallel universes, might consist of a space broken up into different zones, each zone being a bubble universe. If this were the case, it would appear to raise the possibility that one might be able to move from one bubble, across a dividing boundary, and into the neighbouring one. By travelling out into space sufficiently far we might come to such a boundary separating our universe from our neighbour. We would then be able to prove that there were indeed universes other than our own, and that the laws of nature and other basic physical characteristics were different from our own.
The trouble with this idea, unfortunately, is that the continuing expansion of the universe is carrying these other universes away from us so fast we would never be able to catch up with any of them. So it looks as though the multiverse idea, even if true, is never likely to be verified. This has led many scientists to claim that the multiverse hypothesis should be regarded as belonging to philosophical speculation rather than genuine science.
Not that that need worry the sceptic demanding proof of God’s existence. Recall that the object of the exercise we are engaged in at present is that of seeing whether the believer can provide unambiguous proof for the reality of the Divine – not the other way round. The anthropic principle, no matter how persuasive it might strike some people, cannot be counted as incontrovertible proof of a Designer God. The sceptic has the get-out option of putting his or her faith in the multiverse instead.
So far we have concentrated on examining the physical world – its contents, its workings and its origins. We now change tack. Inanimate physical objects are not the only things to which we have mutual access. We can also make observations of fellow human beings. For many people their belief in God is not at all based on trying to account for the behaviour of the physical world. Instead it is based on acceptance that Jesus was the Son of God; it is through Jesus one experiences God. Muslims look more to Muhammad. Jews have Moses and other great Old Testament leaders and prophets. Central to such faiths are holy writings such as the Bible and Qur’an, setting out the lives and teachings of such figures. Some would go so far as to claim that these writings are the very word of God.
There can be no doubt that contemplating the lives and teachings of holy people, as set down in Scripture, does for many act as the route by which they come to take religion seriously. For this reason they are of paramount importance, and we shall be elaborating on that later. But do any of these approaches constitute the very ground on which belief is based? The answer must surely be No. One does not have to be a Christian in order to believe in God. One does not have to be a Muslim or Jew, and so on. Today’s great world religions can be regarded as alternative approaches to understanding the spiritual realm, each coloured by differing histories and cultures, each with its own distinctive insights. Moreover, we note that ancient people believed in God (or gods) long before today’s religions were established. Such believers had no access to the teachings and examples of those we revere today, and yet they would surely claim to be as much open to the Divine presence as ourselves. The age into which one is born, and the culture to which one belongs, seem largely immaterial when it comes to the ability to establish a relationship of some sort with God. Thus the particular religion to which one belongs, with its specific spiritual leaders and writings, cannot be the universal, fundamental roots of belief that we are seeking.
In short, if not all spiritual believers accept Jesus as the Son of God, why should the sceptic? If not all spiritual believers accept Muhammad as the great prophet appointed by God, why should the sceptic? We conclude that the study of our fellow human beings, no matter how exceptional some of them might be, is no more successful at proving the reality of God than the study of the physical world.
We have been talking about the nature of the world, what it contains and how it is run according to the laws of nature, its apparent design, and so on. But all of this leaves out of account an all-important prior question, namely: ‘Why is there anything at all?’
Some might attempt to answer the question by pointing to the Big Bang. That was how the world came into being. But why was there a Big Bang? Who or what was responsible for it? The religious believer might be inclined to answer: God. Everything that happens has to have a cause, and God was the cause of the Big Bang. Without God the world could not have got started.
At first sight that sounds like a promising argument in favour of the existence of God. But again we find ourselves going down a blind alley. There are alternatives to the God hypothesis.
For example, in his book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking puts forward a rival proposal. He suggests there might be a law of nature, the function of which is to produce universes out of nothing. It created this universe and presumably many others. In anticipation that this law exists, he calls it M-theory.
At first it might seem impossible that something could arise out of nothing. But not so. Take, for example, electric charge. It comes in two forms: positive and negative. In high-energy collisions between subatomic particles it is commonplace to produce electric charge. The trick is to create as much positive charge as negative charge. That way the net charge remains the same. It is the net charge that is important. Indeed, the net charge of the entire universe appears to add up to precisely nothing.
The same goes for other physical quantities such as momentum – a property of moving objects. One can push a stationary object and produce momentum where previously there was none. But again one can only do this if one at the same time produces an equal and opposite momentum in whatever is doing the pushing. So, for instance, in order to fire a bullet – thus giving it momentum – the gun must recoil with an equal and opposite momentum. Or from standing still, you can only start to move and gain momentum by pushing with your feet against the ground and in the process sending the Earth recoiling in the opposite direction (just a little!). With as many things moving in one direction as another, one finds that, like electric charge, the net momentum in the universe is zero.
Even matter can be accounted for in this way. Matter is known to be a form of energy. It is the transformation of matter into other forms of energy – heat and light – that keeps the Sun’s fires burning. But we know that energy itself can be both positive and negative. Two objects, such as an atomic nucleus and an electron, when bound together by their electric attraction for each other, have less energy than when they are apart. We can see this in that it takes energy to prise them apart. This addition of energy – positive energy – is necessary to overcome the negative binding energy of the combination. In the same way, each object in the universe is subject to the gravitational attraction of all other objects in the universe. It is thought that these gravitational forces might be producing enough negative binding energy overall to completely compensate for all the positive energy manifest in the movements of matter and in the stuff of which matter is made.
Indeed, a plausible case can be made that the entire contents of the universe add up to precisely nothing! Thus all that is needed is a means of rearranging this nothingness into the more interesting form of nothingness that constitutes ourselves and what we observe in the world.
It is this rearrangement of the initial nothingness that is the supposed function of M-theory. But even if there were to be such a theory (and one needs to emphasize that there is no evidence for it whatsoever), would this really provide the way forward? Would it not in turn raise the question as to why there is an M-theory? Why is M-theory in charge rather than some other theory? Indeed, why is there any theory at all? Would not the existence of an M-theory point to the existence of God – a God who set up the theory?
Leaving aside the suggestion of a possible M-theory, let us return to the question of what else might have caused the Big Bang. Can a case be made that it needed a Creator God to get it started? The problem with this is that the Big Bang was very special. It was not like other explosions. Other explosions, such as fireworks going off, occur at some point in space and at some instant in time. But according to physicists, the Big Bang did not occur at some point in space. Rather it saw the coming into existence of space itself. Space started out as an infinitesimally small dot – no space at all – and with the expansion of the universe, it has been growing ever since. Not only that, it is claimed the Big Bang saw the coming into existence not only of space but also of time. The reason for this is that in Einstein’s theory of relativity there is a very close connection between three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time. In fact, they are regarded as being indissolubly welded together to make up a four-dimensional entity called spacetime. One cannot have space without time, nor time without space. So if space came into existence at the instant of the Big Bang, there is a powerful reason for believing that the same was true of time; it also came into being at the Big Bang. There was no time before that instant. And that in turn means that there was no cause of the Big Bang. Cause has to come before effect, and here the effect is the instant of the Big Bang. So any cause would need to precede in time that instant. But there was no such time then.
There is actually nothing particularly new in this idea. The fourth-century theologian St Augustine had concluded long ago that time was as much a property of the world as any other, and would therefore have had to have been created along with everything else. He did not, of course, have access to an argument based on our modern understanding of relativity theory. He did not need it. He simply argued that we can only know about time through the movement of objects – the hands of a clock, for instance. We speak of the objects as changing their position in time. But if there were no objects because they had not been created yet, the concept of time would have had no meaning. So when Augustine thought of a Creator God he certainly did not have in mind a God who existed for all time and at some point in that time decided to make a universe.
Basically we have here a classic confusion between two terms, ‘origins’ and ‘creation’. Although these terms might be used interchangeably in ordinary everyday conversation, in theological discussions they take on specific and quite distinct meanings. Origins is all to do with how things get started – how they originated. This is a topic that holds very little interest for theologians. Creation is distinctively different. When theologians speak of God the Creator, they have something else in mind. They are asking about the very source of existence. If nothing existed, would that call for an explanation? No. Why should anything exist? But as soon as something exists, then the questions arise. What is responsible for certain things existing and not others? To what do we owe the fact that we are existing at this instant? Theologians are not especially interested in any first instant. For them the Creator is as much involved in the present instant as any other. Creating a universe was not just about getting it started and then leaving it to get on with things unaided. The world had to be sustained in existence. That is why God is described not just as the Creator of the world but also its Sustainer. Everything that exists is timelessly dependent on God.
The question as to why there is something rather than nothing has exercised the minds of philosophers and theologians down through the ages. Some incline to the view that the question is meaningless. And certainly, as we have already noted, when one is addressing deeply philosophical or scientific issues, occasionally the way forward is to recognize that the question one is asking, though it makes good grammatical sense, actually is a non-question. We saw this earlier in the attempt to measure the speed of the Earth as it passes through the (non-existent) aether. The question was meaningless. In a similar vein, there are thinkers today who dismiss as meaningless the question concerning why the world exists. The world is there, and that is all one can say on the matter. One just has to accept its existence as a brute fact and get on with the job of science, which is to describe it.
Others accept the validity of the question. They accept that it is a perfectly reasonable question and that it deserves an answer. And the answer is God. God is the name we give to whatever is responsible for existence. Descartes took as the starting point for his philosophy: ‘I think, therefore, I am’. He might have added the further truism: ‘I am, therefore there is a God who created me.’
So does this need for a Ground of All Being constitute the very roots for belief in the God that we have been seeking? Of all the attempts we have been making to establish a foundation for belief in God based on our observations of the physical world, this is probably the most likely candidate. But does it provide proof? The answer yet again has to be No. Certainly there can be little problem accepting that there might be some kind of source responsible for the phenomenon of existence. But why should this source have to be the kind of God one does in fact believe in – a personal God who takes a conscious interest in each and every one of us, a God who loves us and possesses all the other qualities traditionally associated with God? Why not some blind, inanimate pseudo-physical creative force or agency of some sort? If there is to be a further truism to be added to that of Descartes, perhaps it ought not to be: ‘I am, therefore there is a God who created me’, but rather, ‘I am, therefore there is that which created me.’
No, the time is long overdue for us to face up squarely to the kind of God we are seeking, and what that might imply for our search for God.