1.

Prime Mover Argument. This is the great Catholic theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas’s first way to prove the existence of God as outlined in his great work, Summa Theologica. Everything in the universe is in motion. Nothing can be in motion unless it is moved by another. That something else must also be moved by yet another, and so on. But this cannot regress into infinity, “therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”

Counterargument. The universe is everything that is, ever was, or ever shall be. Thus, God must be within the universe or is the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be moved, and thus the regress to a prime mover just begs the question of what moved God. If God does not need to be moved, then clearly not everything in the universe needs to be moved. Maybe the initial creation of the universe was its own prime mover.

2.

First Cause Argument. This is Aquinas’s second way. All effects in the universe have causes. The universe itself must have a cause. But this cause-and-effect sequence cannot be regressed forever, so there had to be a first cause, a causal agent who needed no other cause. “Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.”

Counterargument. This is essentially the prime mover argument rephrased. And, as in the problem with the prime mover argument, God must be within the universe or is the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be caused, and thus the regress to a first cause just begs the question of what caused God. If God does not need a cause, then clearly not everything in the universe needs a cause. Maybe the universe itself does not need a cause. Perhaps, as cosmologist Alan Guth suggests in his 1997 book The Inflationary Universe, it just sprang into existence out of a quantum vacuum, uncaused.

3.

Possibility and Necessity Argument. Aquinas’s third way argues that in nature it is possible for things to be or not to be. But not everything could be in the realm of the possible, for then there could be nothing. If there were at one time nothing, then the universe could not have come into existence. “Therefore we must admit the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.”

Counterargument. Why is it not equally plausible that God, like the universe, is possible but not necessary? As Stephen Hawking likes to ask in his books and lectures: “Why does the universe bother to exist at all? Why should there be something rather than nothing?” No one knows. It is entirely possible that the universe, including God, did not need to come into existence. The problem here is that the human mind is incapable of conceiving of nothing (in the universal sense), and therefore this argument falls into what Martin Gardner calls a mysterian mystery—it is not just unknown, it is unknowable with the minds we possess. Evolution provided us with a big enough brain to ask such profound questions, but not big enough to answer them. This is an argument neither for nor against God.

4.

The Perfection/Ontological Argument. Aquinas argued in his fourth way that there are gradations from less to more good, true, and noble. “There is then, something which is truest, something best, something noblest. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection. And this we call God.” This is known as the ontological argument and was first presented by St. Anselm, the eleventh-century archbishop of Canterbury, who in his Proslogion defined God as “something than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Even a “fool” can understand this, says Anselm (referencing Psalm 14:1, “the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”):

 

For if it is actually in the understanding alone, it can be thought of as existing also in reality, and this is greater. Therefore, if that than which a greater cannot be thought is in the understanding alone, this same thing than which a greater cannot be thought is that than which a greater can be thought. But obviously this is impossible. Without doubt, therefore, there exists, both in the understanding and in reality, something than which a greater cannot be thought.

 

Reversing the argument, Anselm says it is equally impossible to think of God as nonexistent:

 

For something can be thought of as existing, which cannot be thought of as not existing, and this is greater than that which can be thought of as not existing. Thus, if that than which a greater cannot be thought can be thought of as not existing, this very thing than which a greater cannot be thought is not that than which a greater cannot be thought. But this is contradictory. So, then, there truly is a being than that which a greater cannot be thought—so truly that it cannot even be thought of as not existing.

 

Counterargument. Anselm’s somewhat confusing logical twists and turns are examples of the word play often found in these arguments. What does it mean to be perfect? Obviously no human can know, yet we are the creators of the concept itself. We can envision some maximal level of perfection and then argue that God must be above this, but what does that mean? No human can possibly know. And why couldn’t an argument antithetical to Anselm’s be made?: There is then, something which is falsest, something worst, something ignoblest. Therefore there must also be something that is to all beings the cause of falsity, badness, and ignobility. And this we call God.

Further, continuing the Flatland analogy from Chapter 1, why couldn’t God, who is said to be omniscient, conceive of something even greater than perfection? The square thought the sphere the highest state of being, until he became a cube and realized there could be still higher states. The upper boundary of perfection is simply defined as such by our admittedly limited human mind. Does it not seem reasonable to argue that whatever state of “perfection” we might imagine, there could conceivably be a higher state? As with the concept of infinity, whatever number the mind can create as the seemingly largest, you can always add one to it. Why stop at God?

As for it being impossible to think of God as nonexistent, it seems equally impossible to think of nonexistence at all. Is it really possible to conceive of absolutely nothing—no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no life, no molecules, no atoms, no space, no time, no energy—no anything? The concept is epistemologically void. It neither proves nor disproves anything.

5.

The Design/Teleological Argument. Aquinas’s fifth way deals with “the governance of things.” Since “natural bodies act for an end,” and yet lack knowledge, they must have been designed. “Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are ordered to their end; and this being we call God.” Modern design arguments are more sophisticated and involve the intricacies of design in nature, such as symbiotic relationships between organisms like insects and flowers, or the apparent “anthropic” design of the cosmos—that is, it is precisely suited for the evolution of life.

Counterargument. Design arguments from nature are untenable by the simple fact that nature is not as beautifully designed nor as “perfect” as believers would have us think. The python’s hind legs—unarticulated bones buried in flesh and totally useless—are indications of quirky and contingent evolution, not divine creation. Similarly, the whale’s flipper—complete with useless humanlike upper arm, forearm, hand and finger bones—is obviously the evolutionary by-product of mammalian evolution, not the handiwork of a divine Geppetto. The anthropic cosmological principle will be dealt with below in the section on scientific arguments for God, but suffice it to say that any universe with the configuration that gives rise to pattern-seeking animals will appear designed, and those universes with laws that do not lead to life will not appear designed.

6.

The Miracles Argument. The miracles of the Bible, as well as those of modern times, cannot be accounted for by science or natural law, therefore they must have as their cause a higher power. This higher power is God. C. S. Lewis defined a miracle as “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” In fact, Lewis admits, “unless there exists, in addition to Nature, something else which we may call the supernatural, there can be no miracles.”

Counterargument. A miracle—as so well displayed in Sidney Harris’s cartoon in which a scientist inserts the phrase “and then a miracle occurs” in the middle of a long string of equations—is really just a name for something we cannot explain. This is the “God of the gaps” argument, but as soon as we are able to fill the gap with an explanation, it is no longer a miracle. If Jesus’ walking on water is shown to be nothing more than a desert mirage, or the exaggerated tale of enthusiastic proselytizers, it is no longer a miracle. Additionally, how could you ever “prove” a miracle? It seems rather unlikely that one could prove that Jesus suspended the laws of nature that determine the surface tension of water (or of gravity, or whatever). The point of miracles is to inspire the faithful with religious reverence. One does not prove a miracle; one believes a miracle on faith, which is exactly how religion should be believed.

7.

Pascal’s Wager Argument. At the age of thirty-one the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had what he termed a “mystical experience” that changed his life. Not content to rest his belief entirely in the mystical (and knowing this would never convince fellow skeptics such as René Descartes), he formulated what has become known as Pascal’s wager. If we wager that God does not exist and he does, then we have everything to lose and nothing to win. If we wager that God does exist and he does, then we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Pascal was not naive enough to believe that people would then just place the bet, or that God would just accept the gamblers into His heavenly casino. He realized that belief comes through action so he argued that you also needed to go through the motions by attending Mass and taking the sacraments, and in time you would come to really believe. In the jargon of social psychology, you would shift from “conformity” to “internalization,” incorporating God into your core of deeply held beliefs.

Counterargument. First, this is not actually a proof of God since Pascal himself admitted that one still needs faith. Second, believing in God and going through the motions of attending church, praying, taking the sacraments, and so forth, is not a case of “nothing to lose.” There is plenty to lose, including the time and effort it takes to do all this when one could be doing something else. Finally, what if there were some other higher intelligence, even more powerful than God, and His sacraments included some of the more earthly pleasures? Not only would you be missing out on these, you might be eternally punished for placing the wrong wager or choosing the wrong God. This may sound unlikely, but from a purely objective point of view it is no more illogical than the existence of a Judaeo-Christian God.

8.

The Mystical Experience Argument. This is the ultimate close encounter with God himself, directly and experientially: “I know God exists because I have experienced him.” Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, reported just such an experience when he got on his knees and said, “If there is a God, let him show himself now.” Wilson describes what happened next:

 

Suddenly the room lit up, with a bright white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy for which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in the mind’s eye that I was on a mountain, that a wind, not of air, but of the spirit was blowing and then it burst upon me that I was in another world of consciousness. All about me and through me was a wonderful presence and I thought to myself, “so this is the God of the preachers.”

 

Such mystical experiences and conversions are not uncommon in history. Constantine’s “vision” at the Milvian Bridge, preceding his victory over Maxentius in A.D. 312, cemented the Christian religion into his worldview and into our world. Augustine heard voices telling him, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it!” upon which “I got to my feet … to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon.” The passage told him to sell his belongings and give the money to the poor. This he did, and as he notes in his Confessions, “as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” John Calvin reported in his Commentary on the Psalms that he had “a sudden conversion.” Martin Luther was reportedly struck to the ground by a lightning bolt and cried in terror: “St. Anne, help me! I will become a monk.”

 

Counterargument. As we saw in the previous chapter, these experiences are most probably the result of temporal lobe seizures or some other aberration in brain physiology. But it is the weakest of the so-called proofs of God, since not only is it not really a proof, it relies on personal experience, which by definition cannot be shared with others. I made the argument myself when I was a born-again Christian, and tried it out on my philosophy professor, Richard Hardison, who responded with a statement to our philosophy class that provides a potent refutation:

 

The goals of a society that you have valued, and the achievements of the people that you have respected, have depended on objectivity. Even the occasional mystic who impressed you, stepped out of his mysticism when he made the analysis that you read. His very communication, by the nature of communication, was objective. Mystical “truths” by their very nature, must be solely personal. They can have no possible external validation. Nor can they produce any possible communication with those who do not share the particular mysticism. There is a fundamental flaw in all mysticisms: the mystic often seeks external support of his position and in the process, denies his mysticism.

9.

Fideism, or the Credo Quia Consolans Argument. Of all the philosophical arguments for God, perhaps this stands up the best since it does not attempt to be a proof at all. Instead it is quite honest in its admission of the personal nature of belief. It says simply: “I believe because it is consoling.” In his book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, Martin Gardner defines and defends fideism at length. It is a pragmatic argument, taken from the philosophers William James, Charles Peirce, and Miguel Unamuno. At its core it says that (1) in issues of extreme importance to human existence, (2) when the evidence is inconclusive one way or the other, and (3) you must make a choice, it is acceptable to take a leap of faith. Martin Gardner, the skeptic of all skeptics, is a fideist. He even admits that atheists have slightly better arguments than theists. But for personal, emotional reasons he was willing to make the leap.

Counterargument. One flaw in this argument is that it is based on the philosophy of pragmatism, which states that knowledge is valid if it “works” for you. But this does not necessarily apply to all ideas, including God. Some things we really can know, based on external validation. Another flaw is that fideism reduces belief to personality type. As recent research into personality development shows, one’s acceptance or rejection of ideas is as much a function of one’s family dynamics and personality characteristics as it is of empirical evidence. If beliefs are going to be based on emotion rather than argument or evidence, it would seem to eliminate the need for reason and science altogether. Why draw the line at some belief just because it feels good? Why not just say that God is an unknowable concept, an unsolvable mystery, and go about your life without the need for proofs?

10.

The Moral Argument. Humans are moral beings and animals are not. Where did we get this moral drive? Through the ultimate moral being—God. Without God, without the highest of higher moral authorities, anything goes and there would be no reason to be moral.

Counterargument. The argument that we cannot be good without God is easily refuted through a simple and straightforward question: What would you do if there were no God? The question can be followed by an additional question that draws the denouement: Would you commit deception, robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the argument is over. If the answer is that people would quickly turn to deception, robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of their character, indicating they are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, they turn away from their belief in God (and most people do at some point in their lives), the plug is pulled on their constraints and their true immoral nature is revealed; we would be well advised to steer a wide course around them. If the answer is that people would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God.

1.

Stephen Hawking’s God. When cosmologists deal with the beginning of the universe they are only a small step removed from Aquinas’s prime mover and first cause arguments. After all, to ask such questions as: “What was there before the Big Bang?” or “Why should there be something rather than nothing?” is not so distant from “What was God doing before He created the universe?” or “What is God’s purpose for the universe?” Stephen Hawking, in his quest to understand the origin and fate of the universe, admits his work often falls in that shadowland between science and religion, physics and metaphysics, as he told an ABC 20/20 reporter:

 

It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the Universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the Universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws. But in that case one would just have to go by personal belief.

 

In his book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking closes with this now oft-quoted line: “If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” This was an unfortunate choice of words because in his position as one of the world’s leading cosmologists Hawking is eminently quotable, and people have read this to mean the Judaeo-Christian God. According to his biographers Michael White and John Gribbin, although Hawking is not an atheist, he clearly does not believe in a personal God. Shortly after A Brief History of Time was released, in December 1988, the actress Shirley MacLaine asked Hawking at a luncheon if he believes that a God created the universe. In his characteristic economy of words, Hawking’s machine voice answered “No.” Similarly, in a BBC television production called Master of the Universe, Hawking waxed theological about his cosmology: “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.” Indeed, in his chapter, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe,” in A Briet History of Time, where he presents his no-boundary model of the cosmos, Hawking concluded that the universe may have no beginning or end, and thus no need for God:

 

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws, However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started—it would still be up to God to wind up the clackwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place. then, for a creator?

 

It is a difficult concept for the human mind to grasp, but Michael White and John Gribbin, in their biography of Hawking, make this analogy: Imagine walking all the way to the North Pole of the Earth. For the entire trip there you are heading north, but the moment you pass the pole you are now heading south. Similarly, imagine the universe as an expanding sphere beginning with the Big Bang, and that you are in a time machine traveling backward toward that initial point. For the entire trip you are heading back in time, but the moment you pass the starting point you are now heading forward in time. There is no beginning and no end—no boundaries. The universe always was, always is, and always shall be.

Whatever Hawking may mean when he speaks of God, he certainly does not mean the personal Judaeo-Christian God who created the universe and cares about us.

2.

Paul Davies’s God. Mathematical physicist Paul Davies is a believer in God and winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress in religion.” In his book, The Mind of God, Davies reviews all the philosophical and scientific arguments for God’s existence, concluding that “belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of the term ‘God’ for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.” If one of the great believing scientists of our age says that God’s existence cannot be proved, it would seem that some weight should be given to the position that belief in God is a matter of personality and emotional preference, also known as faith.

3.

Frank Tipler’s God. Cosmologist Frank Tipler’s answer to the God Question, while a theistic one, begins with a premise unlike that of most theists. In his books The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and especially The Physics of Immortality, subtitled Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, Tipler presents and defends his Omega Point Theory: The laws of nature and the configuration of the cosmos from atoms to galaxies is such that if you tweaked any of the parameters even slightly (and this often means a change many places after the decimal point in a number describing some aspect of nature), our universe, and we, could not exist in anything remotely similar to what we experience. Since “the Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history,” it does, and here we are. In other words, the universe had to be just so in order for us to be here, and the chances of it being just so are so small that it would have to have been made by some supreme being. More than this, says Tipler, “intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out,” so we must and we will take control of our universe and all other possible universes. In the process of doing this we “will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know.” This, says Tipler, “is the end.” It is the Omega Point—the all-knowing and all-powerful being (God as computer?)—that not only has the power but also the desire to resurrect everyone who ever lived or could have lived.

I have spoken to a number of cosmologists and physicists about Tipler’s theory, and the conclusions are generally the same. Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, for example, found nothing wrong with Tipler’s physics but concluded that his if-then leaps of logic between the steps of what must occur in order to reach the Omega Point were far too speculative to be meaningful; too much “hand-waving” between steps. John Casti, from the Santa Fe Institute, agreed with Tipler’s speculations on how intelligent life could colonize the galaxy and, like Thorne, had no beef with Tipler’s physics, but he concluded that each step in Tipler’s chronology leading up to the universal resurrection could be broken down into further steps to the point where the probability of all these contingencies coming together was so unlikely that he does not know what value such a theory could have.

One of Tipler’s most enthusiastic supporters, on the other hand, is the highly regarded German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, from the Institute for Fundamental Theology at the University of Munich. In a lecture given at the Innsbruck Conference in June 1997, Pannenberg concluded: “Tipler is justified in claiming that his statements on the properties of the Omega Point correspond to Biblical assertions on God. The God of the Bible is not only related to the future by his promises, but he is himself the saving future that constitutes the core of the promises: ‘I shall be who I shall be.’” Yet even Pannenberg must go beyond Tipler’s physics to admit that God is not just in the future: “In hidden ways he is already now the Lord of the universe which is his creation, but it is only in the future of the completion of this universe, in the arrival of his kingdom that he will be fully revealed in his kingship over the universe and thus in his divinity.”

I even had the opportunity to ask Stephen Hawking’s opinion of Tipler’s theory during his 1998 visit to Caltech. Hawking’s lecture dealt with something he calls the “pea instanton,” a particle of space/time resembling a wrinkly pea, out of which the universe sprang into existence. As this universal “pea” expanded, the wrinkles were pushed out, leaving the relatively smooth universe we observe today. In Hawking’s opinion, the question of the closed or open nature of the universe (Tipler’s theory demands a closed universe) depends on the model applied to the question, which means that the universe can be both closed and open, not unlike how light can be both particle and wave. Without ever mentioning God, Hawking skirted that metaphysical line in discussing the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle, so I inquired:

 

You’ve been talking about the Omega Point and the Anthropic Principle. What is your opinion of your cosmologist colleague Frank Tipler’s book, The Physics of Immortality, and his theory that the Omega Point will reach back from the far future of the universe into the past to reconstruct every human who ever lived or who ever could have lived in the ultimate Holodeck?

 

Hawking composed his answer for about a minute, then his now-familiar computer voice responded: “My opinion would be libelous.” Tipler responded to this charge as follows:

 

All I do in my work is accept the logical consequences of the known laws of physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I’m not proposing any new laws of physics, just asking people to accept the logical consequences of the laws they claim to accept. Libeling the Omega Point Theory is equivalent to libeling the known laws of physics. Almost all contemporary theology still presupposes the truth of Aristotelean physics. This being the case, scientists naturally suppose theology is nonsense, or in a separate realm from science. With the almost unique exception of Pannenberg, theologians encourage them in this latter opinion. Only if theology is kept separate can it retain its Aristotelean physical basis.

The reality that the ancients were trying to capture in the word “soul” is expressed by defining the soul to be a computer program being run on the human brain. With this redefinition, we can keep the religious concept, and make it consistent with the facts. But most importantly, the redefinition makes the scientist realize that immortality is perfectly possible: there’s no physical reason why a program cannot exist forever. Some of the programs now coded in our DNA have been around billions of years. Keeping the old definition makes Hawking want to libel a person whose book’s central postulate is that the biosphere can go on forever. Is postulating the immortality of the biosphere an evil postulate? Shouldn’t we at least try to make it so? Should a person who tries to figure out how to use the known physical laws to make the biosphere immortal be ostracized from scientific society?

Similarly for the word “God.” If He is identified with the Omega Point, then the key religious meanings of “God” are retained, with science and religion integrated. As he wrote at length, the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg agrees that the Omega Point is in all essentials the God of the Bible. It’s easier for a German theologian to come to this conclusion than an English speaker. God’s Name, given in Exodus 3:14, was translated by Martin Luther as “ICH WERDE SEIN, DER ICH SEIN WERDE”—“I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Failing to make this change of definition, which is to say, failing to give up Aristotelean physics, makes it difficult to accept the consequences of modern physics. These require the universe to terminate in its ultimate future in an Omega Point, a state of infinite knowledge, and infinite power.

 

Certainly it is time to reject Aristotelian physics and with it the ancient and medieval concepts of God and soul. And with Tipler’s narrow definition of life as information processing machines (with DNA coding for our anatomy and physiology and neurons coding for our thoughts and memories), it is conceivable the short-lived and fragile carbon-based, protein-chain life forms could be reconstituted into something more durable and long-lasting, such as silicon chips. A human life, by this analysis, is a “pattern” of information, and silicon can store the pattern much longer than protein, and there may be other future technologies we cannot yet conceive that could hold the integrity of the pattern still longer, perhaps approaching infinity, and thus immortality. As for God’s future tense, The Interpreter’s Bible notes that the common translation of Exodus 3:14 is “I AM WHO I AM,” with a secondary alternative of “I AM WHAT I AM,” and a tertiary translation of “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, told me: “Tipler and Luther are simply wrong. God is not a future-tense verb in biblical Hebrew.” Case closed. As for the Omega Point, Tipler says it is transcendent to time, but his God is the future c-boundary of the universe that acts back in time, not the personal anthropomorphic God who cares about us that most people think of when they think about God.

Why must the God conclusion be drawn from science? Why not speculate on the possibility of space travel, human occupation of the galaxy and eventually other galaxies, machine intelligence, and even the far future of the universe, without trying to tie it into some ancient mythic Hebrew doctrine created by and for people living on the margins of the Mediterranean nearly 4,000 years ago? What are the chances that this agrarian society, constructing myths and stories whole cloth out of traditions that preceded them sometimes by as much as a thousand years (and rewritten and reinterpreted to fit their social and cultural needs, as all myths are), just happened to anticipate one interpretation of late twentieth-century cosmology? Much more likely is that Tipler is pushing a particular rendition of modern cosmology and physics—one that is by no means shared by his colleagues—into and beyond the borderline between science and religion. It may be that someday science will reduce all religious and metaphysical questions to the equations of physics, but we are so far from that stage that wisdom would seem to dictate that we leave the God conclusion out of science altogether.

4.

God and the Cosmologists. After reading Tipler’s book I thought perhaps I was missing something and that I better read what other cosmologists, astronomers, and physicists were thinking about the relationship of science and religion. According to David Deutsch, whom Tipler quotes in support, there is no God in his cosmos. Deutsch believes Tipler may be right about the Omega Point’s future existence, and that it is conceivable we could all be resurrected in the far future of the universe, but, he concludes: “Unfortunately Tipler himself … makes exaggerated claims for his theory which have caused most scientists and philosophers to reject it out of hand.” Deutsch points out that Tipler’s Omega Point not only differs from everyone else’s version of God, there are additional problems:

 

For instance, the people near the omega point could not, even if they wanted to, speak to us or communicate their wishes to us, or work miracles (today). They did not create the universe, and they did not invent the laws of physics—nor could they violate those laws if they wanted to. They may listen to prayers from the present day (perhaps by detecting very faint signals), but they cannot answer them. They are (and this we can infer from Popperian epistemology) opposed to religious faith, and have no wish to be worshiped. And so on. But Tipler ploughs on, and argues that most of the core features of the God of the Judaeo-Christian religions are also properties of the omega point.

 

Where Tipler and Davies see God in the cosmos, Deutsch and others do not. For example, in Alan Guth’s well-received book, The Inflationary Universe, there is no mention of God or religion whatsoever. In his final chapter, “A Universe ex Nihilo,” Guth concludes:

 

While the attempts to describe the materialization of the universe from nothing remain highly speculative, they represent an exciting enlargement of the boundaries of science. If someday this program can be completed, it would mean that the existence and history of the universe could be explained by the underlying laws of nature. That is, the laws of physics would imply the existence of the universe. We would have accomplished the spectacular goal of understanding why there is something rather than nothing–because, if this approach is right, perpetual “nothing” is impossible.

 

For Lee Smolin, in his 1997 The Life of the Cosmos, “the present crisis of modern cosmology is also an opportunity for science to finally transcend the religious and metaphysical faiths of its founders.” Smolin’s multiverse model includes an evolutionary mechanism where, like its biological counterpart, natural selection chooses from a variety of “species” of universes, each containing varying forms of laws of nature. Some of those universes with laws of nature like ours will be “selected” for intelligent life, which at some point in its evolution develops big enough brains to consider such questions of origins. Beyond that, Smolin admits, questions about ultimate existence and purpose “are in the class of really hard questions, such as the problem of consciousness or the problem of why there is in the world anything at all, rather than nothing. I do not see, really, how science, however much it progresses, could lead us to an understanding of these questions.”

Maybe our universe simply popped into existence out of the quantum fluctuation of the vacuum of some larger multiverse. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happened for no reason at all.

1.

It is not true that the human eye is irreducibly complex, so that the removal of any part results in blindness. Any form of light detection is better than none—lots of people are visually impaired with any number of different diseases and injuries to the eyes, yet they are able to utilize their restricted visual capacity to some degree and would certainly prefer this to blindness. The creationists’ “irreducible complexity” argument is an either-or fallacy. No one asks for partial vision, but if that is what you get, then like all life forms throughout natural history, you learn to cope in order to survive.

2.

There is a deeper answer to the example of the evolution of the eye, and that is that natural selection did not create the human eye out of a warehouse of used parts lying around with nothing to do, any more than Boeing created the 747 without the ten million halting jerks and starts from the Wright Brothers to the present. Natural selection simply does not work that way. The human eye is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years to a simple eyespot where a handful of light-sensitive cells provides information to the organism about an important source of the light—the sun; to a recessed eyespot where a small surface indentation filled with light-sensitive cells provides additional data in the form of direction; to a deep recession eyespot where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; to a pinhole camera eye that is actually able to focus an image on the back of a deeply recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; to a pinhole lens eye that is actually able to focus the image; to a complex eye found in modern mammals such as humans. And this is just part of the story—how many other stages of eye development were lost to the ravages of time because there was an organ that did not fossilize well?

We can also use the human eye as an example of bad design. The configuration of the retina is in three layers, with the light-sensitive rods and cones at the bottom, facing away from the light, and underneath a layer of bipolar, horizontal, and amacrine cells, themselves underneath a layer of ganglion cells that help carry the transduced light signal from the eye to the brain in the form of neural impulses. And this entire structure sits beneath a layer of blood vessels. For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye backwards and upside down? This does not make sense. But it would make sense if natural selection built eyes from whatever materials were available, and in the particular configuration of the ancestral organism’s preexisting organic structures.

The evolution of the eye from a simple eyespot to the complex eye, which has occurred independently at least a dozen times in natural history, shows that the eye is neither irreducibly complex nor intelligently designed. It was constructed by natural selection in fits and starts over hundreds of millions of years from available parts and systems already in use.

The anatomy of the human eye shows that it is anything but “intelligently designed.” It is built upside down and backwards, with photons of light having to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizonal cells, and bipolar cells, before reaching the light-sensitive rods and cones that will transform the signal into neural impulses. From the rods and cones, the impulses are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful images.

 

 

3.

The “intelligent design” argument, similar to Aquinas’s fifth way to prove God, also suffers from the fact that the world is not always so intelligently designed! Look at the animal on the following page. It is Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between the quadrupedal land mammal Mesonychids and the direct ancestor of modern whales, the Archaeocetes. Ambulocetus natans, say the paleontologists who discovered it, swam “by undulating the vertebral column and paddling with the hindlimbs, combining aspects of modern seals and otters, rather than by vertical movements of the tail fluke, as is the case in modern whales.” First of all, why would God, in His infinite wisdom and power, create a mammal that appears midway between a land mammal and a modern marine mammal, that combines the movements of both land and marine mammals, and, most uniquely, paddles with hind limbs obviously well designed for land locomotion? For that matter, why would He create air-breathing, warm-blooded, breast-feeding marine mammals only moderately well “designed” for living in the oceans, when he could have just stuck with the much more efficient fish design? Finally, on a larger scale, why would God design the fossil record to look like descent with modification was the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, rather than sprinkling geological strata willy-nilly with, say, trilobites in Cretaceous strata, and a T-Rex or two alongside some Neanderthal fossils? The fossil record screams out evolution, not creation.

4.

When Michael Behe defines irreducible complexity, he concludes: “An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.” Philosopher Robert Pennock has pointed out that this last phrase employs a classic fallacy of bait-and-switch logic—reasoning from something that is true “by definition” to something that is proved through empirical evidence. Creationists counter the above arguments about the eye by redefining what constitutes an eye, reducing its complexity until they get one that does not work. This is not allowed in the rules of right reasoning.

The frequent rallying cry of creationists and other antievolutionists demands proof of the existence of “just one transitional fossil.” The discovery of Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between the landbased Mesoynchids and the marine mammal Archaeocetes, the direct ancestor of modern whales, answers that demand. This fossil record has all the earmarks of an evolutionary process of Darwinian “descent with modification” rather than a creationist “abrupt appearance.”

 

The new creationists have also mounted an attack on the very foundations of science—its philosophical naturalism (sometimes called methodological naturalism, materialism, or scientism). This is the belief that life is the result of a natural and purposeless process in a system of material causes and effects that does not allow, or need, the introduction of supernatural forces. The argument against naturalism is trumpeted by University of California–Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, a self-proclaimed “philosophical theist and a Christian” who believes in “a Creator who plays an active role in worldly affairs.” In his book Darwin on Trial, Johnson claims that scientists unfairly define God out of the picture by saying, essentially, “we are only going to examine natural causes and shall ignore any supernatural ones.”

This is a fallacy of fuzzy definitions. What does Johnson mean by supernatural? Cosmologists who find God in the anthropic principle are both theists and naturalists. Supernatural simply means a lack of knowledge about the natural. We might as well call it ignatural. To medieval Europeans the weather was caused by supernatural forces; they abandoned that belief when natural forces were understood. This is, once again, the “God of the Gaps” argument, which is what philosophers call “arguments from ignorance.” The rules of logical reasoning do not allow the following: “You cannot explain X, therefore Y must be the cause,” or, to cut to the chase, “Science cannot explain all life, therefore God must be the cause.” Of course, just as naturalism allows us to tell creationists that they cannot “prove” God through science, we cannot “disprove” God through science. After all, as the anthropologist Eugenie Scott cleverly notes, an “omnipotent God by definition can do anything it wants, including interfering in the universe to make it look exactly like there is no interference!”

Even if we did allow creationists to make the gaps argument, it is easily countered. Although in their public debates and published works creationists replace “God” with such obfuscating phrases as “abrupt appearance” and “intelligent design,” their true colors fly when you attend their church services and monitor their Internet chat rooms. There is no question in anyone’s mind that when creationists argue for an intelligent designer they mean God, and it is almost always the Judaeo-Christian God and all that goes with it. But why must an intelligent designer be God? Since creationists like William Dembski argue that what they are doing is no different from what the astronomers do who look for intelligent design in the background noise of the cosmos in their search for extraterrestrial intelligent radio signals, then why not postulate that the design in irreducibly complex structures such as DNA is the result of an extraterrestrial experiment? Such theories have been proffered, in fact, by some daring astronomers and science fiction authors who speculated (wrongly, it appears) that the Earth was seeded with amino acids, protein chains, or microbes billions of years ago, possibly even by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Suffice it to say that no creationist worth his sacred salt is going to break bread or sip wine in the name of some experimental exobiologist from Vega. And that is the point. What we are really talking about here is not a scientific problem in the study of the origins of life, it is a religious problem in dealing with the findings of science.

Finally, at the core of the new creationists’ argument is the arrogant and indolent belief that if they cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, it must mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. (This argument is not unlike those who, because they cannot think of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, assume these structures must have been built by Atlantians or aliens.) It is a remarkable confession of their own inabilities and lack of creativity. Who knows what breakthrough scientific discoveries await us next month or next year? The reason, in fact, that Behe has had to focus on the microscopic world’s gaps is that the macroscopic gaps have mostly been filled. They are chasing science, not leading it. Also, sometimes we must simply live with uncertainties. A scientific theory need not account for every anomaly in order to be viable (this is called the residue problem—we will always have a “residue” of anomalies). It is certainly acceptable to challenge existing theories, and call for an explanation of those anomalies. Indeed, this is routinely done in science. (The “gaps” that creationists focus on have all been identified by scientists first.) But it is not acceptable in science to offer as an alternative a nontestable, mystical, supernatural force to account for those anomalies.

1.

The Margins Problem. Look closely at the block of Hebrew type that Drosnin claims has special significance—a field of Hebrew letters purporting to show the name Kennedy (in the circles), positioned near the word Dallas (in diamonds), adjacent to to die (in squares). The obvious problem is that the margin widths determine the type flow. Reduce or expand the margins and those alignments would disappear. The row widths, Drosnin explains, were determined by the skip-code n. An n of 10 means each row would be 10 letters long. An n of 4,772 would be 4,772 letters long. But why should this be? What is so special about a margin-skip-code correlation? Nothing. Since it is humans doing the margin and skip-code selecting, not God, this reveals the source of the pattern.

2.

The Vowels Problem. Since ancient Hebrew is written without vowels, they are added after the skip-code program is run. If it were English, for example, RBN could be Rabin, or Ruben, or Rubin, or Robin. Bible scholar Ronald Hendel, for example, explained: “The same word may be spelled with a vowel letter in one sentence and without that vowel letter in the next sentence. As a result of these differences, every known ancient Hebrew manuscript of the Bible—including every ancient manuscript of the traditional Masoretic text—has a different number of letters.” This is fatal for a skip-code computer program. Additionally, even though Hebrew is read from right to left, the Bible decoders also look left to right, up to down, down to up, and diagonally in any direction. If you have a name or word in mind ahead of time, just search to find it. Or you can look at the letter sequences and then find a meaningful name or word. Seek and ye shall find.

3.

The Falsifiability Problem. One of the tenets of science is falsifiability. In order to determine if something is true or not, there must be a way to test it, or falsify it. Drosnin provided one such test when he told Newsweek (June 9, 1997): “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick I will believe them.” Australian math professor Brendan McKay did just that, finding in Moby Dick no less than thirteen assassinations of public figures, several of them leaders of countries and even prime ministers. The results of the experiment that falsifies The Bible Code are revealed in the Moby Dick code:

 

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984, a bloody deed to be sure.

Brendan McKay did not stop with Moby Dick. He also found “Hear the law of the sea” in the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea, and fifty-nine words related to Hanukkah in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, including “miracle of lights” and “Maccabees.” The odds against all fifty-nine, he calculated, are more than a quadrillion to 1. Are we to believe that Tolstoy’s hand was directed by God?

Similarly, in their book The Signature of God, which predates The Bible Code by two years, authors Grant Jeffrey and Yacov Rambsel report that they found the phrase “Yeshua is my Name” (“Jesus is my Name”) with an ELS n = 20 in Isaiah 53, which some interpret as the prophecy of Jesus’ coming. But others found that the phrase “Muhammad is my name” occurs twenty-one times, and “Koresh is my name” appears no less than forty-three times! Should we have listened to David Koresh’s ramblings more closely?

 

4.

The Biblical Origins Problem. Drosnin claims that “all Bibles in the original Hebrew language that now exist are the same letter for letter.” All serious scholars of the Bible know this is utter nonsense. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his classic work, Who Wrote The Bible?, traces the multiple sources and authors that went into the construction of the Torah. In his latest research, carefully documented in The Hidden Book in the Bible, Friedman examines the oldest Hebrew documents to reveal that within the cacophony of biblical voices lies a single prose masterpiece that, in the editing process, had been fractured into what we know as the Old Testament. Our Bible is anything but a letter-by-letter transcription from ancient Hebrew. Ronald Hendel adds: “We do not have the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament, and all ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible that we do have differ in the number of letters.” Most biblical scholars now believe that the Torah was written by more than one individual, thus accounting for the different styles, the two different creation stories in Genesis, and other inconsistencies, and that there was a “redactor,” or editor, who coalesced the multiple writings into one tome. Biblical archaeologist Gerald Larue also notes that even allegedly original biblical documents are anything but—quotes may be from memory or a compilation of several sources, errors are faithfully reproduced from one manuscript to another, and Hebrew letters look enough alike that names and words can be easily confused with others that are similar. Concern for accuracy and preserving the original text of the Bible came nearly 1,500 years after the originals were dictated (itself an oral tradition known for generating inaccuracies). All of these problems undermine the belief that the Torah was written by Moses, as inspired by God. Without this foundation, the Bible as an encrypted code of prophecies falls apart, and with it the claim that it provides evidentiary proof of God’s existence.

5.

The Translation Problem. In reading Drosnin’s book in English, it is reasonable to wonder what we are losing in the translation from Hebrew. Ronald Hendel points out that the phrase “assassin that will assassinate” near Rabin’s name is more properly translated as “murderer who murders inadvertently.” Can you have an inadvertent assassination? Hendel identifies other translation howlers by Drosnin: “After the death of Abraham” (Genesis 25:11) is rendered as “after the death (of) Prime Minister”; “[Jacob] set it up as a standing stone” (Genesis 31:45) is rendered as “shooting from the military post”; and “Which she [Rebekah] has made” (Genesis 27:17) is rendered as “fire, earthquake.”

6.

The Prediction–Free Will Problem. In The Bible Code Drosnin tells the dramatic story that he tried to warn Rabin a year before his assassination. In his claim that the Bible Code predicts such future events, Drosnin has unknowingly wedged himself into an insoluble paradox. Consider the implications: Say Rabin took the warning seriously and changed his schedule and was not assassinated. Would this mean that humans are more powerful than God, or that some statistician can rerun the universe to produce a different outcome? Does this mean that biblical prophecies are self-fulfilling prophecies, or that they are not prophecies at all, but warnings? Drosnin tries to solve this problem through an awkward blend of pop-science, pseudoscience, and hand-waving that is typical of most of the modern arguments for God. In his last chapter—“The Final Days”—Drosnin says the Bible Code predicts that the end of the world will occur in 2000, or 2006, or it will be delayed until a later date, or it might not happen at all. Some prediction! He gets around this problem by applying chaos theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Feynman’s quantum physics: “There isn’t just one real future, there are many possible futures.” In fact, he concludes, “the Bible Code revealed each of them.” None of this works. Remarkably, after 178 pages of breathtaking revelations about biblical prophecies, Drosnin confesses that the Bible does not actually predict anything: “It is not a promise of divine salvation. It is not a threat of inevitable doom. It is just information.” Even Rips has cut the tether in a public statement: “I do not support Mr. Drosnin’s work on the codes, or the conclusions he derives. I did witness in 1994 Mr. Drosnin ‘predict’ the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. For me, it was a catalyst to ask whether we can, from a scientific point of view, attempt to use the codes to predict future events. After much thought, my categorical answer is no.” Does the Bible code prove God’s existence? The categorical answer is no.

Faith of our fathers! living still
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword!
O, how our hearts beat high with joy,
Whene’er we hear that glorious word:
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.