The purpose of this book is to characterize God for the twenty-first century. The tools used are reason and evidence—evidence from science and the Bible. On the surface, deriving evidence about God from science and the Bible is impossible. Science does not mention God, and the Bible depicts God in varied ways. How, then, will this book achieve its goal?
The book succeeds by making two assumptions. The first assumption is that God created the universe science describes, which reflects the character of its creator. The second is that Jesus is, in some sense, close to God and knowledgeable about the God-human relationship. Everywhere, I take a critical realist view. Science, in this view, explores an objective world to be discovered, uncovers facts about it, and develops models of it. The models are simplified versions of the world which, when combined, offer an increasingly accurate description. I discuss this position at length in my Doing without Adam and Eve. Characterizing God based on science implies that God truly exists, exists ontologically as the philosophers say. Moreover, God, in some sense, creates the real universe science describes.
My project is theological. It has no interest in discovering more about the natural world. Nor does offer a history of the science and religion debate for, unlike mainstream debaters, I am something of a theological skeptic. I find the mainstream mistaken in its support of orthodox Christianity and especially in its recent emphasis on the end of the world as depicted in the Bible. Unlike the biblical authors, we now know how Earth will end, for we know how stars of our sun’s mass develop. Nonetheless, we do not know the ending of our species. Will we survive another four billion years here on Earth, perhaps to evolve into one new species or more, and then fry as our sun becomes a red giant? Or will we escape Earth to other planets before our sun expands? Our present course, suicidal in poisoning our air, soil, and water while fomenting religious wars whose warriors seek weapons of mass destruction, makes either scenario dubious. Probably, we will destroy ourselves this millennium. Angelic armies (armies!) to our rescue appear unlikely.
Another sign of my theological skepticism: I assume God exists because I find no adequate arguments to prove God’s existence, neither rational nor empirical. For me the proof—if such it be—lies in experience, and I cannot pass that on. One must live it for oneself. In any case, the old, rational proofs have been criticized to death, and I see no point in resurrecting them here. Even if their logic were valid, three centuries of science have taught us that naked logic, without experience, leads only to truths about logic, including mathematical truths. But God is not an element of logic. Moreover, the arguments never offer a God worthy of worship, a result noted by Soren Kierkegaard long ago. As anthropologist Pascal Boyer shows, gods, even powerful ones, that are unaware of human thoughts and actions and fail to interact with human beings remain ciphers, of no interest to people who, nonetheless, live deeply immersed in a psychological world where spirits and people interact. To seek rational proofs of God’s existence is similar to seeking rational proof of the love that a lover declares to the beloved. It asks for the wrong kind of proof.
Likewise, to seek empirical proof for God’s existence from science is to seek the wrong kind of proof. At its best, science describes the physical world. When it delves into metaphysics or theology it becomes scientism, a mistaken and arrogant view of science’s proper realm. What kind of proof, then, could the physical world offer?
The classical answer is, design. The world appears designed; therefore there must be a designer, God. But, as I will argue, the metaphor is wrong. The concept of God that can be extrapolated from modern science is not of a designer, neither engineer nor artist. Moreover, as Darwin shows, the apparent design of organisms is explicable without reference to a designer. Accepting Darwin’s perspective today, the argument from design turns to the apparent design of the cosmos because of the fine-tuning of cosmologically relevant numbers, like the masses and charges of electrons and protons, or the resonance of carbon. Although such numbers occasion goose-bumps from time to time, they are easily addressed rationally with the principle that, if they were not the numbers they are, we would not be here to contemplate them. Apparently, the world must be as it is to produce intelligent life—but why it is as it is remains mysterious. To claim that it is this way because God created it to produce us is to invoke the infamous God-of-the-gaps argument and is also anthropomorphic and arrogant. (Are we the only intelligent beings in the universe? What sorts of intelligent creatures will our Earth evolve in its existence of another four billion years?) Best admit our ignorance and leave the question open. This will not, of course, hinder us from positing the existence of God as creator on other grounds, or from making it a working assumption, as this book does.
So this book will convince no one on either rational or empirical grounds of the existence of God; nor is it designed to do so. Rather, it wrestles with concepts of God. Nonetheless, it may move an atheist to a kind of theism if the atheist has rejected God because God is an angry judge, for the God revealed here is not an angry judge. On the other hand, it may also confront theists—and most certainly orthodox Christians—with the possibility that their concepts of God, too, are mistaken. Thus, it could lead people to change their concepts of God, pulling them toward or away from theism, depending on their starting point. Insofar as it can do either, it offers richer possibilities for correcting concepts of God than arguments for the existence of God do.