Beyond the death of God - scientific challenges to atheism

National Review, May 6, 1996 by Patrick Glynn

Davies writes that "many" scientists find the "parallel universes" idea "a preferable hypothesis to the belief in a supernatural design." But it is no more than a preference, and a very odd one, given what scientists so often preach in advertisement of their own profession. Praising science at the expense of religion in 1935, Russell boasted: "The scientific temper of mind is cautious, tentative, and piecemeal." "The way in which science arrives at its beliefs is quite different," he wrote, "from that of medieval theology. . . . Science starts, not from large assumptions, but from particular facts discovered by observation or experiment." That so many members of a profession which prides itself above all on the dictum, "Just the facts, ma'am," would show a "preference" for wild speculations about unseen universes for which not a shred of observational evidence exists suggests something about both the power of the modern atheistic ideology and the cultural agenda of many in the scientific profession. By embracing the "parallel universes" as a last bulwark against the all-too-threatening suggestion of "supernatural design," the mainstream scientific community has in effect shown its attachment to the atheistic ideology of the random universe to be in some respects more powerful than its commitment to the scientific method itself. The modern scientific mind -- which contentedly believed it had refuted the religious world view on the basis of pure observation and fact -- has been scandalously unwilling to admit that the facts on which it based its presumptive conclusions were not, in reality, what they appeared to be.

The final line of defense against the Anthropic Revolution has been a kind of scientific legalism. The Anthropic Principle is said to fail the test of falsifiability (a contention which, in fact, remains in technical dispute). Since, it is argued, no observation or set of observations could prove or disprove the Anthropic Principle as a theory, it is not properly "scientific." On such grounds, Heinz R. Pagels, executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, in 1987 urged dismissal of the Anthropic Principle as "needless clutter in the conceptual repertoire of science." But this is the moral equivalent of the courts' exclusionary rule -- throwing out the entire murder case on the basis of a minor legal technicality. Whether the Anthropic Principle meets the technical qualifications of a formal scientific theory is irrelevant to what it suggests about the fundamental nature of the universe. Scientists may not "need" the Anthropic Principle as a theory for narrow purposes of scientific investigation (though in fact it has spurred a host of interesting discoveries); but the moment they begin to speculate -- as they so often freely do -- about what scientific discovery tells us about the nature of the universe at large, this elephant in the living room can hardly be overlooked. The double standard at work here is breathtaking: a host of scientists, from Russell to Richard Dawkins to Carl Sagan, are free to use loose surmises based on Darwin's theory to buttress the public case for atheism; but the moment scientists begin marshalling rather considerable and persuasive evidence for the opposite case, their speculation risks being branded by colleagues as "unscientific."