Reading from "Has Science Found God?" By Victor J. Stenger:

People have a hard time imagining how the universe can possibly have come about by anything other than a miracle, a violation of natural law. The intuition being expressed here is at least twofold. First it is widely believed that something cannot come from nothing where that "something" refers to the substance of the universe - its matter and energy - and "nothing" can be interpreted in this context as a state of zero energy and mass. Second, it is also believed widely that the way in which the substance of the Universe seems to be structured in an orderly fashion, rather than simply being randomly distributed, could not have happened except by design.

Note: In my spoken sermon I gave a slightly abbreviated explanation of a few topics in this text. I have also not been academically careful about appropriately footnoting this talk and using quotation marks. Many of the descriptions and ideas have been lifted whole cloth from Victor Stenger (see above) and Daniel Dennett (see below). The good stuff is theirs, the musings and conclusions are mine. I highly recommend both books, which are packed with interesting insights!

Discussions of and rationalizations of and for the existence of God are probably some of the oldest intellectual undertaking of humankind. I believe that much of the first thinking involved attempts to understand a wonderful, mysterious and often frightening world. I think that I can safely argue that many of these early wonderings of humanity would be considered in our times more scientific than religious questions. The Greek and Roman pantheons had gods of wind, sea, sun, moon, fire and harvest mixed with wisdom, fertility, love and war. People have always desired explanations for the complexities of their existence and of the natural world around them. Aristotle noted at the dawn of human science that our curiosity about things takes different forms which he shaped as four basic questions the answers to which are the four aittia or causes.

We may be curious about what something is made of, its matter or material cause.

We may be curious about the form (or structure or shape) that matter takes, its formal cause.

We may be curious about its beginning, how it got started, or its efficient cause.

And

We may be curious about it purpose or goal or end (why it is.), which Aristotle called its Telos or final cause.

The first three, when did it start, what shape does it have and what is it made of, seem like science questions and have been considered so by many philosophers over the ages. The fourth question, why does it happen, has always been the difficulty and has been recognized as such by philosophers, theologians and scientists. It is the one that we continually struggle with. It is this question that forms the basis of teleology. (I have taken this following discussion from "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett. I have lifted a number of ideas for this talk from this interesting but I think very difficult to read book.)

A teleological explanation is one that explains the existence or occurrence of something by citing a goal or purpose that is served by the thing. Artifacts are the most obvious cases; the goal or purpose of an artifact is the function it was designed to serve by its creator. There is no controversy about the telos of a hammer: it is for hammering in and pulling out nails. The telos of more complicated artifacts, such as camcorders or tow trucks or CT scanners, is more obvious. But even in simple cases, a problem can be seen to loom:

An example:
"why are you sawing that board?"
"To make a door."
"And what is the door for?"
"To secure my house."
"And why do you want a secure house?"
"So I can sleep nights."
"And why do you want to sleep nights?"
"Go run along and Stop asking such silly questions."

This exchange reveals one of the troubles with teleology: where does it all stop? What final final cause can be cited to bring this hierarchy of reasons to a close? Aristotle had an answer-, God, the Prime Mover, the for-which to end all for-whiches. The idea, which is taken up by the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, is that all our purposes are ultimately God's purposes. The idea is certainly natural and attractive. If the universe was created by God, for God's purposes, then all the purposes we can find in it must ultimately be due to God's purposes. But what are God's purposes? That is of course the mystery. And much of theology has been preoccupied with finding ways to discern that since Aristotle's time.

Now, one way to get around the "teleological" question is to switch the topic slightly and instead of answering the "why" question, go for a "how" question answer. Instead of telling us why God created us, stories are told about how God came to create us. I would claim that the domain of the sciences has come to be the answering of this "How" question. Religion and Science have come to butt heads primarily when science has produced a "How" answer that disagrees with a previously given divinely inspired (i.e. divine revelation or infallible) "How" answer produced by religion. What we find is that particularly orthodox religions have a very difficult time giving up this ground because they see it as undermining the foundations of their claimed divine basis of belief. I think that many of us are satisfied often with "how" and often really mean "how" when we ask why, but on a fundamental level, it may not be as fulfilling.

I studied physics in college because, as a mechanist, I am very interested in just "How" things happen. Very early on in college I was surprised to discover that I was left some what flat when I realized I was not ever really going to get anything but how answers. I remember exactly when I had that realization. It was in my junior year at Berkeley. It was in a physical optics class after the Professor had spent the entire hour deriving the classical formula for Rayleigh scattering which is a theory which explains just how it is that individual atoms scatter light waves. With some flourish Professor Stone said after completing the lecture "and that is why the sky is blue". And I found myself saying initially wow! After thinking for a minute though I had this epiphany and realized that he had explained to us "How" the sky is blue. "Why" is a far more esoteric answer that seemed to involve human perception and probably some esthetic qualities as well.

In the reading I tried to broach the topic of "design". Design is a teleological concept which has been central to the God question for literally centuries. The argument is simple and was considered until Darwin's time self-evident and not really requiring any proof at all. Even after the Copernican revolution, which displaced the Earth from the center of the Universe and with it the infallibility of the scriptures, and the advent of enlightenment philosophy in the 17th century, it was considered self evident that there had to be an intelligent mover behind the Universe. Given the state of human knowledge it was logical and appealing. The Universe is a very orderly place and that cannot simply come from no where and the human mind which is the ultimate product of creation required an even greater mind to create it. Therefore the Universe and the "Crown of Creation, Humanity" required an ultimate designer and therefore the validity of the "argument from design" which the term "design" refers to. Much of the core of modern anti Darwinian Creationism is simply a rehashing of design arguments from the 17th and 18th Century. These arguments were very effectively demolished long ago.

So let's finally get to my central topic, which is what science has and does not have to say about the existence of God. Our understanding of the Universe and the origins of life and even the mechanisms of life are far different than they were in Darwin's time much less during Galileo's and Newton's life time. And certainly than when the Old Testament was written. Our understanding of humanities place in the Universe is also significantly different. Modern Cosmology gives us a Scientifically demonstrated ( and I will claim essentially proven) view of creation which explains in terms of completely natural laws the development of the known Universe from a time like 10 to the minus 8 seconds (1/100 of a microsecond) after the appearance of our Universe to our current time. The observable order of planet's, stars, and galaxies is completely consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. (That's the one that talks about order and disorder and relates that to something called Entropy, which is often pointed to by the creation scientist as troublesome) The other important piece is that we now understand most of the mechanism's which underlie Darwin's theory of evolution, that is the mechanisms of inherited traits and its relationship to the structure and properties of DNA. With these two revolutionary bits of scientific thinking I believe we can describe the development of the Universe out of nothing and the emergence of the organization of life and in particular the emergence of the thinking brain, that is the emergence of mind from less so called complex forms. It takes lots of time and lots of trial and error but it none the less happens naturally all by itself.

Two other pieces of information stand out to me as very significant about our historical view of god and our own importance in creation. We know today that our planet Earth, rather than sitting at the center of creation is only one of nine planets circling our sun, which is one star of many stars forming a small arm on the edge of a giant galaxy which we call the milky-way galaxy, which is only one galaxy of billions of galaxies spread more or less uniformly over the universe. We are also newly discovering many planets circling other stars in the Milky Way. In the context of space we are pretty insignificant. Another piece has to do with time. The Universe is 15 billion years old. Our planet earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

For most of the 4.5 billion years (some 3 billion years) the only life forms on earth were viruses and bacteria. About 500 million years ago multi-cellular creatures first appeared in the Cambrian oceans. 248 million years ago the earliest dinosaurs first appeared. The dinosaurs held sway on earth for the next 185 million years. It took the impact of a giant meteor to make it possible for mammals to emerge as the dominant life form some 65 million years ago and this great crown of creation, humanity, first appeared on the scene 160,000 years ago. So I conclude that we exist on a tiny insignificant speck of rock in a vast cosmos and we have existed there for an inconceivably small micro-tic of time compared to any time scale of significance relative to creation.

Well, so what? I will ask then the obvious question, the answer to which has come from the existentialists. Why does there have to be a why to anything in the physical world? Aristotle had it right that we seem to want such an answer. Many of us have a great need for an answer but in fact there does not have to necessarily be an answer. And I will claim that if by scientific means we can answer all the how's we will be left with only one question which lies outside of our Universe and that will be: why does the Universe exist? Over the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have assembled a truly unassailable body of science that describes most of the how's of the existence of the Universe including the creation of all life on earth, our own selves included.

Before I get to my final conclusion I want to introduce some more definitions relative to the idea of God to make it clear what my conclusion means relative to God and Science.

There are four generally accepted definitions of "God", which constitute really four different entities .

1. Theism: God is an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent personal being who created the Universe and who, when needed, intervenes in the natural order to secure his providence.
2. Deism: God is an omnipotent and omniscient creator who does not intervene in history. (Sometimes called the clockwork god. The one who designed the clock, set it going and simply watched it for the rest of time.)
3. Pantheism: God is identical to the Universe. (somewhat akin to many animist religions).
4. Panentheism: The Universe is an extension of God, but God exceeds the sum of the objects within the Universe.

An atheist (a-theist) is therefore someone who specifically rejects theism, and I would suppose that there are also adeists, apantheists and apanentheists. There is also an agnostic who might believe that it is not possible to know for sure which definition is correct or incorrect. I think that a lot of people who are supposedly theists hold beliefs that are actually deist, pantheist or panentheist. Thomas Jefferson and many of our founding fathers including my favorite Benjamin Franklin, for instance, were actually deist and in the traditional sense were definitely not Christians. If you are not a theist by the way than you really are pushing the historical meaning of God if you claim you are Christian, Jew or Muslim.

From this set of definitions I believe it can be very firmly demonstrated that modern science is inconsistent with a theistic view of creation. From everything we know and understand as I have already stated no God has had to intervene and no demonstrable evidence exists that a guiding intelligence has intervened in creation after the first moment of the big bang. I think this argument must be made from what is called parsimony, that is it is the most straightforward, simple and direct interpretation of observed reality. After all no one is measuring all of the happenings of the Universe for all time. It is just that everything that we have examined and measured has behaved as if it was obeying a set of natural laws and, I would also argue that the postulated deist god is inconsistent with one that would be deceiving us about her creation by hiding every time we did observe and measure.

Though I don't think one should make up one's mind based solely on polls, I'd think a poll of the best scientific minds does bare some relevance to this topic. An article in Nature magazine in 1998 reported that a survey of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences indicated that only 7 per cent believed in a personal god. This is down from 15 per cent in 1933 and 27.7 per cent in 1913. Personal disbelief as distinguished from non-belief among the same group is 72.2 percent (that is 72.2 percent are atheists or even adeist, and/or apantheists). Disbelief among the subset of physical scientists is the highest at 79 percent. So most of the best scientists with the best understanding of science have ruled out Theism. What about the visions of God? Within the context of what is measurable it is not possible to tell the difference between the deist version of God and our understanding of the Universe. The God who conceived of the laws of creation and set the Universe in motion and walked away lies outside our universe and does not interact with it and is therefore perfectly consistent with a scientific view of reality. I think modern pantheism and panentheism are also not distinguishably different for those gods act only within the laws of nature.

I would like to leave you with one more thing, the modern story of Creation and a conclusion from it.

The modern inflationary view of the creation of the Universe is something like the following: In the beginning there was the primordial nothing some fifteen billion years ago. Through a quantum fluctuation, a sort of bubble of something in the nothing, there emerged a hot, dense seed smaller than a proton, containing all the mass and energy of our universe. In a time on the order of a trillionth of a second, this seed cooled and expanded faster than the speed of light, inflating to the size of a grapefruit. At this point the energy latent in the vacuum precipitated as particles and antiparticles. This matter annihilated itself giving rise to the radiation of the Big Bang. This ball continued its expansion which it continues to this day. Eventually after a few minutes when things cooled sufficiently protons and neutrons could form from the soup of the remaining quarks and gluons. Within a few hours all the nucleons were formed but the density and temperature were too high for any stable atoms to appear.

After 300,000 years of expansion and cooling the material reached a temperature of about 3000 degrees and stable hydrogen and helium atoms formed and the photons could move about without immediately bumping into electrons. The photons could move freely into the ever newly created space and there was light. This early universe consisted of space, electromagnetic radiation and matter in the form of electrons, nucleons, and hydrogen and helium atoms. For eons this gaseous matter swirled and expanded through space until the small inhomogeneities seeded by the turbulence of the big bang lead to the formation of denser and ever denser clouds under mutual gravitational attraction. These clouds of hydrogen and helium eventually collapsed into the first stars. Within these stars the helium and hydrogen provided the energy and light by fusing into heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen and iron. The released heat kept the stars from collapsing on themselves, but eventually when all the fusion was complete the stars could no longer hold themselves up against the gigantic gravitational force of their own mass and they would implode catastrophically becoming super nova creating all of the heavy elements up to and including the transuranic species such as plutonium and neptunium.

This new star dust of all the elements was then strewn out into space only to collapse once again into new stars and something new, heavy dense planetary structures such as we are now detecting all over our own milky way galaxy and of course our own planet earth was one of these. This description of the birth of the universe which is the virtually unanimously accepted and highly tested scientific version of creation tells us that we are all of us created from star dust and in some sense all things around us share this common origin. Living and not living matter is all star dust. We are made of the stuff of stars!! It fills me with the most immense sense of wonder. I look at my face in the mirror and I sometimes think you are star dust cooked in the caldrons of the heavens at 20,000 degrees. It took the universe billions of years just to create the stuff we are made off and more billions of years to create the earth and then another billion or so to reach the conditions for our existence. Even without a deist god this is the stuff of wonder and wonderment. I stand awe struck before the firmament and no less delighted and a lot more humble. I also know that no God stands ready to intervene when we screw up so that we better be ready to be responsible for our own destiny as an integrated and highly dependent part of life in this Universe.

[Delivered 3 August 2003. David Simons is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland in 1974. His doctoral thesis concerned the energization mechanisms of electrons in the Aurora Borealis. He lead the atmospheric sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1980's, working on a diverse set of physics and chemistry problems related to nuclear explosions, radio propagation, radiations transport, lightning physics, near earth space plasma dynamics and complex terrain atmospheric circulation. He has worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 2001.]