A) Thesis:  The universe is a fully self-explanatory system, a "causally closed" mechanism.  (Sometimes called "Scientific Naturalism.")

1. At first, this was manifested as deism:  God's action is restricted to some initial act of creation.  God is like a clockmaker.  He makes the clock and sets it ticking, but he can do nothing about it after that.

2. Or else:  God's action in the world was restricted to the "gaps" in natural causality.  (Thus, increased interest in miracles as evidence of God's continued interest and action in the world.)

B) Problems:

1. With the developments of science, the gaps get closed.

2. With recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology, even the beginnings of the cosmos seem self-explanatory.

3. Examples:

a) Paul Davies, British physicist:
"In this remarkable scenario [the inflationary model of the universe], the entire universe simply comes out of nowhere, completely in accordance with the laws of physics, and creates along the way all the matter and energy needed to build the universe as we now see it."

"For the first time, a unified description of all creation could be within our grasp ... Physicists are now talking about the 'self-creating universe':  a cosmos that erupts into existence spontaneously, much as a subnuclear particle sometimes pops out of nowhere in certain high energy processes.  The question of whether the details of this theory are right or wrong is not so very important.  What matters is that it is now possible to conceive of a scientific explanation for all of creation.  Has modern physics abolished God altogether ...?" (NB:  Recently Davies has become less enthusiastic about the promises of the new physics.) 

c) Carl Sagan, host of PBS special Cosmos:
"Since the birth of the universe could now be explained by the laws of physics alone, the late astronomer and atheist Carl Sagan concluded, there was 'nothing for a Creator to do' and every thinking person was therefore forced to admit 'the absence of God.'"

d) The 18th century philosopher-scientist Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace:  As for God, he told the Emperor Napoleon:  "Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis."  (Nothing for God to do.  We have natural explanations for everything.)
 

D) The result:

1. Determinism.  According to Laplace, if one knew the location of every fundamental particle and all the relevant forces at time t, then one could determine precisely what was or what will be at times t - x or t + x.  "Nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to our eyes."

2. Therefore:  no human freedom.  Everything (including what seems like human choice) is determined according to the ineluctable laws of physics.  I know what's going to happen, because there is no way of changing the future;  nor was there anyway of changing the course of events that led up to the present.  All events have followed and will continue to follow a pre-determined course set by the laws of physics.  Human history has no more drama to it than the rusting of a car:  both are the result of the irresistable forces of nature.

3. Or perhaps, at best, we get "The Two Cultures":  The "sciences" and the "humanities."  The first deals with the realm of NATURE (the realm of causal necessity); the second with the realm of HUMANITY (the realm of rational freedom).

3. Examples:

a) Steven Weinberg, Nobel physicist, University of Texas:
"The more the universe has become comprehensible through cosmology, the more it seems pointless."

b) Quentin Smith, philosopher:
"the fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing."

"our universe exists without cause or without explanation ... [This world] exists non-necessarily, improbably, and causelessly.  It exists for absolutely no reason at all."

E) An aside:
 
1. One of the cornerstones of the critique of any belief in a Creator used to be the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy.  There was no beginning of the universe, it was argued;  all matter and energy have always existed and would always exist -- in aggregate, none was added, none subtracted.  In other words, there was no "beginning" of the "stuff" of the universe.

2. Note how different the situation is now that modern physics seems to be suggesting that particles simply "pop" into existence out of nothing.  According to the U.S. News & World Report:  "If nothing else, the theological idea of creation ex nihilo -- out of nothing -- is looking better all the time as 'inflation' theories increasingly suggest the universe emerged from no tangible source."  And again:  "it appears almost inescapable that substance was made from nothingness at some point." (NB:  Be careful of this notion of ex nihilo;  it is not the only meaning of the term!)

F) The bottom line, however, seems to be this:

1. First Response:  The universe is not a fully self-explanatory system that follows set rules.
This is shown by (a) quantum unpredictability and its more recent cousin (b) chaos theory.

a) On quantum unpredictability, see, for example, Newsweek, 49:

"Some scientists see an opening for [a God who acts in the world] at the level of quantum or subatomic events.  In this spooky realm, the behavior of particles is unpredictable.  In perhaps the most famous example [commonly called the "Einstein's cat" question], a radioactive element might have a half-life of, say, one hour.  Half-life means that half of the atoms in a sample will decay in that time;  half will not.  But what if you have only a single atom?  Then, in an hour, it has a 50-50 chance of decaying.  And what if the experiment is arranged so that if the atom does decay, it releases poison gas?  If you have a cat in the lab, will the cat be alive or dead after the hour is up?  Physicists have discovered that there is not way to determine, even in principle, what the atom would do.  Some theologian-scientists see that decision point -- will the atom decay or not? will the cat live or die? -- as one where God can act.  'Quantum mechanics allows us to think of special divine action,' says [Robert John] Russell.  Even better, since few scientists abide miracles, God can act without violating the laws of physics."

b) Chaos Theory:

 i. Many large-scale phenomena seem to contemporary scientists to exhibit unpredictability strikingly similar to the unpredictability expressed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at the quantum level.  The trajectory of a baseball, for example, is so much easier to predict than that of a flying balloon with the air rushing out of it.  The balloon lurches and turns erratically at times and places that seem to be impossible to predict.  The balloon obeys Newton's laws just as much as the baseball does;  so why is its behavior so much harder to predict than that of the ball?  Uncertainties in our knowledge of the motion of the balloon quickly overwhelm our ability to account for its motion with precision.  The recognition of such uncertainties is the foundation of chaos theory.

 ii. The world described by classical dynamics was, as we mentioned above, often compared to the workings of a clock, in which the regular patterns of behavior could be understood and were, accordingly, quite predictable.  Chaos theory argues that most of the physical world is not like a clock.  The great complexity evident in the various systems that constitute the world -- on all levels, from the very small to the very large -- are so sensitive to circumstance that they are intrinsically unpredictable.

 iii. This intrinsic unpredictability of physical events leaves room for what physicist John Polkinghorne calls "ontological openness."  Chaos theory presents us, he says, with the possibility of "a metaphysically attractive option of openness, a causal grid from below which delineates an envelope of possibility (it is not the case that anything can happen by many things can), within which there remains room for manoeuvre."  Thus "the dead hand of the Laplacean Calculator is relaxed and there is scope for forms of causality other than the energetic transactions of current physical theory."  The flow of reality involves, along with physical forces, "the indiscernible effects of infinitesimal triggers, nudging it this way or that ... these triggers of vanishingly small energy input become non-energetic items of information input ('this way,' 'that way') as proliferating possibilities are negotiated."

 iv. Aha, concludes Polkinghorne;  there may be something for God to do after all.  See Newsweek, 49:  "An even newer science, chaos theory, describes phenomena like the weather and some chemical reactions whose exact outcomes cannot be predicted.  It could be, says Polkinghorne, that God selects which possibility becomes reality.  This divine action would not violate physical laws either."

c) Possible Problems With This First Theistic Response:
 (i) Attempts to locate a venue for divine agency in the indeterminism of contemporary physics really amount to the claim that any account of the physical world in the natural sciences is somehow inherently incomplete.  In other words, these authors must maintain that the natural sciences cannot in principle provide a complete, coherent account of physical reality.
 (ii) Isn't this just another "God of the gaps"?
 

2. Second Response:  So-called "Anthropic Coincidences"
 
a) New scientific discoveries suggest the highly improbable nature of our origins.

Thus:

(i) U.S. News & World Report:
 "Researchers have calculated that after a big bang, unless the ratio of matter and energy to the volume of the universe (a value researchers call "omega") was within one-quadrillionth of 1 percent of the ideal, runaway relativity would have rendered the cosmos uninhabitable:  either too scrunched and distorted for life, or too diffuse for stars to form.
 "Other natural constants that trace back to the big bang also seem strangely fine-tuned in favor of a universe amenable to living consciousness.  Had gravity been only sightly stronger, stars would burn through their nuclear fuel in less than a year:  life could never evolve, much less settle in.  Had the strong force that holds the nucleus of atms together been only sightly weaker, stars could never have formed.  So far no theory is even close to explaining why physical laws exist, much less why they take the form they do.  Standard big-bang theory, for example, essentially explains the propitious universe in this way:  "Well, we got lucky!"

(ii) Physicist Ernest Sternglass (one of Einstein's last surviving students):
 the propitious circumstances of the big bang show that the universe is "apparently designed for the development of life ...."

(iii) Newsweek:
 "Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness.  It turns out that if the constants of nature -- unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a proton -- were the tiniest bit different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have made an appearance.  'When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see," says John Polkinghorne ... "that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it."  Charles Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the principles of the laser, goes further:  "Many have a feeling that somehow intelligence must have been involved in the laws of the universe."

(iv) Now it seems as though not to believe in some intelligent design may be unreasonable.  All these remarkable coincidences are just a big accident?  Does that seem reasonable?

b) But That Depends on how we gauge (A) probability and (B) reasonability -- that is, what constitutes a "reasonable" explanation.

2. How do we gauge the probability of God as an explanation for things?  What numbers enter into calculating the probability of a Creator?

With regard to the second,
(B) Reasonability:
Note that, for some scientists, anything is more reasonable than belief in a supernatural force, which seems to them decidedly unscientific (And indeed it may be.  Don't we prefer science to give natural explanations for natural events?)

3. Thus, we get in modern science, other explanations of how the design might have come about;  for example:
 (a) the notion that life must have been brought here by space aliens;
 (Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner for discovery of the double-helix model of the DNA molecule and present director of the Human Genome Project, famously proposed that, since an undirected origin of life seems so unlikely, perhaps space aliens sent a rocket ship to Earth in the distant past to seed the planet with life.)
 (b) the notion of the "multiverse."
 On this see, for example, U.S. News & World Report:  "There is, however, a way in which purely chance-based physical processes might have resulted in the present user-friendly firmament -- if universes are created all the time, greatly improving the statistical outlook of a firmament such as ours being born.  This is the idea of a "multiverse," and it is rapidly gaining backing within the scientific community.
 "Daughter universe.  The multiverse notion arises like this:  Suppose it's true that, says, black holes are what came before the big bang.  Since our universe has black holes, wouldn't some of them be busily spawning new firmaments in other dimensions?  The result might be an overarching cosmic structure far larger than anything we can see -- a multiverse.
 "Lee Smolin, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University, uses multiverse theory to propose how life-favoring physical laws might have arisen without guidance.  Smolin supposes that deep in the past, some unknowable event [emphasis mine] triggered the first foundations of a multiverse.  Chance reigned, and many heavens were born with physical laws adverse to life:  They collapsed back on themselves or diffused into vapor and were never heard from again.  But those universes that were born with physical laws familiar to us were also the ones able to make black holes:  That allowed them to trigger 'daughter' universes.  Over time, a fantastically large and complex multiverse resulted, with most parts of the cosmos having physical laws that allow life -- natural selection functioning on the cosmic scale.

Possible problems:

 i. Note, however, that the application of the idea of natural selection at this point in the discussion is absolutely incoherent.  The argument is circular:  it uses the thing to be explained in the explanation.  What we are trying to explain is why the universe is a life-favoring system.  The theory of evolution presupposes that the universe is a life-favoring system.  The theory explains why some species live and some don't.  What we're interested in is why we have the species we have today, and not others.  Answer:  some lived because they adapted;  others died because they did not.  There is no evidence that "daughter" universes that don't support life will "die".  There is not reason they can't remain in existence just as well as the "daughter" universes that do support life.  The author is equivocating on the word "die".  Universes don't "die" because they don't adapt.

 ii. The best one could do would be to say that, with the advent of numerous universes, the probability of getting one that allows for life would be greater.  But one couldn't even say that, because one would have absolutely no idea what the parameters of determining the probability would be.

 iii. And, finally, as the U.S. News article makes clear, there is absolutely no evidence for this view.  It is an explanation generated out of the need for having an explanation.
 "The problem with multiverse thinking is that so far there is no evidence that other universes or dimensions exist.  Attributing the virtues of this cosmos to unseen other universes is a little like attributing the virtues of existence to God -- in either case you might be right, but you're assuming an article of faith."

4. Note as well that natural science can always make the claim:  we just don't know enough yet.  In the future, we'll be able to explain all of this.  You just need to wait.  Science always has the trump card of the promissory note of future payments, yet to be made.
 

Thus, the arguments go back and forth.  Is there something more certain that we can say?  How can we possibly sort through all of this mess?