THE UNLIKELIHOOD OF SCIENCE ARISING OUT OF ATHEISM

Physicist Lawrence Kraus insists that:

• The more that we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems.

Meanwhile, mathematician and physicist, Lord William Kelvin, who propounded the first and second Laws of Thermodynamics, asserted:

• I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.

James Joule, the English physicist who discovered the law of the conservation of energy noted:

• It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.

Why would Joule claim such a thing? Perhaps for the same reason that the skeptic and physicist, Paul Davies, wrote:

• There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all… It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe… The impression of design is overwhelming.

While Kraus insists that only idiots can believe that God created this world, Albert Einstein perceived something very different:

• I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

Meanwhile, Kraus claims that God is irrelevant to science. However, Regis Nicoll claims the very opposite thing:

• Our ability to learn about the universe derives from the fact that it is governed by laws and exhibits a rational order and functional design. (Salvo Magazine, Spring 2016, 33. All of the quotations come from his article.)

In fact, it was the belief in a rational God-given order that had prompted Christian scientists to probe the discoverable laws that govern its workings. Consequently, Johannes Kepler wrote:

• The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which he has revealed to us in the language of mathematics (31).

In contrast to Kepler’s understanding, physicists like Kraus would not have been able to predict that this world, with its immutable and elegant laws, is knowable. Atheism can only account for molecules-in-motion in an ever-changing physical and unknowable world. Consequently, it is unlikely that science would have arisen out of such truncated worldview.

In Kraus’ purposeless, random universe, it would be unlikely to encounter design, order, and knowability – the necessary sine qua non or conditions of science.