One of the most famous (perhaps apocryphal) stories in Western intellectual history dealt with Napoleon Bonaparte’s visit to Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace. “They tell me,” Napoleon said to the scholar and polymath, “that you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.”
Laplace’s reply—“Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis”—has become a legendary atheistic one-liner.
But not so fast. Just because you need not evoke the Wright Brothers in order to describe how a plane flies doesn’t mean that the Wright Brothers never existed. Laplace’s refusal to evoke the God hypothesis here didn’t necessarily mean that he rejected God. Laplace just didn’t need Him in order to describe the motion of the planets any more than you would need Wilber and Orville in order to describe the aerodynamics of an Airbus A380.
Following that train of thought, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, hardly known for faith or piety, argued that just because modern materialistic philosophy has no room for God, this stance “does not prove that there is no God: God can still be conceived as a transcendent cause of the entire cosmos.”[1]
Of course He can, and that’s because He is (that is, the transcendent cause of the cosmos). Who else?
Nevertheless, our era’s reigning intellectual assumption, that all reality is material—protons, quarks, quantum fields, and scientism arising from that assumption—present a skewed view of reality that also misses the most crucial parts.
The Natural Thing
Years ago an app appeared. A user would place a phone near whatever music he or she happened to be hearing, say, in a shopping mall, and within seconds the name of the piece, the musician(s) playing the piece, and the opportunity to buy it would pop up on the app. The app and its acts seemed magical; today, they’re as ho-hum as flush toilets. Such has been, and continues to be, the amazing technological fruits of science.
“It is the overwhelming intellectual and practical successes of science,” wrote Mikael Stenmark, “that have led some people to think that there are no real limits to the competence of science, no limits to what can be achieved in the name of science.”[2]
Which means—why bother with texts of the dead when there’s the science of the living? What can Moses, David and Luke say to those nurtured on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? Didn’t Newton’s Principia nullify John’s Apocalypse? And who needs the Spirit of the Lord moving over the “face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2) when flesh of Darwin did the same on the H.M.S. Beagle?
Delivered with impermeable numbers (as opposed to ancient poetry); expressed by PhDs (not by dead prophets); and confirmed in peer-reviewed journals (not in stories from vanished cultures)—the scientific world-view has commanded an aura of objectivity that, apparently, supersedes religious faith. In 1919, Arthur Stanley Eddington pointed a telescope toward the sky and showed that, as Einstein had theorized, gravity does bend light (though evidence suggests that Eddington did fudge some numbers). In contrast, what could the James Webb Space Telescope ever discover which would show that Christ will return and that “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible”(1 Cor. 15:52)?
That’s why for so many, science alone, and certainly not the Bible, must be the final, if not sole, arbiter of truth.
There are some things that science is better off leaving alone.
Scientism
This idea, that science can give us the only accurate account of creation, and that every aspect of reality—from astronomy to psychology and to the arts even—can, in principle, be explained by science, is called “scientism.” Some take scientism further, arguing that chemistry and physics (especially physics) alone give us the whole truth about reality, and that apart from those disciplines all knowledge is either incomplete or wrong.
Really now? What about mathematical knowledge, so crucial for science itself? You might need math like d2Z/dt2 – c2 d2Z/dx2 = 0 to tell us about particle and fields, but what can particles and fields tell us about math like d2Z/dt2 – c2 d2Z/dx2 = 0? How could quarks and the strong nuclear force add, even theoretically, to our knowledge of quadratic equations, or of rational numbers, much less of negative irrational ones?
Or what about logic itself, more foundational than math but just as crucial for science? What’s the atomic structure of the excluded middle; how could organic chemistry or quantum physics, even in the most theoretical way, teach us about modus ponens or the law of non-contradiction?
Scientism is also self-refuting. Applying scientism to scientism refutes scientism. What branch of science proves that science alone presents the most accurate knowledge about reality? And—how do chemistry and physics alone prove that chemistry and physics alone expose other forms of knowledge as incomplete, shallow, even wrong?
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Because science works, even wonderfully, in some realms doesn’t mean that it works so well, or at all, in others. That human generosity, heroism, art, and fear cannot exist apart from organic chemicals or even subatomic particles doesn’t mean that organic chemicals and subatomic particles can explain human heroism, art, generosity and fear any more than the chemicals in Jonas Kauffman’s larynx could explain the thrill of audiences when the tenor sings in Verdi’s La Traviata.
Thomas Nagel, an avowed atheist, has challenged the common belief that physical/material explanations alone can explain everything. “[T]here are some things,” this atheist writes, “that the physical sciences alone cannot fully account for.”[3]
Like love.
“Love,” the Bible says, “is of God” (1 John 4:7). Whom else could love be “of” but God? If bones, flesh, blood, cells, even neurons can’t love—you think love can be found among the molecules and atoms; or deeper, in the electrons and quarks; or even deeper, among the quantum fields and probability waves? The farther down you go the farther from love you get.
Love, no doubt, is created in human brains—which are 60 percent fat, with 40 percent water, protein, carbohydrates and salts left over. How do fat, water, protein, carbohydrates and salts, in any configuration, love? They don’t, at least in and of themselves. Something more is needed, something not found in physics, chemistry, or even biology, and using them to try would be like using a pneumatic drill to break down an argument.
There are aspects of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence” and William Faulkner’s Light in August where science is too crude, too brutish and broad to access (unless analyzing the atomic structure of the words and punctuation will do the trick). Even if in theory science could have mapped the entire neurological processes creating “Renascence” and Light In August—not just neuron by neuron but synaptic cleft by synaptic cleft, including each molecule of Glutamate, Glycine, Serotonin and every other neurotransmitter upon which those works rode—what would that have revealed about the grandeur of their poetry and prose?
What chemicals can explain the beauty of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, what algorithm the warbling of a blackbird, and what law the horror of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children? Theories and laws, principles and formulas, no more make butterflies fly, stars burn, or cheetahs nurse their cubs than etching E=MC2 on uranium will cause a chain reaction. That theories, law, algorithms are part of it, of course; that they are all of it—never, and to think that they are is miss the forest for the pine needles.
The Physics of Faith?
If scientism is inadequate to deal with foundational aspects of the natural world, then how would it fare in the supernatural one? If knowledge comes only through the natural sciences, as some versions of scientism claim, then obviously natural science doesn’t have much, or anything, to say about the supernatural, except to ignore or to deny it altogether.
Still, the lure of scientism can be so strong that an American Mathematical Cosmologist, Frank J. Tipler, in a book called The Physics of Immortality (1995), claimed that he could prove, from physics, the existence “of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God who will one day in the future resurrect every single one of us to live forever in an abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven.”[4]
In a later book, The Physics of Christianity (2007), Tipler claims that physics can explain Jesus’ miracles, saying that all of His “nature” miracles could have been accomplished by electroweak quantum tunneling. Tipler explains, for instance, how Jesus could have walked on water:
If Jesus had a mass of 178 pounds, or about 80.8 kilograms (I shall justify this mass shortly), then the force that must be exerted to support his weight against the force of gravity is F = Mg = (80.8 kg)(9.80 m/sec2) = 792 newtons. But the force is the momentum p carried away by the neutrinos per unit time, and for nearly massless particles, such as neutrinos, the momentum equals the energy divided by the speed of light. But if the energy of the neutrinos comes from the annihilation of matter, then this energy equals the mass of the matter annihilated times the speed of light squared (E = mc2). Thus p/t = (E/c)/t = (mc2/c)/t = mc/t = Mg. Thus, the amount of mass that must be annihilated per second, or m/t, must equal Mg/c = (792 Newtons)/(3.00 × 108 m/sec) =2.64 milligrams per second. Thus, if the field responsible for converting matter into neutrinos extends a short distance into the water below Jesus’ feet, and if this field is capable of directing all the neutrinos downward, Jesus would walk on water. Or ascend into the clouds after His Resurrection.” [5]
You don’t need to be a mathematical physicist (though it certainly would help,) to recognize that this is, most likely, scientific psycho-babble. But it exemplifies the pull of scientism, the modern mythical notion that, in principle at least, science can explain everything, even the supernatural.
The God Hypothesis
People marvel at the astonishing successes of science, which includes apps that not only pull music out of the air but identify the piece and musician(s) performing it—a technological feat that 25 years ago would have been deemed Star Trek stuff. Yet what the app, or what science in general, will never do is explain the inspiration behind the music, and why some people (and not others) are moved by it. Using the assumptions and techniques of science to explain, or even just to describe, realities such as “faith, hope, love” (1 Cor. 13:13), is to make a category mistake, like seeking to understand the artistry of the Mona Lisa by delving into the atomic structure of Leonardo’s paint.
Sure, Laplace didn’t need the God hypothesis in order to describe “the system of the universe.” But in answering the most important questions about that universe, like its purpose, who created it, and why—science comes up short, often ridiculously so. Such as the late atheist Stephen Hawking’s scientific declaration—“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself out of nothing”[6]—which explains the natural (the universe), as absurdly as Frank Tipler’s electroweak quantum tunnelling explains the supernatural (Jesus walking on water).
Contrary to scientism, there are some things that science is better off leaving alone.
[1] Žižek, Slavoj, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury Publishing), Kindle Edition, pp. 103-104.
[2] Stenmark, Mikael. “Scientism and Its Rivals.” In Scientism: Prospects and Problems, edited by Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels, and Rene van Woudenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 201–220.
[3] Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Kindle Edition, p. 14.
[4] Tipler, Frank J. The Physics of Immortality (Anchor Book; New York; 1995), p. 1.
[5] Tipler Frank J. The Physics of Christianity (Random House Publishing Group), Kindle Edition, pp. 199, 200.
[6] Hawking, Stephen; Mlodinow, Leonard, The Grand Design (Random House Publishing Group), Kindle Edition, p. 179.