Tim Andersen Fails to Reconcile Science and Religion

His arguments are weak, and he ignores the deeper conflict

Photo by Pixabay, on Pexels

I was surprised to learn that Tim Andersen, Ph.D., the theoretical physicist and Medium author with 55K followers, is a Christian who sees no conflict between science and religion. On the contrary, he says in an article (called “Science can hold on to their faith”) that “Debate on theological and philosophical grounds is far more effective in developing a coherent worldview that includes both scientific and religious perspectives.” And he lays out there how he sees scientific knowledge complementing his Christian faith.

I should admit that, as I was reading through his article, my initial reaction was one of pity. As condescending as this sounds, what went through my mind is that Andersen carries a heavy burden. Imagine somehow acquiring these altogether opposing perspectives, namely science and theistic religion, which happen to be important to Andersen’s identity. Now, suppose you must defend their compatibility so you don’t come across as muddle-headed, even though the defense is liable to be fallacious, so you end up publicly embarrassing yourself anyway.

Of course, we’re free to adopt foreign perspectives, as when we empathize with a stranger, read a novel and identify with the protagonist for a cathartic release, or think objectively about a problem by setting aside our background beliefs. We may even have multiple sides of ourselves, including public and private roles we play. We needn’t, then, be puritanical in applying some all-embracing standard of personal or intellectual integrity since that would be unrealistic. Our brain, after all, is internally divided between its modules and layers of processing, so how could anyone expect to be perfectly consistent in all his or her thoughts and deeds? Even a computer can malfunction.

But the conflict between science and theistic religion, and particularly between science and Christianity, is deep-seated, and as comprehensive as Andersen’s apologetical case may be, his article doesn’t come to grips with the heart of the problem.

I’ll comment on a few of Andersen’s weaker points before moving to what I think is the conflict’s essence.

Are scientists more likely to be atheistic?

Andersen shifts from the critical-thinking mode that must be routine to him as he carries on his work as a physicist, to an apologist’s mode of strawmanning criticisms, when he says, “The popular myth that scientists are all atheists and agnostics comes from a few well-known science popularizers such as Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don’t have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that atheist scientists may simply be more evangelical about their religion than Christian ones.”

No one says “all” scientists are atheists; that’s a misrepresentation. Seconds spent googling the subject reveal, however, that scientists are disproportionately less religious than the rest of the population, and that the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London are overwhelmingly atheistic.

Andersen admits that he’s not speaking here based on “data” but is just going with his gut when he suspects that atheistic scientists are more evangelical than Christian ones. Even if that were true, it would be consistent with the claim that there’s a deep conflict between science and theistic religion. Maybe Christian scientists are loath to boast about their religiosity because they’re living in denial and they fear they can’t overcome the apparent conflict between their public and private lives, or between their work and their personal beliefs.

Atheism and the necessary being

Andersen is nonchalant about the prospects of atheism itself, saying, “In fact, it is much harder to justify God’s non-existence because one is forced to replace God’s function as the uncaused cause with something else. Agnosticism is perhaps the easiest to justify because it says nothing. But Christian belief requires a great deal more than that, more than most other religions in fact.”

Only the last of those three sentences has a grip on reality. The first sentence is wrong because, first of all, theists have the greater burden of proof, especially in the modern period when science has undermined the primary intuition supporting theism, namely naïve anthropocentrism.

Second, who says “God’s function” is just that of being an uncaused cause? That’s just elite Thomism, which Aquinas himself rejected when he saw how shallow and biased his abstruse theological reasonings were in comparison to a religious experience. The abstract God of the philosophers may overlap with nature and thus the scientific domain, but worship of that impersonal substance would be compatible with atheism.

No, the God of folk religion and mass Christianity, for example, isn’t just an “absolute substance,” “uncaused cause,” or a “necessary being.” Instead, this God is a personal creator and ruler of the universe, a living parental figure for all humanity who expressed himself as Jesus. And no, atheists aren’t obliged to replace that God with anything else.

Even if we confine ourselves to the Thomistic abstraction of a necessary being, atheists don’t have to replace it because they needn’t engage in armchair philosophizing. Indeed, there’s a difference between branding your character and culture with a myth and explaining how something works. The appeal to the necessary being that’s supposed to “explain” how the contingent domain of nature came to be amounts to a myth that’s disguised as pseudoscience. “Necessary being” is gibberish, and it therefore explains nothing. “God” in that sense is a placeholder, the spot on an old map that says, “Here be dragons.”

Regarding the supposed necessity of a supernatural being, Andersen argues:

If time has a beginning, that means that there is no “before” the beginning. There is nothing there. It would be like saying what is north of the North Pole? God could not be present in the void before the beginning getting things set up because there was no time. Time was something that was created, just like space and matter. In that sense, God must exist outside of time, space, and matter. In philosophy, we would call these contingent things. They depend on something outside of themselves for their existence. That thing must be, as in the previous argument, something that causes its own existence, so we find we don’t get away from the uncaused cause either way.

This is where atheists point out that if God were “outside” space and time, God wouldn’t be a person in any sense that would comfort ordinary religious folks, as opposed to the elite clerics who idolize the abstract God of the philosophers. As the uncaused, noncontingent, unlimited cause, God wouldn’t think, speak, judge, or act in anything like a human sense. So how would positing such a supernatural ground of contingent things entail a negation of atheism?

There’s no need for atheists to search for a replacement for such a “necessary being” or “uncaused cause,” because positing such a “being” is either vacuous or consistent with atheism. This isn’t the deity that most religious people are looking for.

Also, quantum mechanics is already effectively supernatural, compared to the emergent level of nature we experience, so much of this debate is merely semantic. What would be the difference between an abstract, impersonal “God,” as an uncaused cause that subsists outside space and time and “creates” the universe, on the one hand, and a subatomic fluctuation in a spaceless and timeless vacuum of virtual particles that does so, on the other?

Granted, the latter would presuppose the laws of quantum mechanics, while the former would presuppose principles of theology (God’s love, generosity, creativity, justice, and so on). But neither explanation would be perfectly complete because our drive to ask more and more questions is bottomless.

As for Andersen’s second sentence, it’s wrong because the agnostic does say something epistemological, which is that we can’t know whether there’s a God or not. The reasons are that the evidence is evenly balanced, the answer to the question is beyond our comprehension, or science is our best bet, and “God” isn’t a well-formulated term.

By this point, though, you should be getting dilettante vibes from Andersen. Here we seem to have a theoretical physicist who’s made something of a hobby wading into philosophical and theological territories, and because of the latent scientism you find in hard-science circles, Andersen is unduly confident in his philosophical opinions and arguments. That’s just an observation, mind you, and it shouldn’t stop critics from engaging with those arguments themselves. So on to the next one!

Miracles and laws of nature

Perhaps the most interesting part of Andersen’s explanation of the compatibility is his discussion of the laws of nature. He says that although scientists aim to discover them, the existence of the laws is what we’d expect were there a divine law-giver, so there may be a deeper set of “supernatural” laws. And a merciful God could show restraint and bend or violate one of the inferior, natural laws, which would look to us like a miracle.

In Andersen’s words,

God established the laws of the universe, and, when we discover them, we know something of what He intended for creation. Knowing those rules does not disprove or remove God from the equation any more than knowing the Federal law code disproves Congress. And just as Congress sets the rules and the Executive branch enforces them, so does the President have the power to make exceptions and pardon in rare circumstances, and we can have no insight into why unless it is revealed to us.

Presto, science is compatible with theistic religion.

Alas, the problem is that the scientific talk of “laws of nature” was tainted all along by the fact that modern science emerged from Christendom via deism. That origin led to the confusion between laws or rules and natural patterns or regularities.

Indeed, strictly speaking, the notion of the laws of nature that scientists discover is compatible with theism, but that’s only because the traditional interpretation of what scientists are doing is itself a theistic or deistic confusion. The so-called “laws of nature” aren’t social laws or rules. Nature isn’t obliged to follow them because there’s no known lawgiver in the case of nature, at least as far as authentic science is concerned.

Science methodically objectifies and therefore can’t posit a giant subject at the root of all objects. How, then, could an object follow a law or rule? Wouldn’t the object have to be animated by something like an Aristotelian telos or purpose to do so? And hasn’t modern science replaced that medieval way of thinking for thousands of reasons?

“Law of nature” is at best a metaphor, which compares natural regularities to social ones. There are literal laws that govern society, but there are no known laws governing nature. The “laws” that science discovers are human representations of natural patterns or regularities. Instead of saying that scientists “discover laws” here, we should say that scientists model real patterns. If anything, the models govern how we should think about nature, not directly what nature must do.

For that matter, we shouldn’t lose sight of the distinction between map and territory. Scientists use laws or models as cognitive tools in their explanations of natural phenomena. But there are no laws themselves in nature (outside of societies). Rather, the models refer to patterns, elements, forces, initial conditions, systems, processes, cycles, and so forth. Granted, those terms of natural language may be loaded with anthropocentric assumptions, but scientists aren’t supposed to take them literally.

In any case, we don’t know whether there’s a “universe” in the strict sense of a cosmos, a field of being united by a single set of coherent codes. Early or late stages of the universe may exhibit contrary patterns, or there may be a multiverse of world orders. Again, as far as we know, the search for a “theory of everything” is based on only a human presumption.

Were Jesus’s incarnation and resurrection historical?

In the article, Andersen is at his most sensible when he takes a liberal stance towards biblical claims and casts doubt on the Christian dogma of the Bible’s inerrancy. He says, for example, that the Eden and Flood narratives are morality tales, myths, and metaphors that make a theological point rather than an empirical or historical one.

As Andersen says,

Most modern Christians accept that when a part of the Bible contradicts known facts it is because it is intended to be metaphorical. That doesn’t mean that the supernatural events in the Bible never happened since we do not have facts that tell us they didn’t. But we do have facts that tell us that the Earth is billions of years old and that people evolved from animals. And basic common sense tells us that no single person could fit all the worlds’ animals on one boat. The story doesn’t seem concerned about this, however, and neither should we because, if we focus on its making literal sense, we lose the point.

To that extent, Andersen sides with science against theistic religion, or at least he writes against the naïve, literalist interpretation of Christianity.

Unfortunately, Andersen makes a whopping exception of Jesus’s resurrection, so his tactic here for showing how science and religion are compatible is to cherry-pick which parts of the Bible he wants to take literally, and which he equates with works of literary fiction. Says Andersen, “The account of Jesus’s death and resurrection, however, was intended to be taken literally, as if it were an account in a newspaper. Again, clues in the text tell us that.”

How does Andersen know the New Testament authors’ intentions? He reads the “clues” one way, while others can read them differently. What Andersen is up against is the fact that the modern, relatively scientific, historical-critical approach to studying the Bible has cast all kinds of doubt on the traditional Christian narrative.

For example, at face value, the Gospels should be taken as eyewitness accounts since they’re named after members of that earliest generation of Christians. But we have overwhelming reason to think that that tradition is erroneous since three of the Gospels draw directly and often extensively from Mark. That erroneous tradition only reinforced the propaganda that’s laced throughout the New Testament. The NT texts aren’t historical reports at all, but hagiographies, allegories, and letters meant to sell a theological message.

Thus, we can apply the same criteria Andersen uses to demote some parts of the Bible to the stories of Jesus’s incarnation and resurrection. Maybe Jesus was only a symbol of everyone’s potential divinity, and he didn’t rise from the dead as a matter of history. But the Gospel authors wrote as if those were literal events to teach Christians a theological lesson by means of metaphor and allegory, to test their spiritual discernment. Maybe Jesus’s resurrection was spiritual, as Paul suggested when he said that flesh can’t inherit the kingdom of God. Maybe Jesus didn’t even live as a historical person. Maybe many late-industrial Christians who live in materialistic societies, millennia after the founding of Christianity, have lost the plot.

But the crucial point is that this is a decisive case of the clash between science and religion. Here we have a soft science, the modern study of history, turning its attention, over the course of several centuries, to the sacred texts of Christianity, and wreaking havoc on the traditional interpretation of what Jesus supposedly said and did. Andersen resorts to special pleading to extricate his faith from the effects of that institutional objectivity.

As Andersen says, Christianity is uniquely tied to the historicity of certain miracle claims, and that means that among the other religions, Christianity is most vulnerable to being made obsolete by scientific progress.

A clash of cultures

As effective as those criticisms of Andersen’s case may be, none of them addresses what I think is the heart of the conflict between science and theistic religion. The conflict has little to do with the content of scientific theories and religious myths. After all, we should expect that the contents could be reinterpreted to accommodate contrary evidence.

This is especially true in the case of religious narratives, which are closer to art than science. Regardless of science’s empirical findings, you could adjust your theology, theodicy, and creed to make the contents of your religious beliefs and practices seem consistent with how science says the world works. Religious beliefs are much less falsifiable than scientific or naturalistic ones. Indeed, philosophy is the battleground between science and religion, and you can make a philosophical case for practically any proposition, however far-fetched it may seem to nonphilosophers.

No, the more profound conflict has to do with the values, cultures, and civilizational projects of science and theistic religion.

I addressed earlier whether most scientists are atheists, but atheism is beside the point. The more telling identification is that most scientists are humanists, meaning that they pursue science to help our species progress by laying the groundwork for applying well-tested models with technologies to raise our living standard in a free society.

It’s no accident that liberal societies like the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, and Israel excel in scientific innovation, while repressive ones in the Middle East and parts of Africa are far less technologically developed. Freedom of thought is needed to absorb the knowledge that’s been scientifically established, and to generate creative hypotheses for science to test. Even China resorts to stealing foreign intellectual properties, for that reason.

Science is connected not just to principles of critical thinking, which typically run contrary to theistic religion’s epistemic standards, but to the liberal values of capitalism, democracy, and consumerism. Science is central to modernity and to a secular concept of human progress.

By contrast, what distinguishes Christianity, for example, is the counterculture for which the Jesus of the New Testament advocated. Jesus was the otherworldly seer who prophesied that the world was going to end soon, or at least that worldly pursuits are meaningless compared to our prospects in an afterlife. He said we ought to be hyper-focused on moral and spiritual concerns and should even sell all our possessions if we find ourselves idolizing them.

Jesus renounced the Jewish conventions of his day since they supported the seemingly all-powerful Roman Empire, which made an ongoing mockery of monotheism. The main inspiration for Christianity was therefore part of the radical Jewish uprising that was soon to culminate in a war against Rome, which the Jews lost. In the wake of that crushing defeat, after 70 CE, the rebellion was spiritualized and combined with pagan philosophies and practices such as Stoicism and the Mystery cults of dying-and-rising savior deities, in an offshoot of Judaism that we know as Christianity.

However domesticated Jesus’s counterculture may have been, compared to the short-lived movements of the militant Sicarii and Zealots who militarily took on the Roman Empire, Christianity is still an otherworldly form of radicalism that renounces secular, humanistic (pagan) standards and pleasures. This is precisely why the American so-called “prosperity gospel” is egregious and grotesque, because of how psychotically shameless its proponents are in selling out the Jesus they claim to worship.

But take a step back and note the social standing of even a moderate Christian like Tim Andersen, an American academic physicist and mathematician whose profession is to try to explain the foundations of nature. What does any of that have to do with Jesus? What do liberal humanism, modernity, consumerism, and technoscientific progress have to do with Jesus’s uncompromising counterculture? Nothing whatsoever since the two are antithetical to each other.

That opposition may be obscured, though, because Christendom sold out Jesus long ago, when Jesus was picked as the figurehead of an organized religion that would go on to rebrand the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. But the more Christianity is concerned with managing an earthly institution, the less it has to do with Jesus’s message and thus the more compatible the religion will be, in effect, with secular humanism, liberalism, modernity, atheism, and so on.

Science is concerned with making human life better in this life, and it does so by systematizing skepticism towards dogmas and enabling us to exploit or replace natural processes with a progressive artificial domain (modern civilization).

Authentic Christianity is concerned with renouncing secular, earthly progress and pleasures out of love for a severe (“holy”) supernatural deity.

You don’t get a more profound social conflict than that.

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