There is more to supporting science than just mouthing the words, I support science. If you mock and belittle scientists for patiently saying they dont know some things, and claim your religion is superior because it has (made up and unverifiable) answers to those empirical questions, then you are not pro-science. You are an enemy of science. On this theme, Ive added the following few paragraphs to my analysis of Gods Not Dead from yesterday. Even at 9,500 words, I realized it wasnt thorough enough: Wheaton tries to argue that because scientists do not have an account yet of the origin of life that perhaps it was God that originated it. What is so tedious about this is that it is a God of the Gaps argument antithetical to the entire spirit of science. God of the Gaps is an expression used to point out that theists used to think of God (or gods) as explaining a great number of phenomena that are now explicable in scientific ways. As science has filled in more and more of our understanding of the world, God keeps being proposed by theists as supposedly necessary to explain whatever happens to be left unexplained. It seems implausible that scientific (and correlate philosophical) advances would keep happening and happening and replacing God-explanation after God-explanation and yet whatever we happen to have not figured out yet is what God alone can account for. God has been overturned over and over again as best explanation we have science and philosophy. It repeatedly proves to be a bad explanation. So there is no reason to stop doing science and philosophy and just say God did it. Had scientists and philosophers stopped any of thousands of other times with and here we stop thinking and just say that God did it, enormous leaps of understanding would have never happened. If we start doing that now because we all become theists, how much progress will we lose? Science does not just assume God doesnt exist. Scientists have just found that saying, well, maybe its because of God is useless in the laboratory and in theory making. Even religious scientists who make great discoveries or build great technologies understand that they have to essentially leave God and holy books completely out of their scientific work because the only accounts that can really be meaningful are those that are empirically and mathematically precise and God is not those things. This is part of why the mere existence of religious scientists does not prove that religion and science go together. Religious people are good scientists only when they leave their religious beliefs out of their science and engineering. As people, this means they are living with cognitive dissonance. In the laboratory they are successful because they think as though there were no God but in church and personal piety they live as though there were none. They abandon all the categories of rigorous thinking that they employ in the lab when looking at their Scriptures. They can only be both religious and scientific by being categorically unscientific and accepting baseless religious authorities when being religious. So, it is silly when Christians say that since we are missing an exact, verifiable scientific account of the dynamics by which the origins of life happened, that somehow this means it could have been God or that the scientific method is flawed or limited. Science is limited here not by a conceptual impossibility (i.e., not because it makes no sense for life to come into being through a naturalistic process, but rather because lifes origins happened very long ago and it happened with such tiny rudimentary organisms that they didnt leave fossil traces. There are a range of ways abiogenesis (the origin of life) could have happened that scientists can dream up that are plausible. When scientists say they dont know how life began its not because they cant imagine things or that nothing would make sense, whereas Christians have a profound imagination or the only sensible possibility. Rather, its that unlike Christians, scientists are patiently waiting for evidence rather than just making something up. Theyre being humble and waiting to actually know. Christians are not smarter or more rational for just insisting they know and not waiting for evidence. Were all science to work like that, thered be no science. Dont blame scientists for embodying the patience and temporary comfortability with not knowing that routinely leads to actual scientific success. You cant say science and Christianity are compatible and then show that in your own thinking you advocate rushing to conclusions and stopping inquiries and settling for God did it explanations and disparaging the patience of scientists. When you do those things, you embody and promote anti-scientific attitudes in practice. You hurt the cause of science. There is more to supporting science than just mouthing the words, I support science. Im also going to add a few remarks on evolution driven by God and on antitheism that its been bugging me have been missing. Full post: patheos/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/03/a-philosophy-professor-analyzes-gods-not-deads-case-for-god/
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 16:07:46 +0000
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