Science And Religion
There's no conflict. In fact, science favors the existence of God in various ways.
A lot of people seem to believe that there is some deep conflict between religion and science, that religion has, in some important sense, been falsified by the scientific findings of the last several centuries. It’s generally much less clear why they believe that,. What scientific finding is supposed to have recently falsified the existence of God? As far as I’m aware, no recent studies have shown that there is no perfect being of pure act, whose essence is existence.
The most common idea of how science has falsified religion is that religion was intended to explain the gaps of science, but since science can now explain lots of stuff, God is an unnecessary hypothesis. The standard tale goes roughly like the following:
Thousands of years ago, superstitious people tried to explain everything with God. They didn’t know why the oceans moved, so they said God did it. They didn’t know why there were stars, so they said God made them. They didn’t know why the sandwich had disappeared from their table, so they said that God ate it. Over time, we’ve learned the explanations of lots of phenomena—now, we no longer need to invoke God to explain these things. We can explain the movement of tides by the moon, we can explain why stars exist from something about Hydrogen and Helium, and we can explain the disappearance of the sandwich by invoking your brother eating it. God, therefore, is no longer necessary.
The problem is that this is terrible argument. As far as I know, it’s a terrible argument that no one ever made, except Bill O’Reilly once. Sure, many polytheists thought that various gods were intervening all the time, moving the tides, eating sandwiches, and turning into dolphins to have sex with women. But the monotheists who believed in a perfect being didn’t do this. God was supposed to explain broad features of the world like the fact that it exists at all, that there is life, that stuff changes, and so on. Just as a good housemaker wouldn’t need to constantly intervene to make the house not fall down, a good being would create a smoothly functioning system that doesn’t need his active intervention.
If one argues that God exists from, say, the De Ente argument—that there must be a being whose essence is existence from the fact that there are things that exist but do so non-essentially (for example, you exist, though you could have not existed if your parents hadn’t shtupped at the right time)—no scientific advance threatens that at all. It turns out, however, that nearly all arguments for God are like that—philosophical, rather than narrowly scientific.
Furthermore, as we’ve plumbed the depths of science, while certain higher-order phenomena become less in need of explanation, the deeper things still are equally mysterious. For example, though contemporary science has eviscerated the most straightforward argument from biological life, it has discovered deeper laws of physics that are equally needing of design. As Luke Barnes has noted, each time we discover more fundamental explanations of things, the deeper laws seem to require a similar degree of fine-tuning—if we’re going to apply induction, we should anticipate the deepest laws still being relatively improbable. (Furthermore, even if we had a simple theory of everything that naturally predicted the parameters, that wouldn’t explain fine-tuning, because it’s very unlikely that fundamental physics would fix those laws, when there could conceivably be a theory of everything that fixes any laws—there’s also a more complicated problem for it that Aron Wall has articulated, but I won’t get into that. Furthermore, this doesn’t address the more troubling a priori fine-tuning argument).
In fact, I think the argument can be turned back on the atheist—science favors theism in a few ways. First of all, science tells us to look for unification—something simple that explains complex phenomena. But God has a decent claim to being the simplest kind of thing that there is. He’s like string theory, but better—everything emerges out of something utterly simple, with no composition.
Second, I think science has just directly furnished us with some premises in theistic arguments. For example, while I’m not very moved by the Kalam, it’s at least bolstered by the Borde Guth and Vilenkin theorem, which constrains what can be true of a past eternal universe.
Third, theism best accounts for our ability to do science at all. It’s very weird that bipedal apes who evolved to pass on their genes can figure out the fundamental nature of reality. That’s not what one should expect on atheism. Furthermore, if Collins is right about the fine-tuning for discoverability, then the parameters of physics happen to be fixed in various ways that make them ideal for scientific discovery. Of similar surprisingness, there’s a striking pairing between beauty and scientific truth, in a way expected if there’s a designer, crafting the universe like a work of art, but shocking if there is no designer. We wouldn’t expect evolved bipedal apes aesthetic sensibilities to match the ultimate nature of reality.
Finally—and this is the one that moves me most—as we discover more of reality, theism starts to look better and better. Science has only really overturned one theistic argument—the argument from biological life. In its place, modern investigation has turned up the argument from anthropics, psychophysical harmony, fine-tuning, nomological harmony, and the most forceful variants of the moral knowledge argument. As I studied more and more areas of philosophy, there seemed to be more puzzles for atheists—ones that theism effortlessly solves.
It’s a bad sign for your view of reality if the more you learn, the worse it gets. But with theism, the only good argument against it—the problem of evil—is old news. That the world contains bad things is not a discovery of contemporary science. While modern science and philosophy turns up numerous new arguments for God, the atheistic case has stagnated, seemingly failing to advance beyond the obvious observation that bad stuff happens. Of course, I’m not minimizing the challenge that that poses to theism—a huge amount of bad stuff does happen, and that’s really weird on theism—but I don’t get the same sense that greater discovery furnishes the case for atheism, the way I do for theism.
Applying induction, then, I expect the case for theism in 1,000 years to be better than the case today. While maybe some clever kitten will come up with some rebuttals to a few of the major arguments today, in their place will come other, better arguments. That is, by my estimation, the way history has gone, and I expect it to continue.
You claim that science does not conflict with religion, but your definition of "religion" is basically "some very abstracted Being exists", a religion that I will call Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. It's a motte and bailey. What percentage of the world's people are Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractists? 0.001%?
People's religions almost always make much more definite concrete claims about the world. Judaism holds that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, Moses parted the seas, the Earth flooded with Noah being the last human, etc. Christianity holds that all of these are true plus some more. Hinduism is a collection of hundreds of various folk religions, a panoply of Gods, the Vedas, and Advaita Vedanta. I could go on.
You can try to squirm out of this as being just stories or metaphors, but then you are just retreating back into Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism. Does Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism conflict with science? No, but it has been defined that way. The more interesting question is, "is Maximally Pleasing Uncommited Abstractism falsifiable?"
"It’s a bad sign for your view of reality if the more you learn, the worse it gets. But with theism, the only good argument against it—the problem of evil—is old news. That the world contains bad things is not a discovery of contemporary science. While modern science and philosophy turns up numerous new arguments for God, the atheistic case has stagnated, seemingly failing to advance beyond the obvious observation that bad stuff happens. Of course, I’m not minimizing the challenge that that poses to theism—a huge amount of bad stuff does happen, and that’s really weird on theism—but I don’t get the same sense that greater discovery furnishes the case for atheism, the way I do for theism."
This seems like sort of a weird and cheap argumentative move. The existence of a being who is all good and has the power to do whatever he wants predicts states of affairs that are good, and predicts against states of affairs that are bad. It's very easy to say "really the only argument for atheism is the problem of evil", ie, the fact that we observe bad states of affairs. But by the same token, you could say "really the only argument for theism is the argument from good", ie, the fact that we observe good states of affairs.
In the same way that the "argument from evil" can be said to subsume what would otherwise be thought of as several distinct sub-arguments (such as: the argument from wild animal suffering, the evolutionary argument from evil, etc), so too the "argument from good" could be said to subsume basically all of the arguments for theism (fine tuning, psychophysical harmony, etc.)
So when you say "we've developed more arguments for theism as time has gone on but we've only had 1 argument for atheism the whole time" this just feels like a semantic trick. In the same way that, over time, we've arguably discovered new good things about the world that raise the probability of theism (such as psychophysical harmony), we have also, over time, discovered new bad things about the world that raise the probability of atheism (evolution, things like wild animal sentience and insect sentience, new natural diseases and ailments, etc.)