Can the universe be a mere brute fact? Can we say, “The universe just exists and that’s that—it has no explanation at all”?

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, thinks so. In a recent interview at Salon.com, Carroll says, “There’s certainly no reason to think that there was something that ‘caused’ it; the universe can just be.”

Carroll is in good company with such an assertion. Bertrand Russell, the late British atheistic philosopher, argued the same thing in the famous 1948 BBC radio debate with Fr. Fredrick Copleston: “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.”

Notice neither Carroll nor Russell says the universe is self-explanatory in that its existence belongs to its nature, which would be the sort of explanation for God’s existence. Nor are they saying we don’t know what the explanation of the universe is. They are saying there is no explanation for why the universe exists rather than not. In essence they are denying the principle of sufficient reason, which states, “Everything that is has a sufficient reason for existing.”

How should we respond? Are we to exchange brute fact for brute fact and say, “Things just need an explanation, and that’s that”? Or is there a way we can show the appeal to brute facts is unreasonable? I answer the latter.

There are several arguments one can employ when arguing against the brute fact view, but for the sake of brevity, I will offer only five.

Double Standards

First, I find it interesting how it’s permitted for an atheist to appeal to unintelligible brute facts but not the theist. If a theist were to say, “God is just a brute fact, there is no rhyme or reason to his existence,” then an atheist would feel justified in denying him membership among the intelligentsia. This is manifest when atheists such as Richard Dawkins object to theistic arguments with, “Who designed the designer?”, thinking theists arbitrarily posit God as the terminus of causal series. If theists aren’t allowed to play the “brute fact” card (which we don’t do anyway), then atheists shouldn’t be allowed to do so either.

The Facts of Ordinary Life

A second response is to point out that we don’t appeal to brute facts when dealing with things in ordinary life. For example, suppose a team of police officers come across a dead body on their shift and begin conjecturing possible explanations. “It’s murder,” one says. “No, I think this was a suicide,” the other officer responds. Another officer says, “No, I disagree, I think the cause is a heart attack.” The last officer says, “We’re wasting our time here—it’s just an unintelligible and inexplicable brute fact that this corpse is here. Let’s keep going.” What would we think of such a police officer? How about, “He’s not a good one!” I think his chief would concur.

So, why should an appeal to a brute fact when faced with the existence of the universe be reasonable when an appeal to a brute fact when faced with a dead body is not?

Can’t Get Out of the Taxi

Our atheist friend might object, “I’m not saying we should accept the police officer’s appeal to a brute fact. I acknowledge everything in the universe probably has an explanation for its existence. But there is no reason to think the universe has to have an explanation for its existence.”

Besides the fact this objection begs the question against the theist—if God exists then the universe would have an explanation for its existence—it commits what some philosophers have aptly called the “taxicab fallacy”; thus a third argument against the brute fact view. Why commit to the idea “Whatever exists has a reason for its existence” and then dismiss it like you dismiss a taxicab once you arrive at the universe as a whole? Such a move is arbitrary and thus unreasonable.

“But,” an atheist might say, “isn’t a theist guilty of the same fallacy in saying God doesn’t have a cause for his existence?” The answer is no, because the theist is not saying God is a brute fact, i.e., he has no reason or explanation for his existence. It is essential to classical theism that God’s existence, though not caused by another, is explained by his essence. His essence is existence itself—ipsum esse subsistens. This is not something theists arbitrarily assert but is the conclusion of deductive reasoning that starts with certain features of the world—motion (change), efficient causality, contingency, degrees of being, and final causality.  So the theist is not guilty of the taxicab fallacy.

Skepticism of the Senses

Another reason the brute fact view is unreasonable is because it entails radical skepticism about perception. As philosopher Alexander Pruss argues in his essay “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument” (in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland), if things can exist without any sufficient reason, then there might be no reason for our perceptional experiences.

For example, according to this line of reasoning there might be no connection between your experience of reading this article on a computer and the actual article the computer is showing on its monitor. Your experience might just be a brute fact having nothing to do with any of the objective things with which we normally would associate your experience.

Do we want to go down that bleak road of skepticism and say all our sensory experiences are untrustworthy? There might be some radical skeptics who choose to walk that path (such skeptics can read this article). But for most reasonable people this is not a path that can be traveled, because such a path leads to the demise of science, which is something I assume Carroll wouldn’t endorse because he would be out of a job.

We need to be able to trust our sensory perceptions if we intend to discover truths about reality through empirical observation. So, unless one is willing to throw science out, one shouldn’t allow brute facts in the game.

No Arguments Allowed

The last argument I’ll offer for consideration comes from philosopher Edward Feser in his book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Feser argues the denial of the principle of sufficient reason is at the same time a denial of rational argumentation, including any argument for brute facts. Consider how when we accept the conclusion “Socrates is mortal,” we do so based on the premises “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man.” In other words, we recognize the conclusion as rational because the premises are true and the argument is logically valid.

But if brute facts are possible, and the principle of sufficient reason is false, then it follows that our conclusion “Socrates is mortal” might have nothing to do with the truth of the premises and their logical structure. It might also be possible our cognitive faculties themselves had no role to play in explaining why we came to that conclusion.

The bottom line is, if brute facts are possible, there might be no reason whatsoever we believe what we do, even the belief that we believe on rational grounds. This applies to any conclusion we might draw, even the conclusion “Things can exist without a reason for their existence.” But if the conclusion “Things, like the universe, can exist without a reason for their existence” might itself be a brute fact—namely, it has no connection to truth or logic—then we would have no reason to accept it as true. So to deny the principle of sufficient reason undercuts any ground one might have for doubting the principle. It’s self-refuting and thus unreasonable.

Conclusion

Sean Carroll is a brilliant man. He is courageous in taking on heavyweights of the likes of Dr. William Lane Craig. But why such a great mind can’t see the rational implications of denying the principle of sufficient reason, I do not know. Perhaps he just hasn’t thought it through. Or perhaps he just isn’t willing to open the door to a line of reasoning that leads to theism. Whatever may be the case, the appeal to brute facts is not a good parry when in the ring with a theist.

On June 4, a few thousand atheists gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for an event they dubbed the “Reason Rally.” Due to health reasons, Richard Dawkins could not be there in person to address the audience, but he did send a video message, the transcript of which has been passed around via atheist blogs.
 

 
In it, Dawkins highlights how atheists are mistreated in the U.S., especially when religious people ask them the incredibly insensitive question “What church do you go to?“ According to Dawkins:

"The question is presumptuous to the point of rudeness, yet informant after informant tells me how often it’s thrown at newcomers to certain neighborhoods in America, as casually and automatically as a comment on the weather. That the newcomer might not attend a place of worship at all simply doesn’t cross the friendly neighborhood mind."

Yikes! Better not ask people where they go to school, work, or celebrate the holidays on the off chance you’re speaking with a dropout, an unemployed person, or a Jehovah’s Witness. Or, maybe atheists and everyone else can save their indignation for something that is truly offensive (like signs from the last Reason Rally that compare religion to male genitalia).

Do you believe in Magick?

Dawkins also mocked any exercise in critical thinking that leads to the conclusion that God has a real causal effect on the physical universe:

"'God did it' can never be an explanation for anything. It is sheer intellectual cowardice. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock designer, you might as well magick an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman."

But notice the irony in what Dawkins says just a few seconds later:

"It’s like when you see a really brilliant conjuring trick. You have to smack yourself and say, 'No!' However largely my senses and my instincts are screaming 'miracle,' it really isn’t. There is a rational explanation [emphasis added]. In the case of the conjuring trick, we know it’s not a miracle. And honest conjurers like Jamy Ian Swiss, James Randi, and Penn & Teller tell us so."

That, my friends, is called the principle of causality or the principle of sufficient reason. Just as we wouldn’t accept the magician’s answer to be, “The rabbit just appeared in the hat without a cause,” we shouldn’t accept the answer that any object, be it a unicycle or an entire universe, simply “popped” into existence without a cause. Some explanations must be ultimate or final, because if they weren’t you would have an infinite number of explanations that don’t explain anything at all.

The atheistic philosopher Gregory Dawes critiques Dawkins’s demand for such an explanation in this way:

"[Dawkins’s idea is] that religious explanations are unacceptable because they leave unexplained the existence of their explanans (God). Dawkins apparently assumes that every successful explanation should also explain its own explanans. But this is an unreasonable demand. Many of our most successful explanations raise new puzzles and present us with new questions to be answered." (Theism and Explanation 16)

Moreover, God is not more complex than the universe he explains. Theologians since Aquinas have argued that because God has no moving parts and does not fragment his thoughts like we do, he is absolutely simple. Atheist Erik Wielenberg says that Dawkins has given us no reason to think that a designer must be as physically complex as the thing he creates and thus himself need a designer. The universe’s designer could just be an immaterial mind that cannot fail to exist. Wielenberg writes:

"The central weakness of Dawkins’s Gambit, then, is that it is aimed primarily at proving the nonexistence of a being that is unlike the God of traditional monotheism in some important ways. . . . In light of this, I must side with those critics of The God Delusion who have judged Dawkins’s Gambit to be a failure." (“Dawkins’s Gambit, Hume’s Aroma, and God’s Simplicity”)

A Simple Retort

Dawkins does seem to be aware of the critique of his arguments that he doesn’t understand God’s simplicity and so his atheistic argument from design doesn’t succeed. In his video for the Reason Rally, Dawkins said this:

"Some of our best theologians pathetically tried to argue that, far from being complex, God is simple. . . . The effrontery of it is beyond astounding. This supposedly simple God had to know how to set the nuclear force 10³⁹ times stronger than gravity. He had to calculate with similar exactitude the requisite values of half a dozen critical numbers—the fundamental constants of physics. . . . God may be almighty, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, but the one thing he cannot be, if he’s even minimally to meet his job description, is 'all-simple.' The statistical argument against the divine designer remains intact and inescapably devastating."

The problem with Dawkins reply is that he still doesn’t understand divine simplicity, which, in spite of its name, is not an easy concept to understand. Essentially, divine simplicity means that God is one, or he is the perfect and infinite act of being. Not even God’s attributes are divided; so, for example, God’s power is identical to his goodness, which is identical to his knowledge, which is identical to his existence, which is identical to all his other attributes.

St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “[T]here are no parts in you, Lord: neither are you many, but you are so much one and the same with yourself that in nothing are you dissimilar with yourself.” God is just ipsum esse, the act of being, or the great I AM. God knows all things because he sustains them in existence, not because he is a giant cosmic person who inexplicably knows more than we do.

Humans speak of God as if he had different parts because our own minds are limited. We have to do this in order to sensibly talk about God, just as scientists use figurative language to explain imperceptible realties like electrons or black holes. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity” (CCC 43).

Finally, using simpler entities to explain more complex ones is common in science. For example, Maxwell’s equations (which describe electromagnetism) could fit on an index card, whereas a description of their effects would fill a chapter of a textbook. An explanation does not always have to explain everything, and a designer can be simpler than the thing he designs.

Since God is the simplest being imaginable, or infinite undivided being, it’s not necessary to ask who designed God. Any explanation for the universe must have a stopping point, and it’s more rational for that point to be unlimited being that exists by necessity, and therefore has an explanation, and not just an unexplained universe or Big Bang singularity.

(If you’d like to learn more about responding to Dawkins and other atheist arguments, I encourage you to check out my book Answering Atheism.)

Skeptics argue that miracles are impossible because the laws of nature are necessary. A miracle, they argue, involves a violation of a law of nature. But the laws of nature cannot be violated. Therefore, miracles must be impossible.

One modern skeptic of repute who argues this is Richard Dawkins. In his book The God Delusion, he says, “[M]iracles, by definition, violate the principles of science” (83).

Dawkins and other modern skeptics derive this argument from philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, argued:

"[I]f miracles are, strictly speaking, all above nature, then you must admit a break in the necessary and immutable course of nature; which is absurd." (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 6)

In the eighteenth century, Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume wrote:

"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is an entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. X)

I'd like to offer two responses to these objections.

Response 1: Miracles are not violations of nature’s laws

We should at first challenge the understanding of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. In order to understand why miracles do not violate the natural order God created, it is necessary to understand what laws of nature are.

Laws of nature are not mere descriptions of causal regularities (e.g., When A, then B) that a miracle would disprove. The laws of nature express what things are capable of exhibiting by virtue of their inherent causal tendencies or dispositions. In other words, the laws of nature are descriptive of what objects are capable of producing given the powers they have by virtue of their nature.

So, for example, the law of nature that tells us water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit is simply a description of the nature of water having a tendency or disposition to freeze when the temperature reaches 32 degrees. The law of nature that tells us fire burns is a description of the inherent power fire possesses given its nature.

The laws of nature, therefore, describe laws of natures—essences with inherent dispositional properties that manifest themselves when certain conditions are met. One could say the phrase “laws of nature” is shorthand for speaking about causal powers inherent in the nature of things.

It is this understanding of the laws of nature that allows one to see how miracles are not violations of the laws of nature (proving a law to be false) and thus not a violation of the natural order set by God.

Miracles are extraordinary sensible effects wrought by God that surpass the power and order of created nature. Miracles are occurrences that can be brought about only by God’s direct causal activity and not by natural forces operative in created objects. As such, a miracle does not prove a law of nature to be false but simply indicates a cause beyond the natural causal powers of a thing is at work, and such causal power is divine.

For example, the natural forces operative in a human body cannot produce the effect of the body rising anew in living health after it has died. But God can produce such an effect by directly giving life to a dead body. When he does this, as he did in the case of Jesus, it does not disprove the law of nature that states that dead bodies stay dead. It still remains true that dead bodies have no inherent power to come back to life.

God can also suspend an inherent power from manifesting itself without proving a law of nature to be false. Consider, for example, the miracle involving Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. The fire into which they were thrown did not burn them.

Does this disprove the law of nature that states fire burns? No. God simply willed that the inherent power of fire not manifest itself in this particular situation. Fire still retains its natural tendency or disposition to burn, and thus the law of nature involving fire remains valid.

God has not only the power to suspend an object’s inherent disposition from manifesting itself but also the power to give an object a new property it doesn’t have by nature. Jesus’ miracle of walking on water is an example of this (Matthew 14:22-23).

Water does not have power within its nature to allow a human being to walk on it. But Jesus, being God, can give water such a property in a particular circumstance. This doesn’t disprove the law of nature that states you will sink if you try to walk on water, because water still lacks within its nature a property that would suffice to hold up a human being.

So miracles do not violate the natural order created by God because they do not violate the laws of nature—they are not contrary to nature but above or beyond nature.

Response 2: Laws of nature are not absolutely necessary

The second response to these objections is that they confuse hypothetical necessity with absolute necessity.

The skeptic assumes the laws of nature are absolutely necessary—that is to say, the phenomena they describe must always occur no matter what. Just as God cannot make a square-circle or make a triangle with four sides, God, even if he did exist, could not suspend the laws of nature.

But this is simply not true. The laws of nature have what philosophers call hypothetical necessity, which means they will hold on the condition that no external cause intervenes. As the prominent Christian apologist William Lane Craig writes:

"[N]atural laws are assumed to have implicit in them the assumption 'all things being equal.' That is to say, the law states what is the case under the assumption that no other natural factors are interfering." (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 263)

For example, the law of gravity tells us a rock will fall to the ground every time when I drop it. But it is not an intrinsic contradiction to imagine someone quickly catching the rock before it hits the ground. The law of gravity will hold provided nothing else happens, i.e., all things being equal.

As with the law of gravity, all laws of nature are hypothetically necessary and not absolutely necessary. They are not inviolable in the sense their violation—or, more properly speaking, their suspension—implies a contradiction.

Since the laws of nature are merely hypothetical, it follows the laws of nature cannot preclude God’s causal activity in miracles. Any denial of miracles based on the laws of nature, therefore, is unjustified.

Conclusion

This understanding of miracles and their relation to the laws of nature dispels the myth that one has to abandon science in order to accept miracles. Skeptics often pit miracles and science against each other, claiming you have to choose one or the other. But this is a false dichotomy.

There is no need for a scientist to give up his own research that shows water has no surface tension to support a human body because, as shown above, a miracle doesn’t prove water has such an inherent property. The scientist’s scientific knowledge remains secure. As such, there is no need to abandon science in order to believe in the miraculous.
 
 
(Image credit: Jagannath Puri HKM)

Last week, I wrote about the longstanding Catholic drive to reinterpret the philosophy of Plato as realist. In actuality, Aristotle’s philosophy perfected Plato’s by connecting the material to the formal world—two separated domains which, in Plato, remain wholly alien to one another. Accordingly, it is quite a “stretcher,” I suggested, when Catholics talk about Plato as a realist. Any philosophy which divorces the material and the formal qualifies as anti-realism, because matter’s interaction with form is the very thing that constitutes intelligibility. (More on that below…)

As predicted, the article’s “combox” bore out my very thesis: Catholics and other Westerners (including some atheists) remain so strongly accustomed to just such an unduly charitable characterization of Plato that they startle to hear otherwise.

But here’s the real rub: such a distinction between the two ancient philosophers matters only because we live in a more violently anti-realist Modern era, which put to death (in popular thought) the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Church’s Scholastic philosophy. Plato’s errors would not matter nearly so much if we were pre-Moderns.

As mentioned in last week’s article, living in the “Modern era” means inhabiting the centuries after the Sixteenth. Two moments of that most unfortunate century are directly insinuated here: the Protestant Reformation and the secularist Enlightenment. They are equal but opposite rejections of the Natural Law.

Today, in English-speaking countries, the faithful grandchildren of the Reformation are usually thought of as “the religious right,” while the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment comprise “the secular left.” It so happens, as one of history’s bitterest ironies, that in countries like America and England, a giant, sustained food fight erupted between the two sets of grandchildren...who were once fellow travelers! We are all familiar with these skirmishes, of course, comprising the so-called “culture war” between two shouting, red-faced fundamentalisms: Protestant Biblicism versus Enlightenment Scientism in all its many vestiges.

The narrative not falsely goes that these two camps despise one another.

They do…today. But as aforementioned, it was not always so. One is surprised to find that together, each half of Prot-Enlight originally teamed up with the other against the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Catholic Church. Together, each camp strove cooperatively to make the sixteenth century Catholic view of nature, the Natural Law, seem outdated. Together, both parties asserted an aggressive new anti-realist dichotomy for the supposedly new times: form versus matter, faith versus science, even faith versus reason.

Ironically, the two sides cooperated steadily against the Church during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in order to create these false dichotomies, only to spend the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries arguing ceaselessly about them!

Whether or not the reader accepts Plato’s role in this Modernist overturn of the Natural Law, it is far more important—and leagues more undeniable—to a clear conception of our world that we come to terms with the primary role played by Prot-Enlight. Plato’s role was mere prefigurement to that of the Prot-Enlight philosophies. The Prot-Enlight philosophies set the goal as the complete eradication of the Natural Law.

Prot-Enlight and the Three Prongs of the Natural Law

The two halves of Prot-Enlight Modernism altered the prevailing Western notion not so much of God, counterintuitively, as of nature. That is, any pop-theological changes wrought by the Reformation or the Enlightenment were actually secondary, in pervasiveness, to the harmful amendments Prot-Enlight made to the popular Western view of the world, or reality, itself.

I wrote in last week’s article: “In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology.” Whether we’re talking about the authors of the Enlightenment like Francis Bacon and David Hume or the authors of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin, Prot-Enlight sought to “take down” the “big game” of the Catholic Natural Law, of which these three prongs were (and are) constitutive.

Natural Law Prong #1: Firstly, Catholic Aristotelianism (i.e. Thomism) puts forward physical nature as the forum of man’s freedom and morality. In other words, humanity’s freedom and morality are altogether natural. Catholicism does not naively suppose that either human or physical nature guarantee man’s automatic morality through any and all uses of his freedom; rather, physical nature is the forum where the proper use of human intellect and will may through deliberate action dispose each of the natural appetites, through habit, toward morality. And nature is the locus in quo where this happens. The secular and the Protestant worlds together decry this Catholic position: morality, for each worldview, counteracts nature. Again, for Catholicism, morality is perfectly natural, which is why Thomas Aquinas asserted that all of the appetites are natural…if implemented with the proper disposition, of course.

Protestantism, as mentioned above, rejects the possibility of freedom and morality altogether. Man is enslaved to sin. Whether we talk of Luther’s assertion that human will is “in bondage,” or Calvin’s infamous doctrine of predestination, Protestantism writ large rejects the first prong of the Natural Law hailed by the Catholic Church. The Protestant view of sin, mankind’s “total depravity,” swallows up any possible proper usage of intellect or will.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, posited naturalism—the perfect opposite of the Natural Law’s first prong. Naturalism describes a deterministic nature which we find “red in tooth and claw.” The animals are no more than complex mechanisms, meat machines, which operate as the vector sum of their competing appetites. Moreover, naturalism places man squarely in the middle of, not above, nature. He too is bestial. He too is determined by his appetites alone. He too is just a meat machine. As such, human free will is rejected and determinism (equal but opposite to Protestant pre-determinism) prevails, although Enlightenment thinkers certainly wouldn’t designate this “sin,” as the Protestants do.

Natural Law Prong #2: Secondly, Catholic Aristotelianism puts forward nature as intelligible. “Being is intelligible,” Aristotle famously explained. As articulated in last week’s article, Aristotle described that form was in matter, as it were, rather than above matter, as Plato had taught. Because matter is in-formed, then, nature is intelligible. If form were instead compartmentalized somewhere above matter, as in Plato’s “noetic heaven,” then the material objects would be neither knowable nor differentiable. But the opposite is true. On this Aristotelian basis, the Thomism of the Catholic Church affirms that faith and reason work together, rather than against one another. Faith is strengthened, not weakened, by the two ways of knowing about human reality: the a priori way, philosophy, and the a posteriori way, science. Both philosophy and science affirm theology because, as Thomas Aquinas famously held, “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Protestantism, beginning with Luther, repudiated the scientific worldview—and not only the false scientific worldview of Scientism, but even science properly done. Protestantism also rejected the philosophical approach to the world: Luther held that “the whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light.” The rallying cry of Luther’s Reformation was sola scriptura, meaning that the Bible alone—not science or philosophy or anything less than supernatural revelation—is intelligible to the mind of man.

The teachings of the Enlightenment, in a coordinate if opposite manner, reject the intelligibility of the universe. And this is strange because Enlightenment secularists have always claimed to be “for science,” a claim which requires the principle of intelligibility. It’s quite simple: the new Scientism posits materialism. For the materialist, nothing but matters exists. Even though this precludes both ratio and intellectus, materialists never seem to understand how their point of view vitiates science’s ability to be done at all (cogitation requires ratio and intellectus: one recalls John Lennox’s debate with Richard Dawkins, where clearly Dawkins failed to understand Lennox that “the principle of consciousness, intelligibility itself, proved [his] point”).

Natural Law Prong #3: Thirdly, the Aristotelian view of nature poses nature’s goal-orientedness (i.e. teleology). Nature discloses its own purpose. Just as in prong #2, wherein the Catholic worldview affirms via the principle of intelligibility the formal cause of nature, this third prong of the Natural Law affirms nature's final cause as Jesus Christ. Nature's purposive, christological aspect is the culmination of Natural Law prongs one and two: because nature has a goal, its morality and intelligibility are thereby validly connected to the supernatural. If, in fact, nature were devoid of a supernatural telos, as the Prot-Enlights believe, then its ostensible morality and intelligibility would be rendered arbitrary and even conceptually null.

So, with regard to the convoluted Protestant stance on prong #3, the Reformation rejection was not of Christ, but of his sustained connection to the physical world. Reformation theology rejects the idea that nature's purpose is knowable through human examinations of the world. In short, Protestants express ambivalence insofar as they think the natural world does not really have a knowable supernatural end, even though of course they affirm Christ as the Logos (and in that sense, the goal). As Louis Bouyer said, “in Protestantism, everything goes on, or seems to go on, as if the Incarnation had ended with the Ascension of the Savior.” As if Jesus' connection to the world lasted only thirty-three years!

Clearly, through the Enlightenment’s rejections of God, of formal causation, and even of consciousness itself, the secularists removed any conception of a purpose in the universe. Such a crystal clear issue need not be belabored here. The secularists tell us every day, after all, that everything is pointless.

Conclusion

From here, the story only gets stranger and stranger. After all, the Modern English-speaking republics—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, among ours and the motherland—all claim to be founded upon the Natural Law, even as their professed basis lies in the twin sixteenth century movements (their opposite motives notwithstanding) whose raison d’etre was the elimination thereof!

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us confused, schizophrenic. Think of American history: who was it but men steeped in the Reformation and the Enlightenment—the “Prots” and the “Enlights”—who drafted the several state constitutions, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights? And what are these papers but documented ways of life, memorialized articles of culture, predicated squarely upon the Natural Law. As such, we Moderns are confounded citizens of the most schizophrenic republics of all-time. America, crown gem of all the paradoxical republics, was even founded as against Rome, by folks who thought Canterbury had grown to be too close a likeness.

Americans in 2016 have the temerity to be surprised when recounting our cultural failures in Natural Law living. Many Americans even have the gall to wonder why our republic is failing. In short, when Modernism is based upon dual rivaling rejections of the Natural Law, untangling the web equates to no trifling academic affair: it becomes an existential exercise required for our very survival. Until the republics founded in the Modern era return to the Natural Law, we will continue to be unable to justify such republican desiderata and sine qua nons as: natural rights, subsidiarity, popular morality, anthropology, a liberty-based political economy, and a humane employment of science and technology (materialist science yields materialistic technology, as we recognize). We shall no longer receive these benefits without shouldering the burdens, or at the very least without acknowledging the mutual exclusivity of the Natural Law and Prot-Enlight Modernism.

Until we return to Aristotle, to Thomas, and to the Natural Law, we should expect to find our Modern world more than just cold and hostile to us—we should expect to find it unfree, unintelligible, and pointless.

Is science the only legitimate form of rational inquiry? The evolutionary biologist and popular atheist Richard Dawkins thinks so.

In a 2012 debate with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dawkins claims that religion, as opposed to science, is “a betrayal of the intellect.” He asserts that appealing to God to explain the universe is “a phony substitute for an explanation” and “peddles false explanations where real explanations could have been offered.” What counts as a real explanation? For Dawkins, it’s science.

The belief that real explanations can only be offered by science is a worldview known as scientism. But is scientism itself a real explanation? Is scientism worthy of the human intellect?

I suggest no, and here's why.

A Betrayal of the Human Intellect

First, scientism is self-refuting. The statement “Scientific knowledge is the only legitimate form of knowledge” cannot be verified by scientific methods. It’s a metaphysical proposition and thus not subject to scientific inquiry. No matter how successful science is, it is restricted to physical reality. Metaphysics deals with foundational truths about reality that go beyond the merely physical (e.g., questions about existence itself, time, space, etc.). Science can never go beyond the boundaries of its data source, so, in principle, cannot verify the truth of scientism.

But if science cannot verify the truth of scientism, then scientism is self-refuting.

Moreover, scientism is self-refuting because it undermines science as a rational form of inquiry. Consider that science presupposes various philosophical assumptions that are not subject to scientific verification—e.g., there is an external world outside the minds of scientists, the world is governed by causal regularities, and the human intellect is capable of uncovering these regularities.

Now, in view of scientism, how could science be a legitimate form of rational inquiry if its presupposed assumptions are not the product of scientific inquiry? It can’t. Scientism seeks to exalt science, but it actually undermines it in the process.

No Human Minds Allowed

The second reason why scientism is unsustainable is because it leads to the denial of the human mind. Philosopher Edward Feser argues such in his article “Blinded by Scientism.”

Feser explains how scientism is based on the divide in modern science between the quantitative-objective-real and qualitative-subjective-appearance images of the world. According to this divide, anything that cannot be quantifiably measured is not real. Since scientific inquiry is subject only to the quantitative aspects of reality, scientism views knowledge of such things as the only real form of knowledge. But this causes a problem.

Concerning the mind, Feser correctly argues that it falls on the qualitative-subjective-appearance side. The mental activities in the practice of science such as the formulation of hypotheses, the weighing of evidence, technical concepts, and the construction of causal chains cannot be described in the language of mathematics. There is no microscope or telescope that can show us the existence of mental beliefs. They do not fall within the purview of the quantitative-objective-real image of the world. Consequently, the activities of the mind fall on the side of the divide that is subjective and mere appearance—that is to say the mind is not real.

Now, as Feser points out, rather than seeing scientism as an absurdity and rejecting it in this light, many proponents of scientism follow their logic and reject the mind outright, viewing human thoughts as mere physiological events. But one has to wonder, “How can one argue for scientism when such argumentation presupposes the very thing scientism logically denies—namely, the mind?”

The answer is, you can’t. Therefore, since scientism denies the reality of the human mind, which is needed to argue in support of scientism itself, scientism is not reasonable.

Confusing Methodology with Ontology

Finally, scientism is unreasonable because it confuses methodology (method of knowing) with ontology (reality). Due to the success of the quantitative methodology in modern science, many think the method exhausts nature. But such success shows only that the method is useful for dealing with those aspects of nature that are quantifiably measurable.

To use Feser’s popular analogy, the claim that nothing exists beyond the boundaries of scientific inquiry is like saying plastic cups do not exist on the beach because of the metal detector’s failure to detect them. The metal detector’s failure says nothing whether or not plastic cups exist. It’s simply a manifestation of the limitations of its detecting powers.

Similarly, science’s inability to detect entities that are not quantitatively measurable or empirically verifiable (immaterial entities) says nothing whether or not such things exist. It’s simply a manifestation of the limitation of science’s detecting powers—science detects only physical reality.

Scientism, therefore, commits the fallacy of confusing method with reality—letting the method dictate what is real rather than letting reality dictate the proper method for studying it.

Whether appealing to God in explaining the universe is the best explanation is something worthy of consideration—theists and atheists need to present arguments to substantiate their worldviews. But what is not worthy of consideration is scientism. It’s self-refuting, it undermines science, and it commits the blunder of confusing method with reality.

Dawkins may reject God as the best explanation for the universe on the basis of bad arguments, but he can’t reasonably reject theism on the grounds that it’s not scientific knowledge. To do so would be to betray the human intellect.
 
 
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Does God still matter? This is the question that seems to be at the heart of the modern debate about God’s existence. Many unbelievers who label themselves agnostic-atheists do not claim definitively that God does not exist. They take the softer position that God probably does not exist, and even if he does exist, he is irrelevant in explaining the universe. As Dr. Richard Dawkins stated in a 2013 Cambridge debate with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, “Religion is redundant and irrelevant.”

But why is God seen as irrelevant? Why don’t modern agnostic-atheists think God matters? One reason, so it is claimed, is that science is sufficient to explain the physical universe.

For example, the world-renowned physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking, in a 2010 interview on the Larry King Live show, stated, “God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.” But is this true? Can science give an exhaustive explanation of the universe that would negate the need for God? I’ll give two reasons why I think the answer is no.

Science and the Inductive Method

First, science’s explanatory power is not sufficient, because it relies on the inductive method in order to validate its hypotheses.

Contrary to the deductive method, the inductive method moves from knowledge of particulars to general conclusions. Without getting into the details that differentiate the inductive and deductive methods, suffice to say that absolute certainty about one’s conclusion is impossible when employing the inductive method. Since science relies on the inductive method, it follows that scientists can never be absolutely certain that their theories explaining the universe are complete. They can never be absolutely certain that they have discovered and observed every piece of data necessary to give a complete explanation of the universe—much less a complete enough explanation that would negate the need for God.

My mentor and friend Fr. Robert J. Spitzer likes to say, “Science cannot know what it has not yet discovered, because it has not yet discovered it.” In other words, scientists can be certain only about what they have already discovered through empirical observation. Certainty can never be had for whether there is some piece of data enshrouded in the past or a piece of data yet to be encountered that shifts the paradigm. Therefore, there necessarily exists in science a perpetual openness to discovering something new that could alter its current theory about the universe.

But if this is true, then one can never rationally claim that science can give a complete and exhaustive explanation of the universe—much less a complete enough explanation that God is no longer needed as its creator. So, the claim that God doesn’t matter because science can sufficiently explain the universe is unfounded.

Science and the Universe's Existence

Another way to respond to this objection is by pointing out that science in principle cannot explain why the universe exists in the first place rather than not exist.

Suppose for argument sake that science could give an exhaustive physical description of the universe. Would that necessarily negate the need for God in explaining the universe? Absolutely not! Why? Science has explanatory power given the fact that the universe exists. It presupposes an already existing universe to observe and explain. Consequently, it cannot explain why the universe exists in the first place. It can’t even explain why the universe exists in this way instead of some other way. So, to the question “What determines that there is to be a universe with time, space, and matter instead no universe at all?”, science is silent.

To the question, “What determines the universe to be this way—e.g., governed by quantum mechanics—and not some other way—e.g., not governed by quantum mechanics?”, science is silent. These are philosophical questions that can be answered only by philosophy. Therefore, science cannot take the place of God in sufficiently explaining the universe.

In conclusion, because science must always be open to modification due to its reliance on the inductive method and its inability to explain why the universe even exists rather than not exist, it will never be able to give an exhaustive description of the universe. Therefore, any claim that science has done away with the need for a transcendent creator in explaining the universe is simply unreasonable.
 
 
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American Atheists responded to the Pennsylvania state legislature’s designation of 2012 as “Year of the Bible” with mocking billboards, and a press release insisting that “the House of Representatives should not be celebrating a barbaric and Bronze Age book.” It’s a common argument against the Bible, that it can’t be trusted because it’s a book from the Bronze Age. Over on Twitter, Richard Dawkins extended this argument to attack both the Bible and the Qu’ran.

Bible and Quran were the best that Bronze Age desert tribes could do. But we’ve moved on. And even at the time, others were doing it better.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) May 17, 2015

Factually, the argument is wide of the mark. Despite its name, the Bible isn’t a book, but a collection of books, the majority of which were written several centuries after the Bronze Age. (The New Testament is closer in age to the foundation of the University of Paris in the High Middle Ages than it is to the close of the Bronze Age in c. 1200 B.C.). Historical inaccuracies aside, Dawkins' argument relies upon a sort of genetic fallacy, the assumption that certain beliefs can be proven false simply because they’re old. But this assumption doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We don’t reason, for example, that murder must be okay simply because people have always thought it was wrong.

Furthermore, this Bronze Age argument is circular. It assumes that the Bible is wrong because it was written by ignorant people. But this assumes, in turn, that the human authors of Scripture were limited to the knowledge otherwise attainable at that time and place, the very question in dispute in debating the authenticity of the Bible. In other words, the strength of this argument relies upon a prior assumption that the Bible is wrong – for example, in its claim to divine inspiration – and concluding from this that the Bible is wrong.

Curiously, in characterizing the Scriptural authors as ignorant and uneducated, American Atheists finds an unlikely ally: Saint Luke, the author of the Book of Acts. In Acts 4:13, he says that when the Jewish Temple authorities “saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus.” Luke doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Peter and John, who together authored seven of the 27 books of the New Testament, were uneducated commoners. But rather than a cause for arrogant dismissal, this should lead us, as it did the Temple authorities, to a state of wonder. If the human authors of Scripture were “Bronze Aged” ignoramuses, how do we account for the credibility of the Apostles’ testimony?

Recall that the Bible isn’t, as American Atheists suggests, a single book. Instead, it’s a collection of centuries worth of religious texts, including centuries worth of Messianic prophecies. This means that, unlike the Qu’ran or the Book of Mormon, the prophecies and the accounts of the fulfillment of these prophecies aren’t coming from the same sources. This makes it all the more remarkable that the life of Jesus Christ so neatly fits the time and place foretold by the Jewish prophets.

For example, the Book of Daniel foretold that “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed” during the fourth kingdom after the then-reigning Babylonians, a timeline corresponding with the Roman Empire. The Book of Micah specifies that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem, and be of the tribe of Judah. The Books of Malachi and Haggai prophesied that the Second Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed in 70 A.D.) would be greater than the First Temple because the Lord Himself would enter it. And Psalm 22 depicted the Messiah as being executed by having his hands and feet pierced, a description eerily reminiscent of Crucifixion, despite having been written several centuries prior to its invention.

Christ meets all of these criteria: no small feat, given that none of these factors involved events within the Apostles’ control. He rose to prominence from a very particular part of the world, within a very particular time frame. A generation after His death, the Second Temple, so central to the Malachi and Haggai prophecies, was permanently destroyed. Nevertheless, these prophecies might serve as a baseline, of sorts. Anyone claiming to be the Messiah would need, at the very least, to meet these criteria. But the Apostolic message is profound, in that it goes beyond claiming that Christ fulfilled these explicit prophecies.

Instead, they view Him as so much more, as the key to revealing the deepest meanings of Scripture as a whole: “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Countless passages which, on face, don’t even appear prophetic are revealed to have a Christological dimension. To take a single example, consider John 19:32-34, “So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him; but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.”

In verse 36, John explains that this “fulfilled” the Scripture saying that not one of his bones would be broken. But that doesn’t come from an obvious Messianic prophecy; it comes from the instructions for preparing the Passover Lamb. And the water that streams out alongside the blood isn’t just a sign that Christ’s body has ceased metabolism. It’s a fulfillment of the Temple prophecies in Ezekiel. The last several chapters of the Book of Ezekiel describe a miraculous Temple from the side of which will flow life-giving waters. In John 2:21, John explains that this Temple is Jesus’ Body, and Christ applies the life-giving waters prophecy specifically in John 7:38.

This, in turn, points to the Sacramental theology latent in this passage: the life-giving waters flowing from the side of Christ signify Baptism, just as the blood signifies the Eucharist. These two Mysteries together form the Church, revealing yet another sets of Scriptures which are fulfilled: “As Eve was formed from the sleeping Adam’s side, so the Church was born from the pierced heart of Christ hanging dead on the cross” (CCC 766). In a single event, we see the meanings of several parts of Scripture, from the story of Adam and Eve to the Passover ordinances to the Temple prophecies, revealed in a radical new light as prophetic of the Messiah. Unlike the explicit Messianic prophecies, these weren’t predictions that the Apostles “had” to show as fulfilled in order to present Jesus as the Christ. And yet the Gospels are filled with events like this one, each one chock full of meaning and Scriptural significance.

Now perhaps this could be the work of a literary genius, who found a way to take the whole Jewish religious tradition, set it in the context of a single (real or fictional) human life, and combine the various prophecies and literary elements like so many instruments in an orchestra. But of course, the New Testament is no more the work of a single author than is the Old Testament, and we know from Roman sources like Pliny and Tatian that there were already Christians followers in the 50s and 60s A.D., before most of the New Testament (including the Gospels) was written. So the skeptic is left positing, not a single genius, but a cabal of geniuses, conspiring to craft a false Messianic narrative for reasons not immediately apparent. (This is precisely the direction skeptical Biblical scholarship has gone, creating ever-more complex theories about the textual origins of the Bible,)

But even if you’re willing to accept that sort of theory, it’s squarely contradicted by the charge of Bronze Age barbarism. You can’t simultaneously write off the Scriptural authors as halfwits and as too clever by half. The Bible can be primitive nonsense, or it could be an elaborate fraud, but it can’t very well be both. If Richard Dawkins, the American Atheists, and St. Luke are right that many of the writers of the New Testament were simple, uneducated folk, then it’s hard to explain away the literary genius of the New Testament as anything less than Divine inspiration.
 
 
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Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens—these are the posterboys for what some have called the “New Atheists”.

What’s new about the New Atheists? In his book, Gunning For God, Oxford mathematician John Lennox says it’s their tone and emphasis.

The tone of today’s New Atheists is one of intensity and aggression. They are not out to merely inform. They are out to convert—to de-vangelize. In the The God Delusion, Dawkins admits:

“If this book works as I intend, religious leaders who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” (p. 28)

The fearless polemicist, Christopher Hitchens, visited the University of Toronto in 2006 and—to the roaring applause of the crowd—he rallied his troops with these words:

“I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.”

In Letters To A Young Contrarian, Hitchens writes:

“I’m not even an atheist so much as I’m an antitheist”.

These words reflect precisely the intention and emphasis of the New Atheists and their disciples: to put an end to religion, or as Sam Harris has put it:

“To destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” (Letter To A Christian Nation, p.ix)

But the New Atheists are not the only atheists out there today. Indeed some modern atheists object rather strongly to the tact of their counterparts. Atheist Paul Kurtz, founder of the The Center For Inquiry (a secular humanist organization), is cited as giving the new atheists the following assessment:

“I consider them atheist fundamentalists,” he says. “They’re anti-religious, and they’re mean-spirited, unfortunately. Now, they’re very good atheists and very dedicated people who do not believe in God. But you have this aggressive and militant phase of atheism, and that does more damage than good.” (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists”)

Another skeptic who has given a critical assessment of the “anti-theist” division of popular atheists, is BBC Radio personality, John Humphrys, an agnostic. Here is how he responds to seven common New Atheist attitudes in his book, In God We Doubt (I have reconfigured the statement/response format for easier reading):

1. Believers are mostly naive or stupid. Or, at least, they’re not as clever as atheists.

To which Humphreys responds:

“This is so clearly untrue it’s barely worth bothering with. Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, was reduced to producing a “study” by Mensa that purported to show an inverse relationship between intelligence and belief. He also claimed that only a very few members of the Royal Society believe in a personal god. So what? Somebelievers are undoubtedly stupid (witness the creationists) but I’ve met one or two atheists I wouldn’t trust tochange a light-bulb.”

2. The few clever ones are pathetic because they need a crutch to get them through life.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Don’t we all? Some use booze rather than the Bible. It doesn’t prove anything about either.”

3. They are also pathetic because they can’t accept the finality of death.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Maybe, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Count the number of atheists in the foxholes or the cancer wards.”

4. They have been brainwashed into believing. There is no such thing as a “Christian child”, for instance—just a child whose parents have had her baptised.

To which Humphrys responds:

“True, and many children reject it when they get older. But many others stay with it.”

5. They have been bullied into believing.

To which Humphrys responds:

“This is also true in many cases but you can’t actually bully someone into believing—just into pretending to believe.”

6. If we don’t wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Of course the mad mullahs are dangerous and extreme Islamism is a threat to be taken seriously. But we’ve survived monotheist religion for 4, 000 years or so, and  I can think of one or two other things that are a greater threat to civilisation.”

7. Trust me: I’m an atheist.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Why?”

He adds:
“I make no apology if I have oversimplified their views with a little list: it’s what they do to believers all the time.”
 
 
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Richard Dawkins believes that if the universe began to exist—it was caused by nothing. In a debate with Cardinal George Pell in 2012 he asserted:

"Of course it's counterintuitive that you can get something from nothing! Of course common sense doesn't allow you get something from nothing! That's why it's interesting. It's got to be interesting in order to give rise to the universe at all!"

He was right about at least two things: to get something from nothing is both counterintuitive and in opposition to common sense. But in light of mounting evidence for an absolute beginning to the universe, such confidence in nothing is reflective of the radical measures taken by atheists—such as Dawkins, Steven Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Peter Atkins and others—to avoid postulating a divine Designer as the kick-starter of our finely-tuned, expanding universe.

Atheists know that anything which begins to exist must have a cause of its existence. This expectation drives scientific research. But in the case of the origin of the universe there seems to be an extreme aversion to the basic philosophical principle that "out of nothing, no thing comes". Thus atheists object to Lucretius' ancient maxim: "Nothing can be created from nothing". Science is founded on the principle that "things cause things". But wouldn't it seem equally true that "no thing causes no thing"? Yet, as we've seen atheists will make an exception, postulating nothing as a cause, in order to avoid the God conclusion (although it seems that often their description of "nothing" is a description of some thing leaving the question of the ultimate cause of things still open and unanswered).

Indeed such reasoning could make a first-year philosophy student cringe—not to mention professional philosophers such as Dawkins' fellow atheist, Michael Ruse, who once remarked, "I think Dawkins is ignorant of just about every aspect of philosophy and theology and it shows". Regardless, Dawkins and others continue to persist in this line of philosophically problematic thinking—what G.K. Chesterton might have called "uncommon nonsense"—while nonetheless enjoying strong influence on their atheist followers.

In an interview with PBS Dawkins was asked to comment on the hypothesis that God is the designer of whole evolutionary system. His negative answer reflects the same key principle he uses to deny God as the Big Banger of the universe:

"You start with essentially nothing—you start with something very, very simple—the origin of the Earth. And from that, by slow gradual degrees, as I put it "climbing mount improbable"—by slow gradual degree you build up from simple beginnings and simple needs easy to understand, up to complicated endings like ourselves and kangaroos."

Thus, such atheists postulate "nothing" as the cause of the universe because, on their view, nothing is "very, very simple" and God is not. And according to Dawkins and company the Big Bang (and the subsequent forward-moving evolutionary processes) must reflect a transition from the simple to the complex. From a simple molecule to a more complex molecule; from a single-celled organism to a multi-celled organism; from absolutely nothing to a universe. Therefore, on their view, simple nothing is preferable to a complex god as the Grand Cause of things; God is too complex to be the cause of the simple beginnings of the universe and the biological processes contained within.

But I want to point several important considerations in regard to this atheistic objection that God is too complex to be the cause of the universe (and the processes within):

First, the complex God they reject is not the God of Christianity. They might have ruled out a god of complexity, but not the God of simplicity proposed by Christian theists. This error is often committed by skeptics when they paint God with a suspicious similarity to themselves while failing to factor in His most essential supernatural characteristics; and a problematic creation of God in man's image and likeness results.

Dawkins' language betrays this tendency in his PBS interview:

"For one thing, if I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution."

Albert Einstein, a deist (and perhaps this sheds some light on why he remained so), says something similar:

"When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way" (Einstein: His Life And Universe, Walter Isaacson, p. 551)

These men are placing themselves into the shoes of God, assuming they would know how an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of the universe would act. Though they might be men of great intelligence, they are not all-knowing nor all-powerful; nor are they eternal or supernatural. God is in this sense wholly other than man; therefore God may very well have reasons for setting things up as he has; and such reasons may be beyond what our limited intellects can grasp.

Furthermore, they reject a complex God; but the God of Christianity is inconceivably simple. Therefore the god they reject on the basis of over-complexity is not the Christian God.

Second, God has no parts and is therefore more simple than anything in nature. God is pure spirit, by definition. He is completely non-physical. Eminent philosopher from the University of Notre Dame, Alvin Plantinga, has pointed out that by Dawkins' own description of God as a spiritual Being he has, perhaps unknowingly, admitted the simplicity of God as a pure spirit devoid of parts.

The atheist case fails to make key distinctions between a mind and its ideas. As philosopher William Lane Craig has clarified:

"Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—, but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind's ideas, which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity."

Third, the basic Christian definition of God is simple enough to be accepted by non-Christian religions. Antony Flew, the influential 20th century atheist philosopher (who eventually became a deist) writes:

“This strikes me as a bizarre thing to say about the concept of an omnipotent spiritual Being. What is complex about the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient Spirit, an idea so simple that it is understood by all the adherents of the three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam?” (There Is A God, p. 111).

In his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas shows five ways we can know "the absolute simplicity of God" as understood from a Christian perspective. (see also Karlo Broussard's article here).

Fourth, the creation event is not a natural event. Therefore any rule observed in nature (such as the proposed "simple to complex" rule) does not necessarily apply to the origin of the universe.

All of nature (time, space, matter, energy) and its laws came into existence with the Big Bang. Any cause before the beginning of the universe would not be a natural cause; it would be a supernatural cause. The "simple to complex" principle may apply to natural events, but an event that involves a transcendent, supernatural cause—a divine intervener—cannot be analyzed (and restricted) in the same way as natural events. The boundaries of science limit it to the physical world of time, space, matter and energy; in other words, science is limited to the moment of and after the Big Bang, but not before it. We must, therefore, look to other methods of acquiring knowledge—such as philosophy or perhaps even theology—in order to find good answers to questions such as "Why did the universe begin to exist?"

Fifth, the "simple to complex" rule may have exceptions. Oxford mathematician, John Lennox, has offered this possibility in his debates with Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins. Lennox offers the example of a book and its author. The design of a book suggests a designer. But the designer of the book—the author—is much more complex than the book itself. Therefore it seems in some cases that a thing may have a cause more complex than itself.

Sixth, an effect cannot be greater than its cause. Boston College philosopher, Dr. Peter Kreeft, writes:

"But doesn't evolution explain everything without a divine Designer? Just the opposite; evolution is a beautiful example of design, a great clue to God. There is very good scientific evidence for the evolving, ordered appearance of species, from simple to complex." (from "Argument From Design")

The evolutionary process seems to know where it's going. Thus the order and intentional nature of such an evolutionary system appears to point towards a cause greater than itself—which would be congruent with the basic philosophical principle that an effect cannot have more in it than its cause. Kreeft admits that there is very good scientific evidence for the evolving, ordered appearance of species, from simple to complex; but if such a "simple to complex" process exists then what set it in motion? And furthermore, what mechanism keeps it on course?

If an ordered process like evolution exists, so must a more-ordered and intelligent—or in God's case perfectly ordered and omniscient—cause of the evolutionary system. Dawkins admits that:

"Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design." (from "Big Ideas: Evolution")

He writes that evolution's "guiding force is natural selection". But if this is true: what guides natural selection? If he says nothing—then the guiding force called Natural Selection begins to look rather similar to a transcendent, intentional and intelligent cause camouflaged in a scientific-sounding name.

Final Thoughts

Nobel Laureate in physics, Dr. Richard Feyman, has expressed that "you can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity". On this, I think, theists and atheists can agree. I also think it is clear, based on the considerations proposed, that the Christian God is not the complex deity commonly rejected by atheist scientists. God, as he really is, is pure simplicity which is reflected in His name: I Am.

Indeed science must proceed for the sake of the Christian apologetic. For as we unfold the natural mysteries of the universe through scientific discovery, the reality and necessity of God for explaining the universe and all it contains will continue to be more clearly revealed. As the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, an agnostic, admitted in his Templeton address: "Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview".

The God of absolute simplicity we propose is not the "God of the gaps"; at least not the God of the scientific gaps. We might say, however, that God is the God of the limitless gap that lies beyond the confines of the universe (or universes if you prefer). He is the explanation that fills the void beyond the boundaries of time, space, matter and energy and thus provides a explanation for those things that cannot be explained by science. Truly, science and theology fit together exquisitely as the history of science forcefully testifies. But sadly for those who continue to reject the existence of God, nothing will remain the explanation of everything—and the supernatural gap beyond the universe will remain unfilled.

For more on the same topic read Cows, Quarks and Divine Simplicity by Brother Athanasius Murphy, O.P.

“We have to make this planet as good as we possibly can and try to leave it a better place than we found it.”

The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, responds to the trite apothegm with unsurprising applause. But off-stage, after the cameras are turned off, the proverbial devil of the details rears his ugly head.

A weary Dawkins—one almost gets the sense that he’d rather not talk to anybody at all—kneels besides a disabled woman in a wheelchair, handing her a signed copy of his book and forcing a smile for the camera. The woman looks ecstatic to meet her hero; Dawkins seems to still be busy pummeling on Pell in some dusty corner of the same restless mind that gave rise to The God Delusion almost a decade ago.

We see this all play out in the 2013 homage to the New Atheism, "The Unbelievers", a sort of promotional travelogue which follows Dawkins and fellow atheist Lawrence Krauss around the globe to—like two real-life Hazel Moteses—spread the gospel of unbelief.

But Dawkins recently admitted something about people who, like this particular fan, suffer from a lifelong disability: it would have been better for them to have never been born.

Contemplating over Twitter what a woman pregnant with a Down Syndrome child ought to do, Dawkins said: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” The controversial and callous remark—certainly not the first from Dawkins—was not so much walked back as walked forward in his formal apology.

Dawkins is not the only New Atheist that has been mired in public controversy in recent years. From Krauss' cringe-worthy debate with a Muslim scholar to Sam Harris' recent comments about Islam on Bill Maher's show, bizarre, off-color public statements from the New Atheists—often made, or at least said to be made, because of an unflinching commitment to naturalism—are resulting in charges of brutality, misogyny, bigotry, and the same kinds of unflattering associations Dawkins had hoped to keep squarely on God’s head.

Of course, no mountain of personal controversies could discredit the claims of these self-styled “brights” or of atheists more generally. To suggest otherwise would be to engage in the very ad hominem attacks of which some of them are all too fond. But these headlines are, in their way, a visible symptom of what seems to be the diminishing traction and declining vitality of the entire New Atheist movement.

To put it in no uncertain terms: the New Atheism, if not already dead, is quickly dying.

This is first evident in a very literal way, in their fallen ranks. The “fifth horsemen” of the New Atheism, Victor Stenger, passed away a few months ago, but the loss of their leading horseman Christopher Hitchens in 2011 immediately comes to mind.

With Hitchens’ death, the New Atheism lost its scintillating, seductive flair. The wittiest, most likeable new atheist may not have converted as many as he would’ve liked, but certainly won the attention and admiration of many in the Christian community. In one of the first articles at Strange Notions, titled “Why I Loved to Listen to Christopher Hitchens,” Father Robert Barron confesses:

“I think I watched every Hitchens debate that I could find on YouTube; I subscribed to Vanity Fair largely because Hitchens was a regular contributor; I read every one of his books...No one wrote quite like Christopher Hitchens. Whether he was describing an uprising on the streets of Athens, or criticizing the formation of young men in the British boarding schools of the 1950s, or defending his support of the Iraq war, or begging people to let go of what he took to be their childish belief in God, Hitchens was unfailingly intelligent, perceptive, funny, sarcastic, and addictively readable.”

If Christopher Hitchens was the most stimulating New Atheist, the erudite Santa-lookalike Daniel Dennett was always the most scholarly. But, like Saint Nick himself, the philosopher has vacated the public eye so suddenly as to cast doubt on his very existence. Dennett has made no new enemies, inflamed no Twitter wars, and penned no blog screeds about the stupidity of faith. Instead—perhaps with an eye toward securing his legacy as a serious philosopher—he’s been sitting down with respected Christian thinker Alvin Plantinga for a civil, serious dialogue about science and religion.

And here, we see the root cause of the New Atheism’s decline: its lack of a sturdy philosophical foundation. Any organization can withstand its bad press if it’s grounded in something human, something wise, something timeless. But all along, scholars have grumbled that—unlike the writings of a Nietzsche, Sartre, or Russell—the New Atheism lacked intellectual depth and was doomed to self-destruction.

And they were right. Krauss looks like a farm team player brought up to revitalize a crumbling organization, trying (and failing) to recreate Hitch’s signature rhetorical jukes. Meanwhile, Dawkins is resorting to odd trick plays which never get off the ground. (His bizarre mutations of the mind art show comes to mind.) Nothing is meshing the way it used to, and the overcompensation on the part of the remaining leaders—and pushback from their rank and file—is telling.

Meanwhile, less vociferous unbelievers are gladly rushing in to fill that profitable cultural space. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, has rightly been accused of bungling the history of the Church with relation to science in his new "Cosmos" series—but he’s also quick to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to God. “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist,” Tyson says in a Big Think interview. “What is my stance on religion, or spirituality, or God? I would say if I’d find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic...Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active atheists. They’re like in-your-face atheists, and they want to change policies, and they’re having debates. I don’t have the time, the interest, the energy to do any of that. I’m a scientist.”

Then there is Thomas Nagel, a renowned philosopher who—going beyond Tyson—is an avowed atheist. Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False drove fellow atheists up the wall, not only for its defection from the creed of naturalism, but for its alignment with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga—the same Christian enemy who has been sitting down with Dennett for tea.

Lastly, there’s physicist and atheist Sean Carroll who—going even beyond Nagel—is committed to the materialist conception of nature. Carroll penned an insightful piece recently titled “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy.” While men like Dawkins, Krauss, and Stephen Hawking routinely dismiss philosophy as obfuscating gibberish that only serves to embolden the theologians, Carroll acknowledges that philosophy adds quite a lot to the modern scientific project. “The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works,” Carroll writes. “Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway...It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest.”

This, happily, is the new tenor of the conversation. The apparently intramural rivalry between two fundamentalist spins on the world looks increasingly at odds with the problems and possibilities an open-minded majority face on the ground, and warriors from each side are deigning to say to the other, like Pound to Whitman:

I have detested you long enough...
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

That’s not to say that passionate disagreement has ended—it hasn’t, and never will. But the tone and style of "The Unbelievers" seems a decade too late; the moment has passed. As celebrities like Bill Pullman and Cameron Diaz offer public support for this un-dynamic duo, and Krauss proudly holds up a tweet from Miley Cyrus with his picture and the quotation “forget Jesus,” the only real message that gets across is that intellectual fashions, like all fashions, come and go.

And as things continue to change where philosophical substance is concerned, the New Atheists and their readers will either change too, or fade away, raging against the dying of the brights.
 
 
(Image credit: YouTube)