Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (27 page)

It's important to understand that the multiverse theory, the best current solution to the “fine-tuning” problem, is not, as some theists claim, a Hail Mary pass thrown by physicists desperate to avoid invoking God. Rather, it's a natural outcome of well-established theories. Now, it's not clear whether we can actually
show
that there are multiple universes, for they might be undetectable from our own. Still, physicists are beginning to devise ways to test their existence, and we've recently seen evidence for at least one of their preconditions: cosmic inflation. And even if multiverse theory is hard to test, the alternative “God theory” is
impossible
to test, for it makes no predictions.

Yet there are observations that to some physicists militate against God as the cosmic fine-tuner. One, as I mentioned above, is the needless largesse of the universe: the sheer number of places where life—at least “life as we know it”—doesn't or can't exist.
Assuming that life can inhabit
only planets and not stars, conservative estimates suggest about one hundred to two hundred billion planets in our own Milky Way galaxy, and about
10
24
planets
—a trillion trillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them—in our
observable universe.
Most of these are uninhabitable. If humans are the goal of God's creation, why the excess?

Further, there's an unnecessary excess not just of worlds, but also of particles. As far as we can see, among the twelve known types of elementary particles that make up matter (six quarks and six leptons), only four of them—the up and down quarks and the electron and its neutrino—are necessary for the existence of physical objects, including planets and humans. The remaining eight “matter particles” decayed away immediately after the Big Bang. They, as well as the mysterious “dark matter,” don't have an obvious theistic explanation.

The excessive numbers of planets and particles are verified predictions of purely naturalistic theories of physics, but aren't obvious consequences of a God hypothesis. If “fine-tuning” is evidence for God, and natural theology a form of science, then it behooves theologians to explain why there are particles not needed for life. And while they're at it, can they tell us which physical constants are essential for life, and how narrowly they're tuned? Their inability to do so shows that the strong anthropic principle is simply a theological add-on, for invoking God adds nothing to our understanding.

Several other observations go against the theistic explanation for fine-tuning. The first is that human tenure on Earth will end when the Sun, expanding in its death throes, will vaporize the Earth in less than five billion years—assuming that we don't destroy our planet before that via nuclear war or global warming. Perhaps humanity can be saved by a mass migration to other planets, but that doesn't solve the problem, for the universe itself will also end, perhaps in the same time frame, through the “heat death” that will happen when increasing entropy forces our entire universe to a temperature of absolute zero. Theists, however, may not be bothered by this, because some predict the imminent arrival of the End Times.

There's further evidence against the God hypothesis: our universe is almost completely inhospitable to any kind of life we know. Place a human at random somewhere in the universe, or even on a planet, and the chance that she'll die within seconds is overwhelming. Extreme temperatures, radiation, and lack of oxygen are hardly signs of a universe fine-tuned for our existence. In fact, the vast bulk of the Earth is similarly unsuitable: the oceans (70 percent of the surface of our planet), deserts, ice caps, and so on.
Is that a world designed for humans? Rather than assuming that the world was created for humans, the more reasonable hypothesis is that humans evolved to adapt to the world they confronted. Add to that the number of predators, diseases, and parasites that faced our ancestors, and still afflict us today, and you can reasonably conclude that God hasn't given us an especially comfortable home. Indeed, it seems that evolution has enabled us to barely hang on in a world determined to kill us.

Theistic explanations must also take on board the severely delayed appearance of humans, for the universe required ten billion years of physical evolution before life could even begin on our planet. If God is omnipotent, and wanted humans, why didn't he just create the universe, humans, and the species we need instantly, à la Genesis? This is not a fanciful question, but one that religionists must deal with. After all, if you claim to understand God's personality and intentions, can you plead ignorance on crucial matters like this? Herman Philipse argues that the lack of a good answer undermines all of natural theology:

What reasons can God have had
for preferring the long evolutionary route of the history of the cosmos and of life, if he wanted to create the human species? Theists should not answer this question by the traditional bromide that God's intentions are inscrutable for us. Such a move would annihilate the predictive power of theism, and thereby destroy the prospects of natural theology. Instead, they should come up with convincing reasons for God to take the evolutionary detour, assuming that he probably wanted to create humans in the first place.

Of course, theists can respond, and have responded, that evolution is simply more creative, more “self-realizing,” than creation from nothing
.
But that doesn't explain why it took evolution so long to get off the mark.
Similarly, responding to the physicist Sean Carroll's observations that the universe has features
not
optimized for human life, the theologian William Lane Craig simply claimed that God might have some previously unsuspected artistic talents:

But why should we think of God
on the analogy of an engineer? Suppose God is more like the cosmic artist who wants to splash his canvas with
extravagance of design, who enjoys creating this fabulous cosmos, designed in fantastic detail for observers. In fact, how do we know that there isn't extraterrestrial life somewhere in the cosmos that needs these finely-tuned parameters in order to exist? Or perhaps God has over designed the universe to leave a revelation of himself in nature, just as it says in the book of Romans, so that someday physicists probing the universe would find the fingerprints of an intelligent designer, who is incredibly intelligent, incredibly precise, in making this universe.

Such elaborate storytelling is the last resort of the theologian, and it's quickly discredited by the lack of evidence—the “fingerprints of God.” But such special pleading renders the entire program of natural theology unfalsifiable and therefore unworthy of serious consideration. Nor does it give any credence to the Abrahamic God beloved of Craig. Even if one was convinced that the universe was fine-tuned by a deity, why couldn't it have been Allah, Brahma, or Quetzalcoatl? As Christopher Hitchens used to say of such a problem, all the work is still ahead of them.

We still don't understand why the laws of physics are as they are, but scientists will never be satisfied with the answer “Because God wanted them that way.” They may never find an answer, but the difference between the natural scientist and the natural theologian is that scientists aren't satisfied that they've gotten the truth when they simply make up a hypothesis that can't be tested. And until they find a testable answer, scientists simply say, “We don't know.”

The Argument for God from Morality

In his 1871 book
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,
where Darwin first applied his theory of evolution by natural selection to humans, he did not neglect morality. In chapter 3, he floats what can be considered the first suggestion that our morality may be an elaboration by our large brains of social instincts evolved in our ancestors:

The following proposition
seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social
instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

A century later, the biologist Edward O. Wilson angered many by asserting the complete hegemony of biology over ethics:

Scientists and humanists
should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.

Wilson's statement, in the pathbreaking book
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,
really began the modern incursion of evolution into human behavior that has become the discipline of evolutionary psychology. In the last four decades psychologists, philosophers, and biologists have begun to dissect the cultural and evolutionary roots of morality.

This effort is just at the beginning, for it involves laborious studies of animal behavior, neuroscience, and psychological tests of both primates and humans, but it's already starting to pay off. And the naturalistic study of morality has, more than any other scientific endeavor, deeply disturbed theists. Many of them can accept the Big Bang, and even evolution, but if there's any part of human behavior that religion has arrogated to itself, it's morality. And so in the face of scientific progress, religion continues to maintain that both the source and the nature of human moral judgments must involve God. One of the gaps that they see unfillable by science, but explainable by God, is the “moral instinct.”

When you see someone drowning, and you're able to swim, your impulse is to jump in the water to save them. When you hear about someone like Bernie Madoff cheating others out of their life savings, you get angry and feel that he should be punished. If your child and his playmates were attacked by a dog, you'd rush to save your own child first.

There are many instant and instinctive behaviors and feelings like this, all reflecting what you think is the right or wrong thing to do. These are the so-called moral intuitions, defined by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt as “
the sudden appearance in consciousness
of a moral judgment, including an
affective valence (good-bad, like-dislike), without any conscious awareness of having gone through the steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion.”

To many religious people, neither secular reason nor science seems able to explain these instinctive judgments. The geneticist Francis Collins has publicly proclaimed the impossibility of a secular solution, and thus sees innate morality as evidence for God:

But humans are unique
in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history. . . . DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the Moral Law and the universal search for God.

Besides the instinctive nature of morality, some of its manifestations, especially altruism and self-sacrifice, are seen as evidence for God because they too supposedly defy explanation by natural selection, or any secular hypothesis based on culture. As Collins notes, “
Selfless altruism
 . . . is quite frankly a scandal to reductionist reasoning. It cannot be accounted for by the drive of individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves.”

The author Damon Linker draws the same conclusion from the case of Thomas Vander Woude, an American whose twenty-year-old son fell into a sewage-filled septic tank. Vander Woude dived in, rescuing his son but drowning in the process. And how can self-interest explain soldiers who save their comrades by falling on grenades or firefighters who risk their lives daily? Linker argues, “
There are specific human experiences
that atheism in any form simply cannot explain or account for. One of those experiences is radical sacrifice—and the feelings it elicits in us.”
Linker sees human altruism as a gift from not just God but the
Christian
God, who performed his own act of self-sacrifice by sending Jesus to an earthly death.

Of course, atheism, which is merely the lack of belief in gods, isn't responsible for explaining altruism and ethics, a task that properly belongs to philosophy, science, and psychology. And those areas have offered plenty of
nonreligious explanations for the “Moral Law” and altruism. The explanations involve evolution, reason, and education.

But before we get to those explanations, we must question the premises. Do humans really have innate moral sentiments, and are they relatively uniform across people and cultures? If they are, does the uniformity reflect genetics, learning, or a combination of these, or are all such explanations insufficient, pointing to God? (I take “innate” to mean “part of a person's nature” rather than “hardwired genetically.”) And how can we explain not only the moral acts, but also why we
approve
of them? If we can answer these questions plausibly without invoking divine intervention, then the default “god of the gaps” explanation is neither necessary nor parsimonious.

Certainly the idea of morality itself, as well as our tendency to classify some behaviors as moral or immoral, seems nearly universal.
In his book
The Blank Slate
,
Steven Pinker compiled a list, based on the work of the anthropologist Donald Brown, of “human universals”: behaviors, beliefs, rules, and other aspects of social living seen in every culture surveyed. These include “distinguishing right from wrong,” “moral sentiments,” and the notion of “taboos.” Now, this shows only that having moral
sentiments
seems universal, rather than the
particular
sentiments that Collins and Linker see as innate. But Brown and Pinker's list includes some of those as well: empathy; distinctions between in-groups and out-groups; the favoring of kin; the proscribing of murder, rape, and other forms of violence; the favoring of reciprocity; and the idea of fairness.