On Science and Faith
We travelled to the western part of our state recently and in one smaller rural town we passed the offices of one of the political parties. There was a large sign in the window urging those local, rural residents to “vote civility, kindness, and science.” The urban/rural divide in this country is great. “Progress” doesn’t play well in fly-over country and that party office knew it. Space-X’s internet web in the sky means little when the drought has a grip on your crops and you can’t breathe from all of the wildfire smoke. So instead, they were pushing civility, kindness, and science.
The truth matters when it comes to the party of “civility, kindness” and it would be easy for me to take on that low-hanging fruit. The people in that rural town aren’t stupid and know what I’m saying. This is the same party that favors abortions at any stage of pregnancy and birth, and won’t stop the riots, tyranny and anarchy in larger urban centers. For the folks in that town we visited, this is not the same civility and kindness with which they were familiar. The people in that small town knew that, without God, how would anyone know what’s civil and kind anyway?
Voting for science would be consistent for this party that denied to include the name “God” in their party platform in their 2012 national convention. From the floor of their convention, they voted and denied Him three times (yes, you can’t make this stuff up). To be entirely clear, party operatives added His name—in some form—back in to their stated principal goals after the convention. But God’s name was unmistakably booed from the floor in Charlotte. Go ahead. Look it up.
Science itself would find objectionable the notion that you could “vote” for it. Science is a never-ending pursuit of knowledge that starts with hypothesis and through exhaustive research, observation, and examination, determines what it knows about reality at any given time. Despite those who want to “use” science in the place of say, faith, science is never “settled” on anything. There is always something to observe and learn and discover. At least, for “good” science, that’s the case.
In High School, I learned about bad science. People who begin their scientific pursuits after determining what their outcomes will be, pervert the very discipline they advocate. I love science—good science, that is—that knows its limitations and parameters. I am a closet meteorologist, amateur astronomer, wear a mask (who the heck cares), and I endured my annual flu shot this week. Still, popular cultural narratives usually lack the intellectual rigor required to report on good science. Good science doesn’t fit neatly into a thirty-second sound bite or a one-page press release. Bad science usually cuts to the chase and makes for good copy.
Science has limits. In many ways it can explain the “what’s” and the “how’s” of this world. But it can never explain the “why.” Science will never know the “why’s” of the universe unless the creator of the universe reveals it Himself. He made it for His greater glory, a glory to be radiated from His only Son, and reflected on the countenances of you and me.
Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar, the “father” of human organ transplants, was not a man of faith. Still he wrote, “‘The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things—questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’; ‘What are we all here for?’; ‘What is the point of living?’”
I don’t know why people turn to science to explain why there is not a God. Science can never explain the “why” of the universe. Sir Peter concluded that it is only “to imaginative literature and religion that we must turn for answers to such questions.”
Science cannot explain the aesthetic purity of a rose. Science cannot explain why the universe came into existence or what preceded the birth of the physical world. How did the first living organisms emerge from inanimate matter and energy? How did advanced cells emerge from simpler organisms? What is consciousness and how did it arise in living things? How are we able to understand science—biology, physics, math, engineering, medicine—the complexities of cognitive thought processes? Where did that come from? How are humans able to attain mastery in artistic expression, music, literature, and architecture?
Allow me to start wrapping this up with this from noted apologist and Oxford triple-PhD Dr. John Lennox:
“It is one thing to say (correctly) that science cannot answer questions of ultimate purpose. It is quite another to dismiss purpose (and beauty and truth) as an illusion because science cannot deal with it.”
The truth matters when it comes to science and faith. And, I believe Dr. Lennox explains the motivation for the words on that rural office window. God is not illusion because science cannot deal with Him. God was not meant to be a naturalistic explanation anyway. He is supernatural. Now there’s someone for whom I can cast an informed ballot.
If, as many progressives believe, our brains are just a fortunate accident, are our brains trustworthy? If our brains are miraculous accidents, can we believe anything, much less what progressives say? This formulation greatly bothered another unimpeachable source—none other than Charles Darwin who said this in a letter to a friend less than a year before Darwin’s death:
“Nevertheless, you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Good question.
The truth matters when marking a ballot or travelling through small-town, rural, fly-over America. That’s why in the coming election I’ll “vote” for science, right after I vote for God.