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Recent Articles By Mark Stuertz

National Features

Roy Abraham Varghese has a God equation. It is self-evident. He sees it in a grain of sand. He sees it in bees, especially bees. By rights, bees shouldn't fly. The haphazard way in which they beat their wings simply shouldn't haul their pot-bellied bodies aloft. But they fly, hovering and reversing over bluebonnets and bachelor buttons. Bees flout the laws of physics and aerodynamics, a puzzle that perplexed scientists for 70 years. "How is it that they can do that?" he asked in a 2005 interview at Perry's Restaurant while smacking on bites of filet mignon. "The fact that these insects can do this..." Varghese trailed off.

To Varghese bees are a wonder, and wonder is what fascinates him. In his 2003 book The Wonder of the World: A Journey From Modern Science to the Mind of God, Varghese laments the loss of wonder. "[T]he modern world knows little of wonder," he writes. "Some Grinch has stolen the magic that makes us wonder and turned the paradise we call the world into a desolate wilderness."

Varghese blames modern science but not in the way you might think. Varghese isn't in the grip of science phobia, sounding a call to have it stripped from schools and cut off from federal funding. Varghese revels in science, from the weirdness of astrophysics, to the radiating blooms of life embedded in the fossil record, to the mind-blowing implications of quantum mechanics. He is entranced by the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural world. Eerily, everything before our eyes—and far more beyond—follows exacting laws and has attributes that can be expressed through numbers and exotic equations. This effectiveness presupposes profound thought, he believes. Profound thought presupposes infinite mind. Infinite mind presupposes...

Varghese blames "a band of intellectuals trapped in vacuous abstractions and irrational ideologies" for stripping away wonder. They can't see the lush forest of the universe for the trees of scientific theory, experimentation and discovery. We must be saved from these bandits who have blinded us to the glory and mystery of the world.

The universe teems with intelligence at all levels, he says. This intelligence, expressed in the laws of nature, was implanted in the universe by an infinite mind. "I mean the humblest bacterium is an absolutely unbelievable miracle. How can that come to be in a universe of undifferentiated matter?"

To explore such questions, Varghese founded The Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland in 2003. He calls the institute a forum to deliberate the debates raging in science, philosophy and religion. Its mission is to refute the arguments of atheists and those who perceive the world strictly in material terms. He spreads this gospel via books, documentaries and symposiums.

But well before the birth of the institute, Varghese was organizing and funding conferences featuring some of the world's greatest thinkers, beginning in 1983 at the Plaza of the Americas in Dallas. His collaborators have ranged from noted atheists Sir Alfred Ayer of Oxford University and Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to prominent theists Richard Swinburne of Oxford and Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame. "Science cannot proceed without the basic assumptions that imply the existence of God," Varghese insists. Not surprisingly, many prominent scientists and atheists vehemently disagree.

A computer systems and high-tech business consultant by trade, Varghese, 49, calls the institute and these conferences his hobby. He funds them largely out of his own pocket, the way other men might indulge a golf habit or a poker fetish.

"When he puts his mind to something, he does it," says former MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder from his home in Jerusalem. "What he says, he accomplishes." Schroeder's first brush with Varghese was via e-mail some four years ago. Varghese sent comments on Schroeder's controversial books The Science of God and The Hidden Face of God, in which, among other things, Schroeder attempts to square the six-day account of creation in Genesis with a 12- to 15-billion-year-old universe by using Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Schroeder told Varghese he was preparing a trip to the States for a series of lectures. He was startled when Varghese invited him to lunch. "On a very windy, rainy day, he flew from Dallas to Los Angeles," Schroeder says. "We had lunch...spent a half-hour talking at the airport. He got on another plane and flew back to Dallas. That was my introduction to Roy."

His meeting with Schroeder would lay the groundwork for a pivotal New York University summit in May 2004 featuring a handful of some the world's most renowned philosophical thinkers. There, British philosopher Antony Flew, who set the agenda for modern atheism with his 1950 treatise "Theology and Falsification," made a stunning announcement: He had renounced atheism and had come to accept the existence of God, thanks largely to the arguments of Varghese and Schroeder.

An academic storm erupted. Atheists felt betrayed. "They claimed he had gone senile...that this guy Schroeder had duped him," Schroeder says. Flew has been largely silent ever since.

Write Your Comment show comments (20)

  1. Varghese's arguments are standard creationist talking points, oft-refuted, as can easily be verified at sites like www.talkorigins.org. Typically erroneous is the claim that evolutionary algorithms are merely analogies and therefore invalid because an intelligent person wrote the programs, as if intelligence is some sort of contagion that spreads by mere contact. The point demonstrated by EA's is that simple descent with modification, Darwin's preferred term for what he was describing, can indeed create unimaginably complex structures. That a programmer created the artificial selection mechanism is completely irrelevant. This argument from personal incredulity employed by people like Varghese simply won't fly any more.

    Neither will vague arguments which toss about the terms "intelligence" and "information" without a clear definition of what exactly these terms mean. The devil is in the details, and such handwaving simply will not do. Despite Varghese's claims of not promoting intelligent design, his arguments are exactly the same, and just as flawed and scientifically vacuous. Like the "scientists" at the Discovery Institute, he talks a lot about science, but doesn't seem to do any, and for good reason: God did it is a science stopper, and always will be.

    Comment by Mark Piske — May 4, 2007 @ 02:17AM

  2. Varghese's arguments are standard creationist talking points, oft-refuted, as can easily be verified at sites like www.talkorigins.org. Typically erroneous is the claim that evolutionary algorithms are merely analogies and therefore invalid because an intelligent person wrote the programs, as if intelligence is some sort of contagion that spreads by mere contact. The point demonstrated by EA's is that simple descent with modification, Darwin's preferred term for what he was describing, can indeed create unimaginably complex structures. That a programmer created the artificial selection mechanism is completely irrelevant. This argument from personal incredulity employed by people like Varghese simply won't fly any more.

    Neither will vague arguments which toss about the terms "intelligence" and "information" without a clear definition of what exactly these terms mean. The devil is in the details, and such handwaving simply will not do. Despite Varghese's claims of not promoting intelligent design, his arguments are exactly the same, and just as flawed and scientifically vacuous. Like the "scientists" at the Discovery Institute, he talks a lot about science, but doesn't seem to do any, and for good reason: God did it is a science stopper, and always will be.

    Comment by Mark Piske — May 4, 2007 @ 02:18AM

  3. Everyone will believe what they wish to believe. I thought this article was oustanding. Great job.

    Comment by Brad — May 4, 2007 @ 02:15PM

  4. The profound complexity of reality demands a creator and that creator is God. Then again God is so complex that he created everything. So who created God? Is it "turtles all the way up"?

    Comment by MonkeyBoy — May 5, 2007 @ 12:05PM

  5. The article begins with the myth that bees should be unable to fly; a myth that has long been refuted. (Even were it true, which would be more likely-- that our understanding of aerodynamics is flawed or that there must be a supernatural being involved?) The article goes downhill from there.

    Comment by S Foote — May 5, 2007 @ 09:20PM

  6. I thought this article was interesting and informative. Theists such as Varghese pretend to respect science, but where there's a gap in our knowledge, they'll say that there's no scientific account for such and such mysterious thing, and therefore god did it, which certainly doesn't follow logically, and which runs the risk of being falsified when science fills in the gap, as in the example of bee flight. Varghese is making much of the "mysteries" of reproduction and consciousness, but perhaps he should read University of Califirnia evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk's Riddled With Life, which argues that sexual reproduction evolved at least in part to shuffle genes in a never-ending war with parasites, and she also gives a plausible account of how this evolution may have taken place. As for consciousness, nearly all reputable scientists who study this subject agree that it evolved from animal minds.

    Comment by steve beck — May 6, 2007 @ 12:00PM

  7. Congratulations to Mark Stuertz for his balanced feature on Varghese and the new atheist movement. I've read all the works mentioned by Stuertz from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. Together they comprise a masterful refutation of the frontier gibberish that comes from second-rate minds like Roy Varghese. It is their burden to prove the existence of God, not ours to disprove it. And in this task they have utterly failed.

    Varghese starts with grand unsupported assumptions about intelligence being everywhere, whatever that means, and moves on to more nonsense and unsupported claims. It's laughable to call these musings "God Proofs." Belief in God is prevalent for one reason only, because it is forced upon the impressionable minds of children who are brainwashed. The day will come when this is recognized for what it actually is, a form of child abuse.

    I go further than Harris, for the foreseeable future America will continue to be a dimwitted nation of uncivilized ignorant war-mongering pricks, precisely because they lack the critical thinking skills that make them vulnerable to manipulation by such stellar minds as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

    Comment by William W. Newbill — May 6, 2007 @ 01:42PM

  8. On the contrary, it is yours to prove the God does NOT exist. Why the Cambrian Explosion? Why the Big Bang? There is far more evidence that things don't just happen. Atheists need to show proof that the laws of physics don't apply to their theories. Science is consistently changing and reinventing itself. It's funny how much work they put into setting up tests and conducting experiments designed to show how easily things can just "happen." Their would be no tests results were it not for the intelligently design scenarios created by the scientists.

    Comment by random — May 7, 2007 @ 09:31AM

  9. Ridiculous, preposterous nonsense that a thinking person would even affirm any strain of evolutionary thinking, an oxymoronic phrase if ever one existed. Origins, fools, it's about origins. Did you not read Varghese's comment "For anything to exist, someone had to exist before it?" Blind guides, these atheists. A rejection of Creation based on anger and blindness rather than scientific evidence. The Creation myth of our time, Evolution, and its corrupt priests. Proceed, Dr. Varghese.

    Comment by Nigel Van Derwil — May 9, 2007 @ 04:20PM

  10. Mark:

    Thank you for your fine, well-written article.

    ===============================================

    As a Christian it pains me when clear scientific evidence is overlooked or simply assumed away. It is worse when denying such evidence is used as some kind of loyalty test by churches.

    For example, the Earth is billions of years old by virtue of solid scientific study. Still, there are those Christians who maintain that the age of the earth is something like 6,000 years.

    So they assume an Earth governed by observable physical laws and artifacts that are carbon dated well over 6,000 years. This would make God one of the biggest practical jokers around.

    "Let's see", says the creator, "I'll create a universe with discoverable, logical physical laws and then create a whole bunch of stuff which doesn't obey the physical laws that I set up. That'll get 'em plenty confused and get them to love me."

    As a result, many would be Christians are turned off. They just don't think that God would create millions of year old dinosaurs and stuff them under dirt less than 6,000 years old just for fun or for some judgment day pop quiz.

    And as a final comment: Yes the Old and for that matter New Testament God (same God folks) can express a range of emotions including great anger, as well as being longsuffering. This is not at all inconsistent with the New Testament Revelations.

    Comment by David Unti — May 9, 2007 @ 06:08PM

  11. As a Christian whose faith has only increased with age, I disagree with those that say we brainwash our children. Unfortunately more and more of our children leave the church. Churches grow when adults accept Christ. When God created the universe he created a mature earth, and mature animals and a mature man. If you will read the book of Job it talks of an animal with legs big enough to stop the flow of the Jordan river, sounds like a dinosaur to me. Remember the word dinosaur was invented in the 1800's, so it couldn't be used to describe something written about in the Bible.

    Comment by Art Davila — May 10, 2007 @ 10:50AM

  12. Scientists are becoming increasingly confident that everything in nature can be explained without God. They also seem to be mostly satisfied with refuting statements in the Bible. However the invocation verse to Isopanishad states that the world is made to be complete in itself. ( http://isopanisad.com/en )

    The verse goes, "oḿ pūrṇam adaḥ pūrṇam idaḿ pūrṇāt pūrṇam udacyate pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyate." Translated, "The Personality of Godhead is perfect and complete, and because He is completely perfect, all emanations from Him, such as this phenomenal world, are perfectly equipped as complete wholes. Whatever is produced of the Complete Whole is also complete in itself. Because He is the Complete Whole, even though so many complete units emanate from Him, He remains the complete balance."

    Thus although modern discoveries seem to indicate that belief in God is obsolete, the same kind of results are also expected based on the Vedic scriptures that describe the relationship between the material universe and the Personality of Godhead.

    Comment by Pandu das — May 10, 2007 @ 11:19AM

  13. Others have already pointed out the obvious: that the bee business of balderdash, there is nothing new under the Creationist, sun, etc. What I wish to point out is equally obvious: that not to believe in god(s) is not to hold that science can answer every question or is all we need. So Varghese is in one sense simply demolishing a straw man.

    If a believer can find awe and wonder in theological beliefs (which come in a dizzying variety of mutually-exclsuive forms!) an unbeliever can find as much awe and wonder - having once been a believer I can say that it is MORE - in what science tells us of the universe.

    More importantly, I think that real meaning has to come from within. If cows were sentient, for example, they could not get their meaning in life from the farmer who cares for them for their milk and meat. Believer or unbeliever, it is ultimately *from within* that we find what is important and worthwhile for us. The best of us manage to do this over and over and over again, each time with rapturous results.

    But none of what is truly important about religion - understood broadly as simply that which deals with the "ultimate questions" of the human condition, morality, love, purpose, and so on, all the things that science cannot and was never meant to address - depends on the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, or whatever will replace what may one day be seen as quaint notions of the 21st Century. That is why, to the degree that the Bible - and other "holy" books, as well as Shakespeare and the works of many others - speaks to us today it is because it speaks to the heart and not because it informs us about objective reality in the way that science does.

    God is a figment of the imagination. But figments of the imagination can teach us about ourselves too. It is sad that Varghese cannot appreciate this.

    Comment by TGorski — May 10, 2007 @ 04:40PM

  14. I have recently finished Carl Sagan's "The Varieties of Scientific Experience," and these gaps and mysteries addressed by the theists in this article as proof of the existence of God are just that, according to Sagan--gaps and mysteries. That is the point of scientific experimentation, to discover the unknown. Just because, in the year 2007, we don't have a solution to the many gaps and mysteries of life--and ultimately of science--doesn't mean that the answer does not lie in scientific experience. It may take centuries to find solutions to all of the gaps in scientific theories, but those answers will eventually--through the experiments and the minds of great scientists--be found. Why are so many of us quick to fill in these gaps and mysteries with the solution that God must therefore exist? That solution lacks creativity and possibility and, ultimately, "does not follow" to reference logic.

    Comment by Maria — May 10, 2007 @ 04:51PM

  15. Many good ideas here and lots of speculation…so here are a few rules of common sense I try to use:

    1. Remember, speculation unconfirmed by evidence remains speculation. Speculation confirmed by evidence becomes fact.

    2. Facts can be counted on. Facts are objective and discernable by all. Facts exist whether you’re a Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or a Labrador Retriever.

    3. What you don’t know is not a fact.

    4. When you see a contradiction, check your premise. An assumption is false.

    5. Knowledge expands one block at a time. We know more today then we did yesterday, and we’ll know more tomorrow.

    6. What is a fact today will not be overturned tomorrow by a yet “undiscovered” fact. Speculation on the other hand is constantly turned upside down.

    7. Learning is difficult, but letting someone else think for you could cost you your life (or your property).

    Life is good.

    Wes

    Comment by Wes Savon — May 15, 2007 @ 11:24AM

  16. Great article presenting views on both sides of a debate. I had to laugh when I read the line “Evolutionary theory has stubbornly survived 150 years of rigorous scientific testing.” How can we test, according to scientific method, events that purportedly took place billions of years ago over periods of millions of years? All we can test is the here and now, which is not even a blink in the evolutionary timeframe. Anything beyond that is educated speculation. How do we know that the laws we use to describe our observations now were relevant back then?

    If God is truly the creator of all as the Bible says he is, does he owe us anything? Why should we (part of his creation, according to that account) expect to fully understand him? We barely understand a fraction of the world he made. He owes us nothing, yet he gave us everything, including the minds and intelligence to unravel some of the mysteries of this world. Are we proud that it took us 70 years to explain the flight of bees? It gives me all the more reason to be in awe of God’s creation, that something so simple took us so long to figure out.

    Comment by KK — May 18, 2007 @ 07:11AM

  17. Q: How can we test, according to scientific method, events that purportedly took place billions of years ago over periods of millions of years?
    A: Evidence shows those events are happening right now all around you. Seek the evidence.

    Q: All we can test is the here and now, which is not even a blink in the evolutionary timeframe. How do we know that the laws we use to describe our observations now were relevant back then?
    A: The Law of Gravity works the same whether you’re an ant or an elephant. The Law of Natural Selection works whether you’re a flu virus or black squirrel. Laws are observable, measurable, and repeatable. Anybody who tells you can’t rely on the evidence is trying to trick you.

    Q: If God is truly the creator of all as the Bible says he is, does he owe us anything?
    A: Correct. The Bible says God is the creator. The Bible says he doesn’t owe you anything.

    Q: Why should we (part of his creation, according to that account) expect to fully understand him?
    A: Repeat. Anybody who tells you can’t rely on the evidence is trying to trick you, by undermining your ability to reason. You have a free will and the ability to understand the facts. Letting someone else think for you is dangerous. Evading the evidence does not change reality.

    KK. I too am an awe of the natural world. Life IS Good.

    Comment by Wes Savon — May 18, 2007 @ 09:56PM

  18. Mark Piske writes: "God did it is a science stopper and always will be."

    As a scientist myself I have no problem believing in the existence of God and practising science simultaneously. In fact, belief in a Creator makes it even easier for me to admire the wonders of science as Varghese so eloquently portrays. I know the same is true for several colleagues of mine, who like me, study Biology at various levels. However I might as well cite some famous scientists as well. What about, Francis S. Collins, who oversaw the Human Genome Project and discovered the genes for cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease among others. He also invented a molecular approach to cloning called 'positional cloning'. In his recent book, "The Language of God", he eloquently presents evidence for his faith, and conversion from an atheist to a theist. Or Sir Isaac Newton, who along with being perhaps the greatest scientist known to us today, was also an avid student and expositor of the Bible? I would suggest that atheists show a little more humility before they contend that no scientists or 'true ones' do not believe in a Creator. The problem is too many seem to see no reason to defend both their faith and profession. And we would not even have got here (in terms of scientific advances) if dedicated theists and Christians of the 18th and 19th centuries had not rigorously pursued science as a result of their various faiths. After all, was not even Darwin himself confused about this?

    Finally, please do not claim to refute all of Varghese' arguments as some of you have done above without even attempting to understand his work. Answering a challenging question before even understanding it (or reading it) does not show intelligence, but a certain lack of cogency or maturity, something I learnt long ago when I went to grade school.

    Comment by C. Mathias — June 6, 2007 @ 11:00PM

  19. C. Mathias, you misunderstand me. When I say "God did it" is a science stopper, I most certainly do not mean one cannot be a good scientist and believe in gods. I am a great fan of Ken Miller, Catholic, and author of "Finding Darwin's God". What Miller will tell you is that "god did it" doesn't move our knowledge forward. There is no reason, no rhyme, nothing more to study or test. So science cannot posit God as an explanation, whether the scientist believes or not, because it literally stops the science.

    As to not dismissing Varghese' arguments without even attempting to understand his work, that would be wiser advice were his ideas new, instead of the rehashes of long-refuted arguments that they are. They are not challenging questions when measured against the science.

    Comment by Mark Piske — July 4, 2007 @ 11:13PM

  20. The known laws of physics (i.e., general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Extended Standard Model of particle physics) force us to the conclusion that computational resources in the universe must diverge to infinity (i.e., in order for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent at all times). The final state of infinite informational capacity (which is never reached in experiential time) is identified as being God.

    For much more on the technical details of the above, see the below resources:

    F. J. Tipler, "The structure of the world from pure numbers," Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf Also released as "Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything," arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3276

    "Omega Point (Tipler)," Wikipedia, January 6, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omega_Point_%28Tipler%29&oldid=182549075

    "Frank J. Tipler," Wikipedia, January 5, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_J._Tipler&oldid=182407923

    Theophysics http://geocities.com/theophysics/

    Comment by James Redford — January 16, 2008 @ 04:36PM

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