Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The Internal Coherence of the Universe

It is a fundamental opinion of scientists (not science itself) that every question in the universe can be answered.  Many scientists take this one step further and assume that all such questions will be answered.  Whether or not this is true is not truly the point, though I think on some level it may be true, at least within certain bounds.  But many scientists assume that if they can in fact explain everything, this will prove that there is no god.  To work under such a belief, you have to start from the perspective that, "there is no god."  It is important to note here that by god I mean any god, Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Pagan, Muslim, Deist, etc.
There is a broad but simple problem with this assertion.  If science has explained everything, what does that say about "god"?  It says nothing.  All it actually says is that the universe is internally coherent and the different pieces all work together.  There is an assumption made by some atheist scientists that if there is no need for god to fill in the gaps, then god must not exist.
This itself works off of an assumption about who god is.  It is to assume that god, whatever god is, is not competent enough to make an internally coherent universe, that there must be some point at which god says, "Magic! It works now, I couldn't figure out any other way to make this happen."  This is of course ridiculous, because if there is a god who is powerful enough to create everything that is, then it is a small leap to assume that god is intelligent enough to make it all work according to the laws of nature that god created.
On either side of the debate is the same faulty assumption--that we can conceive what the universe would look like if we were wrong about whether or not their is a god.  Theists have no idea what the universe would look like if there is no god, and Atheists would have no idea what the picture would be if there was a god.  Atheists say, in effect, "If there was a god that created the universe, this is what it would look like."  Theists, in their turn say, "If there was no god, then none of this could have happened."  Theists are on firmer ground on this point, since we do exist, and the universe could not be much different and still produce "us".  Along this line of Occam's razor, the situation leans hard to the Theist side.
An atheist would argue that if god existed, why would god not leave evidence that proved god's existence?  Why would there be such logical answers that do not involve god?  This is a valid question, but, for the Judeo-Christian worldview, this question has been answered thousands of years ago by seemingly ignorant nomads.  It has long been the bedrock of this worldview that God desires human beings to make a choice either for or against God--to love or not to love God.  To create a universe that had no alternative but to believe in God would be to withhold the true possibility of a choice.  It would be easy to argue that nomads had no concept of the knowledge we now possess, but to make such a statement assumes to much.  If God is god, then God would be intelligent enough to know that we would one day discover gravity, DNA, dark matter etc.
This is why fundamental internal coherence of the universe is critical to God's designs.  So for a scientist or other person to observe this coherence and to claim that this proves the non-existence of god is nonsense.
But there is an implied warning to theists in this as well.  It applies particularly to Christians and even more so to the "conservative" types.  The God-of-the-gaps principle that says that certain things will never be explained hangs its hat on a very loose peg.  It assumes that a supposedly omniscient and omnipotent God is incapable of creating a universe that is complete in all its details.  If something that contradicts your assumption is proven true, you have nothing left to base your faith on.  But, if we assume more rightly that we will keep making deeper and deeper discoveries into nature, we will find that this does not disprove the existence of God, but rather magnifies our understanding of God.
In the end, all an atheist can really say about God from science is, "The god in whom I believe could not possibly have created the universe in this way, therefore god must not exist."

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