Chapter 4: Tackling Arguments Against a Designing God
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- - Contents
- - Preface
- - Introduction
- - 1) The Physical Universe
- - 2) The Human Mind:
Cognition and Conscience - - 3) Love
- - 4) Tackling Arguments
Against a Designing God - - 5) Jesus
- - 6) The Resurrection
- - 7) Suffering
- - 8) Christianity and Politics
- - 9) Other Religions
- - 10) Heaven and Hell
- More Praise for God, Actually
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In Chapter 4, Williams rebuts some of the most common 'scientific' arguments
made against God by atheists such as Richard Dawkins.
Three remarkable features of the world strongly suggest to me that God must exist: the ordered complexity of the physical Universe; the unique faculties of the human mind; and love. There are solid grounds for thinking that these glorious phenomena are not accidental by-products of mindless natural forces, but were designed.
In concluding Part One of this book, it is now time to address the major atheistic objections to the concept of a Designing God. Some of them have already been touched upon, but several need to be examined more fully. It is not my contention that there are completely clear-cut refutations of these arguments, though all are logically flawed in one way or another and none of them move me. My base contention is that the issues are much more complicated than atheists would have us believe.
Moreover, except in some of the technological details, few if any of these issues are genuinely new. As Herbert Butterfield wrote in 1949:
I am not sure about the existence of any modern obstruction to religious belief which, when we come to the essential point, does not resolve itself into a fundamental difficulty of which the world was already cognisant two or three thousand years ago. Neither the difficulties nor the options before us are as modern as many people think.
Yet, as Butterfield added, the issues are 'not any less important for that'. They must be addressed.
The God of the gaps
It is often objected by atheists and sceptics that God is invoked by believers whenever science cannot explain something: we are left with a God 'of the gaps'. A corollary of this argument is that as science becomes more and more sophisticated, those gaps will be further and further narrowed, perhaps to a stage where there is no room left for God at all.
The Christian Church largely has itself to blame for such superficial strength as these arguments carry. It 'has so often imagined the gospel to be tied to the science of a particular epoch... that men have felt that the one must stand or fall with the other'. Far too often the Church tried to defend entrenched orthodoxies in the face of strong contrary evidence, such as that produced by Galileo and Darwin.
Nevertheless, the 'God of the gaps' argument is weak. The fact that too many religious leaders down the ages have been needlessly antagonistic towards science does not disprove the existence of God. As I sought to argue in Chapter 1, there are key instances where science supports rather than discredits certain basic tenets of Christianity. The Big Bang theory is a good example. More generally, the discoveries of science tend increasingly to reveal the wonderful complexity of the Universe, and in particular of life on Earth, making luck or happenstance less and less credible as explanations for why things are as they are. So many things must come together in just the way that they do; the slightest difference in any of countless ways and the whole would not merely be different - it would not exist, meaningfully or perhaps at all.
The great Australian chess player and analyst, C.J.S. Purdy, once remarked of Bobby Fischer's best games that they often seemed to 'hang by a thread'. Purdy's insight was that the mind's greatest and most profound creations are not simple but astoundingly complex: that is the way of deliberate genius. It is the same in Nature - many of its essential features hang by a thread.
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Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven.
Three remarkable features of the world strongly suggest to me that God must exist: the ordered complexity of the physical Universe; the unique faculties of the human mind; and love. There are solid grounds for thinking that these glorious phenomena are not accidental by-products of mindless natural forces, but were designed.
In concluding Part One of this book, it is now time to address the major atheistic objections to the concept of a Designing God. Some of them have already been touched upon, but several need to be examined more fully. It is not my contention that there are completely clear-cut refutations of these arguments, though all are logically flawed in one way or another and none of them move me. My base contention is that the issues are much more complicated than atheists would have us believe.
Moreover, except in some of the technological details, few if any of these issues are genuinely new. As Herbert Butterfield wrote in 1949:
I am not sure about the existence of any modern obstruction to religious belief which, when we come to the essential point, does not resolve itself into a fundamental difficulty of which the world was already cognisant two or three thousand years ago. Neither the difficulties nor the options before us are as modern as many people think.
Yet, as Butterfield added, the issues are 'not any less important for that'. They must be addressed.
The God of the gaps
It is often objected by atheists and sceptics that God is invoked by believers whenever science cannot explain something: we are left with a God 'of the gaps'. A corollary of this argument is that as science becomes more and more sophisticated, those gaps will be further and further narrowed, perhaps to a stage where there is no room left for God at all.
The Christian Church largely has itself to blame for such superficial strength as these arguments carry. It 'has so often imagined the gospel to be tied to the science of a particular epoch... that men have felt that the one must stand or fall with the other'. Far too often the Church tried to defend entrenched orthodoxies in the face of strong contrary evidence, such as that produced by Galileo and Darwin.
Nevertheless, the 'God of the gaps' argument is weak. The fact that too many religious leaders down the ages have been needlessly antagonistic towards science does not disprove the existence of God. As I sought to argue in Chapter 1, there are key instances where science supports rather than discredits certain basic tenets of Christianity. The Big Bang theory is a good example. More generally, the discoveries of science tend increasingly to reveal the wonderful complexity of the Universe, and in particular of life on Earth, making luck or happenstance less and less credible as explanations for why things are as they are. So many things must come together in just the way that they do; the slightest difference in any of countless ways and the whole would not merely be different - it would not exist, meaningfully or perhaps at all.
The great Australian chess player and analyst, C.J.S. Purdy, once remarked of Bobby Fischer's best games that they often seemed to 'hang by a thread'. Purdy's insight was that the mind's greatest and most profound creations are not simple but astoundingly complex: that is the way of deliberate genius. It is the same in Nature - many of its essential features hang by a thread.
Buy God, Actually and read more...
