Article no.

1
It was a great pleasure for me to meet and have a spirited discussion with John Horgan. We found that we had
much in common, including good scientific grounds for not being atheists, which made it all the more
interesting to discuss the areas where we differed. Horgan is right to suggest that I appeal to the heart as well as
the head since God is not a theory but a person and so a holistic approach is apposite--but I dont appeal to the
heart as opposed to the head!
I was rather amused when I saw the title: Can Faith and Science Coexist? since in one sense the answer is
obvious and has nothing to do with God. All scientists presuppose and therefore have faith in the rational
intelligibility of the universe. Einstein could not have been a scientist without this faith. But the title probably
intended the word faith as shorthand for faith in God." Indeed, one of my main reasons for believing in God
is that we can do science. The mathematical intelligibility of nature is evidence for a rational spirit behind the
universe. If we take the atheist view, then rationality dissolves, as distinguished philosopher Alvin Plantinga of
Notre Dame neatly puts it:
If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong
reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any
belief that they produce including Dawkins own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in
naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with
God.
Plantinga is a Christian, but atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel says essentially the same: Evolutionary
naturalism implies that we shouldnt take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture
on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends."
I sympathise with Horgans main objection--the problem of evil and pain. It is the hardest problem for both of
us. Yet for me it leads to God and not away from him for several reasons. Firstly, at the intellectual level, if
there is no God then I agree with thinkers from Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that there is no such thing as
evil (e.g. Dawkins famous statement: there is no goodno evil no justiceDNA just is and we dance to its
music). Rather contradictory then to talk about a problem of evil at all.
Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid
of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate
personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have
suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will
never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgans positive reaction to what we have
achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.

Whether God could have made a world in which fire warmed but didnt burn and there were no destructive
earthquakes is difficult. After all, earthquakes are paradoxically essential for the maintenance of life. Certainly,
God could have made a world in which there was no moral evil. But there would have been no humans in it--it
would be a robotic world. The greatest God-given capacity we humans have is the capacity to love. It inevitably
carries with it the capacity to hate. Hence the world presents us all with a mixed picture beauty and barbed
wire.
The question I ask is: granted that this is so, is there anywhere evidence of the existence of a God whom I can
trust with this deep issue? Yes. At the heart of Christianity there is a cross. The central claim of Christianity is
that Jesus Christ is God incarnate which raises the question: what is God doing on a cross? At the very least
that shows me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it. Furthermore,
Christ rose from the dead, which is a guarantee that there is to be a future judgement. This is a marvellous hope,
because it means that our conscience is not an illusion, and those who terrorise, abuse, exploit, defame and
cause their fellow humans untold suffering will not get away with it. Atheism has no such hope--for it ultimate
justice is an illusion.
Finally, none of us finds the idea of ultimate justice attractive because we are all flawed and have all messed up.
The cross also speaks of a place where I can receive forgiveness and new life by repenting and trusting the one
who died for me. Christianity competes with no other philosophy or religion since no one else offers me such a
radical solution to my human problem.
Article no. 2
Science and religion are often cast as opponents in a battle for human hearts and minds.
But far from the silo of strict creationism and the fundamentalist view that evolution simply didnt happen lies
the truth: science and religion are complementary.
God cast us in his own image. We have free will and intelligence. Without science we could only ever operate at
the whim of God.
Discussion of the idea that our universe is fundamentally intelligible is even more profound. Through science
and the use of mathematical rules, we can and do understand how nature works.
The fact our universe is intelligible has profound implications for humankind and perhaps for the existence of
God.

Does science work?

Its very clear that science works. We can explain and predict how nature will behave over an extraordinary
range of scales.
There are various limits to scientific understanding but, within these limits, science makes a complete and
compelling picture.
We know that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang model of universal creation
makes a number of very specific and numerical predictions which are observed and measured with high
accuracy.
The Standard Model of Particle Physics employs something known as Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking to
explain the strength of the laws of nature.
Within the Standard Model the strength of these laws are not predicted. At present our current best theory is that
they arose by chance.
But these strengths have to be exquisitely fine-tuned in order for life to exist. How so?
The strength of the gravitational attraction must be tuned to ensure that the expansion of the universe is not too
fast and not too slow.
It must be strong enough to enable stars and planets to form but not too strong, otherwise stars would burn
through their nuclear fuel too quickly.
The imbalance between matter and anti-matter in the early Universe must be fine tuned to 12 orders of
magnitude to create enough mass to form stars and galaxies.
The strength of the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions must be finely-tuned to create stable protons
and neutrons.
They must also be fine-tuned to enable complex nuclei to be synthesized in supernovae.
Finally the mass of the electron and the strength of the electromagnetic interaction must be tuned to provide the
chemical reaction rates that enables life to evolve over the timescale of the Universe.

The fine tuning of gravitational attraction and electromagnetic interactions which allow the laws of nature to
enable life to form are too clever to be simply a coincidence.
Is intelligent life special?
It has taken 4.5 billion years for humans to evolve on earth. This is more than 25% of the age of the universe
itself.
We are the only intelligent life that has existed on the planet and we have only been here for 0.005% of the time
the planet has been here.
This is a mere blink in the age of the galaxy. If some other intelligent life had emerged elsewhere in the galaxy
before us, why havent we seen it here?
To me this is a strong argument that we are the first intelligent life in the galaxy.
Designed for life
One interpretation of the collection of unlikely coincidences that lead to our existence is that a designer made
the universe this way in order for it to create us; in other words, this designer created a dynamic evolving whole
whose output is our creation.
Many take exception to this idea and argue instead that our universe is but one of an uncountable multitude that
has happened to create us.
Other ideas are that there are as-yet unobserved principles of nature that will explain why the strengths of the
forces are as they are.
To me, neither argument is in principle against an intelligent design.
The designer is simply clever enough to have devised either an evolving multitude of universes or to have
devised a way to make our present universe create us.
Intelligible Design
We do know a lot about the design of the universe, so clearly the design is in good measure intelligible.
But why is it that we can understand nature so well?

One answer is that evolution favours organisms that can exploit their environment. Most organisms have a set
of wired instructions passed from earlier generations.
Over the evolutionary history of Earth, organisms that can learn how to manipulate their surroundings have
prospered.
Humans are not unique in this trait but were definitely the best at learning. So in other words nature has built us
to understand the rules of nature.
Mathematics and science
All of this rests on the predictability which results from nature obeying rules. As weve learned about these
rules weve discovered that they can be expressed in purely mathematical form.
Mathematics has a validity that is independent of its ability to describe nature and the universe.
One could imagine mathematics with its complex relationships being true outside of our universe and having
the ability to exist outside it.
The outcome of humankinds investigations into nature is science. And the fundamental tenet of science is that
there is an objective reality which can be understood by anybody who is willing to learn.
A universe without laws?
The only way I can imagine a universe without rules is for every action to be the result of an off-screen director
who controls all.
Such a thing is almost beyond comprehension as everything would need to be the result of premeditation.
Events would appear to occur by pure random chance. Furthermore the level of detail required for godly
oversight is absolutely beyond human comprehension.
Each of the hundreds of billions of cells in our bodies operates within a complex set of biochemical reactions,
all of which have to work individually and as well as collectively for just one human body to function.
So for a start our offscreen director would have to ensure that all these processes happen correctly for every one
of the trillions of living organisms on earth.

Free will
We are all the stuff of the universe, absolutely embedded within, and subject to, the rules which govern nature.
Because were self-aware, one can argue that the universe is self-aware.
Without an intelligible design it would be impossible for humans to have free will as all actions would be as a
consequence of the will of the director. Free will is a fundamental element of Christian doctrine.
The Christian statement God made man in His own image implies both free will and intelligence for humans.
Intelligible design is thus a necessary condition for the existence of a Christian God.
Given we are intelligent, we can imagine sharing this aspect with a God who made us in His own image.
Free will is only possible in a universe with rules and hence predictability.
Intelligence has application beyond our physical universe which is indicative, but not proof of, God to me.
On the other hand, the existence of a God providing free will to humans requires the existence of science.
Otherwise we could only ever operate at the whim of God.
Science and religion go hand in hand.
We all know the subjective reality of experience. I personally feel the power of the redemption which is at the
core of Christianity.
Each of us has access to that through our own free will to exercise choice.
Article no. 3
Evolution
The notion that science and religion are irreconcilable centers in large part on the issue of evolution. Charles
Darwin, in his 1859 bookThe Origin of Species, explained that the myriad species inhabiting Earth were a result
of repeated evolutionary branching from common ancestors.
One would be hard pressed to find a legitimate scientist today who does not believe in evolution. As laid out in
a cover story in the November issue of National Geographic magazine, the scientific evidence for evolution is
overwhelming.

Yet in a 2001 Gallup poll 45 percent of U.S. adults said they believe evolution has played no role in shaping
humans. According to the creationist view, God produced humans fully formed, with no previous related
species.
But what if evolution is God's tool? Darwin never said anything about God. Many scientistsand theologians
maintain that it would be perfectly logical to think that a divine being used evolution as a method to create
the world.
Still, science does contradict a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis in the Bibleon the origin of
the universewhich says that God created heaven and the Earth and the species on it in six days.
Scientific evidence shows that the universe was actually formed about 13.7 billion years ago, while the Earth
was formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first humans date back only a hundred thousand years or so.
Like other scientists of faith, Primack, who is Jewish and reads the Bible regularly, argues that the Bible must
not be taken literally, but should be read allegorically.
"One simply cannot read the Bible as a scientific text, because it's often contradictory," Primack said. "For
example, in the Bible, Noah takes two animals and puts them on the Ark. But in a later section, he takes seven
pairs of animals. If this is the literal word of God, was God confused when He wrote it?"
Proving God
Science is young. The term "scientist" may not even have been coined until 1833. Ironically, modern physics
initially sought to explain the clockwork of God's creation. Geology grew partly out of a search for evidence of
Noah's Flood.
Today few scientists seem to think much about religion in their research. Many are reluctant to stray outside
their area of expertise and may not feel a need to invoke God in their work.
"Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy," said Brian Greene, a world-renowned physicist and
author of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. "If you don't need an explanatory
principle, don't invoke it."
There is, of course, no way to prove religious faith scientifically. And it's hard to envision a test that could tell
the difference between a universe created by God and one that appeared without God.
"There's no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the
abstract idea of a divine creator," Greene said.
Instead, Greene said, science and religion can operate in different realms. "Science is very good at answering
the 'how' questions. How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?" he said. "But it is woefully
inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. Why is there a universe at all? These are the meaning questions,
which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with."
But is a clean separation between science and religion possible? Some scientific work, including such hot topics
as stem cell research, has moral and religious implications.
"Religion is about ethics, or what you should do, while science is about what's true," Primack said. "Those are
different things, but of course what you should do is greatly determined by what's true."

Natural Laws
In a 1997 survey in the science journal Nature, 40 percent of U.S. scientists said they believe in Godnot just a
creator, but a God to whom one can pray in expectation of an answer. That is the same percentage of scientists
who were believers when the survey was taken 80 years earlier.
But the number may have been higher if the question had simply asked about God's existence. While many
scientists seem to have no problem with deismthe belief that God set the universe in motion and then walked
awayothers are more troubled with the concept of an intervening God.
"Every piece of data that we have indicates that the universe operates according to unchanging, immutable laws
that don't allow for the whimsy or divine choice to all of a sudden change things in a manner that those laws
wouldn't have allowed to happen on their own," Greene said.
Yet recent breakthroughs in chaos theory and quantum mechanics, for example, also suggest that the workings
of the universe cannot be predicted with absolute precision.
To many scientists, their discoveries may not be that different from religious revelations. Science advancements
may even draw scientists closer to religion.
"Even as science progresses in its reductionist fashion, moving towards deeper, simpler, and more elegant
understandings of particles and forces, there will still remain a 'why' at the end as to why the ultimate rules are
the way they are," said Ted Sargent, a nanotechnology expert at the University of Toronto.
"This is where many people will find God, and the fact of having a final unanswerable 'why' will not go away,
even if the 'why' gets more and more fundamental as we progress," he said.
Brian Greene believes we are taking giant strides toward understanding the deepest laws of the universe. That,
he says, has strengthened his belief in the underlying harmony and order of the cosmos.
"The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some
underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand," he said. "If someone wants to place the word God
on those collections of words, it's OK with me."