As a pastor, I try to keep tabs on the temperature in the room.
It comes in handy when trying to speak the truth in love. You need to know where people are and what they can handle; otherwise, you might shine too much well-intentioned light in their eyes and they will leave blinded instead of enlightened. When avoidable, we should not lose our influence just so we can make a point. On this particular Sunday, however, my pastoral thermometer failed me.
We were in the last week of a series in which we had tackled very thorny questions, and we were wrapping things up with a Q&A. I was asked a question about evolution and, as it would turn out, far too cavalierly answered that I saw no necessary incompatibility between evolution and Christian faith. I opened my inbox on Monday and discovered that in addition to having come across condescendingly, I had also done a terrible job explaining myself.
I’m a perfectionist by nature, so my initial response to criticism is to challenge you to a duel for daring to suggest I did something imperfectly. But once I get over myself (and sometimes it takes a while), I want to learn from my mistake. So after taking a few days and writing a few incredibly juvenile responses that, mercifully, never saw the light of day, I tried to understand how and why I had handled that question so poorly. And I was reminded of an event from my father’s childhood.
He was in a Sunday school class, listening to his teacher expound on Genesis 1 and a young earth, and asked his teacher how to make sense of all those dinosaur bones. “Was there no room for Rex on the ark?” he asked, with guileless sincerity. “The devil buried the bones,” his teacher answered, and proceeded to explain that a literal Genesis 1 and young earth were essential to Christian faith. My father found himself before a fork in the road. There he was, a young boy who loved Jesus and dinosaurs, and the die had been cast—either the Prince of Darkness had spent the better part of the last millennia burying dinosaur bones or there was no God.
This is the kind of baggage many of us, myself included, have been forced to carry into conversations about faith and science.
Strange things happen in war; desperate times call for desperate measures. And in the minds of many modern folks, faith is at war with science. Militant atheists and Christians march into the field, prime their muskets, and then fire away. The results are predictable—few casualties, much maiming. The wearisome squabbles produce lots of heat but little light, and the volleys of musket fire overpower the more sensible voices. The convergence of faith and science is a frontier that needs exploring, not a battlefield that needs crusading.
And surely all the crusading is partly responsible for the rather stunning revelation that, in the United States, atheists are more likely than Christians to feel a sense of wonder about the universe. Many Christians are now immune to awe when standing before starry heavens, and this immunity is perhaps blasphemy. Other faithful explorers have and will continue to do the heavy lifting, so what I offer here are a few simple thoughts guiding me as I navigate the thicket.
“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean.”
When dealing with something as complex as the relationship between faith (or religion) and science, a stark, simplified frame can give things some needed perspective, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s punchy explanation does just that. Certainly, there is more to be said and many qualifications to be made, but on the whole, I think Sacks is right: faith and science look at the world from different angles, asking primarily different questions, and when this difference is forgotten, reality’s depth collapses into something flat, manageable, and banal. And when reality gets flat, manageable, and banal, it is no longer reality. Or to say this another way, people of faith and no faith often end up chasing each other in circles because both have forgotten that God does not “exist.”
In April of 1966, Time magazine published a cover at least a couple hundred years in the making. The background is black, the letters are red, and the question is brass: Is God dead? Many people think so. Here’s the story they tell.
Long ago primitive people invented religion to explain events they could not understand. A Neanderthal sees a lightning bolt flash down from the heavens, and because he doesn’t understand the atmospheric sciences, he (simple Neanderthal that he is) mistakenly assumes there must be some man up in the clouds, hurling down said lightning bolts. What else could it be? This story of the man in the clouds is passed down through generations until it becomes the story of the god in the heavens—a god like Zeus. And, allegedly, all gods and religions were more or less created this way: unexplainable events, attributed to the gods.
And the gods have a good run. For thousands of years they rule the earth, and the peoples bow to them in reverent submission, but then along comes science, explaining all these previously unexplainable events, leaving deicide in its wake. No god in the heavens hurls down lightning bolts—there are just water droplets and ice crystals rubbing against each other to produce static electricity. So if Zeus was only good for causing an unexplainable physical event, and science can now explain that event, there’s really no need for Zeus anymore. Zeus is simply an antiquated scientific explanation. Zeus is dead, and science has killed him. So it goes with all the gods and religions. The venerable Nietzsche says it best: “God is dead . . . and we have killed him.”
Needless to say, the story of gods and religions is a bit more complicated than that, seeing as how ancient religions, while certainly including ancient science, were more concerned with axiological explanations than scientific ones. That is, they were primarily concerned with pointing to things of worth, value, and meaning. That’s another story for another day, but the thing to mention here is the irony that while scientifically inclined atheists and scientifically antagonistic believers disagree about whether or not God is dead, they tend to agree on a basic premise that serves as the flawed foundation for the whole conversation: either God does something or nature does something.
For example: What created the diverse forms of life on earth? Evolution or God? Many atheists and Christians answer differently, but they agree it is a binary question, because they agree God and nature are in causal competition with one another. Some short reflections on sex and gravity reveal this is a mistake.
What created my son? Did egg and sperm join to make a zygote cell, or did my wife and I intentionally decide to make a baby? I am just old-fashioned enough to think a man is never in competition with his sperm. So, yes, egg and sperm joined to make a zygote cell and, yes, my wife and I intentionally decided to make a baby. Both explanations are true and are not competing explanations because they are different levels of explanation. They are true in different ways, but they are both true. Thus when the psalmist says God knit him together in his mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13), he does not mean God overrode the normal biological processes that form babies in order to knit the psalmist himself; rather, he means the biological processes are how God knit him together in his mother’s womb.
What upholds the planets as they dangle in empty space on their journey round the universe? God or gravity? Again—this is a silly question. Can you imagine someone refusing to believe in God because they believe in gravity?
“Why don’t you believe in God? Gratuitous suffering? Metaphysical grievances? Other religions?”
“No, no. Gravity.”
God and gravity are not in competition with one another. We might say gravity is how God rules the planets.
And now we come back to evolution and the unnecessary maiming it continues to cause. Although many Christians have been deceived into thinking scientists are somewhat split over the theory of evolution, this is false. Scientists are not split over evolution. Every reputable survey you come across puts scientific support for evolution in the range of 90-99 percent, with that number tending toward the latter among scientists who actually specialize in fields that would make them experts on the issue. This is a remarkable consensus. Yes, the theory itself continues to evolve and mature, but the basic premise that terrestrial life has evolved over time from common ancestry has been confirmed over and over. And God need be in competition with evolution no more than God need be in competition with sperm or gravity. There’s more to say here, but first, I’ll circle back to that seemingly provocative but merely ancient, essential, orthodox assertion that God does not “exist.”
Yuri Gagarin was a Russian cosmonaut and the first human in space. Upon his return, Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, an atheist, mockingly quipped that Gagarin flew up into the divine, heavenly abode, and yet God was nowhere to be found. This legendary story hints at the radical flaw ruining much thinking and talking about God. Here are two statements:
At first glance, they might seem comparable. There are two objects that are said to exist somewhere in the universe. We can find the book on the table and prove it exists, and we can find God in heaven and prove God exists. But despite their superficial similarity, the two statements are not remotely comparable because God does not “exist” much less inhabit some physical place called heaven.
God is not a super-powerful creature, really big and strong and smart, who inhabits the universe and performs allegedly unexplainable physical events. God is not like Zeus. God does not “exist” because God is both beyond existence and is existence itself. God is not a being because God is both beyond being and is being itself. God is the infinite ocean of being that endlessly begets and sustains the wild and wondrous ride called existence. God does not live and move and have his being in the universe, but, as David Hart reminds us, the universe lives and moves and has its being in God:
To speak of “God” properly . . . is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. . . . He is not a “being” . . . he is not one more object in the inventory of things. . . . Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is. . . . In one sense he is “beyond being.” . . . In another sense he is “being itself” . . . the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. Infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss, from whom we are, by whom we know and are known, and in whom we find our only true consummation.
One is tempted to chastise much modern atheism for the straw-man caricatures of God it continues to burn down, but perhaps there would be fewer of these if we Christians quit defending those straw-men gods. Let them burn! One can understand how the amateur atheist could think science proves (or even has the capacity to prove) that God does not exist, but we should know better. We should know that God does not “exist.” How did we forget?
That is a complicated story of theological creep, wherein the fundamental doctrine of divine transcendence was slowly and unintentionally subverted as the line between Creator and creation was blurred. In my context, this subversion of proper divine transcendence metastasized in the culture of popular, fundamentalist Christianity, a result of which is the booming cottage industry of pseudosciences that claim to definitively prove the existence of God by the physical events of the universe.
In a sincere but misled attempt to “prove” God’s “existence,” we have shrunk the infinite Creator of space and time into a super-powerful creature so we can look for proofs of his actions in the physical events of the universe. Instead of looking for Zeus’s lightning bolts, we look for irreducible complexity or intelligent design—things that, supposedly, only God can explain. And while there might be a grain of truth in these pursuits, they miss the forest for the trees and fall back on the familiar mistake of “God of the gaps” thinking, wherein God is used to explain physical events we cannot currently explain (and as I once heard a friend say, the problem with God of the gaps is that when you run out of gaps, you run out of God). An illustration borrowed from Richard Taylor helps bring the forest back into focus.
Imagine you are wandering through the woods and come across a giant, floating, translucent sphere. Clearly, you would be astonished at the sight of it and question how on earth it came to be there, out in the middle of the woods. And you would never be able to believe it just happened to be there, without any further cause or explanation. You’d be shocked into wonder and curiosity at the sight of such a thing.
But you should feel the same shock, wonder, and curiosity at the sight of every single thing in the woods: a rock, a leaf, a tree, a squirrel. How wild and wondrous it is that anything at all should exist! The giant, floating, translucent sphere shocks us because we are not used to it. A tree does not shock us because we are used to it. But in those fleeting moments when we truly awaken to the world, we sense how ridiculous and miraculous it is that anything at all should exist. Everything is a miracle!
My son is not yet so familiar with the world to take it all for granted. His world is enchanted—everything is magic. When he sees a bird, he clumsily races toward it yelling, “Bird! Bird! Bird!” It might as well be a unicorn. When he sees a dog, time might as well stand still. Then there are the adults. We see a tree, a bird, a dog, a person, the sun, and we yawn—seen plenty of those before. But not my son. He apprehends the mystery of existence, of being itself. He remembers something most of us have long forgotten. He sees the forest and the trees.
So instead of bickering over whether God or evolution designed humans, or whether the complexity of the human eye is so irreducible as to be a proof for God, we would be better served walking around in wide-eyed wonder, marveling that anything and everything should exist: “That there is a world is a miracle. The question, therefore, is never ‘Does God exist?’ Rather, what should astonish us is that we exist.” From gaping black holes in the deepest reaches of space to the tiniest pebble outside your front door, all of it is shocking because existence itself is the miracle.
The issue is not gaps that God does or does not fill in creation, but the absolute chasm between existence and nonexistence. And before this chasm, evolution, biogenesis, and physics fall silent. But back to evolution for a moment.
How does evolution challenge Christianity?
Among believers and nonbelievers, the antagonism between evolution and Christianity (and most religions) is so assumed that it is rarely explained. But in what specific ways does evolution conflict with Christianity? One could multiply alleged conflicts ad infinitum, but five stand out.
First, and as discussed in the previous chapter, evolution conflicts with rigid biblical literalism. If we read the first two chapters of Genesis as a literal description of how God made the world, then evolution and Christianity are in conflict. But we should not read Genesis 1 and 2 literally! In fact, a rigidly literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2, resulting in the belief that God created the world ten thousand years ago (known as young-earth creationism), has only gained traction within the last hundred years. It is an overwhelmingly minority position in orthodox Christian theology, a novelty on the theological scene. As Noll states, “Despite widespread impressions to the contrary, [young-earth] creationism was not a traditional belief of nineteenth-century conservative Protestants or even of early twentieth-century fundamentalists.”
This needs to be said as clearly, consistently, and charitably as possible: not only is rigid biblical literalism and young-earth creationism not essential, but it is fundamentally biblically, theologically, philosophically, historically, and scientifically mistaken. It may come from a sincere place, but it can be very dangerous. It produces bad Bible reading, bad theology, and very bad science. Consider for a moment the following quotation:
Calvin’s doctrine of creation is, if we have understood it aright, for all except the souls of men, an evolutionary one . . . not only evolutionism but pure evolutionism. . . . And this, we say, is a very pure evolutionary scheme.
This is B. B. Warfield, a conservative Calvinist and the godfather of the Protestant doctrine of inerrancy, summarizing Calvin on creation! It boggles the mind that a very conservative, Calvinist, inerrantist Christian writing one hundred years ago could be so accepting of evolution when so many of his Protestant great-grandchildren would consider belief in evolution heresy. We have strayed far from center when our theology makes someone like B. B. Warfield look “liberal.”
So while evolution is in conflict with biblical literalism and young-earth creationism, a biblical literalism that necessitates young-earth creationism is in conflict with the best of historic, orthodox biblical interpretation, especially in regards to Genesis 1–2. Or to say it another way, most ancient interpreters, relying on ancient science, did think the world was quite young (they also thought it was quite flat). But most of the best ancient interpreters did not employ a rigid biblical literalism that forced them into believing the earth had to be young in order for Scripture to be true. Augustine believed the earth was flat and young; however, his interpretive methods make it clear that if he lived now, he would not. For example, Augustine suggests that when science proves something that seems to contradict Scripture, the proven scientific truth should take precedence over the literal sense of Scripture.
All this is to say that, if some Christians want to make a scientific argument that the earth, despite all appearances from several different scientific fields of inquiry, is only a few thousand years old, that is perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is Christians demanding Genesis 1–2 be read literally, and then bending, censoring, or ignoring science to make it say what a literal reading of Genesis 1–2 has already determined it has to say: namely, the earth is young.
Second, some feel evolution conflicts with the dignity of human beings, as taught by Scripture. As one of Darwin’s contemporary critics put it, “Darwinism casts us all down from this elevated platform, and herds us all with four-footed beasts and creeping things. It tears the crown from our heads; it treats us as bastards and not sons, and reveals the degrading fact that man in his best estate . . . is but a civilized, dressed up, educated monkey, who has lost his tail.”
Humans think highly of ourselves, so there can be an initial indignation toward the idea that we are cultured monkeys with missing posterior appendages. But really, does it matter whether we’re the direct descendants of dirt a few thousand years ago (Genesis 2:7) or prehuman primates a hundred thousand years ago? Is dirt of nobler stock than a chimp? And of course, according to evolution, trace back humanity’s family tree far enough and we are descendants of a cosmic explosion—the Big Bang! That is, trace back our family tree far enough, and we are stardust. Either way, we reduce to stardust, animated by the breath of God. I cannot imagine a more royal pedigree.
And think of this—if evolution is true, then we are the culmination of countless species, over millions of years, who have all left a trace of themselves in us. Ernan McMullin observes this would mean that
when Christ took on human nature, the DNA that made him the son of Mary may have linked him to a more ancient heritage stretching far beyond Adam to the shallows of unimaginably ancient seas. And so, in the Incarnation, it would not have been just human nature that was joined to the Divine, but in a less direct but no less real sense all those myriad organisms that had unknowingly over the eons shaped the way for the coming of the human.
Count me among those who find this inspiring instead of insulting.
Third, some feel evolution conflicts with Christianity’s teaching that God intervenes in creation. The God of Scripture intervenes in creation, and if evolution is a completely closed system in which God cannot or does not intervene, then evolution is in conflict with Christianity.
For me, this alleged conflict is a good deal more complicated than the first two. I do think Scripture teaches that God acts “specially” in creation and that Christianity is, literally, birthed from the special action of God in space and time—from exodus to incarnation to resurrection. And yet I think we must be careful when invoking the idea that divine intervention is in conflict with evolution. I agree with Keith Ward:
I think the word “intervention” has done a great deal of harm. . . . You do not have to think of God as a being who interferes in the clockwork of the universe to adjust the works from time to time. You could think of God as the deepest reality of the universe. . . . God does not have to intervene in a closed universe. God is the reality within which the physical universe exists, and without which the universe would not exist at all. . . . You need to get away from the idea that there is a closed set of physical laws, which do not quite manage to produce life and mind and reason by themselves, so that God has to step in to keep re-directing things to get the results God wants.
Many theologians share similar concerns, suggesting the universe contains a deep rational order, able to move toward certain goals without needing God’s constant “intervention.” God creates and constantly sustains the universal, rational order of creation, but does God intentionally make creation physically incomplete so he can then physically intervene? Some see problems with this idea.
Others, such as Alvin Plantinga, suggest we’re really not very good at even understanding what it means for God to “intervene” and have no clue whether the universe is “closed.” According to some variations of quantum mechanics, it could well be the case that God is constantly “acting specially in the world and the material universe is never causally closed.” So perhaps it would be better to think that instead of occasionally intervening in creation from the outside, God constantly participates in creation from the inside: in him we live and move and have our being (see Acts 17:28).
Obviously we don’t have all this anywhere near sorted out, so it seems appropriate to humbly and patiently work out what it means for God to “intervene” in creation and resist painting ourselves into unnecessary corners. At minimum, even if evolution is a completely closed system, there is no necessary conflict between that and the biblical teaching that God acts in creation. At most, it would mean God does not regularly suspend the natural laws God himself created in the process of evolution, because those divine natural laws are perfectly capable of bringing about the results God intended. If I’m pulling my son along in his little red wagon, I am equally involved in this action regardless of whether the wagon rides along perfectly or if I must occasionally inflate the wheels and tighten a few screws.
Fourth, evolution makes us fundamentally revise some traditional understandings of the fall, wherein the literal fall of a literal Adam and Eve first introduces suffering, evil, and death into the world. Science tells us the creation of humanity was not a singular, instant event involving the creation of a single human pair, Adam and Eve. Rather, it appears we evolved from a population of about 10,000 hominid ancestors that first appeared approximately 200,000 years ago. Science also tells us that suffering and death were present in the world millions of years before humans arrive on the scene. In light of this, how do we make sense of the fall? Perhaps something like this.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but God did not create the heavens and the earth fully realized. God created them unfinished, full of potential and futurity. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and did so in a way that allowed creation to unfold gradually. God created a creation that evolves—and evolves toward humanity—but does so very slowly.
Eventually, the process of evolution produces a population of hominids with an emerging religious awareness, a sense of the divine. A relationship, albeit an embryonic one, between God and humanity is established. We might think of this, metaphorically, as the “creation” of Adam and Eve. And at this first dawn of religious awareness and relationship, humanity is “naked but not ashamed.” We might call this “Eden”:
Eden in this model represents the possibility that human beings were capable of divine recognition, but had no self-conscious evil tendencies. Before that there would have been some acts that harmed other persons, but they were more akin to that most commonly found in other animals, and therefore reactive and transactional rather than deliberate and transcendent.
Humans do things that are wrong but are not “sinful” because they lack the maturity to be held to account. They are spiritual babies (see Romans 5:13, where Paul seems to think along these lines).
However, this religious awareness eventually evolves to the point where humans are no longer spiritual babies but adults and, as adults, capable of sin. That is, they grow capable of deliberate rebellion against God. And once they grow capable of sin, they sin, and the power of humanity’s sin is unleashed on the world. Humanity has “fallen.”
This fall is historical—it is an actual phenomenon that took place in history. But it is not a single event wherein a single human pair that God made from dirt a few thousand years ago rebels against God. It is a real fall, but it is gradual, episodic, and social instead of instant, literal, and individual. Suffering and death are present in creation prior to human sin, perhaps fallout of the primal catastrophe of an angelic fall. Sin enters the world through “Adam,” and sin brings with it a kind of spiritual death that spreads to all humanity (Romans 5:12). The world becomes a place where it is impossible not to be a sinner. This, I think, does what a doctrine of the fall needs to do from a biblical and theological standpoint, while still being true to the findings of modern science. And as Augustine reminded us earlier, when science proves something that seems to contradict Scripture, the proven scientific truth should take precedence over the literal sense of Scripture.
Fifth and finally, evolution challenges Christianity by exacerbating the problem of evil. And this was the challenge that moved Darwin himself, once an aspiring pastor, toward a troubled agnosticism later in life. Simply put, evolution is a brutal, vicious, wasteful, and cruel process. It involves the creation of life through monstrous violence over immense ages of time. It is difficult to believe the God who would use evolution to bring about humanity could be the same God who took on flesh in Christ to redeem humanity. As Philip Kitcher memorably puts it:
When you consider the millions of years in which sentient creatures have suffered, the uncounted number of extended and agonizing deaths, it simply rings hollow to suppose that all this is needed so that, at the very tail end of history, our species can manifest the allegedly transcendent good of free and virtuous action.
And this is quite the problem. It should bother us. Though to be fair, it is not really a problem that Darwinism first posed. Tennyson observed that nature was “red in tooth and claw” before Darwin suggested our ancestors sported tails. So while Darwin perhaps accentuated things by teaching us the stunning variety of life on earth is the result of mass extinctions over millions of years, this was simply a modern scientific restatement of the ancient problem of evil, and I, for one, find evil terribly troubling regardless whether it involves mass extinctions over millions of years or the suffering of a single child. Darwin himself lost his little girl to a tragic death, and one wonders what toll this took on his belief. Evil is and remains a blasphemy you either do or don’t trust God to sort out.
But God takes his time—Scripture says it, the saints accept it, and evolution confirms it. So I will wait. As I wait, I wait with agonizing questions as to why a God of infinite charity would allow a world of, seemingly, infinite cruelty. I see creativity and elegance in evolution, but I also see violence and waste. Creation is beautiful but fallen, including evolution. And while the specter of evil is ancient, perhaps we do bear a novel burden here. Perhaps our distant mothers and fathers in the faith, while no strangers to suffering, glimpsed a kinder universe thanks to their ignorance of the evolutionary process. For we, even when confronted with the simple beauty of, say, a monarch butterfly, are haunted by the knowledge that those bright, orange wings declare not just the beauty of God but the brutality of nature.
So we must be careful discerning God’s purposes from within nature because while the starry heavens declare the glory of God, the crimson sod we tread tells a darker story. God has a purpose for nature, but this does not mean God’s purposes are easily perceived within nature. Indeed, God’s ultimate purpose for nature is glimpsed only in new creation, meaning it is only in light of the end that we can understand the beginning or the present: “the end is in the beginning.”
And if we’re still not convinced evolution might be compatible with Christian faith, that’s okay, but perhaps some of what has been said can at least help us understand that its incompatibility has been seriously overstated, and we have some more considering to do.
And perhaps a final observation bears mentioning: God does not owe us—and has not seen fit to give us—a detailed explanation regarding the origins and mechanics of the universe. I wish that weren’t so. I feel like we have enough mysteries to live with and God could have thrown us a bone here. But this is the essence of a life of faith, constantly forced to live with mysteries that are not of our own choosing.
Setting our sights in a different direction, it might be helpful to close by briefly discussing the ways in which forgetting that God does not “exist” has gotten modern science into a bit of trouble.
Science explores the physical world using physical tools. Science is good at this and we should be thankful for it. Science gets in trouble when it forgets it is exploring the physical world using physical tools and clumsily attempts to distill the whole of reality into a physical world wholly explainable using wholly physical tools. Science gets in trouble when it brashly subjects God to scientific analysis.
Because, again, God is not a creature who “exists.” God is not physically observable or measurable. God cannot be placed in a beaker. Technically, it is manifestly certain that science in and of itself has little to nothing to say about God. So when you find folks saying (always very confidently) that science proves God does not exist, all they are actually saying is they do not understand God, or they do not understand science, or they do not understand either. They are woodpeckers trying to fell a redwood.
For example, suppose you shot a film in black and white, and then proceeded to use your black and white film as proof that color does not exist. “See! There is no such thing as color. Blue, green, red—they are all illusions. My film is the proof!” But of course you can’t see color—your method assured that from the start.
In a similar sense, when science goes into the world, only measuring and taking into account the physically measurable and observable, it only finds the physically measurable and observable. It is ludicrous for science to then conclude, “See! There are no spiritual things. There is no God. There are only physical things.” The circularity of this argument is so crude it often goes unperceived, basically boiling down to something akin to, as Hart cleverly says, “Physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything.”
The mistake of much modern science was turning a method into a metaphysic. It set out to explain the physical processes of the world without recourse to God (method), had—properly understood—moderate success, and somehow came to the conclusion this meant there was no God (metaphysic). It forgot that the limits of scientific inquiry are by no means the limits of reality. This is quite the mistake, considering “it is certain that all possible scientific findings are compatible with the conception of a transcendent creator-God.” It is certainly possible there is no God, and it is certainly impossible that science could ever tell us that. In fact, I am inclined to declare there is not a single, orthodox, classic theological claim that science has disproved.
Indeed, when science stops going à la carte and uses all its findings (in biology, physics, astronomy, etc.) to cobble together a grand theory of everything, it typically presents something amusingly theistic. Take, for example, Stephen Hawking’s ambitious book The Theory of Everything, in which he explains the origin of the universe in terms of a quantum vacuum and quantum laws. In short, our universe is the creation of a quantum vacuum, governed by quantum laws, outside of time, that necessarily expresses the mathematical laws it holds. So the theory of everything, according to one of the smartest men ever to live, is a . . .
necessary,
eternal,
transcendent
quantum
vacuum.
I don’t suppose I am the only one who suspects this is just a particularly abstruse way to say “God.” I would only add that the necessary, eternal, transcendent quantum vacuum took on flesh, died for our sins, was raised on the third day, and has a personal face turned toward us in love.
So Hawking can pray or not pray to the necessary, eternal, transcendent quantum vacuum, but I feel well within my rights to pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You should too.