Physics? Et tu, Brute?

Darwin's evolution removed the need for a god to have designed all living things. A century of brilliant scientists cracked the mysteries of physics, cured feared diseases and explained inheritance through DNA. Science was on a roll and, to atheists, must have seemed to be on the verge of finishing off religious belief.

By the 1950s, life was about to be made in a test tube, artificial intelligence in computers was around the corner, and the mind would be fully accounted for by behaviorist psychology and brain chemistry.

 Then the going got tough for the atheists. While the amount of successful science done increased enormously, the spectacular breakthroughs of the previous century dried up. Especially in the areas that were supposed to make the world uninhabitable for religious belief or for any non-materialist view. The process of making life from nonlife, believed to have happened by chance at the beginning of history, could not be replicated in the lab even in the most favorable conditions.

Artificial intelligence has remained rudimentary; its signature success— victory over the world chess champion in 1997—was mostly a demonstration of human intelligence. The Deep Blue played chess by searching hundreds of millions of moves a second, assisted by rules cloned from human experts. It could not think like a human. The programmers' inability to make computers imitate understanding exploded our simplistic views of the mind. Worse, physics unexpectedly created trouble. (Physics? Et tu, Brute?) Physics is the science of matter itself, the foundation of all the other natural sciences.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it became clear that the universe was very "fine-tuned" for the existence of life. If the basic constants, like the strength of gravity, had been very slightly different, the universe would be unable to support life. The fine-tuning is very, very fine: for the strength of gravity, perhaps one part in 10 to the 40th. For those who prefer no Divine Engineer tuning the dials, the alternatives are unpalatable. The most natural are multiverse theories where all possible universes exist simultaneously and we simply find ourselves in the one that makes our existence possible.

This is not out of the question, but there is no actual evidence. It is just an "atheism of the gaps," calling imaginary entities plug a theoretical hole. The postulation probably involves gods, too—maybe not the omnipotent creator but surely some unlikely combination of quantum fluctuations could produce Zeus and his colorful activities? Zeus is just a very big superman up on Olympus and thus something that physics could manage to account for. The other possibility is to hope that there is some unknown mathematical reason why the constants are locked in as they are—again, a possibility, but one for which there is currently no other evidence.

In "Why Science Does Not Disprove God," the mathematician Amir D. Aczel runs through these issues. He writes on a range of scientific topics, most strongly on physics. He rightly calls to account physicists who claim to show that the universe can arise "from nothing" but who have a subtle technical meaning of "nothing" related to Paul Dirac's prediction of antimatter and not at all to the zilch of the common man. He covers such matters as "why archaeology does not disprove the Bible" (it shows that the cities of the Bible existed) and the difficulties that evolution has explaining the emergence of symbolic thought and art (the birth of consciousness and its effects is a phenomenon that happened at some time in prehistory, and science has almost nothing to say about it).

The book will be satisfactory as a reliable introduction for those who know nothing about the subject. There are others by serious philosophers: "There Is a God" by Antony Flew; Ronald Dworkin's "Religion Without God"; and Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos." They reach similar conclusions. But the days of triumphalist scientism are over.