Encouraged by the success of last year’s conference on faith and science in Krakow, Poland, four institutions including Discovery Institute teamed up to organize a second event. This time the focus was on the return of the God hypothesis. The conference on Faith and Science in the Age of Secularization took place on June 3-4 at the city’s Royal Castle. Brian Miller, Jay Richards, Douglas Axe, and I were all speakers. We are pictured above in the courtyard of Collegium Maius, the oldest building at the Jagiellonian University, dating to 1364.

Has the God hypothesis indeed returned? When Darwin presented his theory in the mid 19th century, it seemed that science had thoroughly confirmed a complete naturalistic paradigm. First Newtonian mechanics, then Lyellian geology, and finally Darwinian evolution had removed God from every facet of our understanding of the universe and its history. French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, after presenting his theory of the origin of the solar system to Napoleon, was asked by the emperor about the role of God. He is said to have responded, “I had no need of such a hypothesis.” The dialogue may be a legend only, but it accurately represents the dominant mind-set of the time — laws of nature had replaced divine action. Ultimately the system of the eternal universe constituted one coherent set of events that are easily explained by reference to one another. 

However, the view attributed to Laplace was mistaken. With new discoveries in science in the early 20th century, the mechanistic worldview fell apart. Today, a century later, scientific evidence encourages theistic interpretations more than ever before.

A Needed Forum for Dialogue

It is thus all the more important to create a forum for dialogue about science and faith that is not restricted to the boundaries delineated by scientism, evolutionism, and materialism. True, we find no shortage of academic and popular events where theologians and scientists gather together. Yet at the vast majority of these meetings, thinking “out of the box” is not welcome. Any positive account of intelligent design, or anything that could be broadly called classical biblical Christianity, is banned from serious consideration. That is the case even though these views had been present in the science-faith dialogue centuries before the New Atheism was conceived. This situation results in an impoverished view of divine causation, limited (if it is considered at all) to the so-called “natural secondary causes.” The implication is that divine action in the universe can never be detected by natural investigation, as it has not left discernible marks in nature. It hardly takes a learned theologian to realize that this mainstream approach is not in keeping with what we know from the Apostle Paul — that from studying nature one can recognize its Author (Romans 1:20).

As Stephen Meyer has shown in his book Return of the God Hypothesis, this dominant view, that has been guiding the interpretation of scientific data since Darwin, is now outdated. It has been shown to be inadequate thanks to developments in science alone, leaving aside the otherwise important contributions of theology and philosophy. In a sense, therefore, there may be some truth to what critics of intelligent design have been claiming for decades — namely, that ID is a “god of the gaps” argument. Perhaps God himself left in nature some gaps through which we — humble humans — can see Him. If God wants to be recognized by us, why would He create a universe without any gaps, a universe that would thoroughly seal Him off from creation? A universe without gaps, through which divine light may be seen, seems compatible with materialistic monism of the type advocated by “Darwin’s bulldog” in Germany, Ernst Haeckel. It is less compatible with classical religions guided by Biblical revelation.

The Heavens Declare

This was precisely the theme of this month’s conference. Our distinguished speakers approached the question of the “God hypothesis” from different perspectives which, combined, offered an irresistible impression that the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19).

Jay Richards clarified for us the terms used in the debate over evolution, and he presented the case for the fine-tuning of our planet — not just for life, but for intelligent life. This argument, elaborated by Dr. Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzales twenty years ago in The Privileged Planet, still awaits full recognition, especially among Christian philosophers and theologians. Another speaker, Brian Miller, convincingly showed that there is not a single realistic theory of the origin of life, and that we need to honestly admit research in the field has been stalled for decades. The origin of life remains as much a mystery for modern science as it was for Darwin and his followers. Douglas Axe explained that the creation of a single protein is more difficult than is usually acknowledged in biology textbooks. Thus there is next to no chance of coming up with a new protein by the Darwinian mechanism of random variation and natural selection. This obviously invalidates the idea of the Darwinian production of new species, because new forms of life require many new proteins, and these cannot be generated randomly. Dr. Axe also amplified what we intuitively know, but perhaps do not fully appreciate: that life contains multiple features that have no survival or adaptive advantage. On the contrary, life is packed with baroque beauty and totally gratuitous forms that seem to have no other value than to amaze humans. No blind process could ever come up with things that clearly serve nothing else but human spiritual needs. Finally, I presented a metaphysical case against theistic evolution, the idea that God never worked supernaturally or directly in the history of the universe but instead left everything to unguided causes operating in nature. 

Those in attendance at the conference — including biologists, medical doctors, physicists, as well as catechists, priests, entrepreneurs, and lawyers — were exposed to cutting-edge arguments for the compatibility between scientific discovery and Christian faith. Even from a common-sense perspective, assuming that the same God who created the universe also revealed himself in the Bible, it is not possible to claim the incompatibility of science with faith. God cannot contradict himself. That modern science confirms this perspective should not be surprising to any believer. What is surprising is that on the one hand we have atheists such as Richard Dawkins, who claim that science excludes any belief in the supernatural, and on the other we have theistic evolutionists who say that faith is compatible with purely naturalistic theories such as neo-Darwinism. The first group cannot see God through the gaps of nature. The second adopts a naturalistic paradigm by which science and faith are divorced, with faith often being modified so that it does not say anything about the visible universe. Instead, faith is relegated to the invisible, spiritual, private, or emotional realms alone. 

Peculiar Views on Religion

My second lecture concerned the theology of Sir John Templeton, a renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist who spent much of his time and fortune on sponsoring what he called a “humble approach” in the science-faith dialogue. But not many people realize that Templeton, best known for establishing the Templeton Prize, held quite peculiar views on religion. He, for instance, believed that the doctrines of traditional religions should be constantly modified according to the growing body of scientific knowledge. He even thought that “the doctrinal formulations of Christianity have changed and will change from age to age and what is sometimes called heresy at one time is accepted as orthodox and infallible in another age.” According to Templeton, “Rigid creed is a form of pride, for it means we think we understand God.” Moreover, he asserted, “A difference between scientists and theologians seems to be that whereas scientists are humbly admitting error, some theologians resent their pet ideas being challenged or criticized.”

Well, I am not sure this is accurate, unless we recognize that some scientists are not so much scientists but rather “high priests” of a religion called Darwinism. They do in fact resent their pet ideas being challenged by other scientists. And, if Templeton is right in saying that scientists accept facts as they are, it’s high time for them to humbly consider a return to the God hypothesis. If theologians should be like scientists, then they as well ought to abandon the false materialistic theory of nature and look at the evidence with humility. That evidence, as we saw in Krakow, points to the reality of divine action with a clarity never before witnessed.