Why Scientists Must Believe in God: Divine Attributes of Scientific Law

All scientists — including agnostics and atheists — believe in God. They have to in order to do their work.

It may seem outrageous to include agnostics and atheists in this broad statement. But by their actions people sometimes show that in a sense they believe in things that they profess not to believe in. Bakht, a Vedantic Hindu philosopher, may say that the world is an illusion. But he does not casually walk into the street in front of an oncoming bus. Sue, a radical relativist, may say that there is no truth. But she travels calmly at 30,000 feet on a plane whose safe flight depends on the unchangeable truths of aerodynamics and structural mechanics.

But what about scientists? Do they believe in God? Must they? Popular modern culture often transmits the contrary idea, namely that science is antagonistic to orthodox Christian belief. Recitations of Galileo's conflict and of the Scopes Trial have gained mythic status and receive reinforcement through vocal promotions of materialistic evolution.

Historians of science point out that modern science arose in the context of a Christian worldview, and was nourished and sustained by that view. But even if that was once so, twentieth-century and twenty-first-century science seems to sustain itself without the help of explicit theistic underpinnings. In fact, many consider God to be merely the "God of the gaps," the God whom people invoke only to account for gaps in modern scientific explanation. As science advances and more gaps become subject to explanation, the role of God diminishes. The natural drives out the need for the supernatural.

FOCUSING ON SCIENTIFIC LAW

The situation looks different if we refuse to confine God to "the gaps." According to the Bible, he is involved in those areas where science does best, namely areas involving regular and predictable events, repeating patterns, and sometimes exact mathematical descriptions. In Genesis 8:22 God promises,

While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.

This general promise concerning earthly regularities is supplemented by many particular examples:

You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about (Ps. 104:20).

You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth (Ps. 104:14).

He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly.

He gives snow like wool; he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.

He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs; who can stand before his cold?

He sends out his word, and melts them; he makes his wind blow and the waters flow (Ps. 147:1518).

The regularities that scientists describe are the regularities of God's commitments and actions. By his word to Noah, he commits himself commitments and actions. By his word to Noah, he commits himself to govern the seasons. By his word he governs snow, frost, and hail. Scientists describe the regularities in God's word governing the world. So-called natural law is really the law of God or word of God, imperfectly and approximately described by human investigators.

Now, the work of science depends constantly on the fact that there are regularities in the world. Without the regularities, there would ultimately be nothing to study. Scientists depend not only on regularities with which they are already familiar, such as the regular behavior of measuring apparatus, but also on the postulate that still more regularities are to be found in the areas they will investigate. Scientists must maintain hope of finding further or they would give up their newest explorations.

(I should say here that I am concentrating on the natural or "hard" sciences such as physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and astronomy. To some extent similar observations hold for "human sciences" such as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. But the study of human beings brings in additional challenges, because of the way in which one's overall understanding of the nature of humanity vitally influences the investigation. In concentrating of the nature of humanity vitally influences the investigation. On regularities, I am also putting into the background studies, such as the study of the past history of the large-scale universe [cosmology], the past history of life [paleobiology], the past history of the earth [historical geology], and so on. These studies rely on the assumption of regularities, but they also wrestle with understanding many unrepeatable events, such as the origin of the first cell, or the origin of the first humans. We will focus on the issue of uniqueness versus repeatability later [chapter 13]. And we will consider issues of origins in chapters 18 and 19.)

BELIEF IN SCIENTIFIC LAWS

Now just what are these regularities? For five years in a row a robin appears and builds a nest in the same bush. But in the sixth year no robin appears. Does this show a "regularity" of the appropriate type? It might be a matter of coincidence. Scientists are concerned to observe robins and their nest-building. But in the long run they do not rest with observations of mere coincidence. They want to know whether the recurrence is somehow constrained, whether it occurs according to a general explanatory principle. The principles go by various names: "natural law," "scientific law," "theory." Some of these regularities can be exactly, quantitatively described for each case (within small limits of error), while others are statistical regularities that come to light only when a large number of cases are examined together. All scientists believe in the existence of such regularities. And in all cases, whatever their professed beliefs, scientists in practice know that the regularities are "out there." Scientists in the end are all "realists" with respect to scientific laws. Scientists discover these laws and do not merely invent them. Otherwise, why go to the trouble, tedium,...