National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, who is a devout Christian, did an interview recently with National Geographic about his faith and his science. Predictably, Jerry Coyne, an atheist biologist from the University of Chicago, took exception to some of Collins’s answers about the compatibility of faith in God and science.

Collins:

[Question asked of Collins] Are science and religion compatible?

I am privileged to be somebody who tries to understand nature using the tools of science. But it is also clear that there are some really important questions that science cannot really answer, such as: Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are we here? In those domains I have found that faith provides a better path to answers. I find it oddly anachronistic that in today’s culture there seems to be a widespread presumption that scientific and spiritual views are incompatible.

Coyne:

Here he’s espousing the NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) reconciliation rather than the "god-of-the-gaps" reconciliation (but see below), but note that what he’s saying is that science and religion are not compatible but complementary. I hate having to to address this issue yet again, but I have no choice.

First, science can answer, at least in principle, those hard questions; it’s just that Collins and his fellow believers don’t like the answers. Why are we here? Because of the Big Bang, the laws of physics, and evolution.

Coyne misunderstands the question to which Collins is referring. "Why are we here?" is primarily a question about purpose, not a question about formal method. It is, in the classical tradition, a question about final cause, not a question about formal cause. The Big Bang etc. are formal causes, and answers such as relativistic cosmology and astrophysics are perfectly appropriate to formal causes.

The more profound question — what purpose, if any, lies behind our existence and the existence of the universe — is what is meant by "Why are we here?", and that is a question about final cause. It is a question about teleology. It is a very important question — the most important question, I think. Now presumably Coyne would answer "There is no reason or purpose to our existence." That is a fair (although mistaken) answer, but it is not an answer that can be supported or contradicted by science per se, which deals with formal and efficient and material causes in nature and not ultimate final causes that necessarily transcend nature.

The Christian case for God’s existence has been made most famously by Thomas Aquinas, who presented five ways in which God’s existence can be demonstrated. The ways are detailed logical metaphysical arguments, not arguments in natural science. Coyne does not address these arguments. He has tried in the past to do so, embarrassingly.

Coyne:

Why is there something instead of nothing? Well, if you conceive of "nothing" as a quantum vacuum, then the answer is that such a "nothing" is unstable and will produce a universe.

If you conceive of "nothing" as a quantum vacuum, you are mistaken. In fact, the phrase "If you conceive of nothing as [FILL IN THE BLANK]" is literally nonsense, because there is nothing that can be written in that blank space that makes sense. Nothing is nothing.

A quantum vacuum is anything but nothing. It is a quantum state — a zero point field — with lowest possible energy. It has an elegant complex mathematical structure. It is very much something, and a universe that emerges from it most emphatically didn’t come from "nothing."

Why would Coyne make such a rudimentary and obvious error?

Coyne, again:

But of course you can ask Collins the reverse question: why must nothing rather than something be the default state? Why couldn’t the Universe or its antecedents (or a multiverse) have been around for eternity?

This answer — that the universe is the fundamental existent and needs no cause — has been around for a long time. It dates to antiquity, and Hume is its most prominent modern exponent. It was also decisively refuted in antiquity.

Aristotle demonstrated that an essential series of causes in a causal chain have need of an unmoved mover (pure Act) in order to exist. It is a detailed metaphysical argument (restated in "Aquinas’ First Way"), not a scientific argument. It has never been successfully refuted.

One gambit that has been used by those who doubt Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ unmoved mover argument is the argument (popularized by Kant) that reasoning in the natural world of human perception cannot be applied across the divide that separates nature from transcendence. We can’t, in other words, reason our way to God, because if God exists, He is beyond reason.

The fatal flaw of the Kantian argument is the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The PSR (expressed in its modern form by Leibniz) states that everything in nature has a sufficient reason for its existence and for its properties. Nothing in the universe has no reason for being what it is. Of course, we may not know the reason, and we may never know the reason, but things don’t happen for no reason, or exist for no reason.

It would seem, of course, that atheists who wish to refute the PSR could simply assert "Everything has a reason — says who?" Atheists could simply deny the PSR. They could insist that perhaps some things don’t have sufficient reasons for their existence. Perhaps the whole universe doesn’t have a sufficient reason for its existence. It just exists without a reason. No need for God.

The difficulty with this argument against PSR is obvious: science depends critically on the truth of the PSR. If anything, let alone the whole universe, can exist without reason, then why invoke scientific explanations for anything? For example, if polar bears can exist without reason, why invoke evolution from whales? Polar bears just exist, like the whole universe just exists. No reason, evolutionary or otherwise. If the whole panoply of nature exists without reason, why invoke a scientific explanation for any part of it? Surely Occam’s Razor favors "just happened" over "happened because random heritable mutation and natural selection…"

Atheists who deny the PSR deny science. And atheists who embrace PSR embrace transcendent causation of the universe via Aquinas’ First Way.

Atheists like Coyne, of course, take recourse in the excluded middle. The most common gambit to get around this problem — Jerry Coyne’s gambit here — is to ignore the contradiction, and hope no one notices.

Image: � neirfy/ Dollar Photo Club.