1

Personal Details

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator A. Raghuramaraju Professor, Department of

Philosophy, University of
Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator Bhaskarjit Neog Assistant Professor, Centre

for Philosophy, Jawaharlal
Nehru University
Content Writer Ankur Barua Faculty of Divinity,
University of Cambridge
Content Reviewer Vibha Chaturvedi / Pragati Professor / Reader,
Sahni Department of Philosophy,
Delhi University
Language Editor Nikita Nisarga Freelancer

Description of Module

Subject name Philosophy

Paper Name Philosophy of Religion

Module Name/Title Reason and Faith

Module Id 10.4

Prerequisites Undergraduate background in philosophy

and philosophy of religion.
Objectives To analyze some of the characterizations of
the relationship between faith and reason
Key words Faith, reason, scientism, reductionism
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Table of Contents
1. Defining Faith and Reason ........................................................................................... 3

2. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: Logic ........................................................... 3

3. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: Empirical Foundations ..................................... 4

4. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: The Authority of Science ............................... 5

5. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: Psychology ...................................................... 7

6. Debating the Rationality of Faith .................................................................................. 9

7. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 10
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Reason and Faith

The relationship between faith and reason is one of the most contested themes in
philosophy of religion. Since the term God putatively refers to a supra-empirical entity, the
key question is whether the divine being can be accessed through reason alone or whether
reason needs to receive special assistance before it is capable of such access. The answer to
this question depends partly on how the terms faith and reason are defined. In sections 1,
2, 3 and 4, we will look at four ways of representing faith and reason as mutually opposed,
in terms of logic, experience, science and psychology respectively. We will see that
none of these alleged oppositions ultimately succeed in capturing the fine-grained nature of
the distinction between faith and reason.

1. Defining Faith and Reason

One of the reasons why philosophers often sharply disagree over how to characterise the
relationship between faith and reason is because these terms are polyvalent and carry
different meanings in different contexts. While there is no philosophical consensus on
precisely what reason is, most understandings of reason include non-violation of the
principle of non-contradiction, responsiveness to empirical stimuli, adjustment of means to
ends, proportioning ones beliefs to evidence, and so on. Likewise, philosophers and
theologians strongly disagree on how faith should be understood, and therefore the nature of
its relationship to what we have defined above as reason. Nevertheless, faith usually
includes two components: the first, the faith that certain propositions about God are true
(God is omniscient) and the second, faith in God as the trustworthy source of all being,
goodness, and value. If the first is the cognitive aspect of faith which is putatively fact-
stating in that an individual claims to have some propositional knowledge concerning God,
the second is the volitional aspect in which an individual entrusts herself to God as the
support of her finite being. If the first is the evidence-based aspect of faith that seeks reasons
for belief in God, the second is the evidence-transcending aspect of faith that consists of
entrusting oneself to God whole-heartedly, even if such reasons are not readily available. The
vital question, of course, is whether the second aspect is rational, and we shall return to this
point in section 4, after exploring four alleged oppositions between faith and reason.

2. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: Logic

A common way of setting up the relationship between faith and reason is to claim that
reason works through logical patterns of thinking whereas faith moves through illogical
and fallacious modes of thought. In other words, the criterion to distinguish between faith and
reason is logic: if we undertake a careful study of the operations of faith in religious contexts,
we would see, according to this view, that faith does not satisfy the canons of logical thinking.
However, this representation of the faith-reason relationship is not supported by the long
history of natural theology both in Europe and in classical India. Philosophers and
theologians have sometimes developed patterns of argumentation which start from premises
that are logical truths or empirical observations, and which then move, through inferential
reasoning, to the conclusion that God exists. Such argumentation is natural in the sense that
it is developed by the natural light of reason and is available even to thinkers who are not
necessarily located within supernatural scriptural contexts.

For instance, a recent formulation of the cosmological argument runs as follows:

Premise 1: Anything that begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

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Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

This argument is a combination of an a priori claim (Premise 1) and an a posteriori statement

based on certain cosmological theories (Premise 2). If the two premises are granted, the
conclusion would demonstrate the existence of God, since the argument is valid. 1 Of course,
whether or not the premises are true, and whether the cause in the conclusion is indeed what
religious believers mean by God are highly debated topics. However, this excursus into the
cosmological argument shows that the distinction between faith and reason is not over
logical patterns of reasoning: faith is not irrational in the sense of directly violating any
logical canons.

A variation on the same theme is to say that reason, unlike faith, proceeds only on the
basis of what is self-evidently true to all human beings. In other words, individuals who
ground their lives on reason always work with self-evident truths, while religious individuals
who shape their lives through faith move beyond such truths. However, the history of modern
European philosophy from Rene Descartes through Bishop Berkeley to G.E. Moore shows
that there is no philosophical consensus on the precise form that the life of reason should
take. For instance, Descartes believed that the only self-evident truth was his own existence as
a thinker, and that the existence of the external world could be demonstrated only via a proof
of the divine existence. In contrast, Hume argued that reason, carefully applied, will show that
the self and the external world are both aggregates of fleeting mental impressions which are
mistakenly reified into enduring objects. Therefore, Descartes self-evident cogito was,
according to Hume, a non-rational belief in a spiritual substance. Further, from Humes
skeptical standpoint, our everyday beliefs, taken to be self-evidently true in our unreflective
moments, that we inhabit a non-hallucinatory universe structured by objective natural laws
are all based on our non-rational passionate natures. 2 To jump across the centuries, Moore, on
the other hand, believed it to be self-evidently true that he had a pair of hands, that he had
lived all his life near the surface of the earth, and so on. This survey of certain key moves in
the history of modern western epistemology shows that the question of what are, in fact, self-
evident truths is by no means a settled matter: for instance, Moores self-evident truths would
be viewed by Hume as the products of non-rational leaps across disconnected impressions.
Consequently, some contemporary philosophers speak not of reason in the strong Cartesian
sense of providing epistemic foundations that are self-evidently true but of reasonableness,
which is a less stringent requirement, and simply indicates that an epistemic subject is
responsive to empirical stimuli in framing justifications for ones beliefs. However, as we
noted earlier during our discussion of the cosmological argument, faith can also be
responsive to empirical considerations, so that this second characterisation of the distinction
in terms either of self-evident truths or of reasonableness does not succeed.

3. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: Empirical

Foundations
A second way of approaching the faith-reason dichotomy is that reason, unlike faith,
operates only with what can be empirically perceived. In other words, while a rational person
bases her dealings with the world on what is visible, audible, tangible, and so on, a faith-
grounded religious individual goes beyond these perceptible data. However, scientific
developments over the last hundred years demonstrate that various domains such as quantum
physics and biology are populated by theoretical entities which are postulated from within a

1
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Illinois: Crossway Books, 2008), p.111.
2
Richard Francks, Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003).
 5

theoretical structure to explain the observed phenomena. Thus, for instance, around a hundred
years ago, the electron was postulated not because it was directly empirically accessible but
because it helped to explain various surface-level phenomena in electrostatics, chemical
bonding, and other experimental results. The same pattern of reasoning, from what is directly
visible to an underlying theoretical entity or mechanism, applies in the case of positrons,
genes, black holes, 11-dimensional space-time, and so on. In the context of faith too, natural
theology has proceeded to infer, on the basis of certain empirical facts about the world, the
existence of a supra-empirical being.

Let us consider one formulation of the teleological argument:

Premise 1: All entities such as watches that exhibit internal complexity have an intelligent
designer.

Premise 2: The world is more like a watch than like, say, a rock.

Conclusion: The world has an intelligent Designer.

We are concerned here not with the validity of the argument or whether the premises are true,
but with the structure of the argument: it proceeds through inferential reasoning from certain
features of the universe that are empirically observed to a postulated trans-empirical
foundation that explains these observations. Therefore, the distinction between faith and
reason is not properly drawn by suggesting that the former lacks, and the latter is grounded
in, an empirical basis.

A related way of contrasting faith with reason is to claim that reason, unlike faith, is
structured by the logical principle of Ockhams Razor. It states that in any field of enquiry
one should not postulate more entities, processes, or mechanisms than are necessary.
Therefore, while rational people, according to this view, are economical in their ontological
commitments, people of faith multiply the universe with all kinds of supernatural entities.
However, just as philosophers do not agree on precisely what are self-evident truths, they also
sharply disagree on what kinds of ontological commitments are ruled out by Ockhams Razor.
For instance, while some philosophers of science, called scientific realists, argue that
scientific laws uncover the deep structure of reality, other philosophers of science, called
scientific instrumentalists, claim that these laws merely provide summary descriptions of
regularities. That is, for the former group of philosophers, electrons are really out there, while
the latter would view this claim as, in effect, a violation of Ockhams Razor since they
believe that the success of science can be explained without postulating the real existence of
electrons. Therefore, it is not immediately obvious that people who in contexts of faith
postulate the existence of God are guilty of violating Ockhams Razor, for they would argue
that God is in fact not more than what is necessary but is precisely just what is necessary
to explain the existence of the world, its cosmological stabilities, its structural harmonies, and
so on.

4. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: The Authority of

Science
Our discussion in the previous sections will have prepared us to tackle the third proposed
dichotomy between faith and reason: the claims of reason are supported by the authority
of science which consigns faith to the irrational peripheries of baseless superstition. To put
it bluntly, rational people, in our scientific age, cannot structure their lives by faith which
science has shown to be intellectually bankrupt. However, the validity of this dichotomy
 6

depends crucially on how the term science is defined: as a methodologically structured

discipline of enquiry that is agnostic about metaphysical claims (Science 1) or as a
metaphysical statement about what exists (Science 2). As we will note in the following
discussion, neither Science 1 nor Science 2 can rule out faith as irrational, for the following
reason. On the one hand, the religious faith that there really is a transcendent God, and that
we are justified in believing, say, that God is a loving creator, cannot be pronounced to be
meaningless by Science 1. On the other hand, Science 2 itself is not a deductive inference
from the scientific enterprise, so that it is not irrational to pursue scientific activity and reject
Science 2.3

To begin with the former, Science 1 refers to a field of activities which is circumscribed by
certain norms relating to the production, transmission and exchange of knowledge. It is an
enterprise carried out by a group of people, whom we call scientists, and who are in active
communication, either meeting one another at conferences or reading one anothers
hypotheses in international scientific journals.4 The aim of this transference is the attainment
of the maximal degree of consensus among scientists, who should be able to reproduce the
results or events proposed by the proposed theories through the design of certain experiments
carried out under controlled conditions.5 Science, in other words, is an ongoing inter-
subjective process in which messages, coded in a universally understood mathematical
language, incessantly flow into archives where they can be preserved, read, assimilated,
understood, criticized, (sometimes) verified and (sometimes) falsified by the community of
competent scientists which is forever recruiting and training novices.

In contrast, Science 2, often referred to as scientism, is a much stronger claim that the only
entities that are cognitively accessible and that constitute reality are the ones that are
investigated through the methodology of Science 1.6 Central to scientism is the notion of
reduction at two levels explanatory and ontological. First, scientism claims that all fields
of human enquiry can be reduced to the conceptual categories of a more fundamental
science, till ultimately everything can be explained in terms of those of the most fundamental
science. In other words, anthropology can be reduced in this manner to biology, biology to
chemistry and chemistry to quantum physics.7 These statements are further undergirded by
the claim that because the ultimate constituents of reality are the entities discovered or posited
by Science 1, all higher-order phenomena can be ontologically reduced to the phenomena
involving these basic particles.8 The only reality that exists is the one that is discoverable by
Science 1, and the various kinds of realities that are studied or postulated by other forms of
human enquiry such as sociology, cultural studies, history, neurophysiology and so on are
nothing but complex aggregates of the entities that are accepted within Science 1.

3
John F. Haught, Science and Religion (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), p.17.
4
John Ziman, An Introduction to Science Studies: the philosophical and social aspects of
science and technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
5
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1970).
6
Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach and David Basinger, Reason and
Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.36.
7
Roger Trigg, Reason and Commitment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
8
Tom Sorrell, Scientism: philosophy and the infatuation with science (London: Routledge,
1991).
 7

Scientisms claim that the only rationally justifiable beliefs about reality are the ones that are
accepted within Science 1 would seem to put scientism at loggerheads with the faith of most
religious traditions which affirm the existence of a reality which is neither amenable in a
straight-forward manner to empirical investigation nor reducible to the entities discovered by
Science 1.9 However, whether the explanatory and the ontological aspects of scientism are
justifiable on scientific grounds is a complicated matter. The claim that all knowledge is
scientific, that is, the summation of discoveries of Science 1 is not itself a scientific
conclusion but a philosophical thesis about the boundaries and limits of human understanding.
It implies, in effect, that any statement about trans-spatio-temporal beings is incoherent, and
limits the sphere of the knowable to what is accessible to sense-experience. In other words,
the claim that only the entities investigated by natural science exist is not an immediate
deduction or inference from the practice of science itself, but a metaphysical judgment about
what kinds of beings exist. Therefore, the real conflict between faith and reason is not over
Science 1 (with which a religious believer may have no quarrel), but the much more debatable
metaphysical assumptions that structure Science 2.

5. The Opposition of Faith and Reason: Psychology

Another widely-articulated contrast between faith and reason is that faith is a
psychological crutch that some irrational people stick on to because they are unable to cope
with the harshness, the miseries and the brutalities of their everyday existence. Supernatural
entities are said to be merely projections of human fears and anxieties on to a cosmic canvas
and instead of childishly bowing to these baseless hallucinations, human beings should be
courageous enough to live in a world without any divine order and build their own destiny.10
However, this complex set of views runs a bit too quickly from the alleged origins of faith in
an attitude of fear to its intellectual bankruptcy. First, it commits the genetic fallacy in
which a certain defect in the origin of a judgment is taken as conclusive evidence that it must
be false. For instance, if one were to argue that John cannot possibly be telling the truth
because he is a thief, the question of whether or not he is in fact lying has already been given
a positive answer by examining not the statement itself but its disreputable source. Even a
ruthless dictator can come up with certain criticisms of democratic forms of government
which are relatively valid, and it will be fallacious to write them off simply by pointing to
their discredited origin. Likewise, whether or not religious faith originated in the fear of the
unknown and whether such beliefs are true, are two logically independent questions which
should not be conflated. One might as well argue that science originated in the human desire
to exploit the environment and conclude therefore that it is a tissue of lies. But once again the
causal derivation of a belief whether respectable or not does not directly validate or
invalidate it.11

Second, the fundamental question in this context is not the sociological observation regarding
whether people turn to faith because it makes the world a more hospitable place but the
philosophically significant point regarding whether the hope of a fuller life is, in fact, empty.

9
Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978),
p.201.
10
Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion (London: Hogarth Press, 1962).
11
T. Edward Damer, Attacking faulty reasoning: a practical guide to fallacy-free arguments
(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1995).
 8

To argue that faith is nothing but the purveyor of false promises which nevertheless
provides some temporary consolation is to beg the question against the theist who will not
agree that these promises are, in fact, false. A proponent of scientism, who accepts that all the
gods and deities are merely higher-order configurations of the basic constituents of empirical
science, will of course argue that the notion of a divine governor of the world holding out a
better future for humanity, is epistemically unjustifiable. But, to repeat, scientism itself is,
strictly speaking, not a scientific judgment, and religious believers who do not accept it are
not logically compelled to conclude that such promises are hollow and meaningless.

The argument between the advocate of scientism and the individual whose life is structured
by faith runs as follows:

Premise 1: There are no trans-spatiotemporal entities.

Premise 2: God is a trans-spatiotemporal entity.

Conclusion: Therefore, there is no God.

The second premise is based on the definition of the term God, who is understood to be a
being that is not contained within spatial and temporal bounds, and will be accepted by both
sides in the discussion. The first premise, however, is much more controversial, being in
effect a statement of scientism. One clear example of this statement comes from the
cosmologist Carl Sagan who believed that science has demonstrated that the only thing that
exists is chunks of matter and its interactions, and that human beings are merely molecular
machines: The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.12 However, this statement is
not a scientific observation but a metaphysical judgment about what there is, and therefore
begs the question against the religious believer.

Third, when it is argued that faith is a sign of psychological immaturity and an infantile
clinging on to illusory promises, it can be claimed that, in fact, it is the lack of faith that it is
infantile. The proponent of scientism, it could be argued, has remained locked on to the false
belief that only the entities postulated by natural science are ultimately real. Thereby it failed
to develop the kind of spiritual attentiveness to the world that can enable her to discern more
layers to it than the material. Reality, it might be pointed out, has more dimensions than the
ones available to sense-experience, and in failing to move beyond the layers most directly
observable by the senses, it is the defender of Science 2 who has remained in the infancy of
humanity. Unlike in the sciences where detached scrutiny is required for understanding, in our
relations with one another, personal involvement and self-transformation are essential
preconditions for knowledge of our friends and loved ones.13 Even more so in the case of
God, this line of argumentation will suggest, unless we open up all aspects of our inner being
to the divine presence, we shall remain stuck in an age of immaturity where we will continue
to deny this presence.

The defender of scientism, of course, will not be convinced by this rejoinder, but it is crucial
to note that the disagreement in this context is not a psychological one but a metaphysical
one about what kinds of beings populate the universe. For the proponent of scientism, there
are only spatio-temporal entities, and for the religious believer these are maintained in being

12
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), p. 105.
13
John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: religion, philosophy and human value
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
 9

by the source of all existence and value but whether this metaphysical dispute can be
resolved simply by collecting more empirical data about the world remains, as we shall
shortly note, an intensely debated matter.

6. Debating the Rationality of Faith

Our discussion in previous sections has shown that none of the criteria that are often put
forward to distinguish between reason and faith, namely, logic, experience, science and
psychology, are sufficiently nuanced to capture this distinction. To repeat, faith does not
violate any logical canons, can have empirical bases, is compatible with Science 1, and is
arguably grounded in psychological maturity.

To understand how reason operates within faith perspectives, let us investigate the
structure of world-views, whether these are world-religions such as Islam, Christianity,
Hinduism and Buddhism or the philosophical systems of Plato, Leibniz, Hegel and Marx.
Any world-view performs two roles. First, it develops a picture or map of the structure of
reality what kinds of beings it consists of, how they interact with one another, and so on.
Second, and equally importantly, it must be able to help human beings to grapple with
existential experiences that crop up in their interpersonal relationships such as those of
suffering, meaninglessness and death. In this sense, scientism is also a world-view: its
proponents hope that eventually all fields of enquiry and forms of value can be reduced to the
level of quantum physics, and can in this manner be theoretically integrated to provide a
coherent, consistent and elegant view of the world and the place of humanity in it.14

Therefore, it is something of a caricature to argue that faith is an irrational leap into the
unknown, for most of the religious traditions of the world have valued rationality and not
based belief in God in a complete absence of evidence. Christian theologians, in particular,
have proposed various kinds of relations between faith and reason. We have Thomas
Aquinas view that faith does not negate, but rather elevates, reason, in the sense that there are
certain truths, such as truths about the Trinity, which cannot be accessed through natural
reason but have to be accepted on the basis of Biblical revelation. Soren Kierkegaard, in
contrast, tends to view faith and reason as more antagonistically related, arguing that truths
with salvific value (for instance, truths about the Incarnation) cannot be accessed by reason
but have to be existentially appropriated by the individual believer in her subjectivity. John
Locke represents a more rationalistic standpoint in these debates, arguing that reason can
adjudicate debates over the scope and the content of revelation. Notwithstanding this internal
diversity, given that there is no deductive step from the empirical world to God, Christian
theologians have usually spoken not of knowing God but of having faith in God.15 As
philosophers of religion have sometimes pointed out, our experiences of the world are
ambiguous, in the sense that they can be woven together into either faith-based or naturalistic
perspectives, and there is no deductive knock-down proof for either. If religious faith and
scientism are two full-fledged world-views, then given the so-called under-determination of
theory by data, which states that more than theoretical system can encompass the same set of
data, it would seem difficult to devise a crucial experiment that would falsify either of the
two.16 The fact that God is not observable is not in itself a fundamental problem for religious
faith, for scientific theories too often postulate entities such as electrons which are not

14
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York:
Charles Scribners Sons, 1994), p.3.
15
Anthony Kenny, Knowledge, Belief, and Faith, Philosophy 82 (2007), pp. 38197.
16
James Ladyman, Understanding philosophy of science (London: Routledge, 2002).
 10

perceivable directly and can be detected only through their effects. But whereas the existence
of these empirical entities is established through replicable tests whose results are inter-
subjectively shareable, the route to demonstrating Gods existence is much more circuitous.
Indeed, in such contexts, religious traditions sometimes argue that faith in God is a virtue in
that it is a commitment to God in the absence of adequate evidence, and it is not surprising
that the rationality of this move has often been challenged. Further, these traditions have often
been compelled to speak of numerous mysteries which cannot be comprehended by the
finite human mind. The creation of the universe from a divine non-spatial being who sustains
it at every moment of its existence, the presence of so much apparently gratuitous evil in a
world governed by an omni-benevolent deity, the relation between divine agency and human
free-will, and so on are said to go beyond the limits of human understanding.

7. Conclusion
The sense of opposition that is often perceived to exist between faith and reason should be
understood as obtaining not between truth versus superstition, or reason versus
irrationality, but between two competing hypotheses of what is able to comprehend, with the
greatest degree of simplicity and maximal explanatory scope, the objective features of the
world around us: scientism with its purely empirical entities whose mutual interactions have
led to the emergence of complex structures or religious faith in a transcendent creator that is
postulated as the best explanation of the stability and coherence of the world. However, if we
accept the view that how human beings assess the evidence is significantly shaped by their
pre-theoretical commitments, inclinations and dispositions, the rational adjudication between
religious faith and scientism is by no means a straightforward business. Defenders of
scientism contend that they are in the process of attaining the complete picture of the
universe, one in which no supernatural entities appear and in which all empirical phenomena
will be given a thoroughly naturalistic explanation. Some religious believers, on the other
hand, have tried to show that it is possible to accept empiricism for purposes of scientific
practice (Science 1), but argue that the temporal contingents and the natural laws that make
up the empirical world require a further explanation which is more satisfying and intelligible.
Such an explanation, it is claimed, will bring together the results of the empirical sciences into
a comprehensive metaphysical picture centered around God.

To sum up: given that the intellectual legitimacy of religious faith is bound up with various
metaphysical assumptions, it is not surprising that its rationality remains an intensely debated
matter. Religious believers can argue that (a) since a commitment to scientism is not, strictly
speaking, a deductive conclusion from scientific practice, science cannot pronounce on the
non-existence of God, (b) since science, as a matter of method, rules out considerations of
value and purpose, it cannot answer some of the deepest existential questions of humanity
which religions have tried to deal with, and (c) the best explanation for the existence of a
cosmos with ordered and harmonious principles is the existence of a divine being who
upholds these cosmic structures. Consequently, the essential tension between the religious
believer and the proponent of scientism lies in their diverging answers to this question: is the
ultimate explanation for everything to be found in a supernatural entity which has the omni-
attributes of traditional theology, or in the laws of nature which are empirically testable and
purposeless? Scientists who are impressed by the spectacular successes of the physical
sciences in understanding various aspects of human existence often argue that the ultimate
explanation must lie in the empirical laws of the most advanced sciences of our time, and
since these laws make no reference to transcendent entities contend that metaphysical
naturalism is the most reliable ontological guide to what kinds of beings there are.17 Religious

17
J.J. Smart, Ockham's Razor in James H. Fetzer ed. Principles of Philosophical Reasoning
(Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984).
 11

believers, however, contend that it is, in fact, the theistic hypothesis which is simpler than its
rivals, because the existence of God is able to explain even the basic laws of physics, which
on the metaphysical naturalists account are so many brute facts. For instance, evolutionary
biology can explain the emergence of complex structures through natural selection, but it still
has to explain how the genetic material composed of DNA, on which this process works,
came into existence.18 From a naturalistic standpoint, a possible explanation is that there are
several billion planets with life-friendly environments, and that there is a finite probability
that in one of them DNA was formed purely through physical and chemical laws.
Alternatively, one can argue that there are many universes, without causal contact with one
another, and our universe, with its finely tuned laws and constants, just happens to be one of
them. A religious believer, however, would argue that the simpler explanation here is one in
terms of the purposes of a cosmic designer, and that the evidence suggests the existence of an
intentional cause, namely, God.

18
William Dembski, The Design Inference: eliminating chance through small probabilities
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).