Will Science Someday Rule Out The Possibility of God? (Part 2)

(In Part 1 I argued that the occasion of Dr. Carroll's claims can be a useful call to authentic Christian faith. In Part 2 I will address the philosophical claim that there could potentially be a theory of everything so encompassing that God is rendered totally useless.)

All philosophical views of the universe can be broken down into two distinct categories--"closed" universes and "open" universes. Dr. Carroll's naturalistic view of the universe is necessarily closed. This means that there are no transcendent forces or beings (i.e. God, Allah, Hare Krishna, Zeus, etc...) that may intervene in the universe from the outside. Therefore, an explanation of this universe must be self-contained. For instance, any explanation of the beginning and/or existence of the universe must be entirely naturalistic--without any appeal to the supernatural (that which is outside of the material realm, such as God, Heaven, Hell, angels, demons, etc...).

Open views of the universe, however, allow for outside intervention from the supernatural (meaning, above the natural) realm. This view permits the existence of a transcendent God who is the creator and even sustainer of his/its universe. Some form of this open view is held by orthodox Christianity, as the Scriptures reveal that Jesus is the pre-existent creator and sustainer of the universe. (Colossians 1:15-17).

Dr. Carroll is suggesting that the universe is in fact closed but that humans have postulated the existence of God, because we are yet to discover an entirely self-contained theory of everything. Humans have imagined this "God of the Gaps" in order to fill in our knowledge gaps. If this is the case, then it is conceivable that, as science advances, religion will retreat. According to this "secularization thesis," as it has come to be known among historians, there is an inverse relationship between human religiosity and the state of scientific knowledge. More science equals less religion.

There are two problems with Dr. Carroll's assumption however. First, the secularization thesis as a historical model has proven to be a false prophet and is increasingly discredited for historians. Secondly, on a philosophical level, the concept of a closed universe is self-defeating, because it fails to account for why the universe exists and fails to account for knowledge itself.

Secularization Theory

Up through most of the 20th century, intellectual historians came to argue that progress in science would eventually replace religion. This came to be known as the "secularization thesis" and, in the 1950s, it would have been very difficult to refute, because the Church had sunken into cultural irrelevance. However, in the 21st century, this thesis faces some major hurdles--most notably the ubiquitous religiosity of American society. If the secularization thesis is true, why is the most modernized nation in the world one of the most deeply religious? Christian apologist and intellectual Dinesh D'Souza writes, "If secularization were proceeding inexorably, then religious people should be getting less religious, and so conservative churches should be shrinking and liberal churches growing. In fact, the opposite is the case." [1]

Globally industrializing nations, such as India and China, are exploding with religious belief. In these and other countries in South America and Africa, religious belief, especially Christianity, is expanding beyond all expectations. While the center of gravity is clearly moving to the southern hemisphere, global Christianity is advancing inexorably.

Today, secularization thesis is in shambles, because its predictions simply didn't come true, except maybe in Europe, which is arguably an exception to the rule, rather than the rule itself. [2] Dr. Carroll's apparent assumption that religious belief and scientific progress/modernization are inversely related has simply proven to be historically false.

But, what may we make of his claim philosophically? The concept of a closed universe presents a couple of philosophical problems--one ontological (philosophy of being), the other, epistemological (philosophy of knowledge).

The incomplete ontology of a closed universe

There are many cosmological models as to how the universe started and continues to exist, but, for the sake of brevity and at the risk of creating a straw man, only the "standard model" will be dealt with here. [3] According to the standard model, the universe, as we currently observe it, is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. Given enough time, it seems, the universe will die a cold, dark death. If that is the case, then the universe must have had a singular starting point about 13.7 billion years ago, because expansion in reverse is recession toward a central point. This point is what physicists call the "singularity"-- a point of near-infinite density, gravity, and energy. Imagine all of the mass in the universe (and the fabric of space-time itself) squeezed down to a point smaller than the head of a ball-point pen.

Here's the problem, as it stands now--mathematics and physics only makes sense back to one Planck time (10^(-43) seconds) after the big bang, the point before which all rules of physics necessarily break down. This means that science can't possibly describe the singularity itself. It is a complete mystery that lies outside the bounds of known physics.

However, let's assume that some yet-to-be-discovered theory could enable scientists to penetrate this infinitesimal temporal barrier of 10^(-43) seconds after the big bang. This hypothetical theory could tell us something about the singularity and how it exploded and rapidly expanded to the universe as we know it, but it can't tell us why the singularity itself exists. This is the grand unanswerable question for advocates of the closed universe--why does the universe exist rather than nothing at all? By definition, there can be no natural (or what Carroll calls "self-contained") theory for where nature came from.

The faulty epistemology of a closed universe

The question of why the universe exists is an ontological (related to being) question. There also lies a fundamental epistemological problem within a self-contained naturalistic theory. This has been argued by both Christian analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga and surprisingly by well-known atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel. If nature is all there is and the human mind is the accidental development of some sort of blind Darwinian process, then there is no reason to believe that the human brain (or mind?) is a tool that is aimed at determining what is true. For example, belief in God would have to be explained as some sort of genetic mutation within the human species that was naturally selected for its life-preserving qualities. It's not that God's existence is true but that believing it somehow contributes to the prolonged survival of a species. If this is true, then all knowledge that humans possess must be the result of the same survival-seeking process. Therefore, the brain is merely an organ aimed at survival--not truth. If that is the case, how can the statement "Nature is all there is" (a belief) be accepted as a true statement? At best, one can only claim that holding that belief makes one more likely to survive. Naturalism is logically self-defeating. If true, we can't know anything, including the proposition that nature is all there is. What this means for Dr. Carroll is that his acceptance of some unifying theory of everything is nothing more than chemical reactions in his mind aimed at his own survival. The belief may or may not correspond to actual reality. In fact, it seems that the chances of a belief generated by the natural chemical-electrical stimulation of the brain actually being true are extremely low.

Conclusion

In the end, it seems that the problem is that Dr. Carroll is a gifted physicist making unsubstantiated metaphysical claims. While his credentials as a physicist are unimpeachable, his philosophical claims lack any warrant. There logically cannot be a "self-contained" (or naturalistic) theory of everything, because, even if a theory could describe the singularity and how it inflated, this theory could not answer the question of why anything exists at all. And, any purely naturalistic theory would be logically self-defeating.

Appendix in footnote [4]


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[1] Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2007) 6-7.; Christian denominations that in the 20th century embraced a liberal ideology that essentially agreed with secularization thesis have died quite abruptly. The Presbyterian, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ are all roughly at half the membership they were in 1960. In addition, conservative denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Church, which grew from 8.7 million in 1960 to 16.4 million in 2005, have doubled in size.
[2] The one area of the world that might support secularization theory is Europe whose native religious belief has clearly receded as it has modernized. But, this makes Europe a statistical outlier, an exception to the rule. This being the case, there is likely another cause for the recession of religious belief in Europe other than the advance of science.
[3] For an excellent overview of each of the competing cosmological models with an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses from an informed Christian perspective, see pages 126-138 of William Lane Craig's Reaonsable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics or Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time.
[4] No part of Christian belief conflicts with the claims of hard science (physics, chemistry, etc...). For instance, if the Bible claimed that the sun was made of gold or that the Earth was flat or that center of the Earth was occupied by Fraggles, I would have to either reject Christianity or at least my belief in the inerrancy of the Scriptures. To borrow Plantinga's thesis in Where the Conflict Really Lies, there is only superficial conflict with the forensic sciences (i.e. evolutionary biology and cosmology). It would seem that most evolutionary biologists and cosmologists reject belief in a transcendent God, because they are committed to entirely naturalistic explanations of origins, even if they don't know what those explanations are. The problem that forensic sciences (as opposed to hard sciences) have is that they are trying to establish the likelihood that some past event (e.g. the big bang) happened in some particular way. It is impossible to recreate that actual event in a lab for empirical observation. Scientists can recreate what they think the variables were at the time and then try to recreate what they think happened, but they can't recreate the original event itself. It already happened. It's over. Forensics is only about probabilities, which can be high or low. I would argue that evolutionary biology and origins cosmology are not nearly as scientific as, say, physics or chemistry, because, in order to count as scientific knowledge, a phenomenon must be repeated and observed in an experiment. No one can observe the big bang or Darwinian evolution. Any evolutionist or cosmologist who claims that his view rules out the existence of God has bitten off more than he can chew.