Sunday, October 09, 2011

Science Supplies the Answers

I don't know of any scientist that would claim that science has all the answers. But what scientists will claim is that science is the best thing we have to acquire the answers - real answers, not wishful-thinking answers. The problem is with the implication that since science doesn't know everything then we still need to look to God for the answers. No we don't. We just need to keep applying science to the question.

There may be questions of nature that science will never be able to divine answers to, but that doesn't mean we should stop looking and default to the God answer, because when you do, then you're stuck not only with no answers but with the defeatist notion that there can be no answers other than God. That's the big difference between having a scientific world view and a religious one. With religion, you don't need to look further than God for any answer to any question. Therefore, discovery is moot. Science, on the other hand, has given us the answers to all we know. It is a train of discovery. If we ever discover the answers to everything, science dies. But long before that, God will have been dead a long time.

14 comments:

Erin Jewett said...

As a Christian scientist I really have to disagree. The Christian worldview, by definition, says that God is behind everything, even processes we have a 'scientific' explanation for. You are correct that just because we don't understand something isn't reason enough to stop investigating it. On the flip side just because we may understand the process that God uses and upholds doesn't take God out of the picture. This is God's creation, by studying it we learn not only about it but about Him. Part of living as a Christian is learning more and more about God and about Christ. Science, among other things, can help do that. Being a Christian is a true train of discovery when God gives us open eyes and open hearts to live.

Jerry Wilson said...

The weakness in your approach is that you start with the major assumption that God is behind it all and that science is just a way to understand how he did it. At least you seem to accept scientific reality but there is no need to make your God assumption. If you postulate God then he must come under the same scrutiny of empirical evidence as everything else. God doesn't get a pass. Science makes only one assumption, that everything obeys the laws of nature. Without that assumption there can be no science. Your God assumption violates this premise from the start.

Erin Jewett said...

But you make an assumption as well. Namely that nothing can be known outside experimental evidence. When a Christian speaks of knowing God they're talking not about knowing some abstract principle, but a person. When you meet a person you don't put them in a test tube to see if they exist. If you haven't met them and you're trying to determine if they are real you don't go to a lab you ask people about them. If there are books written you read them and measure that against what you see. If the majority of what you find aligns with what you see you would think that person exists. Maybe there are some things that you can't explain, but the evidence is there and you make a choice. Yes or No. God presents us with all the evidence, but we're just too blind without His grace in Jesus. It's not that God gets a pass on evidence, it's that He gives a different kind of evidence.

Jerry Wilson said...

There is but one kind of evidence admissible in science: Empirical evidence, the kind you can measure. Anecdotal evidence doesn't count because it relies on feelings and assumptions. You believe in Jesus because of how you were raised. Someone told you about him and then you read about him in the bible. Any other books you've read about him are just rehashes of bible stories. How do you think the ones who told you about him came to believe? Someone else told them and on down the line. Never was there any empirical evidence to back up their beliefs. If you had been raised in a different culture you would think that your current beliefs are just misguided. All religions believe they are passing on the truth and Christianity is no different. Step away from your belief system for a moment and look at all the other beliefs. You probably think they are misguided because you know yours represents truth. But they all believe the exact same thing, and there is no evidence at all to back up any of those claims. The bible is not evidence because it was written by mostly unknown authors, none of whom were eyewitnesses. They are just relating oral stories that had been passed down for decades. In other words, anecdotal evidence, hearsay, and legend-building. Science may not have all the answers, but it's really the only way to find the answers in an unbiased manner.

Erin Jewett said...

Well firstly you are only half right about my background. I was raised in a nominally Christian home, but faith has never had a central role in our family. I was actually a closet atheist for a while (though I always had my doubts and wonderings). I was only an atheist (or only identified myself as such) because I took my professor's assertions that you couldn't be a scientist and believe in God as authoritative. I took them without question. I became a Christian because of the evidence, because I asked questions and they were answered. They were not merely assertions handed down from people as it was at the university. That happened through a good friend who God put into my life, a book by Francis Collins, some old-school C.S. Lewis, and also really reading the Bible for the first time and seeing how much about what was being said about sin and salvation made sense when you look at the world. I became a Christian because Jesus met me in a big way and showed me my sin and showed me His salvation. When I finally evaluated atheism it came up wanting.

I've made (very) casual study of apologetics when I've had time since becoming a Christian and all has pointed to the truth of what God has shown in Christ. If we look at the New Testament the witness of the Church through the centuries is on the authors as they are identified. We have so many manuscripts that the textual evidence for the fidelity of the text that we read today is overwhelming. No other ancient document has so much. Take Tacitus for example, the earliest manuscript we have is 8th or 9th century (~800 years post publication) and we only have about 3 extant manuscripts. With the New Testament we have over 5500 manuscripts *in greek alone* dating back to the 2nd or 3rd century. Far earlier than Tacitus, but yet some people cry foul and say that the Bible comes too late. If we believe that Tacitus wrote as early as he did, and in fact if we say that Tacitus actually wrote at all and not someone else why do we automatically assume that the Bible is a later document than the Church's witness leads? Or that it is pseudonymous, which was NOT acceptable in early Christianity. Seems like a double standard. And that's just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

This is a bit of an aside, but you are correct to say that empirical evidence is what is acceptable in laboratory science, but we're not talking about laboratory science. Other evidence (ie anecdotal, observational) counts in real life. The lab can tell us a lot, but if it doesn't work in the real world it means little. I mean I just saw 2009 nobel laureate Jack W. Szostak speak a few days ago on self-replicating nucleotide polymers. Fascinating chemistry, (there's a reason this guy won the nobel I mean he is really something) that I wish I understood a bit better (starting work in a metabolomics lab should help with that), but you have to wonder how it would do outside a test tube in a pre-biotic earth.

Jerry Wilson said...

Just keep in mind that whatever religious experiences you've had, though the experience may have been real, your attribution that it was linked to the divine most likely is not. As a person who believes in scientific methods you have to ask yourself is it possible that your experience was caused by something completely natural. People in other cultures and from many other religions also have life-altering religious experiences, but they attribute them to their own god or gods. It's natural. But for those of us who know science, as tempting as it might be to attribute those experiences to God, it might just be a natural phenomenon, a trick of the mind, a hallucination, or a perfectly explainable event that you just don't know how to explain yet. Always default to the natural first, because once you take the leap to the supernatural, then all attempts at explanation are moot. That's not how we grow our knowledge.

Beth said...

"That's the big difference between having a scientific world view and a religious one."

Once I started looking at the world with a completely scientific world view, there was no going back for me. It's actually a relief to not live in a way that depends on the mystical and mythological.

It reminds me of my Mom calling me up a while back. She was very upset, because she'd misplaced her car keys and couldn't find them anywhere. We had just been there that afternoon, so I tried to calm her down and said, "Okay, let's think about where we were and what we were doing." I went through several areas, saying that we were there in the kitchen, or the living room, then I said, "And then you got into one of your dresser drawers in your bedroom to find something in there." She said, "Yeah, that's right, let me look in there." I heard her rustling around and she said, "There they are! PRAISE GOD!"

[sigh] Now, I didn't need her to say "Praise Beth!" but God had nothing to do with it. We logically went over our earlier steps and that that led us to her keys. I don't understand the need to place a supernatural explanation on something so obviously natural.

Interesting mention of things working in the lab vs things working in the real world. That's part of the process. Things can work in vitro, but not in vivo and vice versa. Just because both don't work doesn't mean that the process is invalid. My feeling is that if we haven't found a natural explanation for something yet, there is simply more work to be done. To attribute such things to supernatural phenomena is the height of laziness.

Erin Jewett said...

You're making the assumption that people can only have "religious experiences" from God. Demons can cause that sort of thing as well. I'm fully aware that hormones and the like can cause emotions, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing but chemicals behind what happens. You can cite all of the chemical reasons you want, but there's nothing to explain the full truth behind what God has done besides Him at work. My life hasn't been perfect since becoming a Christian and I've had my struggles with it, but through all these two years God has been there. There's nothing to explain how I've kept going through what's been happening. You can say what you will, but Christ is in my heart and in my soul. This is not merely biological, the change that has happened and is happening in me can't be boiled down to mere chemicals. Chemicals don't do that kind of thing, they don't change a life. That takes a will, something chemicals don't have.

I may be a scientist, but that doesn't mean that I have to shut my mind in a box and only admit what I can contain in a lab and test. Life is much bigger than that and (like I said before) there are other ways to know things. The perspective of a Christian says that Jesus upholds everything "by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). That includes upholding me, you, Beth, etc, He rightly deserves praise for everything. We may be able to explain how a certain process works, but upholding that process, even upholding our explanation of how it works is God.

Jerry Wilson said...

Erin as a scientist you should know better. Of course chemistry can explain all your experiences. And I do mean all. Let's say for instance that the holy spirit did dwell inside you. The only way you would experience him is due to the formation of synapses in your brain. You would feel comforted by him because of the release of endorphins. Well sometime those reactions happen without a real stimulus. But you always think there is. My daughter has complex migraine syndrome. Sometime she has a very real sensation that demons are holding her in bed and she can't move. Although she's an atheist she was beginning to wonder if they could be real. But Internet research and confirmation from her neurologist revealed that those symptom are part of the syndrome she has. Every single experience you've had, no matter how real can easily be explained away by natural phenomena. It is your personal choice to reject reality and substitute the supernatural. And, being a person is science that is particularly troubling for me.

Jerry Wilson said...

I might also add that people once thought that multiple personality disorder was caused by demons. But it again comes down to brain chemistry. If you believe in the supernatural then anything can be caused by that even things we can prove in the lab. How do we know anything is real? Maybe everything is imagined and caused by demons, or by god. Once you acknowledge control of anything by the supernatural you're on a slippery slope to anti-intellectualism.

Erin Jewett said...

Well firstly, sorry for the delayed reply. Second, I do know that not everything is caused by demons. My mom has been in a major depression for what feels like forever (though it hasn't been that long). Have I considered that there could be a demonic issue here? Yes. Do I think there is? probably not, at least not in the sense of full-blown possession because there haven't been any chronic symptoms of that. I know there are genuine biological/chemical symptoms of depression, but you know what? No meds have really worked for my mom. She's stable now, in a sense, but not well. Our bodies host in them some of the most amazingly complex chemical reactions there are. And all of them hang out in the same solution (or subsets of the same solution, like inside a mitochondria etc.) and do their things without messing each other up. It's pretty dang amazing (though being a plant person I know less about them than some).

In the end though, what is a mental or emotional disorder on the chemical level other than some emotion or reaction being stimulated without stimulus? My mom's depression, for example, she is sad and afraid and she doesn't know why. There is no stimulus. Now if she were afraid because of a threat someone made no one would think there is anything wrong with that. But the way she is now? Something is wrong, broken. It seems as though you're insinuating that when a person feels the presence or comfort of God they actually have no stimulus for their emotions (though correct me if I'm wrong). In my mind that is not possible, unless I've missed something. Either many, many, more people on earth have some kind of mental disorder than statistics would admit or there is some stimulus going on. When I meditate on the future all Christians are promised, where God will wipe away every tear from the eyes of His people in Christ and there will be no more brokenness, it is the comfort of the Holy Spirit that I feel. There is no other explanation for why things that seemed so strange or stupid just over two years ago have become my hope. There is someone else a work here. You may be able to map and see synapses firing in my brain, but there is still someone behind it.

Jerry Wilson said...

It all comes down to this: You do not see a stimulus (cause), therefore the uncaused effect must be God. But just because you do not see how there could be a stimulus doesn't mean there isn't one. Just because you can't conceive of how the brain firings produce all those effects doesn't mean they can't be explained by natural causes. It seems likely to you that God is the cause because you don't see how it could be otherwise. Your own understanding prevents you from accepting the fact that there might be a more logical and natural explanation. Sure, there are things that science hasn't found the answers to yet. There might even be some it will never find answers to. But it's a giant leap to default back to the God of the Gaps when you don't understand how something works.

Erin Jewett said...

I'm not sure where some of your above reply came out of my argument... but firstly, I don't like god of the gaps arguments, they try to make God too small, say He is only upholding what we don't have some physical mechanism for. I believe it's far more biblical to say He upholds EVERYTHING through the word of His power (like it says in Hebrews 1:3 as one example). Everything defaults to "God did it" it's just that in some cases that we have knowledge of the physical mechanisms used.

You can say what you will, but there's really no other stimulus. When I'm alone, in a quiet place with no one else and I'm reading my Bible or pouring my heart out before God what other stimulus is there to bring conviction or comfort or joy? Sound? It's quiet. Sight? If I'm praying my eyes are likely closed or if I'm reading I'm probably focusing on a page. Smell? If you lived in the house I'm in right now you'd know why that's unlikely. Touch? There's no one else physically in the room. Taste? I highly doubt it, that'd be a strange tale indeed. I'd say the list of physical mechanisms is pretty well exhausted at this point. Nothing is hitting my physical senses, but yet I know God is there. If the mechanism that He works by is knowable through scientific investigation it's very likely something different than purely physical. At least that would be my hypothesis.

Jerry Wilson said...

Stimuli can be internal and not sensuous. It all boils down to the fact that you prefer to believe ancient superstitions and as your "evidence" you point to experiences you can't understand.