One of the most deeply rooted myths that has shaped the thinking of people in the modern world is the idea that science has made belief in God and the supernatural both unnecessary and impossible for the thinking person. It is a very widespread and fallacious myth which unfortunately has become confused with true science in the minds of many people. Let us look at how the myth arose.
A modern myth
The common notion is that belief in God and the supernatural arose in a primitive stage of human development. Ancient man was confronted by all kinds of processes and happenings which he could not understand. On some of them, such as the growth of his crops and the fertility of his cattle, his very life depended. Others of them, thunder and lightning, storm and disease, threatened his very [p 33] existence. Not understanding these processes and in awe of them, he did what a child would do: he personalized them. When the moon went into an eclipse, he imagined that a demon of some kind was trying to strangle the moon and he engaged in all kinds of religion and magic to try to chase the demon away. When it thundered, he thought it was some god speaking, and if lightning struck, he thought it was a malevolent spirit out to destroy him. He even thought that by observing any unusual phenomenon in nature he could predict what the gods were going to do. But since in more recent centuries we have developed the scientific method with ever greater sophistication, we have come to understand more and more the processes of nature. We now can see that an eclipse is not caused by a demon, nor are lightning and disease caused by malevolent spirits. We have discovered that the processes of nature are impersonal and in principle (at the non-quantum level) completely predictable. Atheists therefore argue that there is no longer any need to bring in the idea of God and the supernatural to explain the workings of nature. There is even no need to call God in to fill the gaps in our knowledge as Sir Isaac Newton did when he said: ‘I do not know any power in nature which could cause this transverse motion without the divine arm.’6 The atheist concludes therefore that God has become irrelevant and says that we have no need of that hypothesis. As a result the general public has come to think that science has made belief in a Creator unnecessary and impossible.[p 34]
A manifest fallacy
But there is a manifest fallacy here. Take a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that a primitive person who was seeing one for the first time and who did not understand the principles of an internal combustion engine, might imagine that there was a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly, that was because Mr Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it refused to go that was because Mr Ford did not like him. Of course eventually the primitive person would become civilized, learn engineering, and taking the engine to pieces would discover that there was no Mr Ford inside the engine, and that he did not need to introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for the working of the engine. His grasp of the impersonal principles of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine worked. So far, so good. But if he then decided that his understanding of the principles of the internal combustion engine made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr Ford who designed the engine, this would be patently false. It is likewise a confusion of categories to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made and upholds the great engine that is the universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works with its cause. Every one of us knows how to distinguish between the consciously willed movement of an arm for a purpose and [p 35] an involuntary spasmodic movement of an arm induced by accidental contact with an electric current.
At this point, however, believers in the myth will tend to reply as follows: ‘Well, there might conceivably be a God outside the universe who set it going in the first place. But actually, nothing can be known about him and it is not the task of science to speculate about his possible existence. On the other hand, on the basis of what we now know about the workings of the universe we can confidently assert that even if a God exists outside the universe, he does not, cannot, and never will intervene in its workings. And thus science makes it impossible in particular to believe in the Christian claim that God has invaded nature in the person of Jesus Christ.’ Let us now investigate how this part of the myth arises.
The modern myth again
It has been one of the magnificent achievements of science, not only to describe what goes on in the universe, but to discover the invariable laws which govern its workings. It is important here both to understand and to grant what the scientists claim about the nature of these laws. They are not simply descriptions of what happens. They arise from our perception of the essential processes involved. They tell us that, things being as they are, nature not only does work this way, it must work this way and cannot work any other way. The laws not only describe what happened in the past: provided we are not working at the quantum level, they can successfully predict what will happen in the future with such accuracy that, [p 36] for example, the orbit of the Mir space station can be precisely calculated and Mars landings are possible. It is understandable therefore that many scientists resent the idea that some god could arbitrarily intervene and alter, suspend or reverse the workings of nature. For that would seem to contradict the immutable laws and thus overturn the basis of the scientific understanding of the universe.
But just here there lurks another fallacy which C. S. Lewis illustrated by the following analogy. If this week I put a thousand pounds sterling in the drawer of my desk, add two thousand next week and another thousand the week thereafter, the immutable laws of arithmetic allow me to predict that the next time I come to my drawer, I shall find four thousand pounds. But suppose when I next open the drawer I find only one thousand pounds, what shall I conclude? That the laws of arithmetic have been broken? Certainly not! I might more reasonably conclude that some thief has broken the laws of the State and stolen three thousand pounds out of my drawer. One thing it would be ludicrous to claim is that the laws of arithmetic make it impossible to believe in the existence of such a thief or the possibility of his intervention. On the contrary, it is the normal workings of those laws that have exposed the existence and activity of the thief.
So the laws of nature predict what is bound to happen if God does not intervene; though of course it is no act of thievery if the Creator intervenes in his own creation. To argue that the laws of nature make it impossible for us to believe in the existence of God and the possibility of his intervention in the universe is plainly fallacious. It would be like claiming that an understanding of the laws [p 37] of the internal combustion engine make it impossible to believe that Mr Ford or one of his mechanics could intervene and remove the cylinder head of a motor car. Of course they could intervene. Moreover this intervention would not destroy those laws. The very same laws that explained why the engine worked with the cylinder head on would now explain why it does not work with the head removed.
In passing we should notice that a belief in God as Creator, far from inhibiting the discovery of nature’s laws, has historically been one of the prime motivations in the search for them. Sir Alfred North Whitehead, acknowledged as one of the most eminent historians of science, said: ‘Modern science must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.’7 C. S. Lewis’s summary of Whitehead’s view is worth mentioning: ‘Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature; and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.’8 Examples of such men abound: one has only to think of Newton, Kepler, Faraday and Clerk Maxwell. They would all agree with Einstein that science without religion is blind and religion without science is lame.
At this point proponents of the myth may well retort: ‘Grant, for the sake of argument, that it is not anti-scientific to concede the theoretical possibility that some god or other may have intervened in our world: what actual evidence is there that any such supernatural event has ever taken place?’ Christians will reply, of course, that there is abundant evidence in the miraculous conception, the [p 38] miracles and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To this it will be objected: ‘What kind of evidence is this? And how can you expect us to accept it? For after all it comes from the New Testament which was written in a pre-scientific age when people did not understand the laws of nature and for that very reason were all too ready to believe that a miracle had taken place when it hadn’t.’ Here lies a further fallacy.
A further fallacy
Take for instance the New Testament story that Jesus was born of a virgin without a human father. To say that the early Christians believed this miracle because they did not understand the laws of nature governing the conception and birth of children, is frankly nonsense. They knew all about the fixed laws of nature according to which children are born. If they had not known of those laws they might well have imagined that children could be born without a father or without a mother, but in that case they would not have regarded the story of the birth of Jesus from a virgin as a miracle at all. The very fact that they report it as a miracle shows that they understood perfectly the normal laws governing childbirth. Indeed unless one has first understood that there are laws which normally govern events, how would one ever conclude that a miracle had taken place?
Or take another incident: Luke, who was a doctor trained in the medical science of his day, begins his biography of Christ by raising this very matter (Luke 1:5–25). He tells the story of a man Zechariah and of his wife Elizabeth who for many years had prayed for a son because she was barren. When, in his old age, an angel appeared to him and [p 39] told him that his former prayers were about to be answered and that his wife would conceive and bear a son, he very politely but firmly refused to believe it. The reason he gave was that he was now old and his wife’s body decrepit. For him and his wife to have a child at this stage would run counter to all that he knew of the laws of nature. The interesting thing about him is this: he was no atheist, he was a priest who believed in God and in the existence of angels and the value of prayer. But if the promised fulfilment of his prayer was going to involve a reversal of the laws of nature, he was not prepared to believe it.
The story says that the angel struck him dumb for the sheer illogicality of his unbelief; but it shows this, at least: the early Christians were not a credulous bunch, unaware of the laws of nature and therefore prepared to believe any miraculous story, however absurd. They felt the difficulty in believing the story of such a miracle, just like anyone else. If in the end they believed, it was because they were forced to by the sheer weight of the evidence before their very eyes that a miracle had taken place.
Similarly in his account of the rise of Christianity (the Acts of the Apostles), Luke shows us that the first opposition to the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ came not from atheists but from the Sadducean high priests in Judaism. They were highly religious men. They believed in God. They said their prayers. But it did not mean that the first time they heard the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead they believed it. They did not believe it, for they had embraced a worldview which did not allow the possibility of such a miracle as the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 23:8). [p 40]
To suppose then that Christianity was born in a pre-scientific credulous world is simply false to the facts. The ancient world knew as well as we do the law of nature that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of the sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead in spite of the laws of nature.
Some people nowadays, it is true, who hold a worldview similar to the ancient Sadducees, have mistakenly tried to make the Christian message more credible to the scientific mind by cutting out the miraculous element altogether from the New Testament and presenting merely the ethical teaching of Jesus. But the device will not work. For, in the first place, the New Testament itself declares that the resurrection of Christ is not some superficial inessential decoration on the Christian message: it constitutes its heart. Excise the heart and you destroy the message. And when the New Testament itself declares this to be the case, it is useless for people two thousand years later to argue that you can cut out the miraculous and still be left with a viable Christianity (1 Cor 15).
In the second place, the whole attempt is misconceived. For our progress in scientific understanding of the laws of nature has made it easier and not more difficult to believe in the resurrection of Christ.
Science on the side of faith
One of the basic laws of nature that science has discovered and constantly promulgates is the Second Law of Thermodynamics which teaches that the universe as [p 41] a whole is running down, entropy is increasing. But if the universe is running down, it is scarcely possible to think that it has been doing so for an infinitely long time. Indeed science itself teaches that there must have been a point when the reverse process was in operation and the universe was ‘wound up’. If then at one point in the past the universe was wound up, it is neither impossible nor unscientific to believe that at the resurrection of Christ the processes of nature once more went into reverse and his dead body came to life and came out of the tomb. Moreover science teaches that while the entropy of the universe considered as a whole is increasing, there can be situations where entropy is decreasing locally. Seeds develop into trees which bring forth fruit; and we know that that is possible because in this local situation the earth is receiving a colossal input of energy from the sun. Consistent with this, the New Testament points out that the resurrection of Christ was made possible by an unimaginably great input of energy from the Creator himself: ‘the immeasurable greatness of his power . . . the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead’ (Eph 1:19–20).
Notwithstanding this, some people may feel a continuing difficulty which they will express as follows: ‘This evidence in the New Testament is now for us very remote. How can we possibly have any direct access to it? After all, miracles in general and the resurrection of Christ in particular are not things that happen every day of the week or every week of the year. We have no modern experience to act as a basis of comparison and as a criterion by means of which to measure their credibility. Are we then [p 42] simply expected to believe everything the New Testament writers say just because they say it?’
The nature of Christ’s miracles
The answer is that there are many considerations which we can bring to bear on the record of these miracles for the purpose of assessing their credibility. To begin with, we can notice the difference between the miracles which the New Testament says Jesus did and the silly miracle stories invented by credulous people in later degenerate centuries of Christendom. In these later stories stone images weep tears of blood, wolves turn into humans and birds spring out of lumps of clay. There is nothing remotely like this in the miracle stories in the New Testament. The miracles of Christ were congruent with the normal workings of nature. When Jesus miraculously produced wine he did not conjure it out of the air: he called for water and turned that water into wine. That is what nature does every year by using intervening means of a vine and soil, sun and rain. Had Christ incongruously produced wine from thin air we might have supposed that here was some alien magical power with no respect for nature and her laws. Christ’s miracles show a respect for nature as one might expect from the Creator of nature. At the same time they show him, understandably, superior to nature.
We may also consider the moral quality of his miracles. None was ever done to harm anyone, not even to destroy his enemies.
Instructive too are the terms which the New Testament uses for the miracles of Jesus. Sometimes they are called by [p 43] a word which denotes an act of power. On other occasions they are referred to by a word which means a wonder, or portent. Together these words indicate that Christ deliberately performed acts of supernatural power in order forcefully to focus attention on himself. But beyond this they were intended to function as signs pointing to those great spiritual resources that Christ can make available to all people of all times and places.
This is an aspect of Christ’s miracles that is particularly emphasized by the writer of the Fourth Gospel whose normal word for miracle is ‘sign’ (though this is unfortunately obscured in many translations by the use of the word ‘miracle’ instead of ‘sign’). So, for instance, John tells us that when Christ miraculously multiplied the loaves of bread, he did it, not merely to feed the people’s stomachs, but to call attention to the fact that he is himself the Bread of Life that can satisfy the spiritual hunger of men and women of all ages, who by faith believe him and receive him as Saviour and Lord (John 6). And at this level it is open to every one of us to prove in our personal experience whether this is true or not.
An experiment
And the ultimate verification is this. If Christ did, in fact, rise from the dead on the third day—and he did—that means he is alive today and ready by his Spirit to enter into a personal relationship with us if we on our side are prepared to enter into a personal relationship with him. Like any relationship, you cannot experience and prove its reality unless you are prepared to enter into it. But [p 44] the possibility of entering in is open to us all. That is what John means when he says of the miracles of Jesus: ‘these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31).
Here then is an experiment that any and every one can make. If Jesus is indeed God’s Son, the Gospel of John comes to us with his authority. It is God’s way of getting in touch with us. Millions have testified that through their reading of it God made himself known to them personally. We cannot write off all those millions as fools. The only truly scientific thing to do is to put the claim to the test by making the experiment and reading the Gospel ourselves.
Notes
6 Turnbull et al., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3:240.
7 Science and the Modern World, 19.
8 Miracles, 110.
English (US) · 