ARGUMENTS OF OPPONENTS
OF RELIGION
Atheists might argue that with the advancement of knowledge of the universe in recent centuries, all religious beliefs regarding God have been proven to be false. They might contend that religion is not based on actual reality and is only a product of man’s desire to seek an explanation for the universe. They might claim that paucity of information led our ancestors to those ‘wrong’ answers called ‘God’ and ‘religion.’ They might contend that just as man has corrected his ways in other matters due to intellectual advancement, he must now correct his religious beliefs regarding the universe.
According to this way of thinking, religion is an unreal explanation for a real phenomenon. In earlier times, it was argued that because man’s knowledge was minimal, he could not acquire a correct explanation of phenomena, and so, in the name of religion, he established various absurd hypotheses. But, according to this perspective, the global phenomenon of progressive evolution has extricated man from this darkness, and now, in the light of modern knowledge, it has become possible that instead of clinging to baseless religious beliefs, man can find out the reality of things through purely experimental and observational methods. And so, it is claimed that all those previously believed to be the result of supernatural causes can now be explained entirely through natural causes. Modern methods of research, it is argued, have informed us that to believe in the existence of God was not the result of any discovery by man but that, instead, it was simply speculation from the days of ignorance which, after the spread of the light of scientific knowledge, has been proven to be false. Thus, for instance, British writer Julian Huxley (d. 1975), who was possibly a hardened atheist, writes:
“Newton showed that God did not control the movements of the planets. Laplace, in a famous aphorism, affirmed that astronomy did not need the god hypothesis; Darwin and Pasteur did the same for biology, and in our century, the rise of scientific psychology and the extension of historical knowledge have removed gods to a position where they are no longer of value in interpreting human behaviour and cannot be supposed to control human history or interfere with human affairs.” (Julian Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, 1958).
In the physical world, the ‘hero’ of this revolution was Newton, who presented the theory that specific unchangeable laws bind the universe. There are some laws by which all astronomical bodies are in motion. Later, innumerable people further advanced this research, so much so that all phenomena on Earth and in the skies began to align with a determined and fixed system named ‘The Laws of Nature’. Following this discovery, the idea that behind the universe, there is an active and powerful personal God running it and caring for human beings began to lose currency. People began attributing to ‘The Laws of Nature’ many of the roles that were earlier attributed to God.
For growing numbers of people, especially in the West, the maximum concession they were willing to make was that a God initially set the universe in motion and, after that, had nothing to do with it. And so, in the beginning, people kept believing in God in the capacity of a ‘Prime Mover.’ One scholar came up with the idea that God had made this universe in the same way a watchmaker makes a watch: gathering the watch’s parts, giving them a particular structure, and after that, having no relation with the final product. But later, David Hume (1711-1776) objected, arguing that we have no experience of the world being made. With a watch, we know it has to be created by a watchmaker because we can observe it being made this way and compare it to the making of similar watches to deduce they have similar causes in their creation. However, we have no experience of the universe’s creation (or any other universe’s creation to compare our universe to) and never will; therefore, it would be illogical to infer that our universe has been created by an intelligent Designer in the same way that a watch has been.
Nature Itself Is in Need of an Explanation
According to atheists, the advancement of science and the spread of knowledge has now shown man the truth of things that he had not hitherto understood, because of which he had wrongly attributed them to some ‘imaginary’ supernatural force. Events and phenomena in his surroundings that man lacked proper knowledge of were declared miracles of that supernatural force, but now science has shown them to be the result of entirely natural forces. Earlier, there were certain links in certain events that man did not know; because of this, he could not understand why these events were occurring, so he attributed them to some God. But now, because we fully know all the links in these events, we fully understand why and how they happen—entirely because of natural causes and having nothing to do with a God.
For example, earlier, man did not know the truth about the sun’s rising and setting. That is why, atheists might argue, man came to believe that there is some God who takes the sun out, makes it rise, and causes it to set—and in this way, the notion of a supernatural force was born. But now, when we know that the sun’s rising and setting happens because of an entirely natural cause—the rotation of the earth around its axis—there is no need to believe in God to explain this phenomenon.
In the same way, atheists would contend, all those other phenomena regarding which it was earlier thought that some supernatural force was at work behind them have, in the wake of modern scientific findings, come to be known to be the result of the actions and reactions of entirely natural forces, forces that are known to us. Thus, atheists might argue that after discovering the natural causes of events and phenomena, there is no need to account for them by assuming the existence of a God or some other supernatural force.
This argument can be expressed as follows:
“If a rainbow is caused by the refraction of the sun’s rays as they fall on raindrops, it is wrong to say that they are a sign of God in the sky.”
Atheists might remark:
“If events are due to natural causes, they are not due to supernatural causes.”
Atheists would say that from the study of the universe, it has come to be known that all the events here follow the determined laws of Nature. Hence, to explain them, there is no need to posit the existence of any unknown God because known natural laws explain these events.
In my view, the best answer to this argument is the one that American biologist Cecil Boyce Hamann gives: ‘Nature does not explain; she is herself in need of an explanation.’ This means that Nature or ‘The Laws of Nature’ cannot be the final explanation of such phenomena because the question still arises: “Who or what made Nature and the Laws of Nature?” Analyzing this argument, I would like to conclude that science, which seeks to provide explanations only for the laws of Nature, cannot replace religion because it would need to discover the ultimate and absolute explanation, which it is not in a position to.
Secondary Cause, Primary Cause
The atheists’ naturalistic argument can be answered by asking, “What or Who caused the laws of Nature to come into existence?” Man has indeed discovered various laws of Nature. But the ‘Laws of Nature’ are not the answer to the question in response to which religion has come into being. Religion informs us about the Ultimate Cause that is working behind the universe and that also has brought the Laws of Nature into being, whereas the discovery of the laws of Nature is only related to the external structure of the universe. The ‘Laws of Nature’ are only a secondary cause of the various phenomena they are used to describe; the primary or Ultimate Cause being that Being or Force that caused the laws of Nature to come into being and be just the way they are. And this primary or Ultimate Cause is, in the language of religion, called ‘God.’ Modern science only gives further details of various phenomena in the universe and does not provide an actual or final explanation.
The Ultimate Cause
All the knowledge of science is related to the ‘what’ of things. The ‘why’ aspect is outside its reach, whereas the ultimate explanation of something relates to this latter aspect, which only religion can answer satisfactorily.
One can understand this with the help of an example. A hen lays eggs that have a strong shell. A chick is nourished inside the protective shell of its egg. When the shell breaks, the chick comes out into the world. Now, how does it happen that the shell breaks and the chick, which is not more than a bit of flesh, emerges from it? In ancient times, many people might have said: “God does it like this.” In modern times, through observation through a microscope, it has come to be known that when a period of 21 days is about to get over, a small, hard horn appears on the chick’s beak. With the help of this horn, the chick breaks its shell and emerges. The horn, completing its work, automatically falls off a few days after the chick’s birth.
According to the worldview of the opponents of religion, this phenomenon proves that the ancient belief that the cause of the chick’s emergence from the egg is God is wrong because the ‘eye’ of the microscope very clearly shows us that there is a 21-day law that causes a horn to appear on the chick’s beak, which the chick uses to break its shell and emerge out of the egg. But this argument is nothing but a misunderstanding. All that modern scientific observation has shown us in this regard is one additional step of the phenomenon of the chick’s emergence from its shell. It has not told us the actual or ultimate cause of the phenomenon. Following the observation of the horn that emerges on the chick’s beak, which the chick uses to crack the shell of the egg, the difference that has come about in the situation is nothing more than this: earlier, the question was about how the cover of the egg breaks, and now the issue was extended to ask how the horn-like feature emerged on the chick’s beak! The chick using its ‘horn’ is only an intermediate step of the phenomenon of the chick coming out of the shell of the egg; it is not the ultimate cause of the phenomenon. The ultimate cause of the phenomenon will come to be known only when we can come to know what or who it is that made the horn appear on the chick’s beak—in other words, that Ultimate Cause that had prior knowledge of the chick’s need for a tool to help it to come out of its shell and which compelled a bit of matter to appear, right on time, after 21 days, on the chick’s beak, in the form of a horn, which, after finishing its work, drops off the chick’s beak on its own.
In other words, earlier, the question was, “How does the shell break?” Now, the question is, “How does the horn come into being?” There is no qualitative difference in either of these cases. One can, at the most, term the appearance of the horn on the chick’s beak as a broader observation of reality. One cannot term it as an ultimate explanation of a phenomenon.
The question of what it was that ultimately caused the horn to appear on the beak cannot be answered by materialist science. For theists, the answer is that the horn did not appear on its own. God arranged for this to enable the chick to emerge from its shell.
Invoking the ‘laws of Nature’ may explain the secondary cause of occurrences, but the primary or Ultimate cause is other than this, for a secondary cause is itself caused by another cause—a primary cause—and so it cannot be the ultimate cause of a phenomenon.
Take another example: atheists might admit that the food digestion process and the food becoming part of the body is truly remarkable. But they would probably contend that people who believe that all this happens because God has so arranged for it are in error, claiming that modern observation indicates that it is simply the result of chemical reactions in the body. But will the existence of God be negated because of this? After all, what is that power that makes the chemical components in the human work in such a way as to enable food to be digested and to become part of the body?
After food enters the body, it passes through different stages, in line with an amazing automatic arrangement. Witnessing this, it would be absurd to claim that this arrangement existed on its own or by chance, as atheists might argue. The fact is that this phenomenon makes it even more necessary for us to accept that it is God who is the Ultimate Cause of it and that here, He works through the laws of Nature, which He has established in the world.
In other words, Nature and the laws of Nature do not explain the creation and the functioning of the universe. Instead, they require an explanation for themselves—and that explanation is God. Undoubtedly, science has told us many new things. But even if these discoveries were to increase millions and billions of times, the need for religion would remain. This is because these discoveries only tell us how these events occur. They do not tell us why these events are happening and their ultimate cause. All of these discoveries are only intermediate or secondary explanations, while authentic religion gives us the ultimate and total explanation of things, centred on the existence of the Creator.
