Has Science Disproved God?

Science has neither proved or disproved God. Whatever we believe about science, it is always possible to say that that is simply way that God does things.  When Edmund Gosse was a botanist in the 1850s his wife would look down the microscope and say, 'How marvellous are thy doings!' How wonderful are the things that you do, oh God. Many Christians would simply see the big bang theory and evolution as an explanation of how God created the universe. I have read Richard Dawkin's book, The God Delusion, and that book says more about God than any other book I've ever read, not excluding the Bible. I've read Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time. All the time I was thinking, 'What a clever God. Imagine him setting off big bangs all over the sky, as if he was simply lighting fireworks.' Both of these writers believed that there might have been more than one big bang. 

According to surveys done in America 78 per cent of scientists there attribute creation to God. Only 13 per cent believe that evolution all happened by chance. 46 per cent of Americans believe that the universe is a few thousand years old because the Bible says so. English Christians are more likely to believe that God created the universe in 6 days that were billions of years long. Only a few of us believe in what we call the young Earth. I'm a don't know. I think we have no idea when God created the universe. What about the age of the fossils? Very few fossils can be dated by radioactive methods. Carbon dating works on organic matter like wood and only works over a few centuries. Uranium dating only works on zirconium rocks. These contain uranium. Most fossils are dated from their position in the rock strata. The lower down they are, the older they will be. How do we know that the rate of deposition is always the same? If we can see galaxies that are billions of light years away that suggests that the universe is billions of years old. How do we know that the speed of light has always been the same? Some American writers think that, at the time of creation, light travelled instantaneously. Why am I not a young Earth creationist? I see the stories about creation in the Bible as being poetic and highly metaphorical. In Job 38 God brings the snow out of his store houses. Were you there when I laid the foundations of the Earth? When the morning stars together? In Psalm 19 God pitches a tent in the heavens for the Sun. The heavens proclaim the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. There is no language in which they are not heard. Genesis 1 explains the creation story in six days in a similar order to evolution. Plants and fish first, man and animals later. Christians get passionate about the exact interpretation of this chapter because it's on the first page of the Bible so they all know about it. Fewer people have read Job 38. The intensely poetic nature of these passages makes me uncertain that they are meant to be taken scientifically.

Is evolution a universally accepted theory? It doesn't seem that the majority of Americans believe in it. Believing that everything could come out of nothing and that lifeforms as advanced as us could happen by chance seems ridiculous to many people. Harvard biologist Steven Jay Gould said, 'Humans are a glorious accident of evolution which required 60 trillion contingent events.' There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 million galaxies we can see and perhaps a billion times as many that we can't see. Give a few trillion stars and a few billion years of time and, surely, anything you can imagine will happen eventually.  English people like me are used to thinking that way. But I disagree. The Russian science fiction author Isaac Asimov calculated the odds against one molecule of haemoglobin happening by chance. The BBC astronomer Patrick Moore calculated the odds against another planet being suitable for human life. The odds against these things are not astronomical - they are higher than that. They are greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. Someone reading this might say, okay, but our grandparents thought the universe was infinite. The old astronomers, like Fred Hoyle, believed in the Steady State theory and an eternal, infinite universe. Couldn't they be right? In which case, ET, don't phone home, by the time the signal gets there your sun will be a black hole and your mother will be dead, but surely alien life is out there at an unimaginable distance. 

I don't believe this to be true. It is possible for an event to have a probability of zero. What are the chances of winning the lottery during your lifetime? Maybe a million to one. What are the chances of winning the lottery if gambling is against your fundamentalist Christian beliefs and you never buy a ticket? Zero. Some things aren't highly improbable, they're impossible. 

The universe contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics - matter and energy can neither be created or destroyed. You can't have a cosmic egg coming out of nothing and nowhere. Where did God come from? God didn't come from anywhere. God is eternal. God is, God was, God always will be. God is omnipresent. His substance passes through the whole universe simultaneously. He has no locality. Imagine you are in a square room with a clock on the wall. That room contains the four dimensions we live in. Length, breadth, height and time. God is outside those dimensions. There is a need for something in the universe that is outside normal space and time, a something that didn't come from anywhere, that has always been everywhere. God fits this description and so does Steven Hawking's description of matter and anti-matter particles forming everywhere, constantly colliding. The matter is positive energy, the anti-matter is negative energy, so the net sum energy of the universe is zero. The Steven Hawking universe recycles itself. Neither of us could explain how or why these things happen. Believing in God makes at least as much sense as trying to understand the universe without him. To the Christian God is not energy (that is true only of some eastern religions) and belief in God is not simply an attempt to explain where everything came from. It is revelation. God has spoken to people over the years. Here I am, I created you. I love you.

The third law of thermodynamics is the law of entropy. I see this as a much more of a problem. Without this, I might have considered Steven Hawking to have had at least a reasonable proposal. Any complex system has a tendency to break down, to become more disorganised, chaotic and useless. The universe, if the big bang and evolution are correct, does the exact opposite. It began as a ball of chaotic plasma, cooled into a gas, exploded in the early days of the theory but, in the 21st century, rapidly expanded and composed itself into the weird and wonderful universe and world that we live in. This is not highly improbable, it is impossible. The universe can't begin in a simple form and develop into a more and more complex form. It contradicts the law of entropy.

The Meriam Webster dictionary gives the following definition of science. 'Science is knowledge of or study of the world based on facts based on experiments or observation.' The universe isn't a repeatable experiment. It can not be peer reviewed. No one can take another huge ball of hydrogen gas, expand it, and wait billions of years to see what happens. Scientists make up a theory, like the big bang, they then make up their minds what evidence they should look for, the cosmic background radiation, and then they find it. If the police investigated a crime in this way we could accuse them of fitting somebody up. Then there is the consensus of scientific opinion. Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin's associates, said, 'Science commits suicide if it has a creed.' Too often there is a popular theory no one can disagree with. When they were alive, either Charles Darwin or Steven Hawking were both humble men who would readily admit that their theory was only a proposal. When dead, they became legendary thinkers no one was allowed to disagree with. It's often magazine editors or politicians who seem to make the rules. One writer on Quora website was getting very angry. 'If you don't agree with the Big Bang you are on your own.' Not true. He seems to be ignorant of the statistics in America. You can say that they're wrong not to believe in it, you can't say that they're on their own. The writer recalled a disagreement between Steven Hawking and Fred Hoyle at a university in 1973. At the time, the Steady State theory passionately believed in by Fred Hoyle was equally respected. Who has decided that it isn't anymore? Apparently the government. American astronomers complain that you can't get a grant unless you believe in it. In Gateshead in England a teacher at Emmanuel College said that he didn't believe in evolution. It was headline news. Tony Blair had to answer a question about it in parliament. He was asked if there was a school in Gateshead that taught creation instead of evolution. He replied that rumours about the school were exaggerated. What Thomas Huxley meant is that a theory can become widely accepted not because it has a good chance of being correct but because people are afraid to disagree with it.

The scientific theories we have about the universe go back to the 19th century. People understood atoms but not electrons. If the electrical charge on an electron was just a tiny bit different there would be no atoms. They understood cells but not DNA. If Darwin thought that cells were just blobs of jelly and that atoms were just solid lumps, the universe would have been much simpler. Now what we know about it makes it much harder to believe it could all happen by chance. The DNA in one cell is like an entire volume of encyclopedias. Fill a large hall with monkeys and sit each one in front of a typewriter. How long would it take for one of them to type just one page of text? They'd die first.