[Peace-discuss] Science and God

[C. G. Estabrook]

	God and Creation
	Herbert McCabe

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to 
carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws 
light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To 
prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need 
asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the 
validity of science -- I don't mean science as a body of established 
facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual 
activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just 
routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly 
formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the 
research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the 
unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly 
possible to say we now have science (we didn't have it in the eighth 
century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on 
it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of 
course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning 
just that, by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is 
really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what 
everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite 
easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning. In this 
century we have seen totalitarian societies which have been extremely 
keen on improving their technology and answering detailed questions 
within the accepted framework of science, but extremely hostile to the 
kind of radical thinking I am envisaging; the kind of society where 
Wernher von Braun Is honoured and Einstein is exiled. I also think that 
the same effect can be produced in more subtle ways in societies that 
don't look totalitarian. And of course it was notoriously produced In 
the Church confronted by Galileo. The asking of radical questions is 
discouraged by any society that believes in itself, believes it has 
found the answers, believes that only its authorised questions are 
legitimate.

Faced with such hostility or such incomprehension, you can, of course, 
say: well, wait and see: you will find that in spite of everything, 
science will make startling and quite unexpected changes, that our whole 
world view will shift in ways we cannot now predict or imagine. But that 
is just to assert your belief. And this I think is parallel to asserting 
your belief in God. I think a belief in God -- in the sense of a belief 
in the validity of the kind of radical question to which God would be 
the answer -- is a part of human flourishing and that one who closes 
himself off from it is to that extent deficient. For this reason I 
welcome, such belief in God, but what I am asking myself now is not 
whether I believe, but what grounds I have for such belief. And here 
again I think the analogy with proving the validity of fundamental 
thinking in science is helpful. How, after all, do we show that there is 
still a long and probably unexpected road to travel in science? By 
pointing to anomalies in the present scientific world picture. If your 
world picture includes, for example, the idea of ether as the medium in 
which light waves occur, then there is an anomaly if it turns out to be 
impossible to determine the velocity of a light source with respect to 
the ether; and so on. Now in a parallel way, it seems to me, proofs for 
the existence of God point to anomalies in a world picture which 
excludes the God question. It is, it seems to me, quite anomalous to 
hold that while it is legitimate and valid to ask 'How come?' about any 
particular thing or event in the world, it is illegitimate and invalid 
to ask it about the whole world. To say that we aren't allowed to ask it 
merely because we can't answer it seems to me to be begging the 
question. The question is: Is there an unanswered question about the 
existence of the world? Can we be puzzled by the existence of the world 
instead of nothing? I can be and am; and this is to be puzzled about God.

The question 'How come?' can have a whole lot of different meanings and 
be asked at several levels, and the deeper the question you ask about an 
individual thing the more it is a question about a world to which that 
thing belongs; there is finally a deepest question about a thing which 
is also a question about everything. Let me explain that enigmatic remark.

Supposing you ask 'How come Fido?' You may be asking whether his father 
is Rover or whether it was that promiscuous mongrel down the lane. In 
such a case the answer is satisfactorily given by naming Fido's parents. 
At this level no more need be said; the question is fully answered at 
this level. But now suppose you ask: 'But how come Fido's a dog?' The 
answer could be: 'His parents were dogs, and dogs just are born of other 
dogs'. Here you have moved to what I call a deeper level of questioning 
and begun to talk about what dogs are. You are saying: for Fido to be is 
for him to be a dog, and Fido's parents are the sort of things whose 
activities result in things being dogs. Now your original question 'How 
come Fido?' has deepened into a question about the dog species. It 
remains a question about this individual dog Fido, but it is also a 
question about dogs -- not about dogs in the abstract, but about the 
actual dog species in the world. Your question 'How come Fido?' at this 
new level is a question 'How come dogs anyway?'

And of course there is an answer to that too in terms of things like 
genetics and natural selection and what not. Here we have a new and 
deeper level of the question 'How come Fido?' -- still a question about 
this particular puppy, but one that is answered in terms of its 
membership of a still wider community; no longer now simply the 
community of dogs, but the whole biological community within which dogs 
come to be and have their place. Then of course we can ask a question 
about Fido at a deeper level still. When we ask how come the biological 
community, we no doubt answer in terms of biochemistry. (I am not of 
course pretending that we actually have the answers to all these 
questions, as though we fully understood how it came about, and had to 
come about, that there are now dogs around the place, but we expect 
eventually to answer these questions.)

And now we can go on from the level of biochemistry to that of physics 
and all the time we are asking more penetrating questions concerning 
Fido and each time we go further in our questioning we are seeing Fido 
in a wider and wider context.

We can put this another way by saying that each time we ask the question 
we are asking about Fido over against some other possibility. Our first 
question simply meant: How come Fido is this dog rather than another; 
he's Rover's son rather than the mongrel's son. At the next level we 
were asking: How come he's a dog rather than, say, a giraffe. At the 
next level: How come he's a living being rather than an inanimate, and 
so on.

Now I want to stress that all the time we are asking about this 
individual Fido. It is just that we are seeing further problematics 
within him. Fido's parents brought it about that he is this dog not 
another, but in that act they also brought it about that he is this dog 
(not a giraffe), that he is this living dog, that he is this 
biochemically complex, living dog; that he is this molecularly 
structured, biochemically complex, living dog, and so on. We are probing 
further into what it is for Fido to come to
be and always by noting what he is not, but might have been. Every 'How 
come' question is how come this instead of what is not. And every time, 
of course, we answer by reference to some thing or state of affairs, 
some existing reality, in virtue of which Fido is this rather than what 
he is not.

Now our ultimate radical question is not how come Fido exists as this 
dog instead of that, or how come Fido exists as a dog instead of a 
giraffe, or exists as living instead of inanimate, but how come Fido 
exists instead of nothing, and just as to ask how come he exists as dog 
is to put him in the context of dogs, so to ask how come he exists 
instead of nothing is to put him in the context of everything, the 
universe or world.  And this is the question I call the God-question, 
because whatever the answer is, whatever the thing or state of affairs, 
whatever the existing reality that answers it we call 'God'.

Now of course it is always possible to stop the questioning at any 
point; a man may refuse to ask why there are dogs. He may say there just 
are dogs and perhaps it is impious to enquire how come -- there were 
people who actually said that to Darwin. Similarly it is possible to 
refuse to ask this ultimate question, to say as Russell once did: the 
universe is just there. This seems to me just as arbitrary as to say: 
dogs are just there.  The difference is that we now know by hindsight 
that Darwin's critics were irrational because we have familiarised 
ourselves with an answer to the question, how come there are dogs? We 
have not familiarised ourselves with the answer to the question, how 
come the world instead of nothing? but that does not make it any less 
arbitrary to refuse to ask it. To ask it is to enter on an exploration 
which Russell was simply refusing to do, as it seems to me. It is of 
course perfectly right to point out the mysteriousness of a question 
about everything, to point to the fact that we have no way of answering 
it, but that is by no means the same as saying it is an unaskable 
question. As Wittgenstein said 'Not how the world is, but that it is, is 
the mystery'.

There is indeed a difficulty about having a concept of 'everything', for 
we ordinarily conceive of something with, so to say, a boundary around 
it: this is a sheep and not a giraffe. But everything is bounded by 
nothing, which is just to say that it is not bounded by anything. To put 
what is the same point another way: we can have no concept of nothing, 
absolutely speaking. We can use the word relatively; we can say, 'There 
Is nothing in the cupboard' meaning there are no largish objects -- we 
are understood not to be saying there is no dust or no air. 'There is 
nothing between Kerry and New York' means there is no land. It does not 
mean there is absolutely nothing, no sea or fishes. The notions of 
everything and of absolutely nothing, are not available to us in the 
sense that the notions of sheep or scarlet or savagery are available to 
us. And this means that we are asking our ultimate radical question with 
tools that will not do the job properly, with words whose meaning has to 
be stretched beyond what we can comprehend. It would be very strange if 
it were not so. As Wittgenstein says, what we have here is the mystery. 
If the question of God were a neat and simple question to be answered in 
terms of familiar concepts, then whatever we are talking about, it is 
not God. A God who is in this sense comprehensible would not be worth 
worshipping, or even of talking about (except for the purpose of 
destroying him).

It is clear that we reach out to, but do not reach, an answer to our 
ultimate question, how come anything instead of nothing? But we are able 
to exclude some answers. If God is whatever answers our question, how 
come everything then evidently he is not to be included amongst 
everything. God cannot be a thing, an existent among others. It is not 
possible that God and the universe should add up to make two.

Again, if we are to speak of God as causing the existence of everything, 
it is clear that we must not mean that he makes the universe out of 
anything. Whatever creation means it is not a process of making. Again 
it is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he 
has not the power but because, so to speak, he has too much; to 
interfere you have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are 
interfering with. If God is the cause of everything, there is nothing 
that he is alongside. Obviously God makes no difference to the universe; 
I mean by this that we do not appeal specifically to God to explain why 
the universe is this way rather than that, for this we need only appeal 
to explanations within the universe. For this reason there can, it seems 
to me, be no feature of the universe which indicates it is God-made. 
What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing. 
I have said that whatever God is, he is not a member of everything, not 
an inhabitant of the universe, not a thing or a kind of thing. And I 
should add, I suppose, that it cannot be possible to ask of him, how 
come God instead of nothing? It must not be possible for him to be 
nothing. Not just in the sense that God must be imperishable, but that 
it must make no sense to consider that God might not be. Of course it is 
still possible to say, without manifest contradiction, 'God might not 
be', but that is because when we speak of God by using the word 'God', 
we do not understand what we mean, we have no concept of God; what 
governs our use of the word 'God' is not an understanding of what God is 
but the validity of a question about the world. That is why we are not 
protected by any logical laws from saying 'God might not exist' even 
though it makes no sense. What goes for our rules for the use of 'God' 
does not go for the God we try to name with the word. (And a corollary 
of this, incidentally, is why a famous argument for the existence of God 
called the ontological argument does not work.)

What I have been saying may seem to make God both remote and irrelevant. 
He is not part of the universe and he makes no difference to it. It is 
therefore necessary to stress that God must be in everything that 
happens and everything that exists in the universe. If Fido's parents 
make Fido to exist instead of nothing it is because in their action God 
is acting, just as if a pen writes it is because in its action a writer 
is acting. It is because it is God that wields every agent in the 
universe that agents bring things into existence, make things new. Every 
action in the world is an action of God; not because it is not an action 
of a creature but because it is by God's action that the creature is 
itself and has its own activity. But more of that in the next chapter.

For the moment may I just say that it seems to me that what we often 
call atheism is not a denial of the God of which I speak. Very 
frequently the man who sees himself as an atheist is not denying the 
existence of some answer to the mystery of how come there Is anything 
instead of nothing, he is denying what he thinks or has been told is a 
religious answer to this question. He thinks or has been told that 
religious people, and especially Christians, claim to have discovered 
what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe 
who designed it, just like Basil Spence [Americans might substitute 
Frank Lloyd Wright --CGE] only bigger and less visible, that there is a 
Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of 
the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being 
around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and 
Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheistic too.

But a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any 
problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the 
world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question. This is 
the man I compare to those who are content to ask questions within the 
established framework of science, but cannot see that there are genuine 
though ill-formulated questions on the frontiers. I have made a 
comparison with scientific research, but just the same parallel could be 
made with any kind of creative activity. The poet is trying to write a 
poem but he does not know what he is trying to say until he has said it 
and recognised it. Until he has done this it is extremely difficult to 
show that he is writing a poem or that he could write a poem. I can 
show, by pointing to the existence of bricks and cement and so on and 
the availability of a workforce, that there could be more houses made. I 
cannot show that there will ever be another poem.

I called this paper 'God and Creation' In order to indicate what I and 
the mainstream Christian tradition understand by creation as a path 
towards God. We come across God, So to speak, or rather we search and do 
not come across him, when the universe raises for us a radical question 
concerning its existence at all. And creation is the name we give to 
God's answering this question.

I hope it will be evident that creation is here being used in a quite 
different sense from the way it is used by people who seek to discover 
the origin of the universe (was it a big bang or a lot of little pops or 
whatever). Whatever processes took place in remote periods of time is of 
course in itself a fascinating topic but it is irrelevant to the 
question of creation in the sense that makes us speak of God. When we 
have concluded that God created the world, there still remains the 
scientific question to ask about what kind of world it is and was and 
how, if ever, it began. It is probably unnecessary to say that the 
proposition that the universe is made by God and that everything that 
is, is begun and sustained in existence by God, does not entail that the 
universe has only existed for a finite time. There may be reasons for 
thinking that the universe is finite in time and space but the fact that 
its existence depends on God is not one of them.

Coming to know that the universe is dependent on God does not in fact 
tell us anything about the character of the universe. How could it? 
Since everything we know about God (that he exists and what he is not) 
is derived from what we know of the universe, how could we come back 
from God with some additional information about the world? If we think 
we can it is only because we have smuggled something extra into our 
concept of God -- for example, when we make God in our own image and ask 
ourselves quite illegitimate questions like 'What would I have done If I 
were God?' It should be evident that this is a temptation to be avoided.

There is one last thing I should like to touch on. What are we to make 
of the notion of a 'personal' God?

I think the idea of a personal God has arisen in two quite different 
ways. In the first place people have thought of God as a person because 
they have thought of him as a maker -- I mean they have had an image of 
God as an artist or technician working away at something -- and thereby 
accounting for its existence. In this sense the person (in the sense of 
human person) is an image of God, a picture which may be useful but 
could evidently be misleading. In the second place I think people call 
God personal because it seems absurd to say he is impersonal. However 
romantic we may get about the great impersonal forces of nature that 
seem to tower over us, we know perfectly well that they don't. What is 
impersonal and non-intelligent will, in principle, always obey us if 
only we know the trick. There are people who speak of God as a great 
life-force, and that is all right if they merely want to deny that he is 
some particular concrete individual -- evidently he is not, but we have 
to remember that great forces don't really get anything done unless they 
are wielded in a context. The wind and the waves don't achieve any aim, 
there is nothing that counts as success in their thrashing around. It is 
only by talking about them as though they were persons or at least as 
alive that we can speak of them getting anything done, and since 
whatever else we mean by God we mean what gets something done or made or 
existing, it seems that we cannot think of him as merely impersonal.

Once we have denied that God is merely impersonal we are under a 
temptation to imagine him as forming Intentions or thinking out or 
making up his mind, but none of this is a legitimate For us the business 
of being persons is extremely closely tied but there is no reason at all 
to transfer all this to God; indeed not doing so since this version of 
personality associated with the fact that we are physical beings, parts 
of a material whole.

We can then, I think, say that whatever accounts for the existence of 
the universe cannot be limited in the way that impersonal unintelligent 
things and forces are, but this does not justify us in attributing to 
God our own particular mode of intelligence. If we do speak of God as 
making up his mind or changing his mind or deciding or cogitating or 
reasoning, it can only be by metaphor as when we speak of his strong 
right arm or his all-seeing eye.

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