17 January 2022
Pulse

In June 2018, Forbes published an interesting article entitled, ‘Did History’s Most Famous Scientists Believe in God?’ The article answers this question in the affirmative and provides a formidable list of scientists who held some kind of theistic belief, including Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

While it is heartening that the presence of these believing scientists have shown that naturalists such as physicist Lawrence Krauss are patently mistaken to think that science and religion are incompatible and that no real scientist could ever harbour a ‘superstitious’ belief in God, it is also important that we examine the kind of God that these so-called theistic scientists believe in.

Many of the scientists who claim to entertain the God hypothesis have their own peculiar concepts of God which are often inimical or even antithetical to the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus, while we have reasons to be thankful that these scientists have not completely rejected belief in God like their atheist colleagues, we must also be somewhat wary of the abstract theism they embrace.

In many cases, the God of the physicists is one who has very little or limited involvement in the running of this complex universe that he brought into being. The late Stephen Hawking is perhaps the most eminent representative of this deistic conception of God among his contemporaries.

In his classic A Brief History of Time, Hawking articulates his deism with admirable clarity. Speaking about the laws of physics that have been put in place and are now in full operation, Hawking writes: ‘These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not intervene in it.’

Thus, while allowing the possibility of a Creator, the great physicist wants to limit his involvement once he has brought the world with all its laws into being. For Hawking, it is these laws – not an interventionist deity – that will cause the universe to continue to tick, and that will ensure that it evolves and pursue a certain directionality.

Steven Weinberg is absolutely right to say that Hawking’s God, ‘abstract and unengaged’ as he is, cannot be ‘distinguished from the laws of nature.’ Weinberg insists that if we wish to bring God into the picture when talking about the universe, we should speak about him properly. God, he insists,

… should be taken to mean an interested God … who has established not only the laws of nature and the universe but also standards of good and evil, some personality that is concerned with our actions [and] … is appropriate for us to worship.

Another idea that seems popular among some ‘theistic’ physicists is that of a God who steps in to plug the gaps in our scientific knowledge of the universe. This is the hypothesis of God that is associated with the great Isaac Newton.

Newton believed that science is unable to fully explain the mysteries of the universe, and that we should insert the idea of the divine Creator-Sustainer into the gaps when confronted with the limits of science. When scientific explanation falls short or has proved to be elusive, we resort to the God hypothesis.

This God-of-the-gaps could not be further removed from the God of the Christian faith, who not only created the universe but who is also intimately involved in its continued existence.

Incidentally, the Christian faith also has little truck with the so-called interventionist God. The God of the Bible does not just intervene every now and then to fix things when they go wrong. He is always fully involved, ever sustaining the world through his providential grace.

In their book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1988) John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler proposed yet another idea of the divine, namely, a God who is so intimately related to the universe that it is hardly possible to distinguish him from the created order.

Working on a philosophically naïve understanding of existence, Barrow and Tipler explain their pantheism thus:

If the Universe is by definition the totality of everything that exists, it is a logical impossibility for the entity ‘God’, whatever He is, to be outside the Universe if in fact He exists. By definition, nothing which exists can be outside the Universe. This is a view-point which more and more twentieth-century theologians are coming to hold: they are beginning to adopt a notion of deity which insofar as questions of existence are concerned, is indistinguishable from pantheism.

The God of Barrow and Tipler is not only imprisoned in the universe, he is a part of the natural process from which he is unable to extricate himself. In his 1988 essay ‘The Omega Point Theory: A Model of an Evolving God’, Tipler presents an idea of a God who is evolving together with the universe and yet at the same time the Intelligence that gives it meaning.

Tipler claims that his concept of God is panentheistic and therefore rejects the charge of pantheism, a view which erases the distinction between God and the world. In panentheism God is closely related to the world without ever being fully identified with it.

But I think Philip Clayton is right when he writes that:

It this seems more accurate to describe Tipler’s position as a kind of pantheism, a sort of scientifically updated Spinozism: ‘God’ (for Spinoza, deus siva natura) is another word for the universe taken as a whole, including its physical and mental properties, or what Spinoza called the “attributes” of thought and extension.

There are, of course, many scientists who reject a generic and abstract theism, but who believe in the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These include Michael Polanyi, Stanley Jaki and John Polkinghorne.

These scientists maintain that there is no incompatibility between the practice of science and belief in the God of the Bible – the triune God who not only has created the world, but who sent his Son into the world as a human being to die on the cross for the salvation of the fallen world.

Not only are they of the view that there can be dialogue between science and the Christian faith, some of them – like Stanley Jaki in his book, Cosmos and Creator – have argued that the future progress of humanity requires both.

Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.