[Richard Dawkins] Would you say that,
although God didn't design living things,
that he designed the laws of physics in the
first place, or something like that?
[Father George Coyne] I would say,
first of all in very general terms,
from my religious faith and my
scientific knowledge, God works through evolution.
God not only is the source of all being,
that is, I don't know if we want to get into
a discussion of what it means
that God created the universe, but
I believe God created the universe. Okay?
But that was not a moment, just a moment in time.
God is continuously creating the universe.
And he's working with the universe as we
know the universe scientifically.
If I am faithful to what I know as a
scientist, I reflect back upon the God
I believe in and I say "This God is marvelous!"
He created the universe that shares in
his own dynamism and creativity
through the evolutionary process.
That is, he's not dominating the universe
He's not an autocrat. He's not a watchmaker.
He's none of this. He's the God who created
the universe he loves, and gave to that
universe a creativity and a dynamism of its own.
[Dawkins] If it's sort of running itself,
and evolution is running itself,
doesn't that leave God with rather
little to do? Mightn't he not be
as it were, disappearing altogether if you don't
let him interfere in the way that you don't.
[Coyne] Oh I won't let him interfere.
I don't think God would want to intefere.
Even if we invited him to.
But God sustains everything that's happening
in existence. And now this is philosophy.
This is not science. I admit it, you know?
But from philosophical considerations,
a reasoning human being, some of us
reason one way, some of us another,
would say that everything I know in the
universe is contingent. That is, that it doesnt
have to exist, in fact I know it exists for while
and then it goes out of existence.
And I reason like Aristotle did and
St. Thomas Aquinas, if there's something that
moves someone had to move it.
Well if someone moved it someone had to
move them to move it. And I can go
all the way back.
Well it would be irrational to say
there's not a prime mover.
I mean there has to be someone who
started this process.
So with existence and with motion
and everything else philosophically
considering it, there has to be a necessary being.
Now mind you, I am reasoning to what
I call the God of the philosophers.
Now that happens to be, I think,
the God of faith also.
But it's not adequate. The God of the
philosophers is not adequate to me.
Because it is not a God who loves.
It's a God who explains certain things that
I notice about creation. It's contingency and all.
[Dawkins] Prime mover, it's almost like,
just the first domino to fall and then
everything else. That doesn't sound
like a very God-like attribute.
[Coyne] But that's what I just said.
That's why it's not god.
[Coyne] The philisophical god is not satisfying at all.
[Dawkins] That's why it's not satisfying to you?
[Coyne] It's the God who revealed himself,
as we were saying before, in scripture
the God who got angry. The God who loved.
The God who said to the people of ancient
Israel, you know you turn against me,
you rebel against me, and yet I love you
and I will continue to love you through
all of the ages. Through Abraham and the
prophets and all. That's the God of religious faith.
[Dawkins] There are people in your own field
of cosmology who will say something like,
the fundamental constants of the universe
or physics are too good to be true.
They're fine tuned. If there were a tiny
bit different, the universe wouldn't have the
properties it does and the stars wouldn't
have the tome into existence. The gravitational
constant was wrong etc, we wouldn't be here.
And they, well some physicists invoke God to explain
the fine tuning of the universe.
That's more than just a prime mover.
That's a designer isn't it? That's
somebody who actually twiddled the knobs.
[Coyne] Richard we are going a little bit
afield here but I think it's a good way
to go afield. This is to me, the great God
of the gaps. What is called the anthropic
principle is what we are talking about, right?
I don't think it's either a principle, well
it's anthropic. What we do as scientists,
we observe that the universe is made in
this way. And if we changed any one of the
series of 20 constants you know,
the Planck constant, philosophy of light, and
that mass of the proton, if we changed any one
of those by a little amount we wouldn't be here.
And that's scientifically acceptable.
You know? That we would not be here unless all these
constants had the value they had and the
laws of nature were the way they were.
The mass of the proton to the mass of the
electron differ by just a little bit,
we would not be here because the sun, okay,
would not have lived long enough for life to
have originated on a planet like the earth.
There are all kinds of these arguments.
How does a scientist confront them?
To me, it's a scientific problem.
It's a scientific observation that does not
yet have a scientific answer. But to bring
in God to explain this, to me, is the great
God of the gaps. Because, first of all,
why do you bring in God? This is a
scientific issue. Okay? God has no place in trying
to resolve this, honestly. And if you
bring him in, again, we back to the
intelligent design movement. You bring
in a God who kind of at the beginning was
making a big bowl of soup, the world.
And he tuned it all up. He out a little salt and
a little pepper. He added a little celery
to make it just right, so the human
beings would come to be.
That, to me, is a real absurdity, to
imagine a creator that would have kind of
fine tuned the universe in that way.
I just don't accept that from either a
religious or scientific point of view.
One of the explanations is this
multi universe theory. But again,
you get into all kinds of methodological
considerations there. But it's being
proposed more and more seriously.
You know that. The explanation is
there are many is not an infinite number.
This idea that everything is fine tuned
so that human beings would come to be
does not have a scientific explanation.
It hangs there as an issue
that we have tried to resolve.
One suggestion is this multiverse,
that is that there are many universes.
And one can imagine how this happened
from the Big Bang there was an
inflationary period where little pockets
expanded at greater than the velocity
of light. Because there was no matter so
the space time framework could expand
at greater than the velocity of light.
As it did, then it breaks and so we
have these many pockets that we call
universes, so the whole thing is a multi verse.
And now you can imagine that there are
large numbers, if not an infinite number.
And that's imaginable whether it's
scientifically verifiable is another point.
And so in each one of these universes you have
a different series of constants.
It's like rolling the balls around in a lottery.
You come up with a different series
of numbers each time.
But if you do enough of them then you
come up the series of numbers
that we have in our universe.
[Dawkins] And we have to be in one of those universes
[Coyne] We have to be there.
[Dawkins] that is capable of giving life to us.
[Coyne] Yes. That's correct.
[Coyne] That's sort of a tautology
that we have to be there.
My problem with that, you know
this is, it's more a concern about methodology.
Since these universes were created or
came to be in this inflationary multiverse,
they are further away from one another
than light can travel in the whole age
of our universe. 
That is, we cannot communicate.
[Dawkins] We can know nothing about them.
[Coyne] So that's not verifiable
or falsifiable to follow the tradition of falsifiability.
Therefore, it's not science to me.
[Dawkins] Yes.
[Coyne] But there are some people who are,
including some imminent scientists,
George Ellis, Martin Reese,
people like this are discussing this
multiverse theory in a very serious
scientific way so, who am I to...
[Dawkins] I've been extremely interested in hearing
all that you've said and I agree with so much of it.
It sounds as though you don't want to use
any kind of scientific argument
which smells of gaps.
[Dawkins] You don't want to have anything to do with that.
[Coyne] It's true. I agree thoroughly.
[Dawkins] And I suppose my position would
be that historically the evidence for the
existence of God or gods was always almost
exactly what you're now rejecting.
I mean people looked around them,
they saw the universe. They saw life.
And they thought there had to be a
designer and many people still do that.
And you've rightly said why they're wrong.
