Much of the argument made by the so-called new atheists is actually against the church and religion; they ironically offer little material proof of the non-existence of God. (Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great would more accurately have been titled Religion is Not Great.) I am sympathetic: The history of religion and the church is rife with one screw-up after another, and includes some very despicable characters. But no matter how much the Dawkins-Hitchens crew shares my antipathy for “religion,” this gives them no more evidence that there is no god than I have that there is.[1] Richard Dawkins is straightforward enough to title one of the chapters in his God Delusion, “Why There Almost Certainly is No God” (emphasis mine). I don’t think Dawkins et al. realize the degree to which people of faith harbor doubts of our own. (“Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief.”) This is why I prefer the word “faith;” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated, “Jesus didn’t come to make us religious.” You want a slam on religion? Read the Bible! But don’t let the misbehavior and hypocrisy of the folks you find there distract you from the question of whether there is a god.[2]
I agree with Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary
biologist and science writer (and agnostic) who, in his book Rocks of Ages proposes that faith and
science are not opponents but partners in the search for truth. Some on both sides, however, insist on
turning the conversation into an argument, and the red herring at the center of
the debate is evolution. For the person
of science to say, “Evolution proves there is no god,” or the religious
creationist to warn, “We must not subscribe to evolution, because if it were
true it would prove there is no god,” are equally ignorant statements.
Evolution is simply a theory of organic development (and a fine one) and does
not touch on the primal questions of the existence of god, or creation out of
nothing.
Gould the scientist taught that, by definition, science is
unable to have the final word about ultimate matters of meaning, purpose, and
“what was there before…?” According to Gould, “Why is there something and not
nothing?” and “What was there before there was something?” are not scientific
questions. Science can only work with “something.”
But in a recent book, A
Universe From Nothing, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss claims to prove that
quantum mechanics can, in fact, cross the bridge between nothing and something,
and answer the age-old question purely scientifically. In reading his thesis, however,
it turns out that what Krauss means by “nothing” is more like “nothing much.”
In a clever and elegant New
York Times Book Review article, the philosopher David Albert muses:
Well, let’s see. There are lots
of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like
that: …Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves
supposed to have come from? The laws of relativistic quantum field theories
(on which Krauss bases his case for an “eternally persisting, elementary
physical stuff of the world”)… have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of
where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the
particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of
fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place.
I have often wondered why most cosmologists are
apparently so incurious about the meaning of “nothing” and the question of
“what was there before…?” It is often, to use an over-used phrase, the elephant
in the room. I’m impressed that David Albert has tackled the elephant.
Krauss, by the way, protests that his
philosophical and religious critics have co-opted the meaning of nothing. He
takes issue with the fact that they apparently intend it to mean “nothing.”
In an essay entitled The Origin of the Universe, the theoretical physicist (and
self-described atheist) Victor Weisskopf provides an intricate description of
the instant of the primal explosion – the “Big Bang” – using mathematics and
the quantum mechanics vocabulary of energy fluctuations, false vacuums, and
inflation. Then he concludes,
We now come to the more
philosophical question: What existed before the primal bang? …The origin of the
universe can be talked about not only in scientific terms, but also in poetic
and spiritual language, an approach that is complementary to the scientific
one…. A remarkable musical description of the primal bang is found at the
beginning of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The
Creation. A choir of angels sings darkly and softly, “And God said, ‘Let
there be Light’.” The entire choir and the orchestra burst into a fortissimo
C-major chord with “And there was
Light.” There cannot be a more beautiful and impressive artistic rendition of
the beginning of everything.
I agree with Weisskoppf that this is poetry –
poetry that is not an opponent but a partner with science in the search for
truth. Why is there something rather than nothing? And what was there before
there was something? The questions remain.
[2]
The use of “God” in this conversation is not a reference to the Judeo-Christian
divinity, but to an uncreated, infinite, non-material force or being that
brought everything that is – material, energy, time – into existence. I am, of
course, interested in Christianity but this is not an essay on my personal
faith, and it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
