Does God Exist?

A speech by Dr Peter Atkins, Lecturer in Physical Chemistry, Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in a television debate on Channel 4, October 1993.

One can no more disprove the existence of God than one can disprove the hypothesis that there is a teapot in orbit round the planet Mars. All I can hope to do is to consider the 200 years of exhilarating human intellectual progress and condense them into ten minutes and argue that progress has punctured at least one of the cushions on which the lazy arguments in favour of God the designer still lie. There is, I suppose, still a corner of the universe - its very beginning - where a designer-God might still seem to lurk. But I shall argue too, that there is no hiding place even there. It is only the desperate - those desperate to avoid the inevitability of their own annihilation - those desperate to maintain the power that fear of the almighty gives to them over the lives of others, and those desperate to quench human self determination, who cling on to beliefs for which there is not one iota of evidence and which science can show are unnecessary carbuncles on the face of knowledge.

Take purpose for example. There was a time when people believed in cosmic purpose. Surely, they thought, we must be here for a reason. Now science succeeds in accounting for the workings of the universe and its flow into the future without needing to suppose the existence of a purpose. The concept of cosmic purpose is a human invention without foundation other than wishful thinking.

There was also a time when people believed in divine design to account for the emergence of man; and, presumably, for what seems to me to be some rather odd mistakes such as scorpions, smallpox and the aids virus. Now though, most right thinking individuals believe in the blind power of natural selection.

But not everyone appreciates the enormous potency of replication in the face of competition. All a molecule needs to do is to stumble into the purposeless ability to replicate almost perfect images of itself; then it and its descendants will burst upon the world. A primitive self-replicating organism can't help but replicate itself and it unconsciously and inevitably acquires complexity in the face of competition for resources. An organism cannot but help evolving into more successful forms.

In the explanation of the expansion of the universe from its initial speck we have an understanding in which we can have every confidence but not yet absolute certainty. But in the act of creation itself, here we have essentially no knowledge. This first moment must be God-the-designer's last resort, if resort he has. I don't mean to give the impression that science can yet say much about this moment but certain suggestive glimmerings of understanding are starting to emerge and it is certainly reasonable to suppose that science is edging towards a total understanding of this auspicious moment.

I can see that some people will take it as a sign of God's existence that we exist. We, of course, including such persons as Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler and Peter Sutcliffe. But even if we did not exist and there were no people in the universe then the universe could still exist. The existence of intelligent life is just as much an argument in favour of the universe's happy accident as it is support for the view that it was designed.

In conclusion, let me say the scientific view of the universe looks for the simplest, most uncluttered, description of the world. Science scrapes away the obfuscation of appearance and sentiment to see the true underlying processes of the world and is finding that they are of unsurpassed simplicity. The pursuit of a scientific explanation of an accidental universe with a purposeless but possibly awesomely-glorious short-term future demonstrates a respect for the human spirit of enquiry that religion cannot match. The designer-God is an object of unsurpassed complexity - a cop-out of explanation and an abnegation of the awesome power of human explanation.

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