Many creationists seem to want us to choose faith or science.
Actually, these are not the two only options.
Creationists would have us believe that life is unlikely and rare. Is this true? It may be that life is in some sense inevitable, given the universe we live in. It may not be that the exact life as we know it was inevitable (rewind the tape, and perhaps something different would evolve), but some sort of life may be inevitable, all the same. Creationists seem to want this to be impossible - God had to have created a universe that does not work, except God's hand keeps spinning it up - what if he is a better craftsman than that?
And of course, the possibility exists that God used the natural process science discovers to accomplish his purposes. In which case, no conflict. Or that there is some other set of factors involved that we have yet to discover that accounts for the world we experience.
There is no reason to choose between the horns of the creationist dilemma. They seem to want this to be a faith choice – choose between the purposeful creation of God, or the meaningless, random acts of blind nature – it is a false dichotomy.
Science does not ask you to make a choice. Rather, it asks you to accept that there are physical laws and natural processes that account for the world you see around you. That this is true is obvious on the face of it, and the technology that has sprung from scientific discovery demonstrates this fact.
It does not say anything about what the world means, or for whom it was made, or what its ultimate purpose is. Creationists would have us believe that this is a fault - science is lacking because it is not religion, recapitulating the Bible. True, science is not religion - but it is not a fault (after all, that is what religion is for!).
You do not have to choose between Science and faith, and you should not choose fantasy over reality, just because you’ve been told your faith requires it (faith does not).
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3 comments:
yes, i think i see more of what you mean - at various times people have had concepts of life which later are found to be unduly limiting (even laughable!). e.g. in the 20th century our view of what robots would become were just a new style worn on the industrial revolution. that we can consider we are machines... is only limited by what one thinks a "machine" is - it seems that the more our concept of the universe truly advances, the more astonishing the possabilties and things that exist are - God must have a mighty good reason that we do live in a real universe, with laws and order and... whatever we can discover.
"Creationists would have us believe that life is unlikely and rare. Is this true?"
Excellent question...and one we're not likely to answer in the short term.
Fermi is anecdotally said to have asked why, given the size of the universe and the expected resulting opportunity for life to develop, why haven't we heard from anyone else yet?
Because it was Fermi, it *sounds* like a question for science, but what's interesting is I'm not sure this *can* be answered today using the scientific process: we could certainly come up with some ideas, but they couldn't be tested.
I see this as an opportunity to distinguish creationism from science; creationists may point to the absence of evidence of other life as proof of the special nature of humanity. Science, however, can't speak to the topic at all.
Science uses data to build up a model of the world, and then makes predictions, based on that model, that can be tested.
Revelation simply makes statements, only some of which can be tested. Science is used to rule out posible interpretations (what cannot be true, is not true).
Is life rare? Sketchy data will give us sketchy models. We've only been at this for a few hundred years - better data will give us better models, better models will lead to more specific predictions, testing those gives us better data, which leads to better models.
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