Realism and Reduction: the Quest for Robustness

1.1 A Comic Example I recently came across an evangelical comic strip discussing whether evolutionary theory is true. The strip consists of a dialogue between a righteous college student and his arrogant atheist college professor, and the student is on the verge of convincing his professor of the literal truth of the Book of Genesis when he switches tacks. “Protons have positive charge,” he points out. “One law of electricity is: LIKE CHARGES REPEL EACH OTHER! Since all the protons in the nucleus are positively charged, they should repel each other and scatter into space.” The student argues that we need to believe in God in order to understand what keeps atoms from scattering into space, and in the strip, this is the clincher: his professor hurriedly leaves the classroom and goes to his department chair to explain that he can no longer teach evolutionary theory, since it is false.1 But as an argument for the existence of God, this might seem a little bit questionable, or at least not thoroughly compelling. Physicists already believe in the strong nuclear force, after all. It’s what holds the nuclei of atoms together. So if we really need to posit the existence of God in order to understand why atoms stay together, then God must be none other than the strong nuclear force. But this is a puzzling sort of claim to make. It’s one thing to say that among