Does Science Matter?

Science Gives Us An Accurate Picture Of Our World
The world is not always what it seems. This is especially obvious when you compare how we thought about the world only a few hundred years ago, and how we understand it to work today. It is easy to lose perspective on what it was to live in a world before modern science. People often died young, mostly of diseases easily prevented by good public heath practices. What we would consider modest distances between people presented difficult, often insurmountable barriers. Mountains, oceans, weather, language, economics all conspired to keep us separated and ignorant of one another.

The mechanics of everyday life (why leaves were green, why the sky was blue, where the wind came from, what the stars were made of) were all unknowable, and the subject of wild (inaccurate) speculation.

Science Improves our Everyday Existence
Every time we use a telephone or the internet, take an airplane ride, listen to digital music or enjoy clean drinking water, we owe a debt to science – because science drives the technologies that transform our world.

Without science, there would be no plastics, no antibiotics, no airplanes, automobiles, lasers (so no DVD's or supermarket scanners) – we couldn't even feed the burgeoning population of our planet without the basic research into how the world works that science provides.

Science is a tool, and a powerful one. The proper use of science requires a strong, broad community to guide the policies and priorities of the scientific community, and to help channel the fruits of science into the technologies that build better, more meaningful lives. In order to play that role, we all need a good grounding in science and technology, to help us grasp the benefits and pitfalls of science.

Science Invites Us To Awe And Wonder
Science unveils a world beyond our imaginings– drawing us beyond the day-to-day world we live in, towards amazing variety and potential. Understanding how the world works has not robbed us of mystery, or awe or the capacity to wonder. Rather, as we struggle to uncover how the world works, we are confronted with endless variation and beauty, both subtle and grand.

It turns out that the universe is much more complex and diverse than anyone ever imagined. From the behavior of quarks, to the light-years-spanning nebula seen by our space-based telescopes, from 350,000 species of beetles to the intricate beauty of DNA's double helix, our world has amazed us with its variety, complexity, invention and resiliency.

Science challenges our pre-conceptions about how the world works, and invites us to explore new possibilities, new options, new answers. In the process, we learn about how we impact the world and our community. The world is connected in amazing ways – ways that we would never discover, if not for science.

Science Does Not Take the Place of Ethics or Values
While science concerns itself with “how,” ethics, faith, philosophy struggle with questions of ultimate meaning, and the wisdom or folly of our actions. Science can inform those discussions, but science does not take their place.

At best, science is a tool that we humans use to better understand our world. Like any tool, the kind of value we get from it depends on how we use it. If we use science with skill and wisdom, it enhances our life and understanding. Science is an important window into the world in which we live. To understand science is to better understand our world, our selves and our future.

OK, So What’s The Issue?
Some people have reached conclusions about what the world is like, and they object when their preconceptions are not supported by science. Sometimes we accept this this corrective and revise our perspectives of the world to align with new information. Sometimes, we attempt to discredit, marginalize, or even manipulate science to support our preconceptions. This is a mis-use of science, and results in spreading mis-information about the world. Bad information can lead to improper conclusions. What is worse, these kinds of artificial controversies damages science’s reputation, and results in fewer people studying science, weakening our ability to compete globally and address pressing problems.

Science should be left alone to answer questions about how the world works, free from dogmatic prescriptions about what science can and cannot discover. Questions of ultimate meaning (Why) should be left to philosophy and religion.

(revised 3/30/07)

Is Science Atheism?

Physical processes can be identified at work in the natural world. For example, heating, expansion, cooling, forming and breaking of chemical bonds. The mechanism of evolution is based on these physical processes, which have been observed and are well-defined.

That God is not observed in these processes does not mean that God does not exist, but it does require the belief (which cannot be proved) that God designed the universe in which these processes are active (that is, science uncovers the "how" of God's creative activity). As recent scientific discoveries have indicated, the universe “works” all the way down to the quantum foam, and all the way back to the Big Bang. This severely constrains our understanding of the ways in which God has chosen to interact with the universe. This understanding should inform our theology.

Of course, this belief in God is not required to explain the way that the world works, so some people see this as tacit support for atheism.

So what role does faith play in the world? Well, so far, I do not need it to make sense of how the world works, from the perspective of science. And I do not, in fact, seek scientific understanding from faith. I do look to faith to help me understand my place in the universe, a search that includes the dimensions of spirituality, community and personal morality and ethics.

A Dialogue Between Faith & Science

Both sides of the faith / science dialogue (and those who say you don't have to take sides) are talking. I am not sure folks are always getting what is being said. We all re-interpret what we hear in our own terms - in order to make it intelligible. This does not make understanding impossible, but it makes it more difficult - because we often miss what is being said because we change it into something somewhat different in the process of trying to understand it.

Many conservative Christian creationists are trying to defend two things - the authority of the Bible, and a particular worldview that comes out of their interpretation of the Bible.

Because this worldview is understood to be "ultimate reality" (and the physical world we live in a distorted version of that reality), there is a deep distrust of the natural world and the products of our reasoning, emotions and sensory experiences.

Science cuts through the Gordian knot of the "what is reality?" question by taking it as a given that the world we experience is real, and seeks to understand how the natural world works (bypassing the "Why" question). Science has been successful beyond all imaginings at this enterprise. Lasers, digital music, semiconductors, & nano-machines would have been beyond anyone’s wildest speculation even a few hundred years ago.

Precisely because it ignores the supernatural (and because science has not been hampered by this lack), science is suspect - it is part of the "world" that is set against the "Kingdom of Heaven." The world we live in is part of the “present evil age" – and to be resisted - while Christians are called to be part of the age to come (marked by the direct rule of God, and no part of the current political, economic or technological order – referred to as Babylon, and depicted as a whore).

Because science seems to have no need of God, it represents an affront to the worldview that nothing makes sense except in the light of God's creating, sustaining and guiding activity. So on one level, ID is simply an attempt to “place” science in the context of a larger Christian worldview – it becomes an area of theology (learning about God through his creation).

Lessons Creationists Have Taught Me

Lessons learned from dialouges with creationists:

1. There is no evidence for creationism (young-earth, old-earth or ID). For folks predisposed to see design, they see design. For folks who look into the science of nature, they see that explanations for how the world works requires no supernatural intervention (open invitation for any creationist to provide a counter-example – show your work).
2. Creationist sources invariably lie about, distort or omit important facts about how science works, and what scientists themselves say about their work in order to bolster their claims. Naïve creationist supporters roar in to the frey, armed with arguments form creationist web sites, only to be shown over and over again that they have their facts wrong. Invariably, the argument is pared down to how to read the Bible – almost always, they end up saying something like “I have the right interpretation, and those who don’t share it are going to hell.”
3. Truth takes a back seat to strategy. This is obviously a religious issue – creationists want their children to be able to hold on to their creationist beliefs while getting a public education. There are two main approaches here – withdraw from public school, like the Southern Baptists, or get schools to stop teaching science, as laid out in the DI’s Wedge Strategy.
4. The discussion cannot take place on the basis of facts. Creationists have no facts to back up their position (they are not even interpreting Genesis 1 literally, or they would be flat-earthers and geocentrists). They simply “know in their knower” that they are right, and that means that anyone who opposes them are tools of Satan.
5. This is not about materialism, or liberalism, or naturalism. Science makes no claims about the supernatural, and so far, no appeal to the supernatural is required to explain the world we live in. This may mean that the natural principles we’ve discovered are the methods by which God created the universe. It does not mean that science is opposed to religion – just that science does not deal with religion.
6. We do have real problems to deal with – but they are not the fault of evolution, and are not solved by believing that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together, or that God spends His time poofing tails onto flagella.

We've Got Options

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).

A False Controversy

We are being driven into a false conflict between faith and religion, simply because some people want to insist that the Bible is science. This is both harmful and wrong.

1. It is no more improbable that God made a universe where His will could be expressed thorough evolution and other natural causes than that he created a universe where all the hard parts have to be done through supernatural intervention (i.e. creationism).

2. Science no more promotes an ideology of materialism than does any other way of explaining how the world works – it is simply describing what is, and how what is works. No evidence for design has been found, and no observation of design in progress has ever been observed. This is not the case for various natural causes, which abound in every field, and can be observed whenever you bake a cake or drive your car (or for that matter, eat your breakfast or blink your eyes).

3. To insist that public school science class consider non-material causes introduces philosophy and religion into science class. Science is not improved in the process. A further danger is that there are many, many competing philosophies and religions – shall they take turns in science class? Shall they be voted in by the local religious majority at the time?

4. Scientists can study the idea of supernatural design anytime they want. There are hundreds, if not thousands of privately-funded research institutions. There has never been a barrier to such research, and in fact there have been Christian creationist research organizations founded. They simply have not been able to demonstrate the creationist hypothesis.

All this furor over creationism only serves to alienate many Christians from the discoveries of science, and create the false notion that you have to choose between thee Bible and the discoveries of science. It is time for more Christians to be willing to think, rather than just take the word of their youth leader, pastor or radio preacher.

Beyond Faith and Science

While science cannot answer questions about the existence of God, it can answer questions about the impact of God on the natural world.

Several scientific studies have concluded that so far, that impact has not been detectable. Surely this a significant and unexpected mystery. Why is God’s impact on the world not measurable – if not in a specific instance, in aggregate (for example, in hundreds of patients in a hospital, or in the life outcomes of the British royal family).

This lack of tangible effect has led some to suggest that if God exists, then s/he has no effect on the natural world. Others affirm that God does make a difference in the natural world (beyond the inner state of the believer), just not one that can be studied scientifically. It is not clear what this statement might mean

I think that this boundary is one of the important frontiers of religious thought. Some centuries ago, there would have been overwhelming certainty that God was a potent force in the world. Yet everywhere that science has looked, that potency has receded in the presence of testable laws governing the workings of the natural world. Is this a failure of science? Of perspective? Does this tell us something about God, or ourselves?

If religion is going to play a role among modern, technological, scientifically literate people, these questions are going to have to be raised and, if not answered, at least wrestled with.