Tuesday, August 12, 2008
I am not alone!
You would think that as a scientist of deep faith, I am fairly unique. This MSNBC article opens with the same presumption:
I have said this before, and I will say it again, a million times - science limits itself to the naturalistic as a field of study, but that is an arbitrary boundary set to enable a certain set of tools for purposes of making the study. That boundary is NOT the end of reality, it is simply a dividing line - inside science works, outside of it, it does not.
There is a very old joke that you may or may not get. A farmer's hens quit laying, so he calls the smartest guy he knows to help solve the problem - a theoretical physicist. The physicist moves into the chicken coop for the better part of a week. He eventually emerges covered in chicken mess and straw. He stumbles up to the farmer and says, "I have solved your problem, but only if you have a perfectly spherical chicken in a vacuuum."
Think about that joke for a minute - to solve the problem the physicist set limiting conditions. What makes the joke extraordinarily funny to we science geek types is that is something we do every day - we set up the problem in such a way that we can solve it, even if what we set up is only vaguely related to the reality that evoked the question to begin with.
Many science types claim to have solved the "mysteries of the universe." Far from it, they have solved some extraordinary mysteries, but they are mysteries that they are interested in framed in a way that permits them to solve them.
What we have on our hands here is good old human emotion and socio/religio/political conflict. It is a power struggle for the hearts and minds of the world. Like all great conflicts you try and chose the place of battle. Since this is a battle over explaining reality, scientists chose to proclaim the natural as reality.
They're just wrong about that.
But then the church has hardly played fair in all this over the centuries either. So on a purely human level, I don't blame the scientists too much. Although, for people that claim reason as their final authority, it is disappointing to see them be somewhat deceitful in their presentation. (Although for moralists, I could say the same about the church.)
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Scientists hate God. Or find God very disturbing. In fact, modern science has found no evidence of God and so it's stupid anymore to think God exists.Thankfully, that is far from truth:
The above statements are often presented as conventional wisdom, but are they true?
Yet many scientists — 40 percent according to a 1997 poll cited by Shermer — believe in God. This isn't big news to scientists, but might surprise people who rely on mainstream views of science. A handful of those folks — including Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate in physics and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — are also represented in the booklet, arguing that the natural world and the world of faith are relatively separate, yet personally reconcilable domains.When you get down to the crux of things, this is my favorite bit:
In the booklet, philosopher Mary Midgley, who was not at the AEI event, states that science is just one worldview that has come to prevail. Science and religion need not be at odds.Notice something implicit in there - science is a "worldview." I think Midgley is right - people that wish to create a culture clash between science and religion certainly treat science as a worldview - but in all my science education it is not a world view - it is, simply a field of study.
"What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people's worldviews at most other times," she writes.
I have said this before, and I will say it again, a million times - science limits itself to the naturalistic as a field of study, but that is an arbitrary boundary set to enable a certain set of tools for purposes of making the study. That boundary is NOT the end of reality, it is simply a dividing line - inside science works, outside of it, it does not.
There is a very old joke that you may or may not get. A farmer's hens quit laying, so he calls the smartest guy he knows to help solve the problem - a theoretical physicist. The physicist moves into the chicken coop for the better part of a week. He eventually emerges covered in chicken mess and straw. He stumbles up to the farmer and says, "I have solved your problem, but only if you have a perfectly spherical chicken in a vacuuum."
Think about that joke for a minute - to solve the problem the physicist set limiting conditions. What makes the joke extraordinarily funny to we science geek types is that is something we do every day - we set up the problem in such a way that we can solve it, even if what we set up is only vaguely related to the reality that evoked the question to begin with.
Many science types claim to have solved the "mysteries of the universe." Far from it, they have solved some extraordinary mysteries, but they are mysteries that they are interested in framed in a way that permits them to solve them.
What we have on our hands here is good old human emotion and socio/religio/political conflict. It is a power struggle for the hearts and minds of the world. Like all great conflicts you try and chose the place of battle. Since this is a battle over explaining reality, scientists chose to proclaim the natural as reality.
They're just wrong about that.
But then the church has hardly played fair in all this over the centuries either. So on a purely human level, I don't blame the scientists too much. Although, for people that claim reason as their final authority, it is disappointing to see them be somewhat deceitful in their presentation. (Although for moralists, I could say the same about the church.)
Technorati Tags:science, religion, conflict, worldview, naturalism
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