Is God Necessary?

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has gotten a lot of press recently for making the provocative statement that while science cannot disprove the reality of God, "science makes God unnecessary."  Because Hawking is so brilliant, because his statement has gotten so much coverage, because his statement sounds so outrageous to some, and because there is both a limited way in which the statement may be true and a vitally important way in which it is not true, we need to consider it very carefully.

When we do, the first thing that appears is that Hawking is talking only about God as Creator.  Whether or not Hawking knows that the great religions see God as Creator but also as much more than Creator I do not know. Yet the only way in which science could ever make God unnecessary even in theory is to make God unnecessary precisely as Creator.  Science could to that, in theory, by demonstrating how the universe came into existence through its own processes.  How it could explain where those cosmic processes came from without a Creator God I do not understand, but for the sake of argument I will posit that it is possible, at least in theory, for science to explain the existence of the universe without an appeal to a Creator God.  I am no Stephen Hawking.  Indeed I am no kind of scientist at all; but if science has actually succeeded in doing that, I haven't heard about it.

Humans across the cultures and across the millenia have posited the reality of a Creator God to explain why anything at all exists instead of nothing at all; yet religion, or if you prefer the spiritual life, has purposes that go far beyond the explanation of why anything at all exists.  Religion functions in human culture to give life meaning and to give people solace in the face of the seeming meaninglessness of the universe and the pain of life as much as to explain why the universe exists in the first place.  Physical reality is the subject matter of science.  The meaning of physical reality is the subject of religion.  Science has much to say about the reality of the physical world.  It has and can have nothing to say about that world's meaning.  Physical reality is the subject matter of science.  The despair and pain that humans universally feel in their lives as part of physical reality are the subject matter of religion.  Science has much to say about the matters that are properly within its purview.  When science is properly understood, it has and can have nothing to say about those matters, like meaning and solace, that are outside its proper purview.  Stephen Jay Gould, the late American evolutionary biologist who called himself an "atheistically inclined agnostic," taught that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria," that is, they are separate areas of human inquiry that deal with different types of truth.  Neither has anything to say about the truth that is the province of the other.  Meaning and solace are within the magisterium of religion, and science has nothing to say about them.  Science therefore cannot, even in theory, prove that God is not necessary for those areas of inquiry and belief.

So is God necessary?  As Creator perhaps not (but only perhaps not, not definitely not), although that has yet to be established as far as I am aware.  For all of the other roles that God plays in the lives of people of faith yes.  Yes, God is necessary; and science cannot even in theory prove otherwise.

There is at least one other way in which God is necessary that I haven't mentioned here.  God is necessary as the ground of the good.  Without God morality has no ground on which to stand.  For a fuller discussion of that issue see my sermon "The Ground of the Good" dated August 29, 2010, and available in the Sermon Archive section of my church's web site, monroeucc.org.