Is Science Supreme?

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God and of its relation to science. The one denying a divine being stated:

"The whole picture of the universe which science has given us makes it such a rot to believe that the Power at the back of it all could be interested in us tiny creatures crawling about on an unimportant planet_ It was all so obviously invented by people who believed in a flat earth with the stars only a mile or two away."
"When did people believe that?" the other replied.
"Why, all those old Christian chaps you're always telling me about did. I mean Boethius and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and Dante."
"Sorry," said the other, "but this is one of the few subjects I do know about." He reached toward the bookshelf and pulled a volume of Ptolemy's Almagest: "You know what this is?"
"Yes," said the man, "It's the standard astronomical handbook used all through the Middle Ages."
"Well, just read that," said the other, pointing to Book I, chapter 5.
"The earth," read the man, hesitating a little while he translated the Latin, "the earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point_"
There was a moment's silence.
"Did they really know that then?" asked the nonbeliever. "But-but none of the histories of science - none of the modern encyclopedias - ever mention the fact."
"Exactly," said the other. "I'll leave you to think out the reason...The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as arguments against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don't you think you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people?"

This is the unfortunate state of affairs for us today. The current notion of Science that is held is that it likes to keep its distance from Religion; and as long as the religious people are willing to step back and not let theology "interfere" with scientific pursuit, we will all get along reasonably well. But those who rashly assume this to be the natural relationship between these two disciplines will be surprised if they read anything about the real origin of modern science-the 16th century Scientific Revolution.

Because the modern astronomer who says he relies solely on science for knowledge about the stars, not on religious "mythology," will be surprised to learn that the Father of Astronomy (Galileo) was himself an eminently religious man. Or the modern chemist who despises "religious superstition" in explanations of the world should be surprised to learn that the Father of Modern Chemistry (Robert Boyle) wrote almost as much about God as he did about chemistry. Or most shocking of all might be to read the works of Francis Bacon - who is sometimes considered the foremost advocate of the scientific method - for practically every page of his Essays contains a biblical citation, and his Novum Organum goes so far as to make science the "most faithful handmaid" of religion.

Admittedly, however, science and religion today are at odds; and of course we mean not the pure disciplines in themselves but rather the people who study them. The question is why. One of the surest reasons is that whereas science was once used purely for physics, it is now used for metaphysics. When a person declares that he invests much of his faith in science, it is an admirable thing; for science itself is admirable. But when he declares that science has answered his life's deeper questions, that is where the grand mistake begins; for all metaphysical questions end up being answered in the negative (or get declared unanswerable) when handed over to science. As the Oxford chemist Michael Polanyi once put it: "Intellectual assent to the reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations and forces...has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific and woolgathering to us. And it is this assent, more than any other one intellectual factor, that has set science and religion (in all but its most frothy forms) in opposition to each other in the contemporary mind."

It is interesting to note before we begin our discussion that none of the scientists of the past ever seriously believed that the experiments he conducted had any bearing on the meaning (or teleology or essence) of life. That is, prior to the rise of modern science, the mechanical laws of cause-and-effect were applied only to physics, astronomy, and chemistry-which deal with matter. But today they are applied as well to psychology and sociology and even religion-which deal with meaning. At any rate, we must now review a few of the major consequences that must ensue when once science is erected as the final arbiter of truth.

The Destruction of Thought
Our first concern (even if the one did not care about life's "meaning") of the claim that science can lead us to all truth is the destruction of science itself. For some of our scientists boast of the fact that science has undermined not only the "mythological accretions" of religion-like flood stories and suns freezing in mid-flight-but also the very essence of religion: Theism and immortality. That is, insofar as science can give a satisfactory account of man as a purely biological entity, they say, it excludes the soul and thus immortality. But a purely scientific or "biological" account of man means essentially the explaining away of anything a man will do by invoking purely irrational forces; for nature (the source of bios) is governed strictly by the irrational. And so not only will the soul and immortality be excluded, but anything rational about a man will also be excluded: even his thoughts. And therein is the downfall of science.

Let us take this idea step by step. First, most would agree that science is based on thought. Next, "scientific naturalism" or "scientism" is the belief that all that really exists is the material world (i.e., nature): a world that is essentially irrational. So everything that seems to be meaningful can be ultimately explained by irrational causes. Now, every particular thought (whether of fact or of value) is always and by all people discounted the moment they believe that it can be explained as the result of irrational causes. Whenever you know that what a man is saying is wholly due to a complex he is suffering from or a bit of bone pressing on his brain, you cease to attach any importance to it. But if scientific naturalism were true, then all thoughts whatever arising in a man's head would be ultimately the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be equally worthless. Therefore, science must be worthless.

And this is the snag that all scientific naturalists (and atheists) who adhere to strict naturalism must face. Science used to only explain the physical details of life. But these days scientific naturalism goes on claiming territory after territory: first it explains the inorganic, then the lower organisms, then man's body, then his emotions. But when it takes the final step and tries to account for thought itself, the whole thing unravels; the last step invalidates all the preceding ones; the entire structure falls and we are left with a meaningless rubble. But not only have many of our scientists today tried accounting for thought using science, they have done so with religion and the whole question of life's meaning and goals.

Miracles
Besides all of the above said, we must move into the next great arena of problems: miracles. A religious dissident might reply to us, "Oh, come. I might agree that science might not be the last explainer of all things; thought may have some genuine decency to it. But miracles? Why, science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know that Nature is governed by fixed laws." Our science education has indeed instilled in us such a pious reverence for the rigidity of the physical laws, they are the last things we would think to break-it is less dangerous to break one of the Ten Commandments than to break one of these. But the point to notice is that miracles are not claimed to be things springing up from within nature, like arbitrary exceptions to standard rules. For the most indigestible idea about miracles for some modern folk is that they seem to be phenomena working from inside the natural system that just randomly violate the usual physical laws for really no good reason. Now if this were what miracles were all about, it is doubtful whether we would have any use for them. An object (say a flower or mushroom) that is completely tied up by the rules of nature has no right to violate them. The point here is that miracles surely come from outside nature, to interfere with her regular order of events.

A simple example of this is St. Joseph of Bethlehem. When he discovered that the holy Virgin was with child, he immediately planned on hiding her; and he did this because he clearly understood the natural way babies are born, by copulation between a man and woman. That is, he believed child-bearing to be governed by fixed natural laws. And afterward he unquestionably came to believe in the virgin birth; but he did not do so because he thought that the natural laws of child-bearing had changed: he still believed that nature worked in fixed, regular ways. Rather he believed that there also existed something beyond nature which could interfere with her workings - from the outside, so to speak. And there is simply no way for "modern science" to show that such a thing "beyond" nature does not exist. For science studies only nature; and to find out whether anything besides nature exists-anything "outside"- obviously could not be done by simply studying nature.

"Look here," our nonbeliever might object, "granted that this 'something outside' does exist, it is absurd to say that it may 'interfere' with the natural laws. Could it make two and two equal five? I feel that saying that any natural law may be altered is as absurd as trying to alter the laws of arithmetic." Arithmetic is often considered a nice point of recourse for those appealing to the fixity of nature. But here is the catch. If, for example, one were to place five pennies in a drawer one night, and then five more the following night, the laws of arithmetic predict that he would find a dime's worth the day after: unless of course someone tampers with the drawer. The laws of arithmetic tell us what he will find, with absolute certainty, provided that there is no interference. But a thief who comes to steal the pennies will not have to break the laws of arithmetic-only the laws of America.

And the argument here is that the laws of nature are much in the same boat. When a person hits a billiard ball, it will travel in a straight line only provided there is no interference. If another person snatches up the ball, then you will not get what the scientist predicted. And likewise if there is anything outside nature, and it interferes with nature's regular course of events, then we will get something other than what the scientist predicts-we would have what is called a miracle. And of course, we do not ask the arithmetician how likely a thief is to tamper with the drawer; we ask a detective. We do not ask a physicist how likely a person is to snatch up the ball; we ask a psychologist. And we do not ask the scientist how likely nature is to be interfered with from the outside; we would ask a theologian.

Faith vs. Reason
For some, there is an even greater hindrance to the acceptance of religion than just the doctrine of miracles. It is the peculiar notion and widely preached error that science runs itself pretty much on pure reason, and religion pretty much on pure faith, and that there is very little overlap. And the unavoidable conclusion from this is that once I have accepted religion, then I will have to stick my loyalties to faith at reason's expense. One will often find that in the university system, the commonest religious slur that scientists slap on religion is "dogmatism"-that is, the intention to hold on to a preconceived belief despite logical evidence to the contrary. Of course, the perceptive thinker will immediately see the thinness of such a view; for some of the more rigorous philosophy of the West has come directly from books of religion, as in Aquinas and Anselm; and one or two of our current scientific theories require an immoderate mass of faith to be believed, as in Darwinism.

Thus you have the popular reason vs. faith question and the ensuant science vs. religion corollary. The reason for all this confusion might be found in the vast misunderstanding people have come to show regarding Faith. When religion praises "faith," it often seems to us today that it is praising the intention to believe what you want to believe in the face of contrary evidence. (That is what we are taught in the universities.) So let us provide here a rectified definition of faith that was once written by the famed C.S. Lewis: faith is the power to continue to believe something a person once honestly thought to be true until cogent reasons for honestly changing his mind appear. This idea of continuing to believe is constantly ignored in discussions of this subject. It is always assumed that the difficulties of faith are intellectual difficulties: that a person who accepts a certain proposition (say, divine creation) will automatically go on believing it until grounds for disbelief appear. But this is not anywhere near the truth. How many freshmen who go to college these days and who end up losing their religion are honestly argued out of it? Is it not more the case that they leave their homes with a half-hearted religious mindset to gradually drift into nonbelief by a college's secular surroundings? How many of our own sudden temporary losses of faith are the result of rational thought rather than of mere mood swings of the soul?

If it is not really logical argumentation then that pulls a person into doubt, but merely a change of lifestyle (religious home to an atheistic college), change of mood (gladsome to dreary), change of scenery (church hall to magazine shop), what causes the "drift" or the "swing"? It is the emotions. For a sufficient amount of introspection will reveal to a person that when doubts attack his faith, they are in most instances unrelated to his reason. For example, a man might look at the immense complexity of writing in his genes, the ingenious architecture of his organs, and the immense precision of the revolution of the planets-and then he might look at the wild and unbelievable claims of Darwinian evolution-and his reason would conclude that it must have been God in fact who made it all. But then, the next day as he walks across the street and looks around, some weird conviction will hit, an inexplicable upwelling of feelings in his mind that makes it seem that everything around him was not in fact created by God: a doubt. But in that case, no new arguments for believing Darwin or disbelieving Creation will have come up: no new logical propositions will have been presented to him: it is merely a movement of his emotions. And so the doubt will not have been the result of his reason attacking his faith, but rather of his emotions attacking his reason. And here is the role of faith: to continue believing or to keep hold on that rational proposition (e.g., Creation which his reason initially accepted) in the face of fluctuating feelings.

These irrational fluctuations of belief are by no means peculiar to religious belief. There are things in life, say in learning to swim, which look dangerous but are not. Your instructor tells you it's safe. You know from past experience that what he says is true. You might even be able to see, by your own reason, that it's safe. But the crucial question is, will you go on believing it once you stand at the cliff's edge and look down at the water below? Your reaction might be to shake in fear; but you will have no rational grounds for disbelieving the water's safety. It is your senses and imagination that will attack your belief. The emotions will attack reason; but your faith in your instructor and in what you can see will encourage you to stick to your reason.

Looking for God in the Physical World (Empirically)
In spite of all the foregoing arguments, the final and ultimate demand usually voiced by our modern skeptics may be succinctly summed up by something a professor whose acquaintance I once made said: "I can only and will only believe in something if it's empirically confirmable. If you can provide me with empirical evidence for God, then I will believe in Him." Of course, on the exterior this is a statement uttered by one wishing to appear objective; for he invokes science (empiricism), a discipline world-renowned for its objectivity. But it should be apparent that to demand to have evidence of a God-whom for thousands of years was declared to be invisible, immaterial, and above all things like science-to demand to have proof of Him that can be touched and seen and smelled is at rock bottom a willful refusal to believe in Him. To say that God must be proved by science is to assume from the outset that no being outside science's reach can exist.

An illustration is here needed. We may say that looking for God in nature is something like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope of finding Shakespeare himself. In one sense, Shakespeare is indeed present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Othello or Hamlet are present. Nor is He diffused through the play like a gas. And if there were a simpleton who thought plays existed on their own, without an author (not to mention actors, producer, manager, etc), our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying that he studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare.

The argument here is that God is related to the universe more like an author is related to a play than as one object in the universe is related to another. And if God created the universe, He created space-time (the medium of science), which is to the universe much like meter is to a poem or the key is to a piece of music. And if this is so, then mere manipulation of the physical world will not reveal any absolute information about His nature. To try to prove God by empirical work is like analyzing a poem to find out the name of its poet or listening to a piece of music with the hope of discovering where the composer lives.

In conclusion we can say that Science is an enterprise that seeks to make the world more comprehensible to man, and Christianity is the only faith to maintain that the world is comprehensible to man, since in Christ, the Creator has made Himself known and through Him all is knowable. Christian faith that the world is comprehensible to man, and that the enterprise of trying to comprehend it is therefore worthwhile, finally bore the fruit that is science. It could not have happened elsewhere. Evolution is a fully scientific theory and is part of the Human tradition of seeking order in creation, even though it makes no explicit reference to God.

Contemporary Western culture as we have said typically sees faith and reason as opposed. There are different definitions of faith besides the one proposed above. "Faith" in general (not necessarily Christian faith) simply means suppositions that someone believes in but is unable to prove. Everyone has these, because everyone has to start from somewhere. If your suppositions come from the prevailing culture you will probably not be aware that you hold them; but if you spend some time in a quite different culture you rapidly become aware of what you take for granted, and what people of that different culture take for granted that you do not. Hebrews 11 probably gives the best definition of faith a Christian can find.

Reason is one of the tools that enable you to progress from your (faith-held) starting point in dealing with the world as it comes to you. Reason is therefore not opposed to faith, but complementary to it. It is the preferred tool in the West.

If you find someone arguing for a particular starting point, then that point is not really their starting point but an intermediate position. Their real starting point and faith lies in the tools they use in that argument. It is difficult for people to prove or disprove, by reason or anything else, the existence of God because such arguments would necessarily set the tools they use above God, in contradiction to the meaning of God as above all else. Necessarily it is a matter of faith. St. Augustine understood and summarized the relation between faith and reason in the phrase "credo ut intelligam,"which means "I believe in order to know."

Nobody can claim that he has full control of his life. If we did have such control, then why do we die? Let us be humble and submit ourselves to our Creator and entrust our lives in His hands: since He is the only ONE who has full control over our lives.