Top Scientists Know They Rig the Game Against God

The supposed war between science and God has always been sold to the public as a contest between evidence and superstition, with the men in lab coats on one side and the men in pulpits on the other. It is a tidy story, and it is false.

The real dividing line does not run between science and faith at all. It runs between the evidence and a philosophy called materialism, a philosophy that a great many scientists smuggle into the laboratory or classroom before they ever look through the telescope or the microscope.

We do not have to guess that they do this. One of the most decorated evolutionary biologists of the last century admitted it in print, and he was proud enough of the admission to italicize it.

Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1997, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin was reviewing a book by Carl Sagan when he paused to explain why he and his colleagues accept certain claims that strike ordinary people as absurd. His answer had nothing to do with data. It had to do with commitment.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Read that passage again slowly, because the phrase that matters is a priori. It means “beforehand,” prior to and independent of the evidence. Lewontin is not saying that decades of careful research drove him reluctantly to conclude that only matter exists. He is saying the opposite, that the commitment to matter comes first and the research is then bent to fit it.

This is not a description of following the evidence wherever it leads. It is a description of deciding the destination and forbidding any road that does not arrive there. A juror who announced before opening statements that he would not permit a guilty verdict “no matter how counter-intuitive” the acquittal would be removed from the courtroom. In much of modern science, that juror writes the textbooks.

Who Guards the Door

If materialism were merely one option competing fairly against others, we would expect scientists to sort themselves out roughly the way the rest of humanity does, some believing, some doubting, most somewhere in between. That is not what we find at the top.

When researchers surveyed members of the National Academy of Sciences, the most exclusive scientific body in the country, belief in a personal God came in around 7 percent. Belief in human immortality was scarcely higher. Meanwhile the general public professes belief in God at rates north of 80 percent. Something happens on the way to the Academy.

The honest question is what that something is. The establishment would have us believe it is enlightenment, that the more one learns of nature the less room remains for its Author. But the sociologist Elaine Ecklund, who has studied religion among scientists more carefully than almost anyone, found that most non-believing scientists arrived at their unbelief before they arrived at their careers. They did not lose God in the lab. They brought their unbelief to the lab, often from childhood, and then chose a profession congenial to it.

The atheism is upstream of the science, not downstream. Fairness compels a further point that strengthens rather than weakens the case. Broader surveys of working scientists, not just the rarefied Academy, show them split closer to the middle, with roughly half professing belief in God or a higher power. A bias does not have to capture every technician to shape a field. It only has to capture the gatekeepers, the journal editors, the grant committees, the hiring panels, and there the door is guarded zealously.

Without Excuse

Scripture anticipated this posture two thousand years before Lewontin gave it a memorable phrase. Paul, writing to the church at Rome, did not describe unbelief primarily as an intellectual shortage. He described it as a suppression.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God … Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

The passage is almost uncomfortably precise for the present argument. The creation testifies. The evidence is, in Paul’s word, “clearly seen.” The problem is not that the signal is faint. The problem is a prior decision not to receive it, dressed up afterward as sophistication.

“Professing themselves to be wise” is as fair a caption as any for a discipline that announces its conclusions before its inquiries.

The Evidence They Have Pledged to Explain Away

Consider what the materialist has committed himself, in advance, to explaining without reference to a Designer. Start with the physical constants of the universe. The strength of gravity, the charge of the electron, the precise energy levels inside a carbon nucleus, these and dozens of other quantities appear to be balanced on a razor’s edge, such that a minuscule change in almost any of them would yield a cosmos incapable of producing stars, planets, chemistry, or life.

This is not a claim invented by preachers. It was pressed most famously by Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang” and who was himself no friend of religion. After working out how carbon manages to form in the hearts of stars, Hoyle concluded that the fine tuning was too exact to be an accident, writing that “a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

Then there is the matter of information. The living cell does not merely display complexity; it runs on code, a genuine four-letter chemical language stored in DNA, transcribed, translated, and error-corrected by molecular machinery of staggering sophistication. Codes, in every other instance known to man, come from minds. This is the evidence that broke the most formidable atheist of the age. Antony Flew spent half a century as the English-speaking world’s leading philosophical champion of unbelief, and then, in his early eighties, he followed the argument out the door he had spent his life guarding.

As reported at the time of his death, Flew concluded that “the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.” He then said, “It’s simply not on to think this could occur simply by chance.”

Flew never became a Christian, and honesty requires saying so. But he did something the materialist consensus regards as unthinkable. He let the evidence change his mind.

Uncharted Territory

The materialist will object that science is self-correcting, that its models bend to new data, and that this flexibility is its glory rather than its embarrassment. There is truth in that, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. When the James Webb Space Telescope began returning images of the early universe, it found galaxies that appeared far too massive to have assembled so soon after the Big Bang, objects that, by one astronomer’s candid admission, put cosmologists “in uncharted territory” and might require “something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology.”

Later analysis softened some of those early alarms, and NASA has since reported that several of the galaxies are less massive than they first seemed. That is science working as advertised, and it deserves credit for the correction. But it also lays bare how much of what is presented to the public as settled fact is in truth a working scaffold, provisional and revisable. The confidence sold on the evening news vastly exceeds the confidence warranted in the journals. A field that revises its account of the cosmos every few years is in a poor position to lecture believers about certainty.

So the honest reckoning turns the accusation around. For a century the charge has been that faith is the closed-minded posture, clinging to conclusions it will not surrender. Yet it is the materialist, by his own testimony, who has ruled a whole class of explanations out of bounds before the inquiry begins.

It is the believer who can say, without embarrassment, “follow the evidence.”

The heavens have been declaring the glory of God since long before there were telescopes to resent it, and the men who have trained the finest instruments ever built upon those heavens have, again and again, found fingerprints they did not expect and were not permitted to name.

The evidence has never been the problem. The door has. And a science brave enough to open it might discover that the thing it has spent a century trying to keep out was holding up the house all along.