Tag Archives: Henry Ford

Science and God

The God of the Gaps?

4 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

A frequent refrain from skeptics of Christianity is that any time God is posited as the cause of just about anything, the Christian has committed the sin of “God of the gaps.”  Philosopher John Lennox explains the sin as follows: “the introduction of a god or God is an evidence of an intellectual laziness: we cannot explain something scientifically and so we introduce ‘God’ to cover our ignorance.”

Referring back to the previous blog post, is the supposition of Mr Ford as the cause of the motor car engine a “God of the gaps” move?  Lennox answers “no.”

Mr Ford is not to be found in the gaps in our knowledge about the workings of internal combustion engines.  More precisely, he is not to be found in any reason-giving explanations that concern mechanisms.  For Henry Ford is not a mechanism: he is no less than the agent who is responsible for the existence of the mechanism in the first place so that it all bears the marks of his handiwork – and that means the bits we do understand and the bits we don’t.

Bringing this point around to God, Lennox quotes philosopher Richard Swinburne.

Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps,’ a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained.  I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.  The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.

Science can explain what science can explain.  As we’ve developed previously on this blog, science is a limited enterprise that can give us knowledge about recurring physical mechanisms and physical events that occurred in the past.  To press science beyond these realms is folly.

Lennox concludes with these words:

The point to grasp here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps. On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.  It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth.  Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill – dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway.

Science and God

Does Our Understanding of How the Universe Works Negate God’s Existence?

29 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some skeptics of Christianity are known to argue that the great success of science revealing the physical mechanisms of the universe should lead us to conclude that the God hypothesis is totally unnecessary.  Science will ultimately reveal the laws of nature, and once we know these laws, the need for God has vanished.  Does that follow?

Not according to Philosopher John Lennox in his book God’s Undertaker.  Lennox says, “Such reasoning involves a common logical fallacy.”  Here is how he illustrates the fallacy:

Take a Ford motor car.  It is conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world , who was seeing one for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine that there is a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go.  He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr Ford did not like him.

Of course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr Ford inside it.  Neither would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mr Ford as an explanation for its working.  His grasp of the impersonal principles of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine works.

So far, so good.  But if he then decided that his understanding of the principles of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false – in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake.  Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand.

How does this illustration apply to God and the universe?  Lennox explains:

It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal Creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe.  In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or upholder.

Hawking, Dawkins, and other atheistic scientists fail to understand this basic philosophical point.  One day, if there is a full and complete physical explanation of how every particle in the universe behaves, if we arrive at a set of equations that explains every physical mechanism, the fundamental question of where these equations came from will still need to be answered.  Scientists will not have eliminated the existence of Mr Ford.