God: The Evidence
The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular World
By Patrick Glynn
Forum (Prima Publishing, USA).
216 pages. £14.99
ISBN 0 7615 0941 0
Today, the popular idea is that Christian faith is a personal thing. But an older and bolder view claims that Christianity is not a matter of private opinion but of public truth. It claims that reason is on the side of Christianity.
This view has been on the retreat for the last century or so, as science seemed to be making God more and more an unnecessary assumption. This book argues with both wit and cogency that the tide has very definitely turned.
The author
Patrick Glynn is an American professor with a PhD from Harvard, who has written widely on religion, culture and foreign affairs in the US secular media. With years of commenting on world politics behind him, he describes himself as a 'cold warrior'.
This book resulted from his coming to faith during the early 1990s out of a background of agnosticism and atheism. His conversion sprang out of his falling in love with a believer after a previous failed marriage. He says that no one can truly fall in love without somehow thinking of God. While at Harvard in the 1970s, the prevailing ethos among academics was that religion was an anachronism and God was a joke. Briefly surveying the secular arguments at that time, he easily took on board this way of thinking for himself. He speaks of this time of being particularly drawn to a kind of esoteric atheism. 'The philosopher who discovered that there is no God and that all values are relative did not want to broadcast this insight to the populace at large. It was important to sustain a decent social order, even if the philosopher, in some sense, held in contempt the naive belief on which the social order was based.
But through his love and subsequent second marriage, Glynn was forced to retrace his steps and think seriously again about God. To his surprise, he found that in the last 25 years or so, the whole balance of evidence has completely changed.
Glynn contends that in areas of fundamental physics, medicine and psychology, there is now clear evidence which points to the existence of God and the soul. In short, we live in a universe with a definite spiritual dimension.
Science
In autumn 1973, a cosmologist named Brandon Carter gave a paper at a conference in Krakow, Poland, entitled 'Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology'. This paper was to change the perception of the universe, just as much as the Copernican revolution had done 500 years before. The anthropic principle comes down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics are seemingly fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man - that the universe appears expressly designed for the emergence of human beings. The only way the current atheistic physicists have of getting around this evidence for the Creator is to propound the idea of innumerable parallel universes of which ours happens to be the lucky one. In Glynn's eyes, this amounts to giving up on Occam's razor, the very foundation of modern science. '20th-century cosmology had come up with . . . something of a scientific embarrassment: a universe with a definite beginning, expressly designed for life. Ironically, the picture of a universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced 20th-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the book of Genesis that anything offered by science since Copernicus. The irony is deepened by the fact that modern cosmology is the result of extending the concept of 'evolution' - an idea once viewed as deeply inimical to faith.'
However, when reading that last quote, it would be very wrong to see Glynn as a six-day creationist. He is quite scathing of 'young earth' believers. But on the other hand, he also has severe criticism for the other side. 'No less an authority than Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould has attacked what he calls the 'Darwinian fundamentalists', writers like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, for insisting that the mechanism of natural selection holds the entire key to evolution. Recent discoveries have been in the opposite direction - toward recognising what Gould calls 'an astonishing conservation' in basic evolutionary 'pathways'. In other words, biologists are emphasising that the manner in which organisms evolve is determined more by internal dicta than by simple adaptation to the outside world. Definite 'pathways' are built into the organic world.'
Psychology
Glynn then turns to look at research which has been done into the beneficial effects of religious faith in areas of medicine and psychology. Again, he uncovers a vast range of interesting evidence which seems to point to the idea that actually human beings are 'wired for God', that we function best as we believe.
For example, he quotes the research of David B. Larson, a former National Institute of Health psychiatrist in the US: 'If a new health treatment were discovered that helped to reduce the rate of teenage suicide, prevent drug and alcohol abuse, improve treatment for depression, reduce recovery time from surgery, lower divorce rates and enhance a sense of well-being, one would think that every physician in the country would be scrambling to try it. Yet what if critics denounced this treatment as harmful, despite research findings that showed it to be effective more than 80% of the time? Which would you be more ready to believe - the assertions of the critics based on their opinions or the results of clinical trials based upon research?' The 'new health treatment' that Larson is talking about, of course, is religious faith. Opposed vehemently by the secularists of the academy, yet numerous studies show that believers are far less likely than non-believers to commit suicide, abuse drugs, get depressed or divorced.
Perhaps the most controversial section of his book concerns his investigations into near-death experiences (NDEs), where people have briefly 'died' and experienced survival in what appears to be a spiritual realm. Glynn points us to research by those who started out as sceptics in this area but have ended up believing that these experiences do really point to the existence of the human soul as an entity which can be separated from the body. He gives fascinating accounts of NDEs in which people have been able to recount details of the medical machinery and what the doctors were doing to them on the operating table which they could never have seen except from a vantage point outside their bodies. We may wish to be more cautious in how we interpret this material as the possibility of occult phenomena is not considered in the book. But all this is grist to the mill for Glynn that the spiritual realm is real.
Finally, he touches on his own speciality of world politics. He is clear that the collapse of communism, though having many causes, was fundamentally down to the fact that a purely materialistic political philosophy could not sustain the motivation for moral order in society. His conclusion? 'The knowledge of the Spirit is prior to the knowledge of reason. Where reason follows Spirit, the results are good; where it rejects or parts with the Spirit, the results are invariably disastrous.'
This is a fascinating book. It will raise questions for many Bible believers, but it will stimulate much good thought and more reasoned faith.
JEB
Dr John Benton
