Could the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ have a Ringmaster?
Richard Dawkins’ latest book is titled ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ and argues the case for the process of life in ‘Evolution’ being the greatest and only show on earth, occurring totally independently of any idea or concept of a God or Creator (or ‘Ringmaster’). After his other more highly popularised book ‘The God Delusion’ (in which he passionately argues against any possibility of there being a God) numerous writers have written in response and also publicly debated with him over this matter of God’s existence in the universe. Did the universe (or multiverses) occur through random chance or is there a Ringmaster behind it all who initiated (and continues to sustain?) this very complex and beautiful environment in which we live?
Before I begin to address this question of God’s existence in particular, let me state several riders and preliminaries so that we can focus in particular on the main issue.
1. I thank Dawkins for the many ways in which he has pointed out inconsistencies and evils that have occurred in the church in the past and which still blight the public face of the church. Many of these are connected with the extreme elements of the church and it is healthy to expose these extremities and their unacceptable beliefs and practices. Other evils are closer to the heart of the church involving wrong actions of leaders and members of the church. As with all human organisations they need to be faced, admitted and apologised for and all attempts made to amend the situation and make sure it does not happen again. But as we know these faults occur in all human organisations and belief systems including those with an atheist base as well (eg Communist countries and systems as well as Nazism).
2. I am not going to address the question of evolution per se in this paper as it involves another whole area of discussion. Suffice it to say that it is not the particular issue of this discussion as there are thousands of scientists who are theists (including Christians, Jews and Muslims) who work with the evolutionary theory in their everyday working lives and who also have it as part of their worldview. One of the most prominent of these is Francis Collins who is the Head of the Human Genome Project. Originally an agnostic and then an atheist at university, he went on to have his atheistic faith challenged by some of his patients, and after taking up their logical challenge, embraced the Christian faith. He now combines his faith and his scientific work, particularly in relation to genetics and evolutionary theory. He rejects Intelligent Design but has developed what he calls Biologos, which is a combination of science and faith in harmony. His recent book details his views and is called: ‘The Language of God’ Francis Collins, Free Press, 2007.
3. One of the main theses of this discussion is to ask for a more open and humble discussion about this question of whether of not there may be a God and creator of the universe as we now scientifically know it. I will point out how Dawkins has distorted and dragged the discussion away from an academic, scientific and open forum and often resorted to verbal thuggery which is helpful to no one. I also call on all theists and Christians (who have also resorted to heavy-handed approaches) to put down their ‘clubs’ and come to the discussion table acknowledging that we can neither insist nor prove that God exists. That is why this paper begins with the word ‘Could…there be a Ringmaster?’ Neither atheists nor theists can fully logically prove or insist on their belief in this area, nor should they scoff at or rubbish people who have a different worldview to them. Hopefully there can be an open and logical discussion about this question and its implications for both science and our wider living in the world today.
The discussion
Three of the most reasonable and significant responses in this debate have come from Dawkins’ fellow academics at Oxford University. These men know Dawkins personally and have also engaged in debate with him both informally and formally. Their recently written books in response to Dawkins are both polite, but also pertinent in their criticism of his sloppy arguments and the extreme positions which he takes. They include John Lennox, a Reader in Mathematics; Keith Ward who was a philosopher at universities in England for most of his academic life until taking on the position of Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Alistair McGrath, a former atheist who studied chemistry at Oxford in the area of molecular biophysics.
The first response is John Lennox whose book is titled ‘God’s undertaker: Has science buried God?’ (Lion, Oxford, 2007)
His book includes some of the following responses:
1. War of the worldviews
‘It is no part of the biblical view that things should be believed where there is no evidence. Just as in science, faith, reason and existence belong together. Dawkins’ definition of faith as ‘blind faith’ turns out, therefore to be the exact opposite of the biblical one.’ (15, 16)
‘Francis Collins says of Dawkins’ definition that it ‘certainly does not describe the faith of most serious believers in history nor of most of those in my personal acquaintance’.’ (16)
Men such as Galileo (1564-1642), Kepler (1571-1630), Pascal ((1623-62), Boyle (1627-91), Newton ((1642-1727), Faraday (1791-1867), Babbage (1791-1871), Mendel (1822-84), Pasteur (1822-95), Kelvin (1824-1907) and Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) were theists; most of them, in fact, were Christians. Their belief in God, far from being a hindrance to their science, was often the main inspiration for it and they were not shy of saying so.’ (20)
‘…Galileo was a firm believer in God and the Bible, and remained so all his life. He held that ‘the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics’ and that the ‘human mind is a work of God and one of the most excellent’. Furthermore, Galileo enjoyed a great deal of support from religious intellectuals—at least at the start. The astronomers of the powerful Jesuit educational institution, the Collegio Romano, initially endorsed his astronomical work and feted him for it. However, he was vigorously opposed by the secular philosophers, who were enraged at his criticism of Aristotle.’ (23)
‘Mendelian geneticists were persecuted by Marxists because Mendel’s ideas on heredity were regarded as inconsistent with Marxist philosophy, and so the Marxists refused to allow the Mendelians to follow where the evidence led. (37)
‘Philosophers and scientists today also have need of humility in light of facts, even if those facts are being pointed out to them by a believer in God. Lack of belief in God is no more of a guarantee of scientific orthodoxy than is belief in God. What is clear in Galileo’s time and ours, is that criticism of a reigning scientific paradigm is fraught with risk, no matter who is engaged in it. We conclude that the ‘Galileo affair’ really does nothing to confirm a simplistic conflict view of the relationship of science to religion.’ (25)
‘…the real conflict is between two diametrically opposed worldviews: naturalism and theism. They inevitably collide. For the sake of clarity, we note that naturalism is related to, but not identical with, materialism; although sometimes they are very hard to tell apart.’ (27)
Whatever their differences, materialism and naturalism are therefore intrinsically atheist.’ (28)
‘In order to tease out the relationship between worldviews and science we must now ask a surprisingly difficult question: What exactly is science?’ (29)
2. The scope and limits of science
‘Michael Ruse…holds that science ‘by definition deals only with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law’….The most obvious weakness in this definition is that, if allowed to stand, it would rule out most of contemporary cosmology as science.’ (31)
‘…there is another way of looking at things that is an essential part of the methodology of contemporary science, and that is the method of inference to the best explanation (or abduction, as it is sometimes called).’ 31
‘What no scientist can avoid is having his or her own philosophical commitments. Those commitments…are not likely to figure very largely, if at all, when we are studying how things work, but they may well play a much more dominant role when we are studying how things came to exist in the first place, or when we are studying things that bear on our understanding of ourselves as human beings.’ (37)
‘We cannot emphasize too much that vast tracts of science remain unaffected by such philosophical commitments. But not quite all—and that is where the problem lies.’ (38)
‘Dawkins is guilty of committing the error of proposing false alternatives by suggesting that it is either fairies or nothing. Fairies at the bottom of the garden may well be a delusion, but what about a gardener, to say nothing about an owner? The possibility of their existence cannot be so summarily dismissed—in fact, most gardens have both. Furthermore, take the claim that only science can deliver truth. If it were true it would at once spell the end of many disciplines in schools and universities. For the evaluation of philosophy, literature, art, music lies outside the scope of science strictly so-called. How could science tells us whether a poem is a bad poem or a work of genius?...whether a painting is a masterpiece or a confused smudge of colours?...The teaching of morality likewise lies outside science.’ (39)
‘…the statement that only science can deliver knowledge is one of those self-refuting statements that logicians like Bertrand Russell love to point out. All the more surprising that Russell himself appears to have subscribed to this particular view when he wrote: ‘whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’ In order to see the self-contradictory nature of this statement we simply have to ask: How does Russell know this? For his statement is not in itself a statement of science and so if it is true then (according to the statement itself) it is unknowable—and yet Russell believes it to be true.’ (40)
‘Let us imagine that my Aunt Matilda has baked a beautiful cake and we take it along to be analysed by a group of the world’s top scientists. I, as master of ceremonies, ask them for an explanation of the cake and they go to work…Now that these experts, each in terms of his or her scientific discipline, have given us an exhaustive description of the cake, can we say that the cake is completely explained? We have certainly been given a description of how the cake was made and how its various constituent elements relate to each other, but suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts a final question: Why was the cake made?...All the…scientists…in the world will not be able to answer the question—and it is no insult to their disciplines to state their incapacity to answer it. Their disciplines…cannot answer the ‘why’ questions connected with the purpose for which the cake was made. In fact, the only way we shall ever get an answer is if Aunt Matilda reveals it to us. But if she does not disclose the answer to us, the plain fact is that no amount of scientific analysis will enlighten us.’ (40, 41)
‘The claim that science is the only way to truth is a claim ultimately unworthy of science itself. Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar points this out…’There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and upon his profession than roundly to declare…that science knows, or soon will know, the answers to all questions worth asking, and that questions which do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or “pseudo-questions” that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.’ Medwar goes on to say, ‘The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things—questions such as: “How did everything begin?”; :What are we all here for?”; “What is the point of living?”.’ He adds that it is to imaginative literature and religion that we much turn for such questions…There is clearly no inconsistency involved in being a passionately committed scientist at the highest level while simultaneously recognizing that science cannot answer every kind of question, including some of the deepest questions that human beings ask.
It is only fair to say also that Russell, in spite of the fact that he wrote the very scientistic sounding statement we cited above, indicated elsewhere that he did not subscribe to full-blown scientism…’To such questions no answers can be found in the laboratory.’’ (41)
‘It is one thing to suggest that science cannot answer questions of ultimate purpose. It is quite another to dismiss purpose itself as an illusion because science cannot deal with it.’ (42)
‘But what destroys scientism completely is the fatal flaw of self-contradiction that runs through it. Scientism does not need to be refuted by external argument: it self-destructs. It suffers the same fate as in the earliest times did the verification principle that was at the heart of the philosophy of logical-positivism. For, the statement that only science can lead to truth is not itself deduced from science. It is not a scientific statement but rather a statement about science, that is, it is a metascientific statement. Therefore, if scientism’s basic principle is true, the statement expressing scientism must be false. Hence it is incoherent.’ (42)
3. Reduction, reduction, reduction…
‘Philosopher Richard Swinburne in his book Is there a God? Says: ‘Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps’, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains’…The point to grasp here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps. On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation; it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.’ (47)