Mary Lou was old and wise, young at heart and sharp as a tack.
She grew up poor in the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression, but was well-read and took classes at the University of Kentucky in her eighth decade.
Hers was no ordinary life. She lived in Georgia, California and Oregon, and her list of friends ranged from Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, to Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. She edited the newspaper in President Jimmy Carter’s hometown and endorsed his 1980 primary opponent, Ted Kennedy.
Mary Lou and I had many things in common, but belief in God wasn’t one of them.
She still loved the old hymns and had a servant’s heart, but she had given up on God when she was a girl and her beloved brother died in World War II.
One day when we were in my car, she told me she couldn’t understand how someone as smart as I (she was being generous) could believe in God.
I answered that I couldn’t understand how someone as smart as she couldn’t believe.
One thing she was right about is that there is no proof for God’s existence.
There also is no proof God doesn’t exist.
Both theism, or the belief in God, and atheism, the belief that there isn’t a God, require faith. But I think the theists have the better argument.
Timothy Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and one of the philosophers whose thinking on faith deeply influenced my own, died of cancer last spring. About that time, I began re-reading his 2010 book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
One point Keller makes is that science is only equipped to test for natural causes, and it cannot disprove other possible causes.
Some of the popular atheist writers of the early 21st century, such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett and Richard Dawkins, assumed that science and religion made faith obsolete, and ridiculed those who thought otherwise. But their conclusions were philosophical, not scientific.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Many prominent scientists are Christians. Among them are John Polkinghorne, a renowned British physicist who is also an Anglican priest, Alister McGrath, an Oxford-educated biophysicist and Christian author, and Francis Collins, a physician who was director of the National Institutes for Health from 2009 to 2021, and who led the Human Genome Project.
The same year Dawkins published The God Delusion, in 2006, Collins published The Language of God, in which he made his case that science and Christianity are not inconsistent.
Like McGrath, C.S. Lewis and other defenders of the faith, Collins was an atheist until he could no longer reconcile his unbelief with what he knew about the origin of the universe, the emergence of life and the complexity of DNA.
“I cannot see how nature could have created itself,” Collins said. “Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.”
Collins is an evolutionist and believes in the transmutation of species. He also believes there is a design behind it, and that there are clues that point to a designer.
In the age of Aristotle and for centuries after, scholars believed the universe had always existed. That was until the big bang theory indicated that the universe had a beginning with an explosion that occurred about 15 billion years ago, and that objects in space continue to move away from each other.
Many think that if something didn’t exist and then it did, there must be a cause. And perhaps that cause was something that exists outside of nature and has always existed.
Those who mock the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin have no problem with believing in the miraculous virgin birth of the universe — the idea that something everything emerged from nothing.
You have to choose your miracles.
The “fine tuning” argument is another clue for a designer. Imagine that if you had a control room with thousands of knobs and just a few of them were off by a fraction of a centimeter. Scientists say the universe is like that. Our Sun, for example, has to be the right kind of star, at the right age, and the Earth must be precisely the right distance from that star, or it would be inhospitable to life.
The complexity of DNA also appears to require fine tuning. To believe that DNA is the result of random forces is like believing you could drop hundreds of thousands of Scrabble letters onto the floor and they would assemble themselves into the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Nature doesn’t normally work that way. The second law of thermodynamics, for example, says that processes that involve the transfer or conversion of heat energy are irreversible and always move toward disorder. The state of entropy of the entire universe increases over time.
In one of his books, Lee Strobel, a former investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who studied law at Yale and was an atheist until he set out to disprove the existence of God, interviewed Stephen Meyer, a scientist who earned his doctorate from Cambridge and is a leader of intelligent design school of thought.
Meyer says that to create a simple protein molecule, you have to have a tertiary structure that requires at least 75 amino acids, and there must be the right bonds between them. Those amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you only need the left-handed ones. Third, those amino acids must link up in a specific sequence, like letters in a sentence.
“Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own, and you find that the probabilities of these things forming a short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That’s a ten with 125 zeros after it!” Meyer said.
The big bang, which seems consistent with the oral tradition of the Genesis creation story if you don’t take it too literally (God said “Let there be light”) and the fine-tuning argument are just two clues that point to theism being compatible with science. There are many others, but that would require a book, not a brief website post.
According to Keller, “A majority of scientists consider themselves deeply or moderately religious, and those numbers have increased in recent decades.”
Skeptics mocking Christians for their beliefs is as inappropriate as Christians mocking atheists and agnostics for theirs when there is so much we don’t know.
Consider this observation by the late Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard scientist, evolutionist and historian of science: “Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism.”
Gould was an atheist, but one who respected his colleagues’ beliefs.
