I guess I tried to cram two ideas into one skinny paragraph.
1) and the big one imo - There is a distinction between science and scientism. Scientism is a religion, one that lays out as an article of faith that the material universe is the whole thing. As a consequence (or perhaps even premise) it states that science will have all the answers.
Honest science is, at the core, a process, a way of asking questions and recording the answers ... and even how the answers change. "We don't know" is a valid outcome in science. (Although it is usually dressed up in an apology for the inadequacy of current method, e.g. Current information allows the formulation of several hypotheses.)
It is my opinion that the great success of science in understanding and arranging our universe is that the answers aren't preset by the scientists. Sure, there is the usual human resistance to a new idea, but if the facts bear it out in a repeatable way, "the truth will out". Many media-fed people today confuse science with engineering. Engineers and technologists give us the machines and materials that grant our current standard of living. Engineers make things that work. Scientists look into what makes things work. Ultimately they are seekers of satisfying beauty in the patterns of things, the sort of beauty that is abstractly codified by math.
2) The Bible, as the Judeo-Christian core text, is distinguished by the great detail of its creation and calendar stories. As science came out from under the hammer of the black-robed crowd, these assertions became more or less testable. (Basically, "put up or shut up" time.) Some things (like accounts of miracles, past or present) are notoriously difficult to be put to the test of investigative science. But others, like the six days of creation or the multiplication of fish and loaves, are being marginalized by our growing understanding of how the material universe does things. Most modern Christians and Jews adapt by giving the Biblical accounts metaphorical rather than factual credence. Some don't, and in my experience they uniformly resort to contortion or outright denial in order to keep their faith pure. Trying to handwave away the solider planks of our scientific story-in-writing (sedimentary paleontology kind of jumps to mind) is imo maladaptive.
But trying to use paleontology, astrophysics etc. in their revealed glory to try to make a point about there being no God at all is an overreach in the other direction.
Personal confession: I am agnostic. I see no evidence of divine action in the material universe. But that does not motivate nor entitle me to make sweeping staements about God being dead, or something. But I do get uneasy when I hear a very common argument: "here is some great complexity that we cannot easily explain - so that points to an all-capable, all-conscious prime mover at work!" Imo what it means is "here is some great complexity that we cannot easily explain. Period. Maybe one day we will be able to, but that is a hope and not a promise."
Faith in some form is the common property of the religious person and of the natural philosopher. |
