Today’s New Reason To Believe

by Jeff Zweerink

Just before Thanksgiving last year, a New York Times article by Paul Davies said:

…”science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.”

Davies added:

“Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.”

As you might expect, the article prompted a considerable response from various scientists. More recently, a response in the spring 2008 Forum on the History of Physics newsletter caught my attention. The author boils Davies’ argument down to this proposition: “All human knowledge is uncertain and incomplete.” He then advances three caveats against Davies’ proposition and in favor of trusting scientific beliefs.

1. Not all uncertainty is created equal; there are degrees of certainty, depending on the strength of reasonable ground for our beliefs.
2. Science has widely accepted strategies for producing and evaluating evidence that provides firm grounds for scientific beliefs.
3. Science works; it produces reliable knowledge with demonstrable effects.

I distinctly remember a lunchtime conversation at a local Subway where Ken Samples was articulating the Argument from Reason (AfR). As I understood Ken’s explanation, the AfR contends that naturalistic philosophies cannot account for the rational inferences which provide the backbone of scientific inquiry. Blind naturalistic mechanisms, like those typically invoked in the theory of evolution, provide no basis for human beings to trust the thought processes operating in our brains. In contrast, Christianity does provide a basis for rational thought by virtue of humanity being made in God’s image. In other words, humanity’s capability for rational thought flows from God’s rationality.

I responded to Ken, “So what, science works.” Like most philosophically challenged scientists, I did not appreciate the weight of the AfR. As I have pondered the argument more and discussed it further with Ken, I better understand its import (although I still have trouble articulating the argument in a way others understand).

Davies grapples with the elements of science that derive from a Christian worldview. We believe the world to be governed by a reliable, rational set of physical laws. Further, we believe humanity possesses the necessary mental capacities to discover and understand those laws. Naturalists have yet to provide a compelling, or even adequate, explanation for these beliefs.

On the other hand, the Christian worldview firmly grounds the characteristics necessary to the scientific enterprise in an uncaused Creator who endowed us with the ability to understand His creation.

Kenneth Richard Samples

In the first installment of this series I mentioned that one of my favorite Beatles songs is “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s a reflective tune about the lives of melancholy, isolated people.

All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?/ All the lonely people/ Where do they all belong?

Former Beatle Paul McCartney said that he wrote the song after meeting so many lonely people when the Beatles toured the world during the mid-1960s.

A recent news article in Live Science entitled “Loneliness Breeds Belief in Supernatural” implies that those lonely people that McCartney wrote about would likely believe in God. The article claims that, “People who feel lonely are more likely to believe in the supernatural, whether that is God, angels or miracles, a new study finds.”

Many atheists over the past couple centuries have sought to explain belief in God as an illusion that arises from purely psychological factors. Last Tuesday, I explained that such attempts commit the genetic fallacy and ignore the fact that there are many rational arguments to support belief in God.

In this article I will explore two more criticisms of the “Loneliness Breeds Belief in God” theory.

Loneliness May Reveal an Actual Need for God

Christian philosophers Augustine (354-430 AD) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) both argued that human beings have a god-shaped vacuum within them. While humans were created by God they have nevertheless fallen away from God into sinful rebellion. Therefore, they long for God and desperately need to be reconciled back to him.

Augustine wrote these words in his classic work the Confessions as a prayer to God:

“Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you…. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”

In a similar vein Pascal mentions the following in his apologetics work the Pensées :

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? …This infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”

The upshot of these quotes is that it is possible that loneliness breeds belief in God because that is the way God designed it to work in the human heart.

If human beings were created in the image of God as the Bible reveals (Genesis 1:26-27), then it seems reasonable to conclude that people will feel a deep-seated loneliness if they are alienated from God (for example, through sin). If loneliness does in fact lead to belief in God then that may serve as a type of evidence that the biblical description of man is indeed true. In that case, the Bible’s anthropology (doctrine of human nature) would possess authentic psychological explanatory power.

Man’s Loneliness May Point to God’s Real Existence

Christian apologist C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) argued in his book Mere Christianity that human beings have internal needs that are satisfied by external realities. For example, hunger and thirst are satisfied in food and drink. Lewis further argued that humans have an internal need for transcendence (worship, immortality, spirituality) that nothing in this world can satisfy. He therefore concluded that there is likely a transcendent external reality (God) to fulfill this powerful internal need. Here Lewis is using a form of reasoning called abductive logic or inference to the best explanation.

(For more on abductive reasoning, see chapter 4 of my new book A World of Difference.)

If people come to believe in God out of need (psychological, existential, spiritual), then that may be a sign that God is a reality.

While some atheists ridicule believers for needing a “crutch” to make it through life, it may just be that believers are responding to an authentic intuition of need—like using crutches when one’s leg is broken.

The four points explored in this series illustrate that studies that tie belief in God to psychological needs do not in any way serve to disprove God.

For more on God’s existence and the truth of the Christian worldview, see my two books Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions and A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test.

by Hugh Ross

In a recent meeting with insurance agents I learned that it is no longer politically correct to refer to an employee as overweight. The proper terminology is to say that someone is not tall enough for his or her weight. This description illustrates the difference between morphology and structure. A person’s rotundity is an example of a morphological feature. Someone’s skeletal dimensions exemplify structure.

Arien van der Wel, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, has made a discovery about galaxy structure and morphology that implies that there may be more to the design of a galaxy for the possible support of life than what had previously been recognized.¹ He noted that astronomers face a serious limitation in accurately determining a galaxy’s morphology if that galaxy is not nearby. For distant galaxies astronomers have used galaxy structure as a proxy for galaxy morphology. Van der Wel determined to test whether or not this proxy assumption had any validity. He performed this test thanks to the recent release of the deepest-ever survey of galaxies, namely the fifth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Van der Wel extracted detailed features of 4,594 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey between redshifts of 0.2 and 0.3 (corresponding to distances between about two and a half and four billion light-years). This sample was complete down to a galaxy mass of ten billion solar masses. (By way of comparison, the total mass of the Milky Way Galaxy is sixty times greater). The features of these galaxies unambiguously established that galaxy morphology does not depend on galaxy structure. Thus, galaxy structure cannot be used as a proxy for galaxy morphology.

The analysis also revealed the causes for both a galaxy’s morphology and its structure. Van der Wel showed that galactic structure depends mainly on the galaxy’s mass, whereas a galaxy’s morphology depends primarily on the galaxy’s environment. (A galaxy’s environment refers to the quantity, types, sizes, and proximities of neighboring galaxies.)

Van der Wel offered an explanation for the dependencies he had observed. A galaxy’s environment will determine the timing and the quantity of the amount of gas and dust it will either ingest or lose from its interactions with neighboring galaxies. This gain or loss of gas and dust will affect the star formation rates and histories of the galaxy. For obvious reasons, these star formation rates and histories influence a galaxy’s luminosity and color, but, evidently, they have little effect on the distribution of mass within the galaxy.

This research means that astronomers now face a much more challenging task in determining the detailed characteristics of distant galaxies. Van der Wel’s work also has significant implications for the list of requirements for life-supporting galaxies.

For advanced life to be possible within a galaxy, the planet on which that life exists must orbit about a star that orbits around the center of the galaxy at just inside the co-rotation distance where that orbit remains undisturbed for billions of years. Advanced life also requires that both the measure of a galaxy’s co-rotation distance and the timing of the life-friendly planet’s birth relative to the birth date of the galaxy must be fine-tuned. If not, the planet will either possess the wrong mix of heavy elements, be subjected to deadly radiation, or experience gravitational disturbances.

(The co-rotation distance is that distance from the center of a galaxy where a star orbits about the galactic center at the same rate as the spiral arm structure rotates. A star too distant from the co-rotation distance will cross spiral arms too frequently for advanced life. However, if it is exactly at the co-rotation distance, it will suffer a mean motion resonance, which will destabilize its orbit. Just inside is necessary because outside the co-rotation distance the quantity of heavy elements is too low.)

In order to meet all of the above-listed requirements for the existence of advanced life, both the structure and the morphology of a galaxy must be carefully fine-tuned. That a galaxy’s morphology exerts very little or no dependence on a galaxy’s structure implies that both of these two features, rather than just one, need to be fine-tuned. Van der Wel’s study provides yet another demonstration that the more astronomers learn about the science of the universe and the population of galaxies, stars, planets, etc., the more reasons they uncover for the supernatural, super-intelligent design of the universe and its constituent components for the specific benefit of human life.²

1. Adrien van der Wel, “The Dependence of Galaxy Morphology and Structure on Environment and Stellar Mass,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 675 (2008): L13-16.
2. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 3rd ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), XXX-XXX; Hugh Ross, Creation as Science (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006), XX-XXX.