God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger Read Free Book Online

science, religious belief was based on faith, cultural tradition, and a confidence in the revealed truth in the scriptures and teachings of holy men and women specially selected by God. As science began to erode these beliefs by showing that many of the traditional teachings, such as that of a flat Earth at rest at the center of a firmament of stars and planets were simply wrong, people began to look to science itself for evidence of a supreme being that did not depend on any assumptions about the literal truth of the Bible or divine revelation.
    The notion that the observation of nature alone provides evidence for the existence of God has a long history. It received perhaps its most brilliant exposition in the work of Anglican archdeacon William Paley (d. 1805). In his
Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature,
first published in 1802 1 , Paley wrote about finding both a stone and a watch while crossing a heath. While the stone would be regarded as a simple part of nature, no one would question that the watch is an artifice, designed for the purpose of telling time. Paley then alleged that objects of nature, such as the human eye, give every indication of being contrivances.
    Paley’s argument continues to be used down to the present day. Just a few weeks before writing these words, two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door. When I politely expressed my skepticism, one began, “Suppose you found a watch…” Design arguments never die; nor do they fade away.
    Sophisticated modern forms of the argument from design are found in the current movement called
intelligent design,
which asserts that many biological systems are far too complex to have arisen naturally. Also classifying as an argument from design is the contemporary claim that the laws and constants of physics are “fine-tuned” so that the universe is able to contain life. This is commonly but misleadingly called the
anthropic principle.
    Believers also often ask how the universe itself can have appeared, why there is something rather than nothing, how the laws of nature and human reason could possibly have arisen—all without the action of a supreme being who transcends the world of space, time, and matter. In this chapter and those that follow, we will see what science has to say about these questions.
    Darwinism
    When Charles Darwin (d. 1882) entered Cambridge University in 1827 to study for the clergy, he was assigned to the same rooms in Christ’s College occupied by William Paley seventy years earlier 2 . By that time, the syllabus included the study of Paley’s works and Darwin was deeply impressed. He remarked that he could have written out the whole of Paley’s 1794 treatise,
A View of the Evidences of Christianity,
and that
Natural Theology
“gave me as much delight as did Euclid 3 .”
    Yet it would be Darwin who provided the answer to Paley and produced the most profound challenge to religious belief since Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe.
    Darwin’s discovery caused him great, personal grief and serves as an exemplar of a scientist following the evidence wherever its leads and whatever the consequences.
    Although the idea of evolution had been around for a while, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin being a notable proponent, no one had recognized the mechanism involved. That mechanism, proposed by Darwin in 1859 in
The Origin of Species 4
and independently by Alfred Russel Wallace 5 , was
natural selection
by which organisms accumulate changes that enable them to survive and have progeny that maintain those features. Darwin had actually held back publishing for twenty years until Wallace wrote him with his ideas and forced him to go public. Darwin’s work was by far the more comprehensive and deserved the greater recognition it received.
    Today we understand the process of natural selection in terms of the genetic information carried in the DNA