Contending For The Faith---Part 50

In St. Jude 1:3, we read, "Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." [Emphasis mine]. Contending For The Faith is a series of posts dedicated to apologetics (i.e.,  the intellectual defense of the truth of the Traditional Catholic Faith) to be published the first Monday of each month.  This is the next installment.

Sadly, in this time of Great Apostasy, the faith is under attack like never before, and many Traditionalists don't know their faith well enough to defend it. Remember the words of our first pope, "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect..." (1Peter 3:16). There are five (5) categories of attacks that will be dealt with in these posts. Attacks against:

• The existence and attributes of God
• The truth of the One True Church established by Christ for the salvation of all 
• The truth of a particular dogma or doctrine of the Church
• The truth of Catholic moral teaching
• The truth of the sedevacantist position as the only Catholic solution to what has happened since Vatican II 

In addition, controversial topics touching on the Faith will sometimes be featured, so that the problem and possible solutions may be better understood. If anyone had suggestions for topics that would fall into any of these categories, you may post them in the comments. I cannot guarantee a post on each one, but each will be carefully considered.

The "God of the Gaps"

To My Readers: As a former science teacher, I had to explain to my students complex ideas in child-like (not childish) ways for them to understand. I have done that this week for those of you with children in grades 6-8. For those without children (or young children), you may know a youngster from the neighborhood or have a niece/ nephew in that age range. They may attend public school or have friends who do. They may be challenged that belief in God goes against science. My purpose in writing this post is to help them understand that God and science do not conflict at all, and science points to God. Most often some science texts (and some unscrupulous teachers) will mock belief in God as "the God of the gaps" that fills in to explain things science cannot yet elucidate. 

This writing is compiled from my many sources, both past and present, when trying to explain why God is a necessary postulate for the beginning of life.  Assuming everything modern science teaches is true, it proves (not disproves) the need for a Creator. I take no credit at all, except for condensing this into a terse post that you can hopefully use to help a child if he/she is challenged that life began on its own and belief in God is not compatible with science. Please comment if you find this post helpful; I have never written one like it before. 

God bless you all, my dear readers---Introibo

Have you ever wondered how life on Earth began? In the 1920s, two scientists came up with more or less the same answer to that question. One was the Russian biochemist Aleksandr Oparin, and the other was a British scientist called J.B.S. Haldane. They suggested that millions of years ago, there was a lot of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor, plus a few other ingredients, all bubbling away in a “primordial soup”. Nothing in this soup was alive. Then, all of a sudden (they theorized), some compounds called amino acids were formed—possibly because of a lightning strike which kick-started certain chemical reactions. Amino acids can combine together to make up proteins, and proteins are what you need for cells, and cells are what living things are made of. So, amino acids are often described as the basic building blocks of life. From a primordial soup to the beginnings of life! That’s how Oparin and Haldane thought it must have happened. And that’s how many people still assume it happened. Yet there are problems with this theory.

Most geochemists now think differently about which compounds were around at the relevant point in the earth’s history. It now seems to them that the atmosphere of the early earth would actually have prevented amino acids from forming. But there’s an even more serious difficulty than that. In one of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century, it was found that amino acids can’t become the building blocks of life until they are connected together in a particular order in very long chains. Why is this a problem for the “primordial soup” hypothesis? Because it’s extremely unlikely that this could happen by chance.

 I mean extremely unlikely. It’s been said that the likelihood of life starting from non-life, just like that, is about the same as the likelihood of a tornado ripping through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a Boeing 747 aircraft. (The mathematician Sir Fred Hoyle was the person who first made this comparison.). It might just be possible in theory, but it’s so improbable, it would never actually happen. Other theories have also been put forward. But the honest answer to the question, “How did life on Earth begin?” is that scientists aren’t sure.

Now you might expect me to say, “Therefore, God must have started life on Earth! It’s the only possible explanation. We must have a Creator!” However, making that kind of argument would be a mistake. As a matter of fact, I do believe that God is the one who got life started on our planet. Yet I don’t believe it just because scientists haven’t come up with a definite explanation.

I want you to imagine for a moment that you have grown up believing in Zeus—the Greek god of lightning. Every time there is a storm, you look out of your window and shudder at the rumbling thunder and flashes of light. You know that what you’re seeing is Zeus hurling a thunderbolt through the sky, and you fear for those who are feeling the full effects of his anger.

Now imagine that you go to school one day, and your physics teacher announces that the topic for today’s lesson is lightning. You listen in amazement as you discover how electrical charges build up inside clouds as ice crystals rub together. The lecturer explains that a flash of lightning is a huge spark that discharges this built-up electricity. In other words, lightning and thunder are just a giant version of the snap that happens when you’ve rubbed a balloon against your woolly sweater and then someone touches you.

You stare at your teacher as the penny finally drops: Zeus isn’t real. You believed in Zeus because you needed an explanation for thunder and lightning. But now you have a better explanation—one based on science. So you don’t need Zeus anymore. It makes no sense to believe in him, now that you know what you know. This is because Zeus is what we call a “god of the gaps.”

Throughout history, many people have believed in various gods because they wanted explanations for things they had no other way of understanding. The gods filled the gaps in people’s knowledge. But as science has developed, many of those gaps have gone away. We don’t need to believe in a god of lightning anymore because lightning isn’t a gap anymore: we know how it works. So if your only reason to believe in God is “We don’t know how life on Earth began; therefore there must be a God who miraculously made it happen,” you’re making the same error as the ancient Greeks. You’re believing in yet another god of the gaps—it’s just a different gap. If scientists discover more about what was going on in the very earliest stages of the earth, the gap might go away, and so will your belief in God. By contrast, the reason why I think God is the person who started off life on Earth is that I have lots of other reasons to believe that he exists and that he created the world. My belief in God doesn’t depend on a particular gap, or even on a combination of gaps. 

Let’s say you’ve decided to make a roast dinner, and you’re looking at a recipe. Perhaps it begins like this: "Preheat oven to 350F. Roughly chop 1 onion and 2 carrots. Scatter onion and carrots across the base of a roasting tin. Sit 1 whole chicken on top of the vegetables." The question is, how did those words come about?

Your answer is probably that a chef wrote them. That’s very reasonable. Language comes from people. (Even if the words come via AI, that AI still needs to have been given information by a human.) Faced with words, it’s reasonable to assume that a human mind is behind them. This is not a “mind of the gaps” argument. You’re not saying, “There is no explanation; therefore it must have been a person.” Instead, you are thinking through the evidence—which includes all the experience of writing and language you’ve had in your life—and you’re putting forward the explanation that fits best with that evidence: a human being designed this recipe and wrote these words. In the same way, plenty of people have looked at the world and decided that the best explanation for the way it works is that it has a Creator or designer. In other words, they put forward the hypothesis of a personal Creator we call GOD. (A hypothesis just means a scientist’s best guess. It means, “I’m not completely sure, but taking all the evidence into account, I think it probably happened this way.”).

One such person was the philosophy professor Antony Flew, a former atheist who died in 2010. 

Convinced by DNA

It was quite big news when, in 2004, Professor Flew decided that he believed in an intelligent Creator. He had been a well-known atheist for most of his life. He had even written books arguing for atheism and had persuaded lots of other people to be atheists too. Now he decided that there must be some sort of God. He explained:

My whole life has been guided by the principle … “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.” 

(See There is a God, [2007], pg. 123). 

What changed Flew’s mind was some new evidence that biologists had discovered about DNA. DNA is a bit like the words in your roast chicken recipe. It’s a set of instructions—a code that tells the cells in your body what to do. The thing is, your recipe wouldn’t be at all useful if it read like this:

"un3btdeo83 ^4 bs)@ bgs."

Instructions are only instructions if they have actual words in them, and words are only words if the letters are in the right order. In just the same way, DNA only works if the “letters” inside it come in the right order. (The “letters” are molecules called nucleotides, which have to be connected in specific ways in order to work.) When Flew understood this, he decided that the best explanation for the existence of DNA was some sort of intelligent designer. Just as you see a recipe and realise that a mind must be behind it, so Flew saw the way DNA works and decided that a mind must be behind that too.

This is different from believing in Zeus, because it involves actually looking at evidence. Flew saw the observations that scientists had made and formed the conclusion, based on evidence, that an intelligent mind was responsible for life on our planet.

More Evidence of a Designed Universe

There is other evidence that has persuaded scientists that God exists. We are gradually discovering that the fundamental forces in the universe are amazingly delicately balanced, or “fine-tuned”, to support life. Many different aspects of the universe—from the energy levels in carbon atoms to the rate at which the universe is expanding—turn out to be exactly what they need to be for life to be possible. Change any of them just a little, and we would not exist. For example, life wouldn’t exist without stars. To be more precise, we need both large stars, which are like huge machines that produce crucial elements like oxygen and carbon, and small stars, like our sun which burn long enough to provide the long-term warmth that is required for life. 

The theoretical physicist Paul Davies tells us that, happily, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are delicately balanced in such a way that the universe includes both large stars and small stars. But if you changed the strength of one of those forces just slightly, you’d have big problems. What do I mean by “just slightly”? Davies explains that the accuracy that is needed is the same level of accuracy that you would need to shoot a gun and hit a coin at the far side of the universe—that’s 20 billion light years away. It’s very unlikely that anyone would make that shot successfully. But that is how accurately balanced the forces of gravity and electromagnetism have to be in order for life to exist. Davies concludes: The impression of design is overwhelming. (See The Cosmic Blueprint,[1988], pg. 203).

Conclusion

I hope you’re getting the point that believing in God can be rational—it’s a reasonable way of understanding the evidence that science shows us. However, it doesn’t make sense to believe in any old god. It doesn’t make sense to believe in a god who exists within the universe, like Zeus or Thor, and serves as an explanation for particular things we observe in the world. No, we have to be talking about a Creator God: someone who designed the universe and set the whole thing in motion. Someone who exists beyond the world we know. This is the only kind of God science can point us towards:

This is the One True God worshipped by the One True Church.

"For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable." (Romans 1:20).