God is not “on trend” at the moment. He’s been banished from biology by Darwin, and pronounced dead by the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. If this were not enough, he’s been discredited by the disunity and abuses that have occurred within fallible church institutions tasked with representing him.
Despite this, there remains a troublesome concept, which – although largely dispensed with by modern philosophers – is still appealed to by those working in the hard sciences… and that is the notion of truth.
Scientists rely on scientific truth, and the cosmos being both ordered and rational to do their work. It’s worth remembering that the universe is under no obligation to be rationally understandable, but remarkably, it is. So, do we shrug with indifference or is this significant?
There are four forces that build the universe. Two of them are the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force. If the ratio of the relative strengths of these two forces had differed by one ten-thousand trillion-trillion-trillionth… there would be no life on planet Earth. (That staggering statistic is just one of a number that suggests that out universe has been very finely tuned so as to allow life.) Again: should we shrug with indifference, or do we ask if this is significant?
As physicists look at the cosmos, they are discovering that it is constructed in way that suggests there was an intent that it be understood. The universe is built along mathematical lines – and not just any sort of mathematics. When mathematicians see that an equation for a foundational law of physics that is ugly, they know it is wrong. The mathematics of the cosmos, it seems, is both beautiful… and of a very high order.
The English physicist Paul Dirac (the man who discovered the positron) said: “God is a mathematician of a very high order, and he used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”[i] In saying this, he was echoing a conviction of Galileo who said:
Philosophy is written in the grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.[ii]
So, again, may I ask: Do we shrug with indifference on learning this, or is this significant?
Let me now take you a little way down the crazy rabbit hole that is quantum physics – the physics of particles that are smaller than an atom. In this microscopic world, the normal laws of physics don’t apply. In quantum physics: a subatomic particle collapses from a “cloud of probability” into a solid particle only when it is observed. If this doesn’t sound absurd to you, it should! We are saying that a sub-atomic particle doesn’t actually exist as a tiny bit of matter. It exists only as a cloud of potential. And this cloud of potential only collapses into a tiny bit of matter when an intelligent mind watches it.
This characteristic seems to point to the existence of consciousness. One of the scientist making this claim is the Nobel prize-winning physicist, Eugene Wigner. He says: “Study of the external world leads to the conclusion that contents of consciousness are the ultimate reality.”[iii]John von Neumann (also a Nobel prize-winning physicist) shares this view. He says: “All real things are contents of consciousness.”[iv]
It appears that empirical truth being uncovered by quantum physics is pointing to God. Do we shrug with indifference, or do we take note?
If all these empirical truths don’t result in you taking the existence of God seriously, then I submit that you are just falling back into wilful atheism – and there is not much that anyone can do about that.
So what can we say to conclude? Perhaps this: Whilst trendy philosophers in the humanities departments of our universities have given up on the notion of truth, those engaged in the hard sciences have not… and what they are discovering suggests that science gives very real reasons to believe in God.
[i] Paul Dirac, (May 1963). “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature, Scientific American. Retrieved 4 April 2013.
[ii] Galileo GalileiIl Saggiatore, quote translated by R.H. Popkin in (The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 65.
[iii] Eugene Wigner “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” pp. 171-174 in Symmetries and Reflections, Bloomington: IN, Indiana University Press, 1967), 171.
[iv] John von Neumann, in Keith Ward, Is Religion Irrational?(Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2011), 21.
