The Reverend Canon Dr. Stephen Ames is Lecturer in the Philosophy School at the University of Melbourne, and is a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. Bishop Gerald Beaumont asked Fr Stephen to address some aspect of the Science & Religion debate and, as one who has, in addition to his Theological Degree, Doctorates in both Physics and the Philosophy of Science, he is well placed to offer us some creative options for reflection. After the 10am Eucharist Dr Ames was available for some questions and discussion in the Garden Room and in the Rutherford Room over breakfast, after the 8am Service. The Parish welcomed the opportunity to engage with him in an area of hot current debate.
Bishop Gerald, thank you for inviting me to speak to you today on this large theme of science and religion, with a special focus on Richard Dawkins.
I trust this will be of service to you all, or at least of interest.
I should say that I am not here at this Eucharist to give a lecture but to preach the gospel. The Creed proclaims that all things, visible and invisible are created by God the Father through his only begotten Son and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life. The Eucharistic prayer gives thanks to the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Spirit for the creation, redemption and promised consummation of God’s purpose for the world. We are sent into the world with the whole church to bring the good news of Christ to all.
All this and more Dawkins denies in his latest book, The God Delusion, which sold four million copies faster than Dan Brown sold four million copies of the Da Vinci Cod.
Dawkins denies the gospel understanding of creation and does so in the name of natural science, - physics, chemistry and especially biology – which he thinks leads directly to naturalism and atheism. Naturalism is the view that only what the natural sciences says exists, in fact exists, and that natural science is the only reliable way of finding out about the world.
The apparent strength of Dawkins view largely comes from his claim that all he says against religion and for atheism is based on the results and methods of the natural sciences. Until recently he was the professor of biology at Oxford and is now the professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford.
How does this impact on our receiving and holding to the gospel? Given that our whole culture is profoundly shaped by the natural sciences and the vast array of technologies they spawn, Dawkins’ views are not something we can just shrug off, unless of course the faith we hold is really only a private affair, not a public affair. If it is a private affair then no worries, we can ignore views we don’t like and keep our opinions to ourselves. But this would radically impair our reception of the gospel and the great commission to go into all the world, and it would make a mockery of our being sent out into the world, at the end of the Eucharist, to live and work to the praise and glory and God. The Christian gospel and the faith it evokes is a public affair, not least because its central event was in a public place and advertised in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
Furthermore Christian faith was a significant factor in the rise of modern science in the 16th / 17th centuries in Europe. It would be amazing were we to shrug off claims made in the name of these sciences, even or especially claims that deny our faith.
If we engage with Dawkins what are the essentials? One is to deny that the natural sciences lead to atheism and naturalism. There are various ways to do this but let us take up Dawkins view that evolutionary science shows that God almost certainly does not exist. This is what Dawkins calls the central argument of the whole book, in chapter 4.
What does Dawkins mean by ‘God’? He says he does not mean the monster you find in the Bible. Rather, he proposes a God hypothesis, that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it including us.” This is the God he does not believe in. His alternative view is that “any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.”
His point is that if God is the designer of the world, then God must be very complex, and so even more improbable than the complex things God is supposed to explain. If God is complex there must have been a Darwinian like process that produced God. So what was the process that produced God? What designed the designer? And that is what Dawkins thinks is an “unrebuttable refutation” of God.
What is wrong here? There are two problems. One is that Dawkins forgets that his God hypothesis is an alternative to his view about the origins of complexity. Nevertheless he wants to make God fit into his view. Not surprisingly it doesn’t work and this is obvious from the start. If on his hypothesis God is the creator and designer of all that is then obviously there is nothing prior to God that could have produced God. As we might say, God is the creator of all things visible and invisible.
The second thing is Dawkins view of the origins of complexity is based on Darwinism. Darwinism shows that improbable complex life forms on planet earth, with all the appearances of being designed, have evolved from slow incremental processes of natural selection. Dawkins pictures these processes slowly climbing up the easy incremental slope of Mt. Improbable over a vast time scale. I accept that as the view of our best sciences to date. What Darwinism hasn’t shown, and cannot show is that any creative intelligence must be complex like intelligent life we known, and must come about via a long slow process of climbing up Mt. Improbable. This extension of Darwinism to ‘any creative intelligence’ is not a scientific view. Science, including biological science studies what is at hand and does not pretend to speak about any and every kind of intelligence. We know that this Darwinian idea cannot be applied to Dawkins’ God hypothesis. If there is such a God as Dawkins considers, then logically that God is a creative intelligence that cannot be the product of a slow Darwinian process. That God is a different kind of creative intelligence than the complex intelligent beings like us that evolution has produced. Dawkins cannot claim the natural sciences as the basis for saying ‘any creative intelligence’ must have arisen from a long Darwinian process. No science provides the theory or evidence for that. It is his philosophical opinion, which goes by the name of naturalism. If I were giving lectures I would present a number of arguments against it.
What should Dawkins have done if he wanted to examine the viability of his God hypothesis, especially in the light of what the natural sciences show us about the world? Firstly he should have explored what is implied about God by the idea of God he is considering. I have mentioned one, the otherness of God from the world God creates. Another is the freedom and rationality of God. Secondly he should have asked what kind of world we should expect to see if it is created and designed by such a God. Thirdly he should have asked whether there is any scientific and other evidence that our world is created and designed by such a God or evidence that counts against it.
What I am suggesting is hardly radical. It is what happens with any scientific or philosophical proposal. My view is that Dawkins should have followed this procedure and if Dawkins should follow this procedure so should we whose understanding of God goes well beyond what Dawkins considers.
The good news is that Christians have done just that in the public arena and in the discussion after the service I could give some examples. But here I want to tell you a story of my own public efforts to do so for the idea of God as all powerful, all knowing, all good, who creates the world for a purpose. This is different from Dawkins’ view of God, which does not include the idea that God is good. It may not be an adequate Christian idea of God but I use it because my colleague Neil Thomason introduces it in the first lecture in God and The Natural Sciences, a subject we teach for 2nd/3rd year students at Melbourne University. Neil introduces this idea of God when he explains to well over a hundred students why he is an atheist, why he does not believe in that God.
I respond fully in a later lecture when I consider what kind of world should we expect to find were it created by such a God? Would it be a world in which something like evolution would take place? Neil believes it would not, because evolution is such a wasteful and violent process. Neil is sitting in the front row for this later lecture. We are very interactive in our lectures and his comments on my lecture to that point is that OK an all powerful and all knowing God might create a world like ours with evolution but would an all loving God do so? In this sermon I can’t go into the answer I give in the lecture, but this in itself is no small step. I then say we seems to need a character reference for God. As a Christian I draw on a parable of Jesus to bear witness to God. Neil goes along with this because at this point we are just seeing if the idea has legs. Does it help address his criticism that a good God would not create a world that produces life through evolution?
I retell the parable of the Prodigal son who takes half the inheritance and leaves for a distant land, to find who knows what. Some might say that the father in the parable was reckless in giving his son half the heritage and letting him go. But would anyone say that the father did not love his son? At that point my friend Neil said for all to hear, ‘Yes, the father was cruel and reckless, not loving.’ The lecture theatre goes silent. An important moment.
The parable purports to tell us about the character of God and invites us to learn something about God and God’s love. If God was reckless enough to create a world with its own God given powers that leads to life through evolution, would you say that God did not love the world? If God created humankind with their own powers to use for good or ill, is that God loving or cruel? The answer of the parable, indeed the whole Bible is clear. Not cruel but loving. So there in a public lecture what came to light was the question about the nature of love, and the gospel testimony to the character of God’s love, and its relevance to what kind of world an all powerful, all knowing, all loving God would create. The difference between Neil and myself with regard to the nature of love was respectfully allowed to stand. But everyone could savor the fact that something new had come to light in our discussion.
Well there is more to say, but it will have to wait for the discussion after the service. I see the time, that like the author of the letter to the Hebrews time does not permit me to tell of the other public conversations the church needs to pursue, in which a mutually constructive relationship between Christian faith and natural sciences would help advance our mission to the glory of the living God, who is, who was, and who is to come. Amen.