No need for scientists to be dogmatic about the existence, or not, of God
It is always a delight when scientists talk sense. The Guardian quotes the gynaecologist Robert Winston saying last week that science and religion are ‘essentially both the same thing’. He denies that science is ‘about certainty, about absolute knowledge, about facts’. The truth, he adds, ‘is that science really is about uncertainty, and I think that religion is also about uncertainty’. This accords with my view. True religion has an element of mystery — greys, shades, shadows and doubts. Absolute religious certitude, of the kind exhibited by Muslim fanatics, is a sure sign of superstition and paganism. Equally, the arrogant certitude displayed by the Darwinian fundamentalists is a form of bad science. A true scientist, who puts truth before any theory to which he is committed, is ready to re-examine and even abandon his hypothesis if it is seriously challenged. This is the lesson I learnt from Karl Popper who contrasted Einstein, and his special and general theories of relativity, with pseudo-sciences like Marxism and Freudianism, whose theories were sufficiently elastic and imprecise to expand and accommodate fresh evidence which conflicted with their original formulation.
Of the three great systems which emerged in the mid-19th century, Comte’s Positivism began to unravel even before his death in 1857. Marxism was saved by the accident of the Russian revolution in 1917, which gave it another three quarters of a century of precarious existence until it crashed irretrievably in about 1990, but Darwinism has somehow managed to stagger on. Today very few people doubt evolution as such. But then Darwin was by no means the first to argue that species, including man, evolved. He stands or falls by his hypothesis that the main or even sole method of evolution is by natural selection. Why Darwin was so obstinate in making natural selection the dynamic of evolution I have never understood. I find it odd that, although Mendel presented his revolutionary findings about genes to the Natural Science Society in 1865, only six years after the publication of the Origin of Species, Darwin never showed any interest in his books. Mendel’s results were published in detail in 1866, and he sent a copy to Darwin, but the Great Scientist never even opened it. Perhaps he wasn’t such a Great Scientist after all? Mendel’s researches, just as original and brilliant in their own way as Darwin’s, were largely ignored until about 1900, partly at least because the Darwinians were determined to protect their master’s work. By then, they were committed to various forms of atheism or agnosticism, and I often think that what unites the Darwinians, even today, is not so much a love of scientific truth as a blind resistance to the idea of a God or Providence — any form of which operates outside what appear to be the laws of nature.
Personally I take the same view as Newton, whose views on God were set out carefully towards the end of his life when preparing the second edition of the Principia (1713). Newton rejected the idea that God’s true nature lay in his perfection. He insisted that God is ‘utterly void of all body and bodily figure; and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched’. His essential characteristic, Newton wrote, was what he called ‘dominion’ — God was all-powerful, the primal universal force. We know nothing about God except through his works, ‘by his most wise and excellent contrivance of all things’. Hence Newton could have had no difficulty in accommodating what we now know of the origins and history of the universe with his austere theology.
If, as we currently believe, the Big Bang occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, and the future universe was largely determined by that initial event, it poses a serious problem to scientific atheists. First, it was an event without a cause, or an action without an agent. Second, it produced out of nothing not only something but everything. Both go against all the laws of physics. The explanation of the Big Bang thus lies in metaphysics. For Newton this raised no difficulty as he has his God or a force, power or dominion. But for the Darwinians, who have the evolution of Homo sapiens firmly embedded in a process of natural selection which has no ultimate cause or agent and no end or object, the Big Bang is an enigma. They cannot explain it, and they avert their gaze. Moreover, our growing knowledge of the history of the universe and our own planet threatens natural selection itself. It is a slow, blind and almost inconceivably clumsy process, unless it had an element of programming which, if admitted, could destroy the entire theory.
Darwin was no historian, to put it mildly, and never produced a chronology of the evolution of species through natural selection. But the creation of the universe by the Big Bang, and the evolution of living things on earth — and eventually Homo sapiens himself — were historical events, however remote, and therefore the proper province of historians like myself. In analysing events, the historian requires a chronology, and if those endeavouring to explain events cannot provide one, or provide one which does not fit, then their explanation is plainly erroneous. The trouble with natural selection, as advanced by Darwin, and defended and elaborated by his triumphalist followers today, is that it operates too slowly to fit in with the years available in earth-history. When challenged on this point, Darwinians become very slippery, and their answers are those of people defending a dogma or an ideology rather than of scientists looking for truth. There are five other weaknesses in natural selection as an explanation of how species evolve but the historical one is the most important and will eventually prove fatal. Why can’t the Darwinians admit it now, and throw the whole debate open, so that mankind can get at the truth?
The other huge area of incertitude, for both religion and science, is what happens after death. If Newton was right, and there is a power or force exercising ‘dominion’, then it seems highly unlikely that the end of earthly life is the end of everything. I have been reading a lot recently about Alfred Tennyson, who for the last 30 years of his life was obsessed by this problem — hence, among other things, his beautiful little late poem ‘Crossing the Bar’. Some scientists, unable to cope with uncertainty about an afterlife, take refuge in poetry. Tennyson related that he found himself sitting at an all-male dinner with Gladstone and Tyndall, a greater allround scientist than either Darwin or his fugleman, Huxley. Tyndall talked ‘in his loose way’ about ‘this Poem or Poetic Idea — God’. Gladstone was furious and said ‘with severity’, ‘Professor Tyndall, leave God to the Poets and Philosophers and attend to your own business.’ Tyndall was stunned into complete silence. However, human nature being what it is, Tyndall was soon publicly denouncing Gladstone as the ‘wickedest man of our day and generation’.
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