Aunt Matilda's Cake

Let us imagine that my Aunt Matilda has baked a beautiful cake and we submit it for analysis to a group of the world’s top scientists. The nutrition scientists will calculate the calories in the cakes and tell us of its effect on the body; the biochemist will inform us about he structure of the proteins and fats in the cake; the chemist will describe the elements involved and their bonding; the physicists will be able to analyse the cake in terms of fundamental particles; and the mathematicians will no doubt offer us a set of elegant equations to describe the behaviour of those particles.

Now that these experts have given us an exhaustive description of the cake, can we say that the cake is completely explained? We have certainly been given a description of how the cake was made and how its various constituent elements relate to one another, but suppose we now ask them WHY the cake was made. The grin on Aunt Matilda’s face shows that she knows the answer, for she made the cake, and she made it for a purpose. But surely it is clear that all the scientists in the world will not be able to tell us why she made it. Unless Aunt Matilda reveals the answer, they are powerless. Their disciplines can cope with questions about the nature and structure of the cake but hey cannot answer the “Whey” questions. Now, the artists among us will add that science is limited in another sense – it cannot comment on the sheer elegance and aesthetic appeal of the cake, nor could it comment on the quality and truth of the poem written about the cake. Many import aspects of reality are simply outside the provenance of science.

Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar writes, “The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’; ‘What are we all here for?’; ‘What is the point of living?’” He adds that it is to imaginative literature and religion that we must turn for answers to such questions.

In light of this, we should take issue with Peter Atkins’s statement: “Science has not need of purpose…all the extraordinary, wonderful richness of the world can be expressed as growth from the dunghill of purposeless interconnected corruption.” What would Aunt Matilda think of this as an explanation for the fact that she made the cake for her nephew Jimmy’s birthday – to say nothing of it as an explanation of why she, Jimmy, and the birthday cake existed in the first place? She might just prefer a “primeval soup” to a “dunghill of corruption,” if she was offered the choice.

It is one thing to say (correctly) that science cannot answer questions of ultimate purpose. It is quite another to dismiss purpose (and beauty and truth) as an illusion because science cannot deal with it. Atkins is simply taking his materialism to its logical conclusion – or perhaps not quite. After all, the existence of a dunghill presupposes the existence of creatures capable of making dung! Rather odd then to think of the dung as creating the creatures.  And if it is a “dunghill of corruption” (as prescribed, one might suppose, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics), one might wonder how the corruption gets reversed. The mind boggles!

Reason versus Revelation?

Clearly it is absurd to hold that if science cannot tell us, then we cannot know why Aunt Matilda baked the cake. We can know why she baked it, if she chooses to reveal the answer to us. But if she doesn’t, no amount of scientific analysis will help. However, if she does reveal the answer to us, this does not now mean that reason is either irrelevant or inactive. We need our reason to understand and assess the credibility of her explanation. If she says she make the cake for her nephew Jimmy and we know that she has no nephew of that name, we will reject of explanation; if we know she has a nephew of that name, then her explanation will make sense.

In other words, reason is not opposed to revelation’ it is simply that her revelation of the purpose for which she made the cake supplies to reasons information that unaided reason cannot access. Reason is absolutely essential to process that information, even though it cannot create that information. The lesson is that in cases where science is not our source of information, we must not automatically assume either that reason has ceased to function or that evidence has cease to be relevant.

Thus, when Christians claim there is Someone who stand in a similar relationship to the universe that Aunt Matilda stands to her cake, and that this Someone has revealed why the universe was created, the are no abandoning reasons, rationality, and evidence at all. They are claiming that there are certain questions that unaided reason cannot answer. To answer them we need anther source of information – in this instance, revelation from God. But to understand and evaluate that revelation, reasons is essential. It was in this spirit that Francis Bacon talked of God’s two books: The Book of Nature and the Bible. Reason, rationality, and evidence are essential to understanding both!”

Professor John Lennox

Pp 113-115 Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, Zacharias. R, 2007 (Thomas Nelson)