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Historically, physicists regarded the findings of their discipline as consistent with, or even supportive of, religious claims. Isaac Newton, famously believed that his physics could form the basis of a 'physico-theology' providing evidence of God's existence. However, the findings of physics have also been interpreted as inconsistent with religious beliefs for a variety of reasons. The determinism of classical physics has been held to exclude the possibility of human free will and divine providential action, and cosmology has supposedly revealed the insignificance of human life in a vast cosmos indifferent to its concerns, dispensed with the need for a Creator of the universe, and cast doubt on religious hopes for a future life. However, these supposed entailments of physics are debated by contemporary physicists and philosophers of science, and no obvious consensus has emerged.

If we turn to biology, findings in this discipline are today widely believed to have negative implications for religion. The most prominent contemporary atheist, Richard Dawkins, is a biologist, and Daniel Dennett has written extensively on the implications of evolutionary theory for our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Prior to Darwin, the findings of biology had not played a major part in the atheist's arsenal. In the earliest avowedly atheist texts, atheists were embarrassed by the difficulty of accounting for evidence for design by an appeal to chance. They pointed to obsolete theories such as spontaneous generation to account for how life and order could spring from chaotic matter.[1] As Schroeder has noted, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries theists excelled atheists in their ability to make contributions to the serious study of biological processes.

Dawkins himself recognises this: "an atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."[2] Post-Darwin, however, the findings of biology are broadly perceived as posing a real problem for religious belief; again, however, no consensus has emerged on the implications of biology for belief, neither amongst biologists themselves nor among those who interpret the significance of biology for religion.

Finally, the new brain sciences are also widely regarded as undermining traditional religious claims. Neuroscience is seen as undermining religion in four chief ways: by denying consciousness; by denying free will; by denying the authenticity of religious experiences; by denying the possibility of life after death. This results in a picture of human nature radically at odds with traditional theological anthropology, since at a minimum the latter has to defend the existence of persons and free will, and religious traditions have generally defended the authenticity of some religious experiences.

References

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman, 1986.
Schroeder, Winfried. Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Frommann- Holzboog, 1998.

Footnotes

[1]↑ Winfried Schroeder, Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Tubingen: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998), 297-302.
[2]↑ Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Harlow: Longman, 1986), 6.

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