It is not an explanation to assert that something happened as a result of magic or miracles. By definition, magic and miracles are not subject to explanations.
Legitimate explanations are invitations to continue the investigation and the discussion using the scientific method. Asserting that Someone created the universe thus comes with the responsibilty to explain that Someone in a way that can be tested. Anything less is a power play to use the word “God” to stop inquiry dead in its tracks. Invoking an unexplained God is a refusal to explain.
Time’s November 5, 2006 cover story is titled “God vs. Science.” [1] It features the following exchange between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, a theist who has served as Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those “How must it have come to be” questions.
DAWKINS: I think that’s the mother and father of all cop-outs. It’s an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, “Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this.” Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don’t do that. Scientists say, “We’re working on it. We’re struggling to understand.” . . . To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.
TIME: Could the answer be God?
DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
COLLINS: That’s God.
DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small–at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.
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