11
We saw in Chapter 2 that not only has atheism in its various forms been around for centuries, but there have been no scientific advances in the last 250 years that have challenged essential Christian belief. But wait, many may cry out, what about evolution? Yet, as we saw in Chapters 8 and 9, evolution has in many respects been carefully crafted by twentieth-century anti-Christian writers (assisted, one must admit, by the “fortuitous” gift of modern-day fundamentalism) into an intellectual and spiritual trauma that in reality was less of a worry to the Victorians than it has been inflated into by modern secularists. So can we actually consider New Atheist claims as little more than – to borrow a quotation from Shakespeare – “Much Ado about Nothing”?
When we examine the post-1860 science and religion scene, we find a situation which was far less clear-cut than many modern writers would lead us to believe. Take, for instance, those prominent late-Victorian advocates of a purely naturalistic “secularism” in science that was independent from the clutches of the “argument from design”: Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. Huxley would become notorious as “Darwin’s Bulldog”, while Tyndall was an influential Irish physicist, and both, in addition to pure research, were active in the popularization of science, especially among the working classes. Yet what drove both of them was not atheism so much as a wish to disentangle science from ecclesiastical input – such as the “argument from design”. A point that is often missed today.
On the other hand, both men recognized that human beings have unfathomable attributes that could not, and probably never would be, adequately explained by science. Human consciousness was a case in point. There seemed to be some sort of spiritual aspect of humanity that could, perhaps, be consigned to “religion” in its various forms. What overwhelmingly concerned both men, however, was that it should be wholly and entirely divorced from science, which itself should occupy a purely secular realm. But this did not imply atheism by any means. Indeed, it was Huxley who, in 1869, coined the term “agnostic” from a Greek theological provenance. Had not St Paul, when in Athens (as related in the Acts of the Apostles), spoken of an altar to an “unknown [Greek agnosto] god”? And can we know the nature of God and of causes? And by extension, Huxley suggested that clerical-dominated science, with its argument from design, smacked of the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism, or the idea that human intelligence, wisdom, or knowledge could bring you to God. But “a-gnosticism”, far from being necessarily anti-religious, was simply saying that we cannot get to God by our own cleverness – if at all. Hence, the argument from design, instead of bringing us to God, could actually lead us astray! Not the radical anti-religion so often attributed to Huxley and Tyndall.
Of course, I am not for a second trying to imply that these men were closet religiosi, for there is far too much evidence to the contrary. Huxley’s comment about science being surrounded by dead theological notions, and Tyndall’s notorious “Belfast Address” of 1874 – when he was serving as president of the British Association – spelling out the secular materialistic status of science, make any attempt in that direction impossible. Yet while both actively and loudly campaigned for the profession of science in an independent secular context, and loved going for what they saw as meddlesome clergy, neither was especially atheistic. Religion and science were recognized as serving their wholly separate functions, and should keep to their distinct spheres.
Needless to say, there is a problem with this way of thinking, gnostic or not; for scientific and religious questions do interpenetrate on many levels, for both are about aspects of meaning and making sense of things. Indeed, to say that they must be kept apart is a bit like saying, “Medicine is a very worthwhile intellectual pursuit, but under no conceivable circumstances must you inflict it upon the sick.”
It may also have seemed viable, 150 years ago, for the new breed of Victorian science professionals, such as Huxley and Tyndall and their friends in the “X” and “Metaphysical” dining clubs, to attempt to keep science and religion apart as a way of escaping the dreaded clerical teleology, but this doesn’t work today. Many evangelical atheists now occupy a position that is far more extreme than that of Huxley and Tyndall: indeed, there are people who now scream out for the abolition of religion altogether, especially in public life, and who lump together Anglicans, American Protestant fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, and militant Islamists, because all claim allegiance to “outdated” or “backward” beliefs incapable of being proven in a laboratory. And as for things like consciousness or morality, well, they are generated by our evolved monkey brains – aren’t they?
Yet, there are two areas in which late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientific research has produced a body of new discoveries that Huxley and Tyndall could never have dreamed of, and which just cry out for religious engagement. I mean modern-day biomedical technology and deep-space cosmology.
Though we will be looking quite separately at the interpretation of brain scans in Chapter 12, we must stand in awe of how medical therapeutics has transformed the lifestyles and expectations of Western people since 1950. The way, for instance, body scans, using magnetic and other forms of high-energy fields in conjunction with computers, can now make visible and generate moving images of the inside of a living person, along with bio-engineering technologies which routinely allow us to ventilate, blood-circulate, nourish, and sustain bodies in various types of deep trauma. Nowadays life and death is no longer a simple matter: questions about meaningful existence and justifiable termination come into play. Exactly when, for example, does an independent human life begin? When in a body scan we see a group of cells starting to divide in a woman’s womb? And is the person who has lain inert on the life-support machine for a month, yet whose biological processes are being sustained by machinery, dead or alive? And what about the Alzheimer’s patient who occasionally flashes a meaningful glance or smile which forces us to ask: “The telephone exchange may well have shut down, but it still seems that there are intelligent messages trying to get through, so is there still a vital soul trapped in that poor physical shell of the person I once knew?” And what about the whole business of legal suicide? If modern medicine can extend biological life beyond what nature intended, and indeed, beyond what the patient may desire, do we have a right to say “enough is enough”? And who can say that a loving God will not forgive a person for making that choice?
A while ago, I was discussing some of these points with a retired physician of considerable eminence. He said that when he first entered medical school, in 1949, none of the above medical possibilities existed. You were conceived, born, and died, and medicine did what it could in between. Diagnostics relied heavily on the doctor’s personal skill and experience, and not on machines, and what was going on inside a living person was always difficult to ascertain. But things have changed profoundly over the last sixty years.
Modern medicine has generated a vast raft of diagnostic and therapeutic technologies, but these in turn have posed a spectrum not only of ethical, but also of “meaning” questions: questions that may have arisen occasionally before our very recent ability to scientifically extend life, but which the sheer volume of cases nowadays forces upon our attention in a way we cannot ignore. And who can deny that all of these scenarios are replete not only with professional and ethical, but also with religious questions, impinging as they do upon our sense of human identity, and our belief systems, conscience, and sense of purpose?
In short, modern science, instead of driving religious and “meaning” questions out of the picture, has brought them centre stage and under the spotlight. And the louder the New Atheists shout for an end to religion in the public consciousness, the more people are wanting answers to the “big questions”.
But medical therapeutic research which poses questions about the beginning, ending, and meaning of human life is not the only branch of post-1950 scientific discovery to suggest religious questions. The beginning, possible future, and nature of the universe do the same.
Until the 1920s and 1930s, when the “new cosmology” of Einsteinian relativity and Edwin Hubble’s and other astronomers’ demonstration of the vast distances and rapid recession of the “nebulae” (galaxies) began to transform the older Newtonian cosmology, the heavens were seen as infinitely old. Yes, observation-based cosmologists from the time of Sir William Herschel onwards, after 1785, were aware that the deep-space stellar heavens changed over vast periods of time, as stars slowly formed new gravitational systems with each other, disintegrated, or, as Pierre Simon Laplace had suggested with reference to the sun, threw off filaments of matter to condense to form our solar system. Yet it was all a “steady state” universe, in which matter and energy might be recycled, with stars and nebulae being formed and dying, as did human populations, but where the overall timeless infinite structure remained stable.
Of course, the argument from design showed the universe to be the handiwork of “the creator”, for could such physical and mathematical wonders be anything other than parts of a designed whole? This argument received an additional boost in the 1860s – at exactly the same time, so the atheists would have us believe, that Darwinian evolution was causing the argument from design to fall apart! A boost which came from the new science of astronomical spectroscopy, which detected sodium, nitrogen, iron, and other terrestrial chemicals in the sun and stars. So were the same elements of the periodic table that we find on earth also used by the creator to fabricate the entire universe? If so, what a unity, and what a grand design! And all of this seemed infinitely old and enduring, with one “space-time continuum” running through the whole – with twelve inches to a foot on Sirius, and the equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time in the Andromeda Nebula, just as we experienced them on earth!
By 1950, however, and certainly by the 1960s, things had begun to change drastically. From 1930, growing evidence was beginning to suggest that the universe as we see it today had begun existence as what the Belgian Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist, and mathematician Father Georges Lemaître styled a “primal atom” that somehow exploded at a particular time in the past. By the 1950s this was coming to be called a “big bang”, and this is now the accepted model within which cosmologists work. And the current estimate of time reckoned to have elapsed since the “big bang” is about 13.75 billion years, give or take a bit.
Yet unlike the universe of Newton, or that of the Victorians, this “new” universe is a dynamic place, in which incredible energy systems with seemingly bizarre laws of change and development are at work, a place where a foot and Greenwich Mean Time are not universal standards, but relate only to their own space-time situation. And the more we discover, the more bizarre this universe seems. Yet two things emerge. (1) This “new” universe still makes sense, and is no less susceptible to human comprehension and mathematical description than was the “old” one of 1860. (2) If the universe is 13.75 billion years old, then what was going on 14 billion years ago?
Now I am not for a moment suggesting that “big bang” cosmology provides us with some kind of proof for God’s existence, because it does not. But what it does do is pose questions that transcend physical and mathematical description. Being the kind of creatures that we are, we cannot prevent the “how” questions (or “by what scientific techniques can we find out all these facts?”) from leading to the “why” questions. Such as why did the universe develop in this way, and why has our intelligence been able to work it all out? As we saw in Chapter 10, we are purpose-, origin-, meaning-, congruence-seeking beings – that, quite simply, is how our minds work.
So when we look at how things changed between the 1880s and early 2000s, and how scientific discoveries in medicine and cosmology opened up whole new domains of science and religion issues that the Victorians could never have imagined, we are brought face to face with the aridity of modern atheist thinking, and we are reminded yet again that the principal currencies in which the New Atheists deal are bombast and myth. New and original atheistical ideas are about as thick on the ground as are the proverbial snowballs in hell.