Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Does God Exist? Order in Nature
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Theology is Verbiage
Professor A E Taylor, an expert in moral philosophy, sought to persuade us in his final book (Does God Exist?) that God really does exist. One wonders how people manage to get professorships in anything except kitchen portering while believing such things. Nevertheless he is determined, as the last thing he does in life, to explain it.
He begins by saying that the only reason that scientists believe that Nature is uniform and coherent is because God is perfect intelligence, and Nature must therefore reflect the character of its source. To be sure to be on safe ground, he cites A N Whitehead (Science and the Modern World) because Whitehead, the son of a minister held to the idea of God, and incorporated it into his scheme of things even though it does not need it.
It might be in a sense true that Christianity preserved the idea of Nature’s harmony—because a good God must be harmonious—for a millennium until the Enlightenment, but it is not true that it was a Christian invention or even revelation. In any case what was the Enlightenment enlightening people about? It was enlightening them about the dead hand of religion that had weighed down discovery for all this time.
No one can deny, least of all educated men like Taylor, even when they are Christians, that the Greeks developed the idea of natural harmony, and they had the basic notion from the “Arta” or “Order” of the Persian Zoroastrian religion. Revealed religions have the big disadvantage of knowing perfection from their originating revelation. Thereafter they cannot develop—perfection being as perfect as it is possible to be—and in practice all they can do from then on is schism as one after another believer disagrees with the received wisdom. Tortuous theological schemes are built up to try to stitch up tear after tear in the fabric of their revelation, but none of it has any grounding in reality. They are incapable of developing natural ideas because their ideas are supernatural.
The Greek philosophers, whose ideas were not conditioned by the concept of God because all intelligent Greeks regarded their gods as literary amusements, were able to philosophize over the unusual thoughts they picked up from the superpower on their doorstep. “Logo”, “Nous” and “Forms” became philosophical expressions of Nature’s order—a rationality that conditioned everything, even gods—and it was these ideas, perhaps, that Christianity might be claiming to have preserved—even though no expression of such thoughts emerged in Christendom for over a thousand years of filth and ignorance. It is time these modern Christians and their philosophical fellow travellers stopped glossing over the atrocious record that Christianity has had for the largest part of its existence.
The first scientists were also Christians at a time when it was impossible to be anything else, but, does that mean that Christianity should take credit for the uncertain steps they took to rid the world of the Christian dictatorship? When Christianity was at its zenith, knowledge was at its nadir. For Christianity, ignorance was superior to knowledge. For Christians, knowledge was vanity but ignorance was humility, and therefore saintliness. The western world was insane, and it has not recovered, despite the efforts of science and rationalists!
Newton indeed wrote more on Christianity than he wrote on the calculus, mechanics and light put together. What of it is remembered today? Theology is verbiage with no foundation in Nature, so is immune to any form of natural order. Science limits itself to what can be tried and tested in real life. This is the crucial point that Taylor and clever men like him seem unable to get, or refuse to accept. He thinks science needs to have some fundamental principle as a foundation, and God, for him, is it. He does not seem to notice that he is offering a choice—accept God as fundamental or accept Nature as fundamental. He cannot see this because, for him, there is only one choice—God. The other is not even an option!
Why must Nature have a God to control it? The fundamental order in the cosmos presupposed by Taylor can be Nature as easily—more easily—than God. That is really the conclusion of many of the Greek philosophers, and became a tenet of the Stoic religion. They had no supreme intelligence but simply a supreme law—a supreme orderliness. They called it God, but it did not change its mind and waggle its finger, metaphorical or otherwise, in the natural workings which it regulated, including human history.
Do scientists need to presuppose even this before they can start their scientific work? Science works by observing and testing. Human observers can count the number of sunrises between successive full moons. Before doing this did the observers have to assume that there would be some order in the universe that would regulate an orderly answer? Obviously there was no such presupposition. Taylor might care to argue that the supposition of order was made even though it was not stated or even consciously considered. Perhaps so, but, if it was, it was because the observers had spent their lives until then noticing that the waxing and waning of the moon indeed seemed to be regular. That was their hypothesis, and by counting sunrises, they were simply testing it. They found the answer was usually 28—sometimes 29. There was certainly order in it but not perfect order on that simple hypothesis. A more refined hypothesis restored the order.
The point of the example is that it preceded Christianity and even the Greek philosophers by thousands, perhaps myriads, of years. The people sitting under the night sky counting how many dawns separated one full moon from the next had no idea of theology, philosophy or science. They simply saw what was happening and concluded that there was harmony in Nature. God was later invented as a supreme intelligence to explain spuriously the observed harmony.
