Postscript

Victor J. Stenger

 

Part of the success of the hardcover edition of this book can no doubt be attributed to its fortunate timing, appearing just when the public was becoming aware of the corrosive effects extremist religion has had on society in recent years. Readers have welcomed the opportunity to learn about the alternative to theism—looking at the world as it is, without having to create a place for God in it. Fine authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have contributed to a growing popular literature on atheism. In the context of this movement, God: The Failed Hypothesis addresses head-on the question of the existence of God from a scientific perspective.

       While the subtitle of the book, How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, was bound to generate some strong reactions, these have been happily quite muted. Personally, I have not received a single threat. The only act of violence connected with the publication of this book of which I am aware occurred in Toronto in early April 2007 when Justin Trottier, the executive director of the Center for Inquiry/Toronto, was attacked and bloodied on the campus of Ryerson University while hanging posters for a talk I was to give at the university. That said, I take the fact that there was any violence at all to be an indication of how toxic some religious belief can be.

       Those believers who read my book should be reassured by my insistence that scientists are not dogmatically opposed to God. Instead, scientists are required by the very nature of science to go wherever the data lead. As I say many times in the book, present me with adequate evidence and I will believe.

       I also take a stance in agreement with most theists, but contrary to the majority of scientists, that science can investigate the supernatural. If the supernatural can affect physical phenomena, then those phenomena can certainly be studied by science. If no plausible natural explanation can be found for an observation, then a supernatural cause may be considered. Indeed, the reason I deem the God hypothesis to have failed is precisely because no physical phenomena have been reliably shown to exist that require us to go beyond natural explanations.

       At this point, I am often confronted with another homily: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Under some circumstances this is true, but under others it is clearly false. Absence of evidence can be strong evidence of absence when the evidence should be there and it is not. For example, there is absence of evidence that elephants roam Rocky Mountain National Park near where I live. Are we to conclude that elephants could still be there, in some unexplored region? Surely if elephants were there we would find some signs—droppings, crushed grass, footprints. In the absence of such evidence, we can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that there are no elephants in the park.

       The subtitle by itself generated considerable e-mail in which the correspondents essentially said, “I haven’t read the book, but here’s why it’s wrong.” Even some of the negative reviewers who presumably read the book raised objections that did not relate to the book’s contents. Despite my repeated caveats that I limit myself to the God (uppercase G) most people worship, these critics insist that it is not possible to disprove (or prove) the existence of every conceivable god (lowercase g) or, at least, their god.

       Part of the problem, carefully explained in the book but I will repeat it anyway, is that proofs and disproofs in empirical science are not the same as the deductive process in mathematics or logic. The deductive proofs of mathematics and logic start from clearly stated assumptions and then follow a precise procedure to arrive at a conclusion. As long as no mistakes are made in the procedure and the initial assumptions are themselves correct, the conclusion is 100 percent certain.

Scientific proofs involving empirical judgments, on the other hand, are more like those in a court of law, where decisions of guilt are not made by way of abstract logical reasoning, but rather on the basis of what the actual, available evidence shows to be true “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Furthermore, scientific judgments are always open to appeal based on new evidence, a course not generally open for legal or theological appeals.

       One otherwise favorable reviewer surmised that I did not really intend the subtitle and that the publisher must have introduced it to sell more books. Well, let me make it clear: the subtitle is mine, and I mean unequivocally that beyond any reasonable doubt the God most people worship can be scientifically shown not to exist.

       Perhaps some confusion resulted from my statement:

 

The existence of the Catholic, evangelical, extreme Muslim, extreme Judaic God who hides himself from all but a selected elite cannot be totally ruled out. All I can say is that we have not one iota of evidence that he exists and, if he does exist, I personally want nothing to do with him. This is a possible god, but a hideous one. (p. 240)

 

Here I was arguing that a God who deliberately hides from those who are open and willing to believe, given sufficient evidence, is not a moral God. Many Christians believe that the only way to salvation is through accepting Jesus Christ as their savior. Everyone else is doomed to eternal fire. Muslims hold similar beliefs. These faithful would, of course, insist that they believe in a loving, moral God, and I was trying to point out the inconsistency between this belief and their exclusive, hidden God.

       In order to clarify that position, the sentence (p. 240, first line, third paragraph from the end of the chapter) that read: “Those Catholics and evangelical Christians who hold this view clearly do not believe in a perfectly loving God” has been changed to read instead: “Those Catholics and evangelical Christians who hold this view clearly do not worship a perfectly loving God” (italics added here for emphasis). Also the first sentence of the final paragraph that was quoted above has been changed to read:

 

The existence of a God who hides himself from all but a selected elite cannot be totally ruled out.

 

       Another common criticism has been that I am not a theologian and so should not be writing on the subject. While it is true that I am not a trained theologian, I certainly know the core theology for the God I am addressing. Furthermore, I am fully aware that theologians and apologists can come up with rational explanations for many of the inconsistencies and downright errors found in traditional beliefs. I wrote about some of these in my 2003 book, Has Science Found God? I admit there are logically possible gods. But none is the God most people worship.

In any case, this is not a book on theology but a book on science. I am not speculating about the nature of God; nor am I trying to logically derive what God must be like based on any particular assumptions. Instead, I am simply looking at the observable physical consequences, the phenomena that would follow if the God who is believed by many to constitute the essential reality behind all existence actually did exist. I do not need to know any of the characteristics of this God, just that “he” (using the traditional pronoun for convenience) should produce detectable evidence, visible not just to science but to every human on Earth who seeks it.

       In this regard, I am not relying on any supposed special, superhuman powers of science. Science is a human endeavor that is really just an especially systematic and careful version of the process that each of us uses in our daily lives: observing the world around us and drawing conclusions from these observations.

Several correspondents have argued that, since God created the natural laws that govern the universe, these would be designed to achieve whatever plans he has. Thus he need never act outside of natural law, and so his acts could not be distinguished from natural processes.

       I did address this argument in my discussion of the deist god of the Enlightenment (p. 234), but not quite so explicitly, and have rewritten that section to hopefully make it clearer. Basically, modern quantum mechanics indicates that the universe is not totally deterministic and that much of what happens is random. Thus God must step in on occasion to get things back on track. This could lead to him revealing himself to us by this deviation from randomness, which is in principle detectable.

       This is also where I have a strong disagreement with perhaps a majority of scientists who claim to see no incompatibility between science and religion. This comes up usually with respect to evolution. Here I find myself in rare agreement with lawyer Phillip Johnson, founder of the intelligent design movement, who is quoted as saying, “If Darwinism is true, Christian metaphysics is a fantasy.”1 Our disagreement, of course is that he thinks Darwinism is false and I think Christian metaphysics is a fantasy.

       In December 2007 I participated in a panel discussion of God: The Failed Hypothesis on the campus of the University of Hawaii. The panel was sponsored by the Hawaii Youth for Christ and the Waterhouse Foundation. It was moderated by my close friend Keli’i Akina, president and CEO of Hawaii Youth for Christ, and attended by about six hundred people. The other members of the panel were believers from the University of Hawaii faculty and included two Christian astronomers, a Christian architect, and a cell biologist who happened to be a Reform Jew.

       One of the panelists was longtime friend and colleague, physicist and astronomer Bob Joseph. Bob chastised me for claiming that science was the only way to truth (which I did not say) and used the example of his loving relationship with his wife, which has nothing to do with science. Well, I have a loving relationship with my wife, our children, and our grandchildren that has nothing to do with God. The fact that people can and do appreciate art, music, poetry—and each other—is not evidence for a world beyond matter. It is evidence for what it means to be human. Indeed, science is not forbidden from studying such matters. Science isn’t everything; but it’s about everything.

       Some have remarked that my last chapter, “Living in the Godless Universe,” is out of character with the rest of the book, which attempts to stick to science. This is fair enough. Even so, I believed, and believe, that such a chapter was necessary to counter arguments such as that given by Bob and also to answer a common question: “Why did you write this book?”

       I must say the question puzzles me. Do these people ask the authors of the religious books that clog bookstore shelves why they write them? When I question the questioner, I sense the implication that, by writing my book, I am doing harm by depriving people of the comfort of religion.

       My response to this implied question is that I don’t see how taking comfort in imaginary beings can be very healthy for a grown adult who must live in the real world. Furthermore, in my long life I have witnessed many examples where the religious fear of divine retribution has brought less rather than more comfort. I can also cite examples where religion has ruined people’s lives. In any case, whether religion is good or bad has no bearing on the question of God’s existence. And that is the subject of this book.

 

Note

1. Phillip Johnson quoted by Nancy Pearcey in William A. Dembski, ed., Darwin’s Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), p. 228.