Against Atheism by Markham Ian S

Author:Markham, Ian S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

To Sum Up

In the last two chapters we have seen how the gift of faith is analogous to the gift of sight. It is the capacity to see the transcendent in the immanent (in the same way one picture can be both an old woman and a young woman). It is the capacity to see the divine in one’s experience of the world. In the same way as sight or smell or the learning of a language needs to be cultivated (it takes time to appreciate great art or discern the smell of grass in a full New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc wine), so the capacity to see God needs to be nurtured.

Although the heart of faith is grounded in this direct experience of the world, the vision of a world intended by an act of love is justified by a variety of arguments. In this chapter, we have seen how physics has “matured” from the conceit of Laplace into the complexity of a discourse that takes the possibility of God seriously. The speculation of parallel universes (many millions of them occupying vast quantities of space) makes Christian musings of a “heaven” seem positively parochial. And, as we will see in chapter 8, the discourse of deep connectivity across the universe at the sub-atomic level makes Christian accounts of prayer possible. Modern physics is definitely faith-friendly. Biology is not yet in this place. And Richard Dawkins is behaving just like Laplace. He is understandably proud of the impressive strides that his discipline is making. For this reason, it is going through its teenage phase as a discipline.

As we have seen, the discussion of physics in the God Delusion illustrates this tension between physics and biology. Dawkins is frustrated that there is not a similar “crane” to Darwinian natural selection in physics. Dawkins admits the remarkable data emerging from astrophysicists about the mathematics of the universe. The “fine-tuning” argument is a good argument for faith: the simplest explanation for the ways in which this universe clearly intended life to emerge is to recognize there is an agent capable of agency. This is the natural explanation for agency.

And, finally, it was Anthony Flew who took us back to the cosmological argument. Even if there are billions of universes (and we just happen to be in the only life-friendly one), we still need to determine whether the basic scientific intuition is justified. Is the universe ultimately intelligible? If the answer is yes, then the ultimate explanation for the universe must be something other than the physical and must contain within itself the reason for its own existence (a central characteristic of the concept of a creator). If the answer is no, then the very intuition of science is undermined.

Cultivating the religious sense should be seen as not simply compatible with science, but as arising out of science. God can be found both at the level of the discoveries in physics and in the very intuitions underpinning science.

However, we now need to learn what this God is like.

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