In the previous post I mentioned that science does not provide proof of the existence of God, but it does give inklings. In a book I wrote, which was published in Spanish in 2013 with the title ¿Es compatible Dios con la ciencia? Evolución y Cosmología (Is God Compatible with Science? Evolution and Cosmology) I described a list of those inklings. Here I will summarize a few of them. The first three are scientific, the others are not.
1. The universe is a physical object. During the 19th century, atheist philosophers denied that the universe is a concept applicable to a concrete object that exists outside our mind. The universe is usually defined as the set of everything that exists. According to those philosophers, such a set does not exist, since the concept of the universe is an invention of the human mind, which does not correspond to any physical object. Therefore, it would not be necessary to look for its origin (its cause) outside our mind. This argument was disproved in the 20th century: Einstein’s theory of general relativity leads to a cosmological equation that applies to the universe, which implies that the cosmos has real existence, that it is a physical object.
2. The universe had a beginning. The confirmation of the Big Bang theory during the 1960s was a hard blow for atheist scientists, who saw no way to escape creation and the existence of God. In fact, this shows that they did not know (and do not know even now) much about philosophy or about theology, because creation has nothing to do with the existence of an initial moment. This was made clear by St. Augustine, who distinguished creatio ex nihilo from creatio originans (creation from nothing from the initial moment of creation), and St. Thomas Aquinas, who pointed out that creation at an initial moment is undecidable, and therefore secondary. Creation by God affects the entire universe and is compatible both with a universe with a beginning and with a universe with an infinite duration, for time is part of creation. Just as, if I'm the author of a book, I'm the author of the entire book, not just the first page.
3.
The universe seems to have been designed so that life is possible
(fine-tuning).
I have published many posts on this issue in this blog, so I will not repeat
them here. Once again, atheist scientists felt cornered, and to recover they
turned to the non-scientific theories of multiverses, not realizing that these
theories are still compatible with God’s creation, and that fine-tuning is
simply moved to a new level, for all multiverse theories (except one)
are quantic. As life could only appear in a quantic multiverse, fine-tuning
arises again.
4.
Philosophical arguments. These are the classic arguments, such as the ontological
argument by St. Anselm of Canterbury (with a modern
mathematical version by Kurt Gödel) and the five ways of St. Thomas
Aquinas.
 |
| Alvin Plantinga |
5.
The universe contains intrinsic moral laws (axiological argument). A version of this argument, due
to Alvin Plantinga, turns on its head the argument from evil, the most frequently used by atheists to justify
their belief that God does not exist: a good God would not allow so much evil in the world. According to this version, there are abhorrent
evils in the world, because the fact itself is horrible (think about Auschwitz).
But in a materialistic and atheistic universe, the existence of abhorrent evils
would be meaningless.
6.
Argument from aesthetic experience, also called Mozart's argument: Why are we able to appreciate beauty? According
to the materialist hypothesis, evolution has led us to this result as an
inexplicable by-product, since it is not clear how this trait can be useful for
our survival. From the hypothesis of the existence of God, however, it is easy
to explain it, starting from the basis that God is Beauty.
7.
Argument from religious experience. Many human beings, from different religions,
claim to have had experiences of God, with spectacular consequences: those who
have had them usually reach absolute certainty that God exists.
It is well-known that all human knowledge comes
from three different sources:
a)
Authority:
what other people who seem trustworthy tell us. Children learn from their
parents and teachers; adults learn from other adults, from books and the media;
scientists learn from textbooks and scientific communications in journals and
conferences; all of us learn from the Internet. The credibility of all these
sources is not always trustworthy, but authority is the source of most of our
knowledge. In the case of scientific knowledge, I would venture to say that over
99 percent of what we know, we know by authority. No one has personally
performed a significant proportion of the experiments that have been conducted
throughout history. Yet all scientists assume that what they know about the
results of those experiments is correct, even though they know it by authority.
b)
Experience:
what we have experienced in person. During our life, our experiences
accumulate, although we can also lose them through oblivion.
c)
Reasoning:
the use of reason to deduce, induce or abduce new knowledge from what we
already have. This article belongs to this group.
The main question is: Are all these
accumulated inklings sufficient to build a reasonable case for the existence of
God? Atheists will
say no, believers will say yes. Let each person draw their own conclusions.
Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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