Read Online God and Stephen Hawking by John Lennox - Free Book Online
Authors: John Lennox
Ads: Link
that capacity. We live in an information age, and we are well aware that language-type information is intimately connected with intelligence. For instance, we have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then, is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion “letters” – the longest “word” yet discovered?
However, we are now moving away from physics in the direction of biology – a subject in which similar issues arise. I have devoted a great deal of attention to it in my book God’s Undertaker , so I shall not re-tell that story here.
Rational support for the existence of God from outside science
Rational support for the existence of God is not only to be found in the realm of science, for science is not co-extensive with rationality, as many people imagine. For instance, we find ourselves to be moral beings, capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong. There is no scientific route to such ethics, as has been admitted by all but the most die-hard converts to scientism. Physics cannot inspire our concern for others, nor was science responsible for the spirit of altruism that has existed in human societies since the dawn of time. But that does not mean that ethics is non-rational.
Furthermore, just as the fine-tuning of the constants of nature and the rational intelligibility of nature point to a transcendent intelligence that is independent of this world, so the existence of a common pool of moral values points to the existence of a transcendent moral being.
History is also a very important rational discipline. Indeed, it is easy to overlook the fact that the methods of the historian have a very important role to play within science itself. We have been discussing the way in which the universe is describable in terms of physical law, and most of us are aware that physical laws are often established by an inductive process. That is, observations can be repeatedly made, experiments repeatedly done, and, if they give the same results each time under the same conditions, we feel comfortable in asserting that we have a genuine law, by what we call “inductive inference”. For instance, we can repeatedly observe the motion of the planets in their orbits round the sun, and thus confirm Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
In areas of science such as cosmology, however, there are things which we cannot repeat. The most obvious example is the history of the universe from its beginning. We cannot re-run the Big Bang and say that it has been established by repeated experimentation.
What we can and do employ are the methods of the historian. We use a procedure called “inference to the best explanation” (or “abductive inference”). 75 We are all familiar with this procedure, since it is the key to every good detective novel. A is murdered. B is found to have a motive – she stood to profit if A died. So B did it? Maybe. But then C is found to have had a violent row with A on the night he was murdered. So C did it? Maybe. But then… and Hercule Poirot keeps us guessing until the final denouement. Let us call the circumstance where there are several possible hypotheses consistent with an observed outcome the Poirot Principle.
The point about a Poirot story is that you cannot re-run the murder to see who did it. We cannot, therefore, expect the same level of certainty here which we get with repeated experimentation. It is that very feature, of course, that makes Poirot stories so enjoyable.
Exactly the same thing happens in cosmology. We set up a hypothesis. Suppose there was a Big Bang, and let’s call this hypothesis A. We then say: if A happened, what would we expect to find today? Someone says: we would expect to find B. So, scientists look and find B. What does this prove? Well, it is
However, we are now moving away from physics in the direction of biology – a subject in which similar issues arise. I have devoted a great deal of attention to it in my book God’s Undertaker , so I shall not re-tell that story here.
Rational support for the existence of God from outside science
Rational support for the existence of God is not only to be found in the realm of science, for science is not co-extensive with rationality, as many people imagine. For instance, we find ourselves to be moral beings, capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong. There is no scientific route to such ethics, as has been admitted by all but the most die-hard converts to scientism. Physics cannot inspire our concern for others, nor was science responsible for the spirit of altruism that has existed in human societies since the dawn of time. But that does not mean that ethics is non-rational.
Furthermore, just as the fine-tuning of the constants of nature and the rational intelligibility of nature point to a transcendent intelligence that is independent of this world, so the existence of a common pool of moral values points to the existence of a transcendent moral being.
History is also a very important rational discipline. Indeed, it is easy to overlook the fact that the methods of the historian have a very important role to play within science itself. We have been discussing the way in which the universe is describable in terms of physical law, and most of us are aware that physical laws are often established by an inductive process. That is, observations can be repeatedly made, experiments repeatedly done, and, if they give the same results each time under the same conditions, we feel comfortable in asserting that we have a genuine law, by what we call “inductive inference”. For instance, we can repeatedly observe the motion of the planets in their orbits round the sun, and thus confirm Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
In areas of science such as cosmology, however, there are things which we cannot repeat. The most obvious example is the history of the universe from its beginning. We cannot re-run the Big Bang and say that it has been established by repeated experimentation.
What we can and do employ are the methods of the historian. We use a procedure called “inference to the best explanation” (or “abductive inference”). 75 We are all familiar with this procedure, since it is the key to every good detective novel. A is murdered. B is found to have a motive – she stood to profit if A died. So B did it? Maybe. But then C is found to have had a violent row with A on the night he was murdered. So C did it? Maybe. But then… and Hercule Poirot keeps us guessing until the final denouement. Let us call the circumstance where there are several possible hypotheses consistent with an observed outcome the Poirot Principle.
The point about a Poirot story is that you cannot re-run the murder to see who did it. We cannot, therefore, expect the same level of certainty here which we get with repeated experimentation. It is that very feature, of course, that makes Poirot stories so enjoyable.
Exactly the same thing happens in cosmology. We set up a hypothesis. Suppose there was a Big Bang, and let’s call this hypothesis A. We then say: if A happened, what would we expect to find today? Someone says: we would expect to find B. So, scientists look and find B. What does this prove? Well, it is
Similar Books
