Years ago I wrote several articles debunking the commonplace claim that Theism (or indeed even Biblical Christianity) was necessary for modern science. It’s time for an updated round-up, particularly in preparation for a recent new attempt to argue this that I will blog about next (that link will go active in a couple days); also in supplementation of having recently analyzed Ben Shapiro’s garbling of a version of this class of arguments, and the Hoover Institute promoting a cynical version of it.

The General Problem

Most claims of this type are simply historically false. I surveyed this side of the issue in “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science” in The Christian Delusion (2010). Others are just philosophically or scientifically false. For example, I devote a few pages to why Intelligent Design is not necessary to explain how our brains can figure out facts of the world in “Neither Life Nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed” in The End of Christianity (2011; cf. pp. 298–302). And I devote a lot of attention to the real historical underpinnings of our modern scientific mindset in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (2017), essentially expanding those earlier works into a fully cited analysis.

I’ve also collated all the problems with “Argument from Reason” versions of this claim, where somehow God is needed even to explain how logical and scientific reasoning exists at all, in The Argument from Reason (2022); and all the problems with “Argument from the Applicability of Mathematics” versions of this claim, where somehow God is needed to explain why science can be so successful explaining the world with mathematics, in All Godless Universes Are Mathematical (2017); and all the problems with “Christian Culture” style versions of this claim, where somehow something about “Christian culture” was necessary for modern rational empiricism (as well as every popular moral and political and economic innovation of the modern era), in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West (2019). You can follow those breadcrumbs as needed.

The Argument from Uniformities

But one common version of this deserving an updated treatment is the “Argument from Uniformities in Nature.” It can’t be “The Uniformity of Nature” because there is a ton of randomness—possibly even fundamental randomness—in the universe, so it isn’t the case that “Nature” is consistently uniform; it is, rather, quite poorly governed, which is why the Argument from Evil is still a thing, most of existence is lethal junk, and our planet’s climate and biosphere are catastrophically capricious. But there is a lot of “uniformity” to be explained (even some that’s inconvenient for the theist).

Which ultimately comes down to what you think most likely grounds observable reality. Which I covered in The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit (2021), and more broadly in my book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005; see especially section III.3 on “The Nature and Origin of the Universe,” pp.  71-96, and there most especially, pp. 86-88). That whole side of the question often comes down to some cosmological argument or other (see The Problem with Nothing and A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).

But at the top level of analysis, we can formulate the argument I’m talking about in a straightforward Bayesian way: the evidence e is “the uniformities of nature,” such that the explanation h, “God made it that way,” makes e highly probable, whereas one might suppose ~h, “A god did not make it that way,” does not make e highly probable; therefore e is evidence for God. Not that this must be a conclusive argument; having evidence for something is not the same as that something being true (see my recent discussion of this same point as well-made by Emerson Green). For example, you can have evidence for someone committing a crime that in fact they didn’t commit—like fingerprints on a murder weapon, which could have gotten there in other ways besides having used it to kill the vic. But then the question becomes—what’s most likely?

The real problem is that ~h is a stand-in for all other possible explanations of that evidence, e. Not just the null set. The alternatives are not “God” (h) or “Nothing” (~h). That would violate the Law of Excluded Middle: there are lots of alternatives in between; and they all get subsumed under ~h in Bayesian reasoning. Because to produce a valid argument, h and ~h together must include all logically possible theories of the evidence (just as e and b must exhaust all human knowledge without remainder). And since h is only one of those possible theories (“God did it”); then necessarily ~h contains all the others—many of which do make e highly probable.

And we don’t have to pick one, either. We can say “I can think up ten different explanations, other than God, which all guarantee that e will obtain,” and if those all have a higher prior probability than “God did it,” then God is no longer starting out as the better explanation. In fact, it then becomes one of the worst. And if “God did it” doesn’t even get us a better likelihood (if it doesn’t make the evidence substantially more likely than any alternative does), it’s done for. Note that for this to be the case, we don’t have to know, or even claim, that any one of those other explanations is true. It can still be the case that more probably one of them is true than that h is true, regardless.

This is because the probability of ~h is the sum of the probabilities of every hypothesis subsumed under ~h. If, for example, there are ten theories each with an 8% relative chance of being true, the probability one of them is true is 80% (8 x 10). And that entails the probability that “God did it” is only 20% (as that probability must be the converse of the other, so: 100 – 80 = 20). And that simply means “probably God did not do it.” Then e is no longer evidence for God. It does not become evidence against God, though, because here, “God did not do that one thing” is not synonymous with “God does not exist.” Nor is “we do not know whether God did that one thing.” Sure, you might be able to cobble up such an argument against God, but it would have to have some added steps. The point is that here we are not testing the question of whether God exists, but whether God did a thing. It’s just that his doing it entails he exists (to effectively 100% certainty); but his not doing it does not entail he doesn’t. (For an example explaining all this in resurrection apologetics, see Stephen Davis Gets It Wrong.)

Of course I think we already have good explanations for the uniformities of nature that bear a far higher probability than God. I discuss the best in Sense and Goodness without God (per above); but for a start just compare Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism with The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism, for example. But there are indeed at least ten possibles with higher priors, and none with worse likelihoods (some of which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but neither do any entail the others). Here’s a list of those ten hypotheses:

1. Brute fact. Just as God “just exists for no reason,” uniform nature “just exists for no reason.” This is a simpler hypothesis because it posits only one entity, which is fully in evidence and thus not hypothetical, while God posits two entities, one of which is not in evidence, and not only not in evidence, but possessed of properties without any established precedent. For example, see: A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument.
2. Random event in a multiverse. In any system of randomly generated universes, regions of uniformity are a logically necessary outcome, in the same way that long runs of 6s are inevitable in any long enough series of rolls of a six-sided die; and obviously life will only arise in those regions. For example, see: Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God.
3. Random event in an early universe. In any single system of randomly interacting elements, regions of uniformity are a logically necessary outcome, so any Inflationary Era would have inevitably produced some, and obviously life will only arise in those regions, a fact as true of the universe as a whole as of life’s location in it. For example, see my analysis of design arguments in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics.
4. Random event in universe selection. Any randomly selected universe from among all possible universes will have uniformities, to an extremely high probability; because having no uniformities is only one possible outcome (of all possible uniformity conditions, there is only one state of zero uniformities), whereas there are infinitely many more possible outcomes each of which are full of uniformities, so any random selection among them will produce a system with uniformities to a probability of effectively 100%. Which actually better fits the observation that the universe is also full of non-uniformities. For example, see: Koons Cosmology vs. The Problem with Nothing.
5. Ontological necessity. Just as God is imagined to be a Necessary Being, for all we know it’s actually the Universe (at its fundamental state) that is a Necessary Being. For example, see: The Problem with Nothing and The Ontological Whatsit.
6. Geometric necessity. If Superstring theory is true (or any theory relevantly like it), then all particles and therefore all forces and therefore all laws of physics are nothing more than oscillations of collapsed but contiguous regions of space-time, and then all existence is simply a giant geometrical shape, in which uniformity is an inevitable product of geometry. This is simpler because it posits only one entity: space-time; which we have proven exists and therefore is not hypothetical. And with space-time you have geometry, and that geometry deductively entails all the facts of Superstring theory (if Superstring theory is true). For example, see: Superstring Theory as Metaphysical Atheism and, again, The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit.
7. Logical necessity. Really, nature is full of non-uniformity, we just choose to talk about the uniform bits of it, whereas having no uniform bits would entail logical contradictions, therefore it is logically impossible to have a universe that doesn’t exhibit enough uniformity for us to talk about it being (to some degree) uniform. For example, if we were in a different universe, we’d just be listing different uniformities. For example, see: All Godless Universes Are Mathematical.
8. Temporal inevitability from manifest physics. On established and proven physics, there is a nonzero probability of a randomly structured Big Bang occurring anywhere at any time; that probability just happens to be absurdly small. But on any indefinite timeline, all nonzero probabilities approach 100%. Therefore, eventually—perhaps trillions of trillions of trillions of years from now, but however long it may be, inevitably—another random Big Bang event will occur. And again after that. And again after that—ad infinitum. As the amount of uniformities in each random universe will thus be determined at random, a universe full of uniformities is thus temporally inevitable. For example, see My Fourth Reply to Wallace Marshall on the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
9. Temporal inevitability from no manifest physics. While that last hypothesis requires one brute fact (a rudimentary quantum mechanics, far simpler than any God and, unlike God, essentially in evidence), even in a universe governed by no physics at all (no uniformities, a total chaos) the same outcome will also be true: there will always be a nonzero probability of a random formation of a region of uniformities, precisely because no uniformities exist to prevent it. We can expect everything is more likely to have started with a random chaos, because “absolutely nothing” is an extreme form of uniformity and thus the least likely state of being to just exist for no reason (stay tuned for the closing paragraph of my next article on that point). But any completely random chaos will eventually form uniform structures given unending time, as a logically necessary fact of probability. As uniform structures randomly form, over time one of them will inevitably contain enough uniformities to produce an observable universe. For example, see: Justin Brierley on the Science of Existence and The Problem with Nothing.
10. Ontological Euthyphro. How can God create uniformity if he is not himself uniform? So where do the uniformities in God come from? He can’t have started as a chaos and then “chosen” to pull himself together, because that requires enough uniformity to think and choose, much less choose correctly, and thus it presupposes uniformity. We can’t say God has always been uniform as a brute fact, as then positing a uniform nature as a brute fact is a simpler hypothesis, per the very first hypothesis (above). That leaves the conclusion that a certain uniformity is an innate property of existing in and of itself, in which case it will be the innate property of everything that exists, whether a god or anything else. Therefore no God is needed to explain why everything that exists exhibits a certain measure of uniformity. For example, see: The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism and Graham Oppy on Existential Inertia.

Again, I don’t need to know or claim that any one of these explanations is true. All I need to know is that each of them has a higher prior probability than “God did it” or “God exists” (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them), and a more favorable likelihood ratio (see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics and The God Impossible), which entails the probability that at least one of them is true is many times higher than the probability that God did it. And since all of them produce the observed result (“there are uniformities in nature”) to the same 100% probability as “God did it,” Bayes’ Theorem entails “God did it” is the least likely explanation of uniformity in nature.

That wouldn’t always be the case. As I recently pointed out in response to Daniel Bonevac’s Bayesian Argument for Miracles, it’s just the happenstance of how things turned out. If God actually did exist and really did design the universe, the signature of his intelligent selection would be visible all over it. Just as all religious thinkers originally predicted: if the Genesis account of the universe’s origin and structure bore out in evidence, none of the ten explanations offered above would make that likely, whereas at least some form of god would; likewise even if the universe were structured the way Aristotle imagined (inhabitable throughout and too small and geocentric to have a chance explanation). No human creationist ideology ever predicted the actual size, age, lethality, randomness, and oddity of the actual universe; they predicted outcomes far more congruent with intelligent design. Because they knew what a designed universe would look like. Modern theists have had to forget that in order to quell their cognitive dissonance. They are forced to try and sell the actual mess we found as intelligent. And that just doesn’t fly. If God really did exist, this wouldn’t be the mess we’d find, and their case would then qualify.

That’s how we know God doesn’t exist.

The Argument from Five Axioms

That’s an example of an ontological form of the uniformities argument. There are also epistemological forms: rather than saying God is needed for the universe to be a certain way, these say God is needed for scientific thinking to be conceivable or rationally justifiable (or, in more cynical versions, that a belief in God, or even a particular kind of God, is needed, even if it’s false—such as I found being argued at the Hoover Institute in Another Two ‘Best’ Arguments for God?). A typical example of this variant comes from Victor Reppert, drawing on C.S. Lewis, who in turn drew on Arthur Balfour: their proposal is that modern science depends on five “preinvestigatory convictions” which, supposedly, are not based on any physical or experimental evidence, so naturalism can’t explain why we came up with them or still trust them. “If all of this is just the product of naturalistic evolution,” Reppert says, “then why are we so sure, and why have we always been so sure, that the world ‘out there’ corresponds to these convictions?”

This is similar to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, which only proceeds on premises that are demonstrable pseudoscience, and completely false (see Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience). But Reppert’s formulation is less convoluted. He just argues that theism would make more sense of the fact that we were innately attracted to these axiomatic beliefs. But Reppert is wrong twice over. Much of these axioms is derived from “physical evidence”—it’s not all biologically innate—and we have not “always been so sure” of them. Some were not historico-culturally universal, either, but in fact ethnographically peculiar, and arrived at historically remarkably late. Humans have existed for over a hundred thousand years. They only figured out to embrace these five axioms over the last few thousand years. Meanwhile, there is a biological explanation of how primitive versions of these assumptions arose, as most are actually shared by dumb animals, and, contrary to Reppert’s rhetorical question, make perfect sense as products of natural selection.

Let’s take them one at a time:

1. Our belief in an objective, independently existing external world.

In fact Greek philosophy from its earliest days included both those who advocated and those who denied this axiom (Parmenides and the Eleatics especially). Hinduism and Buddhism, which have dominated half of the world’s population and the history of civilization, in various ways have rejected it. And the science of child development has shown that infants do not yet behave in accordance with it; they have to learn this axiom empirically. So how can anyone say this axiom has always been believed by all humans? Clearly it is an axiom that only started to see organized defenses in a few particular cultures (Greece and China, for example), late in human history. And it dominated in the West because once correctly applied, it was far more empirically successful. It is thus part of the technology of reason, not the biology of reason (see The Argument from Reason).

There is some biological underpinning for it, though, too. Brains only succeed in producing intelligent behavior because they model an environment that actually exists. This is true for most animals. If brains adopted a different computational strategy, such as imagining that all experience was just a subjective construct or all reality was unpredictably nonuniform, they would far more often fail to benefit the organism. Even so, this system is nowhere perfect. Even in humans, we must take years of interactive brain development after birth before we have fully grasped the tactic of modeling an external environment (rather than acting egoistically as if we were solipsistic gods, or our parents are).

And even then, as history shows, humans can reject this and deploy a different tactic altogether—to their detriment. And not only the sane, but the insane demonstrate this: a schizophrenic has very little prospect of survival without the aid of a non-schizoid community. In simpler animals, who have no ego construct—like, say, cats—there is never any question of subjective constructs, since cats have no conception of a distinction between subjective and objective constructs; but their brains, as a matter of practical fact, still construct models of an actual, not simply an imaginary, environment. That’s why they can get around without bumping into things.

Evidence and evolution thus fully explain our trust in this axiom. God has no role to play.

2. The uniformity of nature and governance by the laws of nature.

Ancient scientists did not employ the idea of a “law of nature” in this sense (that’s a medieval invention). They only imagined what we now call laws of physics as simply “necessity” or the “nature of things.” So that leaves only the “uniformity of nature.” Where that comes from I already covered. But Reppert asks, “Why do we trust in it as a principle?” The answer is: because the reality of this uniformity (which we can even describe with mathematical laws when we get around to it) is observed, by everyone, from the moment they open their eyes as babies. So how can we pretend this was not arrived at by empirical observation? Obviously this axiom would serve an obvious biological advantage as well. So even insofar as there is any innate biological basis for a belief in uniformity (if there is, it’s weak, as the failure of infants to grasp it and their need to have to learn it proves), it is easily explained in evolutionary terms. As I’ve already said, if the universe is uniform, then an organism that operates on the assumption that it is uniform will have an advantage over an organism that does not. And that’s that.

And yet, culturally, this axiom has not been a given. Belief in miracles and the capriciousness of the gods entails abandoning the axiom. Some Buddhists and Hindus believe they can defy the “laws of physics” once they achieve a sufficient degree of enlightenment. Many Christians (laymen far outnumbering theologians) believe the “laws of physics” not only can be broken, but often are. There are postmodern metaphysicians who deny that there even are “laws of physics,” and assert the mind’s supremacy over nature. So clearly it is not the case that humans all innately believe in the uniformity of nature—otherwise humans would all have been scientists from day one. But it took three thousand years of even civilization before we hit upon the idea of a rational scientific method, and another two thousand before it became popular. And even then, it is only really understood, and accepted, by a minority of the world’s population. But they accept it because it works. It is therefore learned empirically. God is irrelevant.

This is therefore another example of the technology of reason, not the biology of reason; and insofar as there is anything to it biologically, natural selection fully explains that.

3. An intuitive, nonmathematical conception of probability.

This has been demonstrated even in pigeons. It’s actually widespread in the animal kingdom and the reasons it was naturally selected are well known (see J. E. Mazur, “Choice with Probabilistic Reinforcement: Effects of Delay and Conditioned Reinforcers,” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 55 (1991) and “Theories of Probabilistic Reinforcement,” Ibid. 51 (1989); and Nir Vulkan, “An Economist’s Perspective on Probability Matching,” Journal of Economic Surveys (2000)).

Our brains evolved as probability machines (see Bayesian Statistics vs. Bayesian Epistemology). And the survival advantage of this is obvious, since the ability to assess the probability of an outcome is of inestimable value in surviving the world. But it has also been proven that our innate ability at this is flawed and often leads to error (e.g., Stuart Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (1997), esp. pp. 94-138; Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (1994); Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (1993); and Thomas Gilovich et al., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (2002); and beyond).

Our innate ability thus helps us more than hurts us (just as it helped pigeons and rats and other animals cope with their environment), but it is nowhere near the sort of intuitional capability we would expect from an intelligent designer. From that perspective, it is extraordinarily poorly designed. Humans, not gods, had to invent formal mathematics and logics to fix this. And an imperfect but useful organ that can only be improved by thousands of years of human invention is exactly what natural evolution predicts, not theism.

In result, the systems of probability actually employed in science are not our innate capacity, but a highly refined technology. Because scientists have found that our intuition here is far too flawed for the needs of scientific reason. This is why anecdotal evidence is rejected, and random sampling and controlled, double-blind experiments followed by mathematically-rigorous analyses are preferred, and countless corrective procedures exist to catch mistakes of probability that slip through even then. And these are all proved to be successful and superior with evidence.

So God does not appear to be involved here either.

4. Our belief in the conservation of matter and energy.

This is another belief that arises from experience. Young children, for example, do not grasp conservation principles until sometime in their first year or two. It has to be learned. And it is learned from experience. And they are learned, because conservation principles are a generally useful discovery. Any kind of long-term planning, such as regarding food and water supplies, depends upon it. Any hunt of prey depends upon it. Any reliance on foraging for survival depends upon it. The very notion of hiding or storing things to access them later depends upon it. Thus, the ability to learn conservation principles is an obvious survival advantage to any intelligent organism that relies on planning as a survival strategy. But even just predators and prey benefit from knowing that something that disappears is still around.

And yet humans did not connect this obvious everyday experience of the fact of conservation to the more subtle conceptions of matter and energy, until, again, the Greeks. In fact, there was barely any concept of “energy” at all until the Greeks started toying with the idea, and it would not get a useful definition until Newton. The principle of nihil ex nihilo was developed by Greek Presocratic philosophers, and was regarded as something novel and distinct to their science of nature—as the ancients continually remarked upon this (see Chapter 2 of The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). Mythophiles, diviners, and traditional religionists rejected the idea—as, again, the ancients continually observed (Ibid.). Philosophers can still be found who believe that energy can be created by a libertarian human will—even in the West, but many Buddhist and Hindu and Chinese sages also believe in conjuration, for example. And obviously thousands of theologians think a god can pull it off. So it is not true that everyone has “always believed” in this axiom.

To the contrary, scientists have not always been comfortable “assuming” it was true, but have repeatedly throughout history endeavored to test it and establish it from empirical evidence and theoretical explanation. From as early as the first distinctions were being made between chemistry and alchemy, to the first laws of thermodynamics (established from experiments on steam engines) or Maxwell’s hunch (leading to an empirical demonstration) of the conservation of electrical charge, and beyond (Planck, Einstein, Bohr), the laws of conservation have been doubted and then empirically proved. (It’s also possible to show that all laws of thermodynamics are the inevitable outcome of randomness and thus require no explanation: see my previous article All the Laws of Thermodynamics Are Inevitable.)

So, once again, insofar as this axiom has a biological basis, its evolutionary advantage is beyond doubt, whereas in most respects relevant to scientific method, this axiom belongs again to the technology, not the biology of reason. God has nothing to do with it.

5. Our belief that the world must have an atomic structure.

This one is the most amusing, because this belief was only ever commonplace when ancient pagan (indeed, functionally atheist) atomist philosophy was rediscovered in the West, launching the Scientific Revolution—though even then there were scientists who tried to get along without adopting it, and it was only their failure to produce the same impressive results as their colleagues that put a stop to it. Even in antiquity, when atomism first appeared as an idea in which anyone could be said to “believe” (notice how all this stuff comes from the pagan Greeks?), it was a minority view, rejected even by many scientists. Medieval Christians largely gave up on it; and atomism never systematically developed independently outside the West. So there is no sense in which humans innately, much less “always have” believed in this axiom.

This is indeed one of the clearest examples of a technology of reason. And to understand how someone could come to “discover” it even before the technologies and techniques of the 19th and 20th centuries became available, all one need do is read the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. He walks you through his thinking—no God involved (in fact, God historically has actually been very bad at science). And since then, atomism has received an enormous and sound empirical basis. It is no longer any sort of fundamental “axiom.” It never was. It was always a scientific hypothesis—which almost no one in human history thought of. It survives today because it turned out to be right. Had an Aristotelian or Taoist ontology turned out correct instead, Reppert would be going on about how we need God to explain how we adopted that assumption instead of atomism. But we adopted atomism, from among all competing views, simply because it’s the one that turned out to be correct.

It is clear that Reppert cannot maintain there is any mystery here. These five principles are easily accounted for by naturalism. Historically, many of the inventors of science were not theists (e.g. Strato, Erasistratus), or adopted no theistic assumptions in their science even if they were (e.g. Aristotle, Galen). And there is no analytical need for theism, even as an implied assumption, for the scientific method to be discoverable and effective, much less for the universe to be uniform enough to produce observers able to reliably describe and catalog its features using that method. See The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and Why A Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism Is Probably True. Likewise see The Ontology of Logic and All Godless Universes Are Mathematical. And, again, The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit.

Conclusion

Last year yet another iteration of this claim appeared, from a well-credentialed Christian professor of philosophy, Tomas Bogardus: “If Naturalism Is True, Then Scientific Explanation Is Impossible,” Religious Studies 59.1 (2022). It doesn’t actually contain anything new; but it is formulated in a new way. So the present article will still be pertinent to explaining why his thesis goes horribly wrong. But I’ll critique that next (that link will go active in a couple days). For now, the takeaway is this: claims that some aspect(s) of distinctly Christian ideology are necessary to think scientifically and do science are all false; and they often rest on demonstrably false claims about history or science.

None of the underlying assumptions of modern science came from theology, nor require it as justification; they aren’t even assumptions, but are all empirically learned conclusions, predating the influence of any Biblical culture; and they would be true in all internally observable godless worlds. Because no worlds lacking sufficient uniformity and describability to produce observers of them will have observers in them (so our being in one that has observers cannot itself be evidence for design); there are plenty of ways those features could arise without gods (or the supernatural); and the evidence actually supports the conclusion that, in our universe, they did. And none of the underlying ontologies require a god either. Uniformity, intelligibility, human reason: all have simpler explanations in natural causes that actually explain the evidence better (see, again, The Argument from Reason, The Ontology of Logic, All Godless Universes Are Mathematical, and The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit).