I realize that I have not added anything to this spot since last week. Part of the reason lies with personal issues. Part with my own struggle on whether to jump in on the aftermath of the Saddleback Valley forum or not. I don't think I will be able to resist dealing with the Saddleback forum and other politically related faith issues, but that is to come. For now, you may find some grins at seeing part of a piece that P. J. O'Rourke did for Science & Spirit, entitled On God. You can read the entire thing at: http://www.science-spirit.org/newdirections.php?article_id=744.
O'Rourke writes:
Faith depends upon belief in things that cannot be proved, and I can prove that more people flunk physics than flunk Sunday School.
"But science can be proved," a scientist would say. "The whole point of science is experimental proof." Yet we non-scientists have to take that experimental proof on faith because we don't know what the scientists are talking about. This makes science a matter of faith in men while religion, of course, is a matter of faith in God, and if you've got to choose...
Personally, I don't think you do. Science and religion both assert the same thing: that the universe operates according to rules and that those rules can be discerned. Albeit this does make it easier to believe in God than, for instance, organic chemistry. Just the fact of rules implies a rule maker while just the fact of mixing nitro with glycerin and causing an explosion does not imply a Ph.D.
I'm also given to understand that the rules of science begin to bend and even break at the extremes of the universe's scale. Down where everything is subatomic-sized, things tend to be a bit random with mesons, leptons, quarks, brilligs, slithy toves, etc., subjected to Strong Force, Weak Force, Force of Habit, and so on. Meanwhile, in the farthest reaches of outer space, matter, antimatter, dark matter, and whatsamatter are tripping over string theory and falling into black holes. God is not like that. He's famously there in the details, and He is the big picture.
In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God--if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may--who knows?--cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea.
His assertion that faith in science does come easier than faith in God is pretty much on target, I think. We live with and are affected by the powers of science everyday. While many very faithful church people proclaim their faith in God, most of them don't act like they believe God is very real. God and the divine forces seem to be so taken for granted that we don't really think that God matters. I am not advocating that we return to the days of the 1st century world or even of medieval times, when everything that happened was seen to be the direct result of God's actions and that anything consumed - food or water included - could contain an evil spirit, but I wonder what would happen if we took the divine more seriously?
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Another view on science and religion
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1 comment:
Just when I was about to un-bookmark you blog, you really seem to have taken a turn to the right, double entendre intended. That Saddleback Valley Forum must have been pretty good if you have taken to reading and quoting P J O'Rourke whose most apropos line is that "if you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it is free!". I also thought that from your perspective anything on Fox was not to be trusted, and that a renowned minister helping in some way to decide the next President of the United States, was violating the separation of church and state, setting aside all that Rev Wright has done and may yet do to decide the outcome. Thinking about it, we may only be a couple of Souters away from a Supreme Court that decides that clergy and people who attend church or declare a belief in God should not be allowed to vote, just to make sure that we don't allow any connection between the will of the Almighty and the affairs of the US Government.
I assume that your comments about religion and science are largely focussed on the US, as misplaced as they may be. In spite of all efforts to the contrary, the US is still a Christian nation where the majority practice moral behavior, and are the most generous nation on earth. The US remains an exceptional place where the Lord has blessed us with the most ambitious immigrants (the legal ones anyway) from all continents, melted together in a way that mostly insulates us from the ethnic and tribal madness that you see elsewhere. From all the evidence, the natural state for man on earth is to live in oppression, rather than free as God intended, for that has been the fate of billions, while only a few hundred million enjoy the life of liberty that we live. Based on scientific observation, we are a very special nation that has been truly blessed, at least for the time being. My final observation is that it is much easier to believe in God than to believe in Al Gore's theories, which bear little resemblance to science, and yet even he has found a following within this extremely faithful nation!
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