A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology Donald Wiebe Alister E. McGrath . A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology. Louisville, KY: WJK, 2009. Pp. xv + 262. Paper, US$29.16. ISBN 9780664233105. A number of peculiarities characterize Alister McGrath’s 2009 Gifford Lectures, titled A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology. Perhaps the most surprising oddity of the volume—especially given the title of the book and his claim that “human longing to make sense of what we observe in nature and history partly underlies both science and religion” (51)—is his claim that the quest for God in science—that is, classic natural theologies—is simply misdirected. Indeed, he simply rejects all natural theologies that assume the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God by unaided human reason on the basis of nature or the natural world without recourse to religious beliefs or assumptions (12). Such a view, he maintains, is a by-product of modernity that is assumed to be universal when in fact it is nothing more than “a situation-specific understanding ... being assumed to be normative” (14). He argues, moreover, that there is no “nature itself”—that claims about nature are simply interpretations of a reality that are always open to re-interpretation—and, therefore, that there is no standard conception of “natural theology” that leaves open the possibility of re-interpretations of the notion of “natural theology” (6). He appears to think that recognition of these “facts” indicates that natural theology as “the attempt to provide a reliable basis for belief in God” (15) is in crisis, and that this justifies either a search to retrieve older approaches to that task, or an attempt to forge new approaches to it (14). As he puts it, there is “no compelling reason to defend a modernist vision of natural theology in a postmodern culture” (14). For McGrath, then, natural theology must move beyond the simple idea of showing the necessity of god/God in making rational sense of the world. Natural theology, he believes, must transcend “the limits of merely making sense of things” (27). The second oddity in this volume is McGrath’s admission that the essential argument of the volume has already been set out in an earlier work of his titled The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (2008) in which (a third oddity of the book) he argues that natural theology is nothing less that “the traditional quest for truth, beauty, and goodness” and that this implies that the renewal and revalidation of natural theology is “a legitimate aspect of Christian theology” (x). What the Gifford Lectures do, he says, is to expand on that argument by exploring the degree of “empirical fit” between science and Trinitarian theology (xi). He states that his objective is “to observe the phenomena of the natural world from the standpoint of the Christian tradition and then to ask whether there is a significant ‘empirical fit’ between the theoretical and empirical. Nature is not studied with any expectation that it will offer a ‘proof’ of the existence of God; rather, Christian theology is proposed as an insightful tool for making sense of what is observed within the world” (34; emphasis added). “The possible existence of god ... cannot be treated as if it were a purely speculative hypothesis” (68); it is also a matter of meaning and life. The rationality of God, he writes, is the only “thing” that can account for the “fundamental resonance between human minds—“the totality of human experience” (56)—and the structure of the universe” (77). It is not simply seeing nature from that point of Christian theology simpliciter that constitutes the new natural theology but rather that nature must be “viewed, interpreted, and appreciated with Trinitarian spectacles” (95). What McGrath sees as of particular significance for the new “Christian, Trinitarian, natural theology” is the increase in our scientific knowledge about the universe over the past few centuries and particularly the fine-tuning of the cosmos (x–xi). He does not set out to argue that the fine-tuning is a “proof” for the existence...