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"Philosophy 101" 2010-06-16
By Dr. James Gardner (California)
Having spent the last hundred years or so trying to overthrow God and replace him with the beaker jar, scientists in recent years are now trying to resuscitate him. You'd think they would have better things to do, what with the problems of cancer, oil, the environment, global warming, etc. Yet every week or so it seems another scientist wants to chime in with his own sophomoric concept of Philosophy 101, and comfort us that God is still there, we just didn't realize it until now.
In this vein I am reading Gerald Schroeder's latest book, "God According to God: A Physicist Proves We've Been Wrong About God All Along." Well, thank God the proof comes from a physicist because now I can be comforted that we are on the right track. I'd hate to be misled by a Priest, or a Rabbi, or an English teacher. But since it's a physicist, I am in good hands.
Or at least that was my perception before I got to the first chapter - "A Few Words About What God is Not". It seems that our Physicist spends a lot of time studying the Old Testament, and it further seems that his concept of God comes from the Old Testament and furthermore, he seems to believe that the words in the Old Testament are tantamount to God's words. Being a mere Clinical Psychologist and biblical scholar, I had always thought that the portrait of God in the Old Testament was more a picture of the people who wrote the document, rather than the word of God, or even the inspired word of God.
Schroder moves from this very shaky base to the argument that life itself shows the existence of God's handiwork. Somewhere early on I am reminded of the clocks and David Hume and all that Philosophy 101 stuff. Along that line he mentions Bart Ehrman's terrible book about suffering, and I have to wonder, given all the wonderful books that Bart Ehrman wrote, how Schroeder can glom on to the worst one. But I digress.
He moves from here to a discussion of the big bang theory and the immediate minutes and hours following the bang itself. Frankly I didn't know that all this had been worked out. Naively, I thought this was a theory, and I didn't know we had a minute by minute time flow chart available to us. In any event, Schroeder assures us that "that is a cause for wonder" and I'm still wondering what the cause was.
From here he deduces that we are "starlight" and I start thinking about the 60s and get very nostalgic. I think he's right, and he may even be right about the big bang - after all, this is a Physicists world. But how this all boils down to God escapes me, and perhaps boiling down is more Chemistry than Physics and there's the rub.
Schroeder eventually asks that Philo 101 question - "Could that miraculous flow from inanimate matter to the incredible intricacy of life have been the result of purely random events?" (p. 31). The answer, of course, is "Yes. Absolutely. It could be." Indeed, one always has the proof of the putting. That is, because we can ask this question, we have the proof that it is possible. Had this not happened, we would not be here to ask this question, or review this book on Amazon. Is there an alternative? Of course. Is one of the alternatives a prime mover? Surely. But so is the random conjunction of events.
Schroeder dismisses this argument by going to the prime mover. How can there be elements to randomly coalesce unless there is a prime mover? Philosophy 101 again. How can there be a prime mover unless there is a prime mover? We go full circle back to the Old Testament. Thousands of years ago these authors dealt with the same subject, and so they too posited a prime mover and then another prime mover and before you knew it, the monotheistic Jews had a polytheistic God system, assuming you know your Old Testament.
Life is a gas (no, not literally, I am speaking figuratively) and no one who observes it, for the past five thousand years, has failed to make this observation and often turned to the explanation of God to satisfy his curiosity and perhaps add some sense of protection and belongingness to his own existence. But the beauty of the blooming buzzing world does not necessarily define God, and we certainly don't need a 21st century Physicist to remind us of this. That's what we have Philosophy 101 for!
