Religion and Certainty

Just expanding paper notes I've made over the past month or so. This made while walking the University Lakes and contemplating the beauty of nature.

In Science the Universe we behold today is unimaginably unlikely. Thinking about all the variables and exact requirements for this universe makes this moment virtually impossible by chance. I for example survived pneumonia as a child. My mother is the second child of my rhesus -ve grand-mother and survived only by chance. My parents almost never got married etc etc. Even in my own small corner of the world the chance of me sitting here and writing this is massively odds against.

Yet I am sitting here writing this. (Or at the time I was thinking this I was walking the lake at University.)

Christian Literalists however have an entirely opposite view. There is no chance here at all. God made 1 world and He made is exactly as He wanted. What we see is not the result of googleplexes of chances - of evolution in biology, chemistry and physics. There was never even one dice throw in God's creation. We look upon a world with total certainty - our existence is assured, the beauty of everything assured - it is the world of the Perfect creator. What Science reveals for the Literalist is not the chance outcomes of evolution but the Grand Design - the very Hand of God.

A deeper Literalist might also say that the apparent chances of evolution - the extinction of dionsaurs for example - were not really dice throws but simply part of the Plan. It only looks like a chance because we don't have the full picture. Like someone trying to predict what day someone else will go on holiday without seeing their diary.

One great advantage of the Literalist is that they capture something essential about Life and Now - that there is no question of what is happening. This is the starting point of all our existence and all our research and science. What happens today is certain - everything else speculation.

So it kind of obliterates the scientific view of multiverses etc which would incline us to think this world and this Life is unimportant and arbitrary. Who cares of The Life if there are countless others? And who cares about the special features of this Universe when countless others have their own special features. Science kind of misses the point of Life and creation here.