For the past five hundred years of modern science, new discoveries about the universe have revealed two things: 1) the natural world is far more complex than we previously thought; and 2) this complexity can (almost) always be accounted for by natural, rather than supernatural, means.  Defenders of theistic belief commonly emphasize the first point and highlight the rich tapestry of DNA coding, the complex interconnectivity of the components of the cell, and the vast expanse of the universe – with its trillions of stars – to argue that the universe must have been the work of a supernatural intelligent designer.  But atheists counter these arguments by emphasizing the second point – the fact that nearly all phenomena in the universe that were once thought to be beyond scientific explanation have been found to be the product of natural phenomena.

 

The entire scientific enterprise is a quest to provide natural explanations for previously unexplainable phenomena, and in general, this project has been remarkably successful.  But for each explanation that scientists provide, they often uncover another layer of complexity that raises new questions.  Newton’s discovery of gravitation constants, for instance, showed that there was apparently no need for a divine hand to guide the planets in their orbits, but as Newton pointed out, it raised new questions about how the planets and their perfectly formed ellipses were set in motion in the first place.  The discovery of “big bang” cosmology provided a natural explanation for the phenomena that Newton believed had required a direct supernatural creation, but for many people, it in turn raised new questions that could only be answered by invoking a supernatural agent – questions, for instance, about what produced the “big bang.”  Similarly, at the microscopic level, the discovery of DNA answered questions about heredity, mutations, and evolution that had long seemed mysterious – and that had once seemed to some of Darwin’s critics to be a fatal flaw in evolutionary theory – but also revealed that the process of genetic coding and replication was far more complicated than anyone had previously assumed (so complicated, in fact, that some believed it could never have originated through purely materialistic processes).

 

For some people, the fact that scientific discoveries are continually revealing things that are beyond the current reach of scientific explanation is a reason to believe in God.  No one today thinks that angels are necessary to carry a planet around the sun or that lightning cannot be explained by natural phenomena, but surely there are some natural phenomena, they argue, that can never be explained by science.  But arguments for a supernatural designer based on phenomena that are seemingly unexplainable via natural means have sometimes been upended by new scientific discoveries.  In the late nineteenth century, at least one work of Christian apologetics mentioned the sun’s energy as an example of one such phenomenon, because in the 1890s, it was apparent that no known fuel could keep the sun burning over the course of millions of years.  But then, in the twentieth century, the discovery of nuclear fusion provided a perfectly natural explanation for a phenomenon that had previously seemed mysterious.  An argument for God’s existence that relies on a “God of the gaps” – that is, the argument that there are some natural phenomena that are incapable of strictly natural explanations and that must therefore have been the work of a supernatural creator – rests on very tenuous foundations and is always in danger of being disproved by a new scientific discovery.

 

But if one cannot point to any part of the natural process and argue that it is beyond the reach of a natural explanation, does that mean that there is no way to argue from the natural world for the necessity of a creator?  Or, to put it in starker terms, has science made the notion of God obsolete?

 

Perhaps another way to look at this question is to focus not on the individual natural processes that explain each facet of the universe, but rather on the astounding complexity of the universe as a whole.  What emerges from this picture is the realization that complex, intelligent life has somehow emerged despite the overwhelming odds against it.  The more we examine this phenomenon, the more striking it is.  Within nanoseconds of the “big bang,” matter began expanding according to the laws of gravitation and twenty-six constants that determined the structure of the universe and kept it from collapsing on itself.  On our own planet, the precise atmospheric and chemical conditions developed for life to emerge when it did – and then different atmospheric conditions developed to sustain life and allow it to continue to evolve at a later stage of the process.  The more that one investigates the anthropic principle (the principle that the precise conditions necessary for development of life were present in our universe), the more one is struck by how difficult life is to sustain – and how unique the conditions were in both the universe and our planet that were required to develop and maintain it.

 

But wait, someone might object – aren’t there natural principles that might explain all of the conditions necessary to develop and sustain life?  And if so, don’t those natural explanations show that there is no need to posit a divine creator?

 

Technically, the answer might be yes.  Some of the natural explanations posed in response to the anthropic principle – such as the presence of multiverses, for instance – seem highly speculative, to say the least, but one can’t say for certain that the constants of the universe or the other conditions necessary for life to develop could not have developed through purely natural means.  But even if it were the case that the formation of all of the constants necessary to produce the “big bang” and sustain the universe, along with every condition necessary for life to form and be maintained, could be explained naturalistically (which is not yet the case, I should note), one would still be struck by the overwhelming odds that were overcome at each step of the evolutionary process in order for us to emerge.  Had conditions been slightly different at any point of the process, there would never have been human life.

 

Atheists respond to this argument by saying that as astonishing as the formation of life might have been, it can be accounted for by natural means – despite the odds against it.

 

But to the Christian, the hand of God is as evident in the formation of the natural world as it is in human history.  The Bible describes the historical decisions of humans – even the sinful decisions – as the work of God.  God used an imperialistic Assyria as a “rod” for divinely administered justice, according to the prophet Isaiah.  He used Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and the machinations of the rulers who administered the crucifixion in order to carry out his plan to save the world.  Could a historian explain these decisions by human means, without invoking divine explanations?  No doubt, the answer is yes; in fact, many historians have done so.  But the end result was the accomplishment of God’s purpose in a way that astounds the believer.  In the same way, each phase of the universe’s origin might be accounted for by purely natural processes – but the end result is a work of such astonishing complexity that both the atheist and the theist are left astounded.  For the believer, the end result of the evolutionary process – combined with the realization that the universe is such a delicately balanced, fine-tuned system that its development defies the imagination – is evidence of God’s work in the entire process.  A believer doesn’t need to resort to a “God of the gaps” argument, because God’s creative power was evident not just in specific intervals of the evolutionary process but in the entire design.  God is not merely a hypothesis of last resort, to be invoked only when scientific explanations fail.  God is instead the reason for the universe’s structure, development, and purpose.  And this is something that science cannot explain away.