God, Faith and the New Millennium

Christian Belief in an Age of Science

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780744827
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Religion

Does being a Christian in the modern scientific age require intellectual suicide?What future for Christianity in the Third Millennium?In God, Faith and the New Millennium Keith Ward has produced a powerful and upbeat study of Christian belief that tackles questions such as these head on. In what he describes as a summary of his life's work on Christianity, religion and science, Ward's new and positive interpretation presents a Christian faith in harmony with the scientific worldview while remaining true to its traditions.This is a cutting-edge study that will provoke and inspire every Christian and anyone interested in the debate on the role of faith in the modern world. Through his examination of key issues such as Creation, evolution and the divine purpose, Ward demonstrates that there is a 'natural fit' between the scientific worldview and mainstream Christian beliefs – Christian faith gives insight into the meaning and purpose of the universe, the physical structure of which modern science has marvellously discovered.

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Christianity and the Scientific Worldview

TRADITIONAL RELIGIOUS AND MODERN SCIENTIFIC PICTURES OF THE UNIVERSE

The fundamental idea of God that is found in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions is that God is the one and only creator of everything other than God. God is ‘the Father’ of the universe, a traditional metaphorical expression for the one who brings the universe into existence and sustains its life. This idea of God might be accepted simply because it is revealed in the Bible and the Qur’an. But it is an idea that arises naturally as one reflects on the nature of the universe in which humans exist. In fact, modern scientific knowledge of the universe suggests the idea of a creator with almost compelling force, yet it can look as though the scientific idea of the universe is in conflict with the traditional religious idea.

This is because, when the ancient Scriptures were written, the universe was believed to be relatively small, both in space and in time. In the first chapters of Genesis, the earth was the centre of the universe, a disc floating on water, covered by the hemisphere of the sky, from which the stars, sun and moon were hung as ‘lamps’ to measure the seasons, days and nights. It had not existed for very long – it had been created in six days, about four thousand years before Christ. And it would probably come to an end quite soon, in a few generations at most, when the sky would fold up, the star-lamps would fall to earth, and the whole created universe would be destroyed.

The modern scientific view of the physical universe is very different. The earth is a small planet in a sun system at the edge of just one galaxy of stars out of many millions of galaxies. It is dwarfed into physical insignificance by a huge and expanding universe, which has no centre but is spread out like the surface of an expanding balloon. The planet earth has existed for billions of years, and it will continue to exist for perhaps another five billion, when it will become uninhabitable as the sun turns into a red giant star and incinerates all life on earth, before collapsing into a tiny white dwarf star. Human life evolved from simpler organic forms, and has existed for about two million years, about ten thousand of them carrying remnants of fairly advanced cultures. The planet earth may indeed cease to exist at any moment, through some cosmic catastrophe. But if it does, that will not be the end of the universe. It will be an event of hardly any significance to the universe as a whole, which will go on existing for billions of years, perhaps evolving many forms of life more advanced than the human, for all we know.

Thus the picture of the universe given by the ancient religious traditions is very different from the picture given by modern science. In the traditional picture, human existence seemed to be the most important thing in creation. Heaven was populated almost entirely with humans, and God’s purposes for humans were assumed to be coincident with God’s purposes for the whole creation. Modern science gives us a picture that looks very different. Human life seems very small in relation to the whole universe. We seem to have lost our central place in creation.

IS HUMAN LIFE INSIGNIFICANT?

To some people, it seems that the scientific view deprives human life of significance altogether. The best available view in physics is that the universe originated about ten to fifteen billion years ago, in a state of infinitely compressed gravity and energy. It exploded into an expanding balloon of space-time, and as it began to cool, the basic forces of electricity, magnetism, gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces were created. Basic elementary particles formed and began to join up into simple atomic structures. The simplest atoms of hydrogen and helium formed swirling clouds of gas, which condensed into galaxies, stars and planets. Stars grew and collapsed, in their death throes creating more complex elements, such as carbon. At a later stage still, planetary systems were seeded with carbon atoms, and on the surface of at least this planet, earth, the extremely complex molecular structures of RNA and DNA gave rise to the self-replicating forms that we call ‘life’. This, in turn produced even more complex structures with consciousness and some capacity for action.

The fifteen-billion-year history of the expanding universe has been one which has produced amazingly complex structures on one tiny planet, and the process is still continuing. We do know, however, that the universe has a finite life span. If it goes on expanding, the law of entropy will ensure that all complexity and organised structure is eliminated. If the universe contracts again, under the force of gravity, it will end in a Big Crunch, in which all things will be destroyed. Either way, the complexity of human life, which was always a freak event in the history of the universe, will inevitably be destroyed. The universe will simply run down, and in it the whole story of humanity will have been a peripheral sideshow, the flicker of a dragonfly’s wing, present only for an instant in the long, blind, purposeless interplay of physical energies that is the real nature of this universe.

That is how it looks to some people. And yet we must be very careful to separate well-established scientific theories about the history of the universe from the significance we give to the process. It is quite true that in the scientific account, human life is a tiny flicker in the vast spatial distances and temporal aeons of this universe. We can look out on a clear night, see stars millions of light years away and feel reduced to insignificance by the vastness of nature. But we should bear in mind that size is not to be confused with importance. I might be a tiny speck in comparison with the starry sky. But if, on all the stars in that sky, there are nothing but lifeless, unconscious nuclear reactions and vast swathes of gas and dust, my little life may be more important than all of them put together.

Just suppose that there is a God who created the universe. No doubt the creator enjoys the beauty and variety of the physical universe, and the intergalactic clouds and the galaxies themselves are important to the creator because they express his power and wisdom: ‘the heavens declare the glory of God’ (Psalm 19: 1). But if it is the creator’s wish to produce conscious agents who can come to understand the universe and share in God’s appreciation of it, to know the creator of the universe, and enter into a relationship of loving co-operation with the creator, then the goal of the whole cosmic process will be the existence of such conscious agents. In that sense, however many billions of galaxies there are, they will all exist as parts of a process whose goal is the existence of human beings. To be exact, the goal will be the existence of rational conscious agents, of which there may be many in the universe. But we only know of one case so far, and it may be the only case. Either way, human beings are one of the forms of life that are the purpose of creation. It is quite consistent with modern scientific knowledge, after all, to think that human beings are more important than the stars and galaxies. Humans may well be the reason why stars and galaxies exist, and they are at any rate one of the reasons why they do.

It may seem a little arrogant to think that the whole of space and time, billions of years old and billions of light years in extent, exists just to produce human beings. In fact, recent research in physics shows that it is not a ludicrous thought. It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the basic constants and laws of physics need to be very fine-tuned to generate the sorts of complex order that exist in our universe. The four basic forces that make up our universe – electromagnetic, gravitational, and the weak and strong nuclear forces – establish a set of relationships between the fundamental physical particles (at present thought to be quarks) that enable them to build into the protons, neutrons and electrons that form atoms of the various elements. Those atoms in turn combine in various ways to form molecules, and they build the extremely complex physical structures that enable living organisms to develop. Such organisms develop central nervous systems, and eventually brains, which can mirror and react to their environments. By a further development of the cortex in some of these brains, truly self-conscious agents come into existence.

All this incremental structural complexity happens in accordance with the fundamental laws of physics, which were built into the universe at the moment of its origin, the so-called ‘Big Bang’. Some physicists have calculated that the time it would take for complex self-conscious agents to evolve from simple atomic structures, in accordance with the basic laws of physics, would be about fifteen billion years. During that time, the visible universe has been expanding at the speed of light, so that the size of the universe should now be fifteen billion light years across – which it is. In other words, the universe needs to be just about the vast age and size it is, if human beings are to evolve in accordance with the basic laws of physics. If the creator wanted human beings to evolve through the successive application to elementary physical particles of a basic set of elegant and simple physical principles, then a universe of just this size and character would be the one to choose.

It turns out that human beings are not peripheral to the universe after all, even if they are dwarfed in size by the physical cosmos. They could well be the reason why the whole cosmos was created. The moral of the story is that size is not everything. A mind that can understand this universe, and even begin to change it, is in many ways of more significance than a billion billion light years of unconscious interstellar dust. The generation of minds that can come to know and love their creator may in the end be what gives meaning and significance to the whole cosmic process.

THE ENDING OF LIFE AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

But what about the inevitable destruction of the universe? Does that deprive human life of significance? The thought that it does rests on another misconception. Just as it is mistaken to think that the vast size of the universe reduces humans to insignificance, so it is mistaken to think that the fact that all sentient life will come to an end deprives such life of significance. A life does not have to last for ever in order to have meaning and value. It has meaning for as long as it lasts, and the thought that it will end may even give it greater meaning. Think about listening to a Mozart symphony. For many people, that will be an experience of great significance. It will be an experience worth having, just for its own sake. Let us call that an experience of intrinsic value. It is intrinsic because we do not value it just as a means to something else, like having a drink in the interval, or getting home after the concert. It is a value, because it is something we would choose to do for its own sake; it is something worthy of choice by any rational and sentient being (whether or not they actually choose it is another matter; the point is, it is worth choosing).

What gives life significance are experiences of intrinsic value. There are millions of different sorts of experiences like that, from playing skittles to enjoying a good meal or walking in the mountains. Listening to a Mozart symphony is just one of them. Now Mozart symphonies all come to an end. Does that mean they are not significant? Not at all. It is safe to say that they would be less significant, or at least less enjoyable, if they went on for ever (people who do not like music may dread the very idea). When we know the symphony will not last for long, we savour its sounds with even greater intensity, attention and enjoyment. Here is something that we may never hear again. This is our only chance to get an experience of very great value. We must grasp it with both hands: carpe diem, seize the day!

So the knowledge that a Mozart symphony will end gives it more, not less, significance. Moreover, its significance does not lie in its ending, in its last chord. That last chord, on its own, has very little significance. Even the final phrase, however beautiful it may be, could hardly be regarded as the reason why the whole symphony exists. The symphony does not exist just to produce that last phrase or two. What matters is the whole symphony, the way the themes come back in varied forms, the way the different movements contrast and build on one another, the way the music forms a pattern and a whole which has a sort of overall completeness and integrated beauty of form.

So we should not look for the meaning of a symphony just in its final few bars. We hope that they will form a fitting resolution of the work, but without the whole preceding set of sounds, they would mean much less. The meaning of the symphony is apprehended only by apprehending the whole work, with each part in its proper place. That is why it is not really satisfactory only to hear the ‘purple passages’ from longer pieces of music, without appreciating the context into which they fit and which gives them a rather different experienced quality. You have to hear the whole thing; and if it is by a gifted composer like Mozart, that will introduce you to forms of beauty you would never otherwise have known.

In a similar way, the significance of human life does not lie in its closing moments, whether we are talking about the cosmic death of the human race or the deaths of its individual members. The significance lies in the process of the life itself, and the way in which its various elements fit into an overall pattern within it. When people complain that life is meaningless, they often mean either that they can discern no intrinsic values in it, or that they cannot see how the events that happen to them fit into any overall pattern at all. To see the meaning of a human life would be to see the distinctive values it realises, which would otherwise not exist at all, and to see how its various elements fit into a unique, complex and integrated pattern. It is not to discover that there is some last state it arrives at which is somehow the purpose of the whole life. In a word, the purpose is not the ending, but the process. A life has a purpose if it has a pattern and a set of realised values that are unique and distinctive to it.

So the universe may have a purpose, if it is a process in which distinctive intrinsic values are realised in a complex, unique and integrated pattern, even if the last temporal state of that universe is one of dark, lifeless emptiness, or the incandescent flare of the Big Crunch. It makes sense to see human beings, or perhaps rational beings in general, who do realise complex and unique intrinsic values, as the purpose for the existence of this universe, even if they all die out long before the universe comes to an end, as it inevitably will.

WHY COSMIC EVOLUTION?

This helps to answer the question of why God has created rational beings who evolve over billions of years, rather than just creating them fully fledged and instantaneously. Humans may be the goal, or part of the goal, of the physical process. Nevertheless, what is significant about this universe is the whole process, and not just the attainment of its goal. Human beings recapitulate in themselves the history of cosmic evolution. They carry in their physical structure, in their genes and molecules, the history of their past. They are parts of that long physical process that is becoming aware of its own nature, and is beginning to direct it responsibly. The goal is not just the culmination of the process, but the whole process itself, which is one of generating from within a material cosmos the ability of that cosmos to understand and take control of its own being. Human beings are parts of the cosmic process in which one can see this understanding and control begin to exist.

They are not mature, conscious agents without a history, who just begin to exist, with the whole material cosmos as an unnecessary backdrop to their activity. They are highly complex material structures, carrying within themselves the history of their development, integral parts of a wider material order. It is that order which they can understand and help to control, and human life should be seen as just one part of a wider process of creative development.

The process is one of creative emergence, as new forms of intelligibility and beauty successively come into existence out of earlier and simpler structures. One can see this whole process as if it were a work of creative imagination, continually building complex structures out of simpler elements, and always moving towards the capacity of the process to know and shape itself. If it is such a work, the whole process will have a beauty, intelligibility and imaginative flair that will be of great value to the creative intelligence that creates it and continues to move it towards that final goal which has been implicit in it from the first. Humans are not spiritual substances dropped into the material world as alien intruders. They are parts of a continuum of growing complexity in the material order, realising possibilities implicit in that order from the beginning.

For most of its existence, it may seem that all the beauty and intelligibility of the universe will be unappreciated, because there will be no one there to appreciate it. But if God is the imaginative creator, the cosmic artist, then of course God will know and appreciate the whol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Praface
• Introduction
• 1. Christianity and the Scientific Worldview
• 2. The Trinity and Creation
• 3. Sacred Cosmology: the Genesis Creation Narratives
• 4. Explaining the Universe
• 5. Theistic Explanation
• 6. Breaking Out of the Mechanistic Universe
• 7. God’s Action in the Universe
• 8. Creation, Suffering and the Divine Purpose
• 9. God and Evolution
• 10. The Soul
• 11. The Fall and Salvation of Humanity
• 12. Breaking out of Literalism
• 13. Christianity Among the World Religions
• 14. The Life of Jesus
• 15. The World to Come
• 16. The End of All Things
• Conclusion
• Selected Further Reading
• Index