Why Science Does Not Disprove God
*Starred Review* In Aczel, Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists face a formidable opponent. As a mathematician with a Berkeley-Harvard résumé, Aczel wields impressive intellectual weapons in demolishing the New Atheists’ claims that science has disproven the existence of God. With compelling reasoning, Aczel demonstrates that whenever Dawkins and his allies turn their attacks against anything but naively literal readings of the Bible, they distort or misrepresent the methods and findings of science. Darwinism has provided no godless explanation of how human consciousness emerged. The attempt to reduce the astounding fine-tuning of the big bang to quantum physics likewise leaves huge questions unanswered. Disproofs of God’s existence based on probability theory similarly fail under scrutiny. When the New Atheists buttress their flawed science by appealing to the authority of Einstein, Aczel catches them cherry-picking quotations, so hiding complexities in the great physicist’s metaphysical thinking. Those who truly grapple with modern science, Aczel finally avers, discover not a disproof of God but rather perplexing mysteries, such as the stunning vistas of infinity that the intensely religious theorist Georg Cantor glimpsed behind his revolutionary continuum hypothesis. Such mysteries may not signify the presence of the divine, but they will surely stir deep wonderings. --Bryce Christensen