God is Not a "Science Stopper"
Admitting that design is the best explanation does not bring the scientific enterprise to a screeching halt.
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book.
Materialists often say that invoking God as an explanation is a “science stopper.” The idea is that science continually strives to find natural explanations and that work stops if we just throw up our hands and say, “God must have done it,” every time we encounter a seemingly intractable problem like the origin of life. History shows that this objection is not valid.
Isaac Newton is the best example of this. In his book Opticks, Newton contemplated whether irregularities in planetary orbits might be apt to increase over time until the “System wants a Reformation.”[i] Newton’s rival, Gottfied Leibniz, accused Newton of holding the view that God needs to wind up the watch of the solar system from time to time.[ii] The story has come down through the centuries that Newton did not have a natural explanation for how the planetary orbits would remain stable, and so he invoked a tinkering God to address the problem, and perhaps that is true.[iii] But even if it is true, it was by no means a science stopper. Scientists continued to work the problem, and Laplace and Lagrange eventually demonstrated how planetary orbits remain stable.
Materialist chemist George Whitesides and theist chemist James Tour agree that today, materialist scientists do not have a clue about how life began. From a materialist perspective, the problem appears to be hopelessly intractable. It really is the case that, by far, the best explanation is that God created the first life. Why shouldn’t everyone honestly admit that? If we admit that, must attempts to find a natural explanation come to a screeching halt? Of course not. Perhaps the biological counterparts of Laplace and Lagrange will someday come up with a solution. They obviously have a huge incentive to do so, because if the problem is ever solved, whoever solved it can immediately book their ticket to Stockholm, where a nice shiny prize (and a huge check) will be waiting for them. But until that happens, no one benefits from pretending that a materialist answer is just around the corner.
[i] Specifically, he wrote “. . . blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.” Newton, Opticks, 402.
[ii] Leibniz wrote: “Mr. Newton and his followers also have a very strange view concerning the work of God. According to them God needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to operate. . . . This machine of God is even so imperfect that he is forced to clean it from time to time by an extraordinary concourse, and even to repair it like a watchmaker . . .” Letter from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Caroline of Brandenburg (November 1715), in The Leibniz-Caroline-Clarke Correspondence, 313.
[iii] I say “perhaps” because in context, it is not at all clear that this was Newton’s considered view. This is demonstrated by the fact the passage quoted above comes from an offhand comment near the end of Opticks, not a book about cosmology or planetary motion.