Defensible Faith

Numerous surveys and studies have shown that young adults are increasingly convinced religious faith and modern science are battling each other in a war where science always wins—and where the losers are deemed intellectually challenged and inferior. Is a belief in God simply a demonstration of human weakness and intellectual laziness? What then of the tremendous scientific discoveries made by those who saw divine beauty and simplicity in the mathematics and natural laws describing the world around them? Are these geniuses, people of tremendous insight, at the same time just naive experts at self-delusion? The answers to these questions and the evidence that science and faith are not just compatible, but complementary, are the central theme of this book. There are far more believers among scientists than popular culture portrays; when the full truth is what matters, it is only found through the application of both physics and metaphysics. We are something more than the sum of our parts. The 2015 Pew Research Center survey on religion and science shows that most Americans (59 percent) say that science is often in conflict with religion. Among the Nones, respondents who have no religious affiliation, the number is 76 percent. Particularly among young adults, science equals rationality; therefore, anything that is not strictly scientific is irrational. Even young adults who still believe often preface their admission of faith with an apology regarding its illogical and unscientific nature. This perceived incompatibility between science and faith has contributed to a tremendous increase in the number of religiously unaffiliated. The 2021 General Social Survey showed that 42 percent of Americans aged 18–34 identified as having no religion (the Nones), a dramatic increase from just 9 percent when the survey began in 1972. It is both ironic and instructive that the available survey data indicates young scientists in this same age group are actually trending more toward belief in God or a higher power than away. Maybe they are seeing the evidence we will review in later chapters and increasingly recognize that while science reveals truth, it is a necessary, but not sufficient, means of revealing the full truth. My purpose is to help these atheists, agnostics, and the religiously indifferent Nones to fully understand what science has firmly answered, and how that science, and the remaining gaps, point more toward God than away from God. For many, such as myself, it is necessary to first believe that faith in God has a reasonable and evidential foundation before such a foundation can support the full burden of faith itself. Before we use science as an excuse not to believe, let us first use reason and logic to openly explore what science and evidence from the world around us really imply about the existence of God. Science is not the enemy of religion; it is a manual written by God that we are still learning how to read. For decades, we have been dumbing down religion, and in so doing, we have woefully prepared our young adults to develop and defend their beliefs. It is almost as if reasoned, evidential, and logical faith is somehow a lesser faith than faith that comes only from the heart. By dumbing down faith, we have opened the door for faith to indeed appear dumb. If it is intellectual issues that are troubling young people, then we must speak to their intellect. While the search for meaning and purpose in life may be an intrinsic human condition, for most people, a strong religious belief is not something you’re born with—or something that just overcomes you one day. For many believers, the sense of something more starts them on their journey, but their path to truth is paved with reason and intellect. When scientific humanism leaves one searching for that something more, the justification for a belief in the spiritual, in a God, it is too often met with the same response: “You just have to have faith.” That is like telling a paranoid schizophrenic they “just need to relax.” The “just have faith” answer, while adequate to many who already believe, is insufficient and unsatisfying to someone struggling with faith on an intellectual basis. I was one of those people, and I am interested in reaching others who sense that science does not tell the whole story of humanity but are not sure how to investigate both science and faith on the path to truth. If the unscientific nature of religion, of faith, and the failure to conventionally prove the existence of God is the leading cause of the surging number of Nones, then to create a credible, defensible, and compelling path to belief, we must start with the mind and end with the heart—and not the other way around. God must be possible before religious faith is possible. While faith in God will always have certain personal, relational, experiential, and subjective elements, strong faith is also built on many objective truths: truths that are based on compelling evidence convincing to any rational person. Evidence we will explore.