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With the passing of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, Paul Davies is perhaps the most prolific science writer currently active. Unlike Asimov and Sagan, how ever, Davies is willing to consider evidence of God in nature. Indeed, Davies often cites God in his scientific writings, offering up titles like God and the New Physics and The Mind of God. As the recipient of the 1995 Templeton Prize for progress in religion—a prize worth 750,000 British pounds and thus the most lucrative academic award currently offered—Davies has become a leading light in the dialogue between science and religion.
Given Davies's background and a title like The Fifth Miracle, one therefore expects this book to engage religious questions. Yet when Davies describes himself on the inside dustjacket of this book, he attributes receiving the Templeton Prize not for his work relating religion and science but for "his work on the philosophical meaning of science." This is significant. Davies does not address religious questions except insofar as they are mediated through certain philosophical presuppositions that he uses to make sense of science. For Davies science is a given, philosophy is what he em ploys to interpret science, and religion is an afterthought that emerges once philosophy has done its work of interpreting science. Ironically, this order of priority—science first, philosophy second, and religion last—though designed to keep science safe from religion, ends up undermining science by artificially restricting its range of inquiry.
Davies's title, The Fifth Miracle, is his idiosyncratic way of referring to the origin of life. When Davies counts up the Creation events in the first chapter of Genesis, the fifth of these is the creation of life. Davies claims that we are "a very long way from comprehending" how life originated. "This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna. … My personal belief, for what it is worth, is that a fully satisfactory theory of the origin of life demands some radically new ideas." Davies is equally clear, however, where his openness to radical ideas ends: "I am not suggesting that life's origin was a supernatural event, only that we are missing something very fundamental about the whole business." And in case we missed his disclaimer the first time, Davies repeats it a few pages later: "Science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn't made by a god or a supernatural being: it happened unaided and spontaneously as a natural process." In particular, Davies is not about to open the door to "religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations."
My own view is that Davies is not being nearly radical enough and that the origin of life can properly be understood only as the product of intelligent design (which can be formulated to avoid Davies's charge of religious fundamentalism or god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations). The Fifth Miracle is fascinating, not for its radical proposals, but for its ingenuity at avoiding radical proposals. Intelligent de sign—the idea that a designing intelligence is responsible for the origin of life—is for Davies scientifically unthinkable. Yet all the options that for him are scientifically thinkable fail miserably to explain the origin of life. The Fifth Miracle thus becomes a balancing act on the boundary between what's thinkable and unthinkable.
What would be so bad about succumbing to the unthinkable and treating intelligent design as a live option in origin-of-life studies? The problem for Davies is that it would render the origin of life "utterly mysterious." According to Davies, "It is the job of science to solve mysteries without re course to divine intervention. Just be cause scientists are still uncertain how life began does not mean life cannot have had a natural origin." Given the premises of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism, such a claim makes perfect sense. What is more difficult to grasp is Davies's persistent use of the G-word despite that claim. On the one hand, Davies portrays God as irrelevant to the origin of life. On the other, by regularly invoking God throughout The Fifth Miracle, he seems still to be leaving some room for God in the origin of life.
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