📖 Apologetics — Unit 8: Science, Chance, and the Limits of Naturalism

Text: Colossians 1:17

Is Faith the Enemy of Science?

A young believer is often told, with great confidence, that he must choose: either he can be a thinking person who trusts science, or he can be a Christian, but he cannot be both. The two are said to be at war, and faith is expected to surrender. I want to take that charge head on, and I want to begin by saying something that may surprise you: I love science, and so should you. The study of the natural world is one of the noblest things a human mind can do, and the Christian has every reason to honor it. Indeed, many of the founders of modern science — Kepler, Boyle, Newton among them — were believing men who expected the universe to be orderly precisely because they believed a reasonable God had made it, and historians of science recognize that theological conviction as a real motivating force in the Scientific Revolution, even though the full story of how modern science arose is historically complex and draws on many streams, including the mathematics and astronomy of earlier Greek, Islamic, and other civilizations. The quarrel is not between faith and science. The quarrel is between faith and a philosophy that has dressed itself in a lab coat and hopes you will not notice the difference.

The How and the Why

To see the trick, you must learn to separate two different kinds of questions that are forever being run together. Science is magnificent at investigating mechanisms and causes within nature — how a star burns, why a cell divides the way it does, why an illness spreads through a population. To these the laboratory speaks with marvelous authority, and we are all in its debt; science can and does investigate many causal "why" questions of this kind. But there is a different kind of question — the question of ultimate purpose, meaning, or value — and here empirical investigation, by its very method, cannot settle the matter one way or the other. Why is there a universe rather than nothing? Why is it lawful and beautiful instead of mere chaos? Why am I here, and what am I for? Consider a kettle boiling on the stove. A scientist can tell you, with perfect accuracy, that the water boils because heat is agitating the molecules until they escape as steam. That is a true causal explanation. But it is not the whole truth, for there is also a further question of purpose: the water is boiling because I want a cup of tea. The two answers do not compete; they belong to different orders. The man who insists that the molecules are the only real explanation, and that the tea is a fairy tale, has not been more scientific. He has merely gone deaf to half of reality.

The Naked Ape

Here is where the philosophy overreaches. It tells you that you are nothing but a naked ape, nothing but a robot built by your genes, nothing but a chance arrangement of atoms briefly holding together before it scatters. Notice that little word, nothing but; it is the most dishonest phrase in the whole debate. It is quite true that a man is, among other things, a remarkable animal, and that he is made of atoms obeying the laws of chemistry. The Christian need not flinch at any of that. But the leap from "a man is an animal" to "a man is nothing but an animal" is not a finding of science; it is a philosophy smuggled in under the cover of science. Consider a great cathedral. A chemist may analyze it and report, with complete accuracy, that it is nothing but a quantity of limestone and glass. He would be right about the stones and wrong about the cathedral, for he has described everything except the thing that makes it a cathedral. So it is with the man who tells you that love is nothing but chemistry, that thought is nothing but electricity, that you are nothing but an ape. He has weighed the stones and missed the building.

Even Evolution Needs the Goldilocks

"But surely," says the objector, "evolution has explained away the need for a Creator." Let us be careful and fair. Whatever one concludes about how living things have developed and changed over the ages, set that whole question to one side, for it does not touch the deeper point at all. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that life unfolded by gradual natural processes exactly as the textbooks say. You have still explained nothing about the real mystery, for every one of those processes was running inside a universe that was already, astonishingly, fine-tuned to allow it. Before a single cell could divide or a single creature adapt, the great dials we spoke of in Unit Two had already been set with breathtaking precision: the strength of gravity, the charge of the electron, the rate of cosmic expansion, the strange properties of water and carbon. Evolution, if it occurred, did not set those dials; it played the game on a board already laid out for life. To say "evolution did it" is like saying the game of chess explains the existence of the chessboard. The deepest question is not how the pieces moved, but who built the board, and lit the room, and wrote the rules.

The Watch on the Heath

The Crack at the Bottom of It All

But the most serious problem for the philosophy of pure matter is not in the stars or the cell. It is much closer to home; it is in the very thoughts by which the unbeliever argues his case. Follow the logic to its end. If my mind is only matter, only the random clattering of atoms in my skull that natural selection arranged for survival and not for truth, then why should I trust a single conclusion it reaches, including the conclusion that my mind is only matter? A man saws off the branch he is sitting on. The one who says "all thought is merely chemistry" has just made a thought, and is asking you to believe it is true and not merely chemical. He cannot have it both ways. The very act of reasoning, the very act of weighing evidence and calling something true, assumes that the mind is more than meat, that it can reach beyond the firing of nerves to touch what is really so. Reason itself is a witness against the creed that reduces reason to chemistry.

The Things That Will Not Reduce

And reason is not alone. There are whole regions of your daily experience that the philosophy of "nothing but" can describe but never explain away. There is the abstract thought that lets you do mathematics about infinities you will never see. There is your unshakable sense that some things are truly right and others truly wrong, not merely useful or unpleasant, but wrong — the moral law we met in Unit Two, which no amount of talk about survival has ever managed to dissolve. There is the strange persistent ache for beauty and for meaning, the homesickness for a country you have never visited. A purely material world has no business producing creatures who weep at music, who feel guilt, who ask what it all means and are not satisfied with "it means nothing." These things are not proof in the way a fingerprint is proof, but they are signposts, and they all point the same direction: that you are not an accident, and that the universe is not a closed box of matter, but the workmanship of a Mind.

The One in Whom It All Holds Together

So the Christian gives the universe back its second story. Science reads the lower floor and reads it well: the how, the mechanism, the law. But the law itself points upward, for a law implies a Lawgiver, and an orderly cosmos that the human mind can actually understand implies a Mind behind it kin to our own. Paul says it in a single breath: "in Him all things consist" — He holds them together. The very regularities that the scientist studies are the faithful habits of the God who upholds all things by the word of His power. Faith is not the retreat of a frightened mind from the advance of knowledge; it is the larger room in which the knowledge finally makes sense. The naturalist must believe that everything came from nothing, that order came from chaos, that mind came from mindless matter, and that reason can be trusted though it was built by an unreasoning process. Hold those up to the light and tell me honestly which takes the greater faith. I, for one, do not have enough faith to be an unbeliever.

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