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In today’s episode, we will see this question. Are the Bible and its miracles against science? Sam Harris wrote the book, the End of Faith. In this book, he argues that because Christian faith is against science and reason, it is destined to disappear. We cannot trust the miracles recorded in the Bible because they are a violation of physical laws. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitches also made similar arguments against the Bible and its miracles.
Now, this argument is not new. They were made by David Hume over 250 years ago. David Hume was a Scottish philosopher who lived from 1711 to 1776. His formative years were deeply influenced by Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanics of physics.
We all know the story of Newton watching an apple falling to the ground from the tree. Newton inquired, ‘Why did it fall to the ground? Why didn’t it fly away?’. He realized it was because of gravitational force. Every object in our universe is under the influence of gravity. Newton theorized that the same gravity that draws an apple towards the ground draws the moon towards the earth. That was a revolution in scientific thinking. Newton came out with his famous three laws of motion. They changed the trajectory of our civilization.
Newton praised God in his scientific publication ‘Principia’. He gave God the glory. He said that this beautiful solar system points to the creative genius of God. Newton spent a lot of time studying the Bible. He did not see any conflict between his science and his faith. Newton’s God was above his creation and its physical laws.
Newton became a favorite scientist for millions of people. However, some of them went in paths Newton would not appreciate. They said, ‘We don’t have a God. Newton is our God. Science is our God’. Newton unveiled a nature which runs on fixed, physical laws. For many people, these absolute natural laws became the gods of creation. David Hume was one of them. Hume said, ‘a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature’.
Hume said, the laws of physics establish uniformity over all nature. Miracles disturb this uniformity, so they could not have happened. For Newton, the law making the apple falling from the tree is the same that attracts the moon towards the earth. He built a clockwork-like universe based on natural laws. However, he allowed God to come into the workings of His nature on as needed basis. He believed in uniformity and induction because He believed in God. But he did not make the uniformity principle an absolute law of nature. He believed in special creation. Uniformity has justification in theism.
Hume adopted Newton’s universe with an exception: No place for God. For Hume, the physical laws are absolute and unbreakable. He started with a naturalistic premise: Nature is all there is. How can anyone break its absolutes? Hume’s uniformity belief is circular and unjustifiable. It is neither self-evident nor provable with a scientific experiment. It is a belief originated in theism. Hume borrowed it from Newton and used it as a substitute for God.
A great many pioneers of science did not buy Hume’s argument, starting from Newton himself. They believed in miracles on one hand and the orderly functions of natural laws on the other hand. Newton wrote, “God could have set up the natural world using a wide variety of different possible laws. There is no way to tell by reason alone which of the possible laws are the true ones. So you must use observation and experiment – and induction – to find out which of these possible laws nature follows.”
If you notice Newton’s words, you would see that he puts God as the supreme arbiter of the universe. God could use a ‘wide variety of different possible laws’ to carry out his purposes in this world. For Newton, God can play dice with the world. But for Hume, God cannot play dice with the world because the natural laws are absolute.
French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace also took Newton’s laws and made them absolutes over the universe. You can predict the location of every atom at every moment of its existence. Using the so-called Laplace Demon, you can fast forward or rewind the universe like a movie. They did not believe in demons, it was just a concept. This demon could predict with absolute certainty the state of the universe at any time in the past and and at any time in the future. They believed that this deterministic universe runs over absolute physical laws. Even God cannot violate these physical laws. Even God cannot disrupt this deterministic dome covering nature.
For Newton, God is above nature. He is above natural laws. God can intervene in nature as He pleases. So for Newton, miracles of God are possible. But Hume and Laplace believed in unbreakable, absolute physical laws acting uniformly over all creation.
But with the emergence of quantum physics, such a position is no longer tenable. Quantum physics brought two conceptual changes to our view of the universe. Firstly, the physical laws are not absolutes with uniformity in all circumstances. Secondly, we have no grounds to claim that this universe is a deterministic universe.
Every physical law has three central characteristics. Symmetry, information, and probability. The third characteristic is probability. Unlike in Newton’s day, today scientists do not look at physical laws as absolute laws. They are only probabilistic laws. They do not possess rigidity which even God cannot break.
The very names which come to mind when we think about quantum physics, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, create a feeling of unpredictability about nature. Where does the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle come from? A quantum particle moves through space in the form of waves. At any moment, the particle might be found at any point on the wave. We cannot locate subatomic particles at specific locations at specific moments. They are described in terms of probability distribution.
Schrodinger’s Wave Equation: It is one of the fundamental equations in all of physics. It describes events in terms of wave functions and probabilities. The square of the wave function gives the probability of finding the electron at a given point in space. The intensity of the wave gives the probability of finding a particle.
Looking back from the vantage point of quantum physics, our universe is not like what David Hume and Simone Laplace believed it to be. It is more like how Newton envisaged it. Remember what Newton told us, “God could have set up the natural world using a wide variety of different possible laws. There is no way to tell by reason alone which of the possible laws are the true ones. So you must use observation and experiment – and induction – to find out which of these possible laws nature follows.” So, Newton left a lot of space for probability and for God in nature. Using observations and experiments, we can learn a lot about the natural world but we should never turn it into a deterministic metal ball impervious to God’s mighty hand.
Modern Science Puts Design Argument on Steroids
Psalm 19:1 says
The heavens declare
the glory of God
and the firmament
shows His handiwork
Psalm 19:1
The universe declares the glory of God. In all its cosmological proportions, it displays the handiwork of God. William Paley (1743 – 1805) was an Anglican theologian and cleric. He presented an argument from design, arguing that divine existence is evident in Newton’s clock-like universe. One of his books was Natural theology. Suppose you were walking down the street and you found a watch on the road. You took it into your hands and observed it. What do you conclude? This watch a product of blind chance or is this watch a product of an intelligent creator?
David Hume, a contemporary of William Paley, mocked this way of thinking. Hume argued that that analogy at the basis of the argument from design is faulty because it reasons to a cause (A perfect supreme being) that is not exactly proportional to the observed effect (the world).
Look at the world. Echoing Milton in the Paradise Lost, Hume complained, “Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering on the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence”. This wastefulness and savagery does not imply a benevolent God. He scoffed at “some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance”. Hume attracted a lot of followers down to our time. ‘I see mutations in nature. It does not show me a good designer’, said atheist cosmologist Neil degrasse Tyson.
“Bad design implies a bad designer. It’s a bad design, so it’s a bad designer. You believe in a good designer. So, he does not exist.”
But this is a misunderstanding of what the Bible teaches. Let me illustrate with a simple example. Let us say, you were a stranger who suddenly dropped into this world and you found an abandoned car beside a highway. You wanted to examine the car. You struggled to start the car, the engine is cranking and misfiring, the radiator is overheating, the coolant is leaking, the battery is failing, the brake pedal is sinking, shock absorbers are failing, the car is bouncing up and down, the windshield wipers are not working. Your friend said, ‘This car is made by Toyota and Toyota is a bad car company’.
That is a bad argument. Because he did not consider other probabilities.
How old is this car?
What was its condition on the day it was sold to the customer?
How exactly did the customer use this car?
Was he driving it carefully or was he drunk driving?
How many cars made by Toyota are working well?
How many cars made by Toyota are not working well?
Those things must be taken into consideration before declaring Toyota a ‘poor designer’. If I give you more information, you might even change your conclusion. If I told you, ‘a gentleman was driving under intoxication and crashed it here’. Then you don’t even blame the Toyota. That is exactly what the Bible teaches us. God handed over a beautiful planet to Adam and his wife. The Bible says when God looked at the original universe, He said, it is Good (Genesis 1:10). On that day, there was not one hospital in this world. There was not one prison in our world. There was not one cemetery in our world. It was Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience that brought all ‘hospitals full of diseases, prisons crowded with malefactors, battle fields strewed with carcasses, and nations languishing under tyranny, famine and pestilence’.
God created us with love. God gave us freedom. We’ve abused our freedom and made a mess. The world is celebrating Mothers Day. Some mothers are not happy. They say, ‘We had children with great hopes but they broke our hearts. What is the point of this Mothers Day?’ Yes, they decided to have kids to see them prosper in this world but their hopes were dashed to the ground. Similarly, God gave us existence so that we prosper but with our disobedience we broke God’s heart. All disease, all violence, all rapes, all murders, all natural disasters came into this world because of man’s sin. It was not God’s will.
Why do millions of people still buy Toyotas? Because the number of safely running cars far outweighs the number of crashed cars. Why do millions of people still love God? Because the number of good things we find in nature far outweigh the number of bad things. We should not say, ‘I found a mutation here. So, God is a bad designer’. The number of orderly genes far outweigh the number of mutations. How many people are in the hospital compared to outside the hospital? How many people are in prisons compared to outside the prisons? The number of beautiful things you experience in this life far outweigh the number of ugly things. With all the sinfulness of human beings, we can still see the goodness of God in our world. Yes, many things show us bad design. But we also see things which show good design.
People say, Bible is against Darwinism, so it must be wrong. Darwinism teaches that intelligent information in entities like RNA and DNA can be created with pure chance. But if you take mathematics of probability into consideration, you will see that Darwinism is not real science, when it comes to macroevolution.
The mathematics of probability put big hurdles on the lucky derivatives of blind nature. Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He wrote, “ If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum”. Given enough time, monkeys can produce all the books in the British Museum! Really? Richard Dawkins applied this idea to natural evolution. ‘Give enough time, nature can produce all intelligence embedded in genes’. But the mathematics of probability proved them wrong.
Professor Michael Starbird from the University of Texas at Austin calculated the odds of producing one sentence from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. ‘To be or not to be’. If the monkey used a keyboard with 100 keys, there are 100¹⁸ different 18-character patterns, which is 10³⁶. The Big Bang to now is about 13 billion years, about 4 X 10¹⁷ seconds. Even if the monkeys make 1 billion attempts per second, the probability would be about 1 out of a billion that ‘to be or not to be’ would have been written.
Russell Grigg in his article ‘Could Monkeys Type the 23rd Psalm?’ calculated that to produce something as long as the 23rd Psalm, it would take on average around 10¹⁰¹⁷ years!
Think about it for a moment. We are not even asking about the origin of the monkey or the typewriter, which are themselves intelligence systems. If you bring them together, even if the monkeys type at the rate of 1 billion times a second, which is unlikely, after 14 billion years, the probability of getting one sentence out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is just 1 out of a billion. With each accumulated sentence, it becomes harder and harder to compose the book.
In 1994, American computer scientist and a pioneer in DNA computing, Professor Leonard Max Adleman demonstrated the use of DNA in computation by solving a math problem. In 2012, molecular engineer George Church stored a 53,000-word book in DNA. According to Harvard’s Wyss Institute1 gram of DNA can hold an estimated 215 petabytes of data. A petabyte holds 1000 terabytes and a terabyte holds 1000 gigabytes. All of our world’s data could fit in a few grams of DNA. This clearly points to a Creator God with mathematical genius.
Even Richard Dawkins acknowledged this, when he said ‘You don’t need to be a mathematician or a physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck’. From Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins, the evolutionists expressed serious doubts about the origin of the eye with purely natural means. Higgledy-piggledy luck does not create intelligent systems like RNA, DNA and human brain.
The Bible never says it has answers to all life’s problems. The Bible does not inform us on the number of planets in the solar system or the treatment of strep throat or how to cook pasta. But it informs us on the nature of God, nature of man, nature of woman, heaven, hell, angels, demons etc. That’s a special revelation. It is about things we cannot know by our own wisdom and research.
That God came to this world to save us from our sins. He died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins and to give us hope which goes beyond the grave. This truth – we can only learn from the Bible.
So, to sum it up, the Bible is not against Science. Great scientists like Newton had very successful scientific careers while believing and loving God.