Defensible Faith: Helping the Nones Find God

By Robert Ryan

A persistent dumbing down of religious faith and the perception that science is the only path to truth are key reasons the Nones, those with no religious affiliation, represent nearly fifty percent of all young adults in America today.

God and science are falsely portrayed as conflicted and innately incompatible. Afraid to offend this new status quo, and unable to defend religious beliefs against increasingly aggressive intellectual bullying, the young have flocked to the safety of no belief.

In Defensible Faith, author Robert Ryan demonstrates that God and science are both true and are both necessary in understanding ourselves and the world around us. He looks at how science provides many compelling arguments for belief in God as well as the more philosophical justifications for faith and the evidential basis supporting Christianity. If you have ever struggled to defend your faith in an intellectually well-reasoned manner, then let this book be your guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385000951

Robert Ryan

Robert Ryan has struggled with the concept of how “God always was” from the age of four. That set him on a journey of discovery that continues today. In this book, he converts his deep questions into clear compelling answers about how the evidence supports the existence of God, demonstrating that intellect is not a barrier to belief, it is a path to belief. When not writing or traveling, Ryan spends time with his wife, Vicki, at their homes in Texas and Michigan.

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Copyright © 2023 Robert Ryan.

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Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are taken from the Holy

Bible, New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) with

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ISBN: 979-8-3850-0094-4 (sc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023911192

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/18/2023

To my family, who

said it could be done.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Problem of Nones

Nones: The New Vocation

Nones’ Arguments against God’s Existence

The God Proof

Chapter 2: Religion Is Not the Enemy (and Neither Is Science)

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Tallying the Truth

Hawking and the Four Popes

Faith Is Not Afraid of Truth

Chapter 3: Great Scientists and Religious

1200s–1600s

1700s–1800s

1900s–Present

Science and Faith: Two Sides of the Cosmic Coin

Chapter 4: In Search of Design

The Arrogance of Intellect

It’s Only Miraculous If You’re Not God

The Intelligence of Intelligent Design

Chapter 5: The Origin of Life Evidence

Necessary but Not Sufficient

The Code of Life

Don’t Bet on It

The Most Beautiful Molecule

The DNA Blackboard

Brother Chimp and Sister Pig

The Spontaneity Problem

Aliens Did It!

LUCA, Where are You?

The Protein Challenge

How to Fill the Emergence of Life Gap?

Chapter 6: The Origin of the Universe Evidence

The Beginning of the Beginning

The Universe in a Few Easy Steps

Big Bang Proof

Big Bang Predictions and Confirmations

Universe Self-Creation Cosmological Models

Chapter 7: We Should Not Be Here: The Fine-Tuning Problem

Initial Big Bang Conditions

Expansion Rate of the Universe (Cosmological Constant)

The Carbon Creation Problem

Is Such Randomness Reasonable?

Chapter 8: Can We Get Something from Nothing?

It’s Complicated

So Big and Yet So Small

The God Equation

Spooky but True: Is God Hiding in Plain Sight?

Does God Leave Quantum Fingerprints?

We Are All Nothing and Something

Without Energy, That Bang’s a Bust

If You Can’t Explain It, Complexify It

The Hybrid God

Chapter 9: Philosophical Objections to God

The Notion of God Is Childish Nonsense

God Is Nothing More Than a Psychological Crutch

Life’s Better without God

If God, Then Why Suffering?

The Christian God, the Bible, and Suffering

God Is Not the Creator of Evil and Suffering

Pain Is Not God’s Plan

Good from Bad

The Purpose of Pain

With God, Suffering Has an End

Chapter 10: Philosophers’ Proofs for God’s Existence

First Cause First

The Essence of Being

Deism Equals Theism in Progress

Why Does God Create?

If I Can Understand It, It’s Not God

God as God from the Biblical Perspective

Christ as God? Some Logical Considerations

Chapter 11: Historical Jesus: The Evidential Case

The Historical Jesus

Digging for Truth

Jesus Adds Up–Early Non-Gospel References to Jesus

Chapter 12: The Authenticity of the Gospels

Emergence of the Written Gospels

Early Confusion, Fear, and Awe

Early Oral Tradition: Eyewitness Accounts

Persecution Drove Preservation

Today’s Gospels: Not First Drafts

Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

Conspiracy to Conspire

Chapter 13: God Evidence from Within

Right and Wrong

What Christians Believe

Christian Behavior

Beyond Personality

Summary

Author’s Answers

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Selected Bibliography

Survey Data References

Images

Reference Notes by Chapter

Preface

The goal of this book is first to generate sufficient curiosity in the reader about the complementary nature of science and religion that they will read on, increasingly surprised with each chapter to learn why belief in a Supreme Being, a God, is the smart choice.

While as author, the flow as presented represents my thought process, the order followed by the reader is not particularly important. I challenge the reader to begin this book on any page, to then read just five pages, and not be surprised by something new that entices them to know more. I hope that is true.

Once the case for both science and religion has been made in the introduction and chapter 1 ("The Problem of Nones), the remaining chapters stand largely on their own. Each chapter provides some logical argument for truth in both science and religion and the clarity that only the combination of the two can provide. If you like science, start somewhere in the middle with chapters 5–8. If you like history, read chapters 2 and 3 first. If philosophy and theology are favorites, pick chapters 4, 9, and 10. And if you’re already a believer and want to address some areas of doubt, I recommend chapters 11–13. And if what I believe as the author is of interest, you could start with the summary and Author’s Answers" at the back.

I wish to engage you, the reader, in any way I can and then encourage you to consider all the extensive arguments on both the science and the religion, the physics and the metaphysics, which may be less familiar, but no less compelling. For when it comes to belief, knowledge really is truth. There is nothing in science or in scripture that must be set aside here. It comes as a surprise to many, but the full truth fully relies on both.

It doesn’t matter if you are not strong in science. The material presented is clearly stated as proven fact where appropriate and unproven theory where appropriate. The reader does not need to fully understand biology or physics to understand the factual arguments being made. However, the arguments are important because not understanding them is one of the main reasons the "Nones," the religiously nonaffiliated, struggle with considerations of faith and how to defend their beliefs.

Ignorance is the worst basis for or against faith. As such, the arguments for belief in this book are intellectual and evidential. The path to the truth can be complicated, but once truth is revealed, it turns out to be surprisingly simple.

Introduction

I believe in all proven scientific discoveries, and I believe in science as a path to truth; I also see no conflict between science and belief in God.

However, I believe there is a growing intellectual bigotry in America today, an aggressive prejudice against any form of knowledge or belief that does not derive from a strictly material and scientific basis. Anyone who holds such beliefs is increasingly ridiculed as ignorant and primitive, lacking the sophistication needed to recognize the nature of their own delusion. Some have come to derisively label this the God delusion.

What has emerged over the past few decades goes beyond the classic humanistic naturalism, the belief that natural causes are sufficient to justify and explain everything from morality to the cosmos. Even more dominant today is a new aggressive form of scientism that seeks to reduce all knowledge and all truth to just what can be known through strict application of the scientific method, relegating any means of knowing that is not empirically observable to the realm of myth and fantasy.

Numerous surveys and studies have shown that young adults are increasingly convinced religious faith and modern science are battling each other in a war where science always wins—and where the losers are deemed intellectually challenged and inferior.

Is a belief in God simply a demonstration of human weakness and intellectual laziness? What then of the tremendous scientific discoveries made by those who saw divine beauty and simplicity in the mathematics and natural laws describing the world around them? Are these geniuses, people of tremendous insight, at the same time just naive experts at self-delusion?

The answers to these questions and the evidence that science and faith are not just compatible, but complementary, are the central theme of this book. There are far more believers among scientists than popular culture portrays; when the full truth is what matters, it is only found through the application of both physics and metaphysics. We are something more than the sum of our parts.

The 2015 Pew Research Center survey on religion and science shows that most Americans (59 percent) say that science is often in conflict with religion. Among the Nones, respondents who have no religious affiliation, the number is 76 percent.¹ Particularly among young adults, science equals rationality; therefore, anything that is not strictly scientific is irrational. Even young adults who still believe often preface their admission of faith with an apology regarding its illogical and unscientific nature.

This perceived incompatibility between science and faith has contributed to a tremendous increase in the number of religiously unaffiliated. The 2021 General Social Survey showed that 42 percent of Americans aged 18–34 identified as having no religion (the Nones), a dramatic increase from just 9 percent when the survey began in 1972.²

It is both ironic and instructive that the available survey data indicates young scientists in this same age group are actually trending more toward belief in God or a higher power than away.³ Maybe they are seeing the evidence we will review in later chapters and increasingly recognize that while science reveals truth, it is a necessary, but not sufficient, means of revealing the full truth.

My purpose is to help these atheists, agnostics, and the religiously indifferent Nones to fully understand what science has firmly answered, and how that science, and the remaining gaps, point more toward God than away from God. For many, such as myself, it is necessary to first believe that faith in God has a reasonable and evidential foundation before such a foundation can support the full burden of faith itself. Before we use science as an excuse not to believe, let us first use reason and logic to openly explore what science and evidence from the world around us really imply about the existence of God. Science is not the enemy of religion; it is a manual written by God that we are still learning how to read.

For decades, we have been dumbing down religion, and in so doing, we have woefully prepared our young adults to develop and defend their beliefs. It is almost as if reasoned, evidential, and logical faith is somehow a lesser faith than faith that comes only from the heart. By dumbing down faith, we have opened the door for faith to indeed appear dumb.

If it is intellectual issues that are troubling young people, then we must speak to their intellect. While the search for meaning and purpose in life may be an intrinsic human condition, for most people, a strong religious belief is not something you’re born with—or something that just overcomes you one day. For many believers, the sense of something more starts them on their journey, but their path to truth is paved with reason and intellect.

When scientific humanism leaves one searching for that something more, the justification for a belief in the spiritual, in a God, it is too often met with the same response: You just have to have faith. That is like telling a paranoid schizophrenic they just need to relax. The just have faith answer, while adequate to many who already believe, is insufficient and unsatisfying to someone struggling with faith on an intellectual basis. I was one of those people, and I am interested in reaching others who sense that science does not tell the whole story of humanity but are not sure how to investigate both science and faith on the path to truth.

If the unscientific nature of religion, of faith, and the failure to conventionally prove the existence of God is the leading cause of the surging number of Nones, then to create a credible, defensible, and compelling path to belief, we must start with the mind and end with the heart—and not the other way around. God must be possible before religious faith is possible.

While faith in God will always have certain personal, relational, experiential, and subjective elements, strong faith is also built on many objective truths: truths that are based on compelling evidence convincing to any rational person. Evidence we will explore.

In a June 27, 2014, Word on Fire episode, Bishop Robert Barron describes watching HBO TV talk show host Bill Maher a few weeks earlier when he was interviewing a well-known Christian spokesperson on his program. Maher rhetorically asked the Christian guest, Now you’re a man of faith, which means you’re someone who suspends all critical judgment and accepts things on the basis of no evidence? And the guest responded, Yes.⁴ Bishop Barron says he shouted at the TV, No, that’s not what faith means!⁵ Bishop Robert Barron, a number one Amazon bestselling author, is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, and his YouTube videos have been viewed more than one hundred million times.

As Bishop Barron often says, authentic faith never involves a sacrifice of the intellect, and it is never infrarational, meaning below or without reason. Faith is suprarational, meaning it is based on reason, but it is also above and beyond reason alone. Faith is not the acceptance of things on no evidence; that’s mythology and superstition. If you feel obligated to leave your mind behind to have faith, it’s not real faith.

Science and religion are not factually inconsistent or incompatible. The complete understanding of the universe and our existence requires both. However, we have not equipped most believers, let alone those who don’t believe, with the ammunition they need to argue for belief on a reasoned, evidential, and intellectual basis—and that is where the fight is. If we want to keep creating Nones and losing the battle for belief, then keep throwing mental marshmallows at those throwing intellectual spears.

Religious belief includes something more than the purely physical, but it is not the acceptance of claims based on the basis of no evidence. Science and religion are not some mutually exclusive choice we must make as we set off on our search for truth. We need both. The supernatural doesn’t deny anything of the natural; it builds on it. It is not the absence of intellect; it is the application of intellect, which will be demonstrated here. Religious belief, what is commonly called faith, is the reasoned outcome of a transcendent mind.

The reasoned, rational basis for religious belief is far more extensive than is generally known and certainly is not widely studied by most Americans today. In order to lay a strong foundation for Defensible Faith, we will look at how science provides many compelling arguments for faith as well as some of the more philosophical and ontological justifications for God’s existence and religious belief.

In making the intellectually based arguments in this book, I will keep both the science and the philosophy as simple as I can—while still providing enough detail to challenges one’s existing biases and make a convincing case. With too much detail, we lose interest, but with too little detail, we lose credibility.

To be clear, this is not an attack on nonbelievers of science or religion. The clarity of nonbelievers has helped define the gaps on both sides. You need not be a scientist or a philosopher to understand the arguments made in the search to reconcile the apparent gaps between a science-only or a faith-only approach. You need only be curious about the world around you and your place within it. In the pursuit of truth, reliance on science alone or faith alone will not reveal the whole truth. To close the gaps, both are needed because the whole truth is found at the intersection of believing and knowing.

This is not an attempt to tell anyone what to believe. It is an attempt to outline a logical approach to the consideration and formulation of one’s own beliefs, and to do this in the following ways:

• Demonstrating that faith in God is not simpleminded. There have been, and there remain, many brilliant scientists who experience a beautiful symmetry between their science and their God.

• Presenting the evidential case for design in our universe and the case for a designer, a God. I hope to demonstrate that this case requires less faith than atheism.

• From that foundation, providing further theological considerations to enable the maturing of faith and belief.

We are spiritual beings on a journey for truth. How far and where does that journey lead? Only the reader can determine. What follows is the basis of my truth journey—a truth that almost screams of a God who is fully compatible with science and fully manifested in it. Whether it’s the workings of the cosmos or of life itself, after years of scientific endeavor, when we find the solution, the natural law, it is perfectly and beautifully simple. For in that law, we glimpse the mind of God.

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Chapter 1

The Problem of Nones

JUST BECAUSE REASONS FOR GOD’S existence cannot be subjected to rigorous scientific laboratory methods of proof does not mean they are not evidence based and well-grounded in arguments fully inclusive of the sciences. I have faith, and I have never denied any natural laws or proven science. Even if all remaining scientific questions about the natural laws governing the universe are one day answered, it would do nothing to destroy my faith in God because God is always something more than the thing He has caused to exist.

I will demonstrate that considering belief in a God is not ignorant, lazy, or irrational, and I challenge anyone to read on and not be surprised—even if only by what is clearly scientifically proven.

Nones: The New Vocation

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Some background on the Nones is needed. In 1972, just 5 percent of all Americans claimed no religion on the General Social Survey (GSS), which is regularly conducted by the University of Chicago.¹ In 2021, that GSS number rose to 29 percent, ironically making the Nones the fastest-growing religious group and the largest single religious category in the survey.

Among the key 18–34 age group, a surprisingly high 42 percent now identify as Nones. Through the early 1990s, this same age group had been quite stable, averaging just below 11 percent, and it had been trending slightly lower. Over the past thirty years, the millennial Nones have steadily increased to nearly four times that figure (see graph above).

To the question, Religion in which raised?, the 2021 GSS data also shows that nearly 21 percent in the 18–34 age group responded no religion, a figure that was less than 3 percent in the early 1970s. So, 21 percent of this group were raised in homes with no religion, but now twice that, 42 percent, say that they have no religion. It’s one thing for those raised without religion in the home to continue as Nones, but an equal number of Nones have abandoned their adolescent religion in favor of none.

The evidential and intellectually well-reasoned basis for belief is very compelling as will be demonstrated in this book, but clearly, it’s not something being effectively taught to our young people.

Consistent with the GSS results, the 2019 Harvard graduating class was the first in Harvard’s 380-year history where the atheists and agnostics (38 percent) exceeded Catholics and Protestants (34 percent). When the students who checked other are included, the number of nontraditionally religious was 50 percent.²

While millennials and Gen Zs are the fastest growing Nones, the trend is broader than just the younger generation. A 2020 Gallup survey showed that Americans’ membership in organized religion dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than eight decades of tracking, with only 47 percent of Americans indicating they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. American church membership was 73 percent when Gallup first measured it in 1937, and it then remained steady at about 70 percent for more than sixty years, before beginning to decline in 2000.³ Clearly, as a nation, we are rapidly becoming more secular.

Initially, such high numbers of the religiously nonaffiliated were predominantly represented by the more upper middle class and college educated. However, more recent survey results show the appeal of the Nones has broadened to include all but the most conservative sectors of society. Does it matter? It matters in the sense that science doesn’t fully answer all the questions relevant to humanity or the cosmos. What of humanity’s thirst for something more, something spiritual?

It may seem cliché, but it is simply a fact that the youth are our future. Most concerning to many who believe some element of faith is important for all kinds of societal sustaining reasons, including personal happiness, is the Pew Research Center data from 2012 that showed 88 percent of the Nones were also not searching for religion.⁴ But that doesn’t mean they aren’t searching. It doesn’t mean they are truly happy being Nones.

As C. S. Lewis so aptly describes in Surprised by Joy⁵, most people as they mature come to realize that the things of this world never fully and finally satisfy the longing for joy that is hardwired into them. While Americans have left traditional religion in droves, they have not entirely given up on religion’s most enduring tenets: life after death and belief in a higher power.

A surprising statistic from the 2021 General Social Survey suggests that the younger Nones may be searching for meaning in their lives more than we know. While 42 percent of those 18–34 reported having no religion, 70 percent of this same demographic reported having a belief in life after death, and 78 percent had at least some belief in a God or a higher power, although half reported doubts in their belief.⁶ So, the Nones increasingly have no religion, but they still have belief in the supernatural at percentages nearly that of the total population. Humanity seems to be infected with this God connection: a sense that we are more than just a fortuitous collection of atoms randomly compiled in the cosmic kitchen.

The 2022 Gallup survey showed that 81 percent of all American adults believe in a God, but this is down from about 98 percent through much of the last century.⁷ And of those who believe in a God, only half believe in a personal God, who hears prayers and can intervene on a person’s behalf. This may help explain why attendance in organized religion has also dropped below 50 percent.⁸

If we search for the meaning of life and hold some belief in life after death, then reconciling science and the spiritual, the physics and the metaphysics, is necessary for finding closure and truth. Perhaps the Nones do understand that science hasn’t answered all the mysteries of the universe—or at least all the mysteries that matter to them.

According to the work of Christian Smith and his colleagues at Notre Dame, fully 50 percent of those brought up in the Catholic Church who are thirty and younger now identify as Nones (see McGrath Institute Report Understanding Former Young Catholics based on data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion, www.youthandreligion.nd.edu).⁹

There are several particularly insightful conclusions in Smith’s McGrath Institute report:

1. Young former Catholics tend to describe religious faith as illogical or unscientific. This is further supported by a Pew study from 2018 that reported the number one reason that young people gave for abandoning religion is that religious faith is at odds with science.¹⁰

2. As with the broader population of Nones, young former Catholics mostly still believe in and interact with some version of God, but their views of God are very simplistic and often somewhat narcissistic. That is to say, if there is a God, then that God’s primary purpose is to solve our personal problems. This is an appropriate God for the me generation.

3. Young former Catholics are uncomfortable with specific statements about who or what God is—as well as with any strong statements regarding theology. To a large degree, this is a function of the moral relativism that dominates so much and so many in society today. They are comfortable with talk of my truth and your truth but they are uncomfortable with talk of the truth. The premise here is that what works for one person may not work for another, and it is the individual and their own personally discovered truth that matters.

Religious tolerance and diversity of thought are certainly good things, but what is not so good is a resultant society where truly anything goes, a society where it is de rigueur to have little or no spiritual rigor. This manifests itself