• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

God & Science

As a scientist and a christian I reconsile both with the understanding that in science we are finding out God's rule book of the natural world. for example if you were making a universe you wouldn't want black to be green one minite and back to being black the next, you nead order and you nead it because if you don't any life you have on the planet will be mightily confused if you don't and if you want to prove your existance by the occasional miricle you can because the ocorance will be diferent from the norm and not just as unpedictable as the norm in an unruly system without rules of matter, thermodynamics etc.

Anyway as to the link I couldn't fathom what that was about, phycology and the working of brains is not my strong point (animal behavior fine, human behavior :confused: ) and for something they planed to relece in popular science books it all sounds a bit complex after several pints of brains skull attack, so I'll have to try reading it in the morning when I will edit this post to add any coments on it.
 
Interesting that modern tomography can now isolate specific areas of the brain which relate to "religious" experiences and that their stimulation by local magnetic fields can reproduce these experiences, but then lsd, amongst other psychodelic drugs, has long been known to be capable of dissolving the boundaries between self and the outer world (Huxley etc.) and producing a feeling of one-ness with god & the rest of the world. None of this proves that god exists to my mind.
 
Science doesn't have anything to say about God if it knows what's good for it, despite the foolish outbursts of people like Dawkins on the subject. The whole question is beyond anything science can hope to deal with. Likewise the religious should avoid making scientific prounoucements based on their beliefs. The two systems just investigage totally different areas. I don't reckon scientific proof can either validate or disprove properly-constructed religious belief, basically; it's all about whether you believe in reductive, naturalistic materialism or in some kind of order of things on a level above the natural. Neither of these are empirically provable.
 
In High School, I had a textbook which stated that the goal of science was to explain how things happen. The goal of religion, it said, was to explain why things happen. I have yet to come across a more concise explanation.
 
Not in the same causal framework as science, but someone religious could turn the question round and say it's science that doesn't explain why stuff happens. Religion tries to answer questions that science can't deal with, like why there's something rather than nothing. Science provides very useful but limited accounts of naturalistic causation - it explains stuff in terms of other stuff that is itself left unexplained. Like gravity or electromagnetism, for instance.
 
tomsk,

I've heard the viewpoint you paraphrase referred to as the "argument from ignorance".

A religious guy says to a scientist, "can you explain why there is something instead of nothing?"

The scientist says "no, not at the moment", so the religious exclaims,

"ah ha. So there must be a higher being behind it all".

I don't think you can reasonably dismiss science as "useful but limited".

It's true to say that science often incorporates physical laws that it can't fully account for into its explanations of certain phenomena.

But that doesn't invalidate its claims. Einstein used observable, testable facts about gravity to develop the theory of relativity, and that theory is still correct, even though he couldn't explain why the force we call gravity exists, and we still can't at the moment.

It is fair to say that the only limitations known to exist concerning science are those of time and scope. There is no reason to think that science will come up aganst a brick wall in terms of the number of things it can explain.

On the contrary, I think that there is every reason to suppose, based upon its past performance and its ongoing development, that science will ultimately be able to answer every question it is possible to ask.
 
Conners, I see your point and don't mean to insult science by calling it limited. It's obviously got a strong claim to be the most amazingly successful way of acquiring knowledge we've discovered. However, it can by definition only produce knowledge of a certain type. Even leaving aside the issue of scientific hypotheses being provisional and hence not really knowledge under a strict definition, the kinds of statements or hypotheses scientists can make to explain their data are limited to what could theoretically be disproved using controlled experiments. I don't mean they have to be falsifiable using current experimental technology, just that such a test can be imagined in theory. I don't believe there could ever be an experiment designed that would have anything to say either way about why there is something rather than nothing. Just as there could never be a valid experiment to disprove the existence of God. Science can and will discover potentially infinite regresses of explanation at finer and finer levels of detail, but it never gets to the stage of trying to answer absolute questions about why stuff happens.

Moreover, scientific statements can't define their own terms. So an explanation involving gravity must assume the existence of gravity without defining it. Following this back to the basic principles, I reckon it's true to say that science can't explain why things happen, because there always have to be undefined/unexamined concepts that are assumed in order to explain things higher up the structure.

As I said above, I think religious concepts tend to fall down when you try to use them to explain empirical phenomena. I'm not suggesting religion fills in the explanatory gaps that science has not yet got to, but rather that well-formulated statements made within each frame of reference will always fail to connect with each other. I don't know if this makes sense. I certainly didn't want to suggest that the necessary ignorance of science about certain areas somehow means any particular religious statement must be true.
 
I understand where you're coming from, tomsk.

However, while it's true to say that many scientific statements don't "define their own terms," I still think that this only reflects the incomplete understanding 21st century science has of the universe, not the ultimate limits of science.

For example, your description of "infinite regresses of explanation at finer and finer levels of detail" seems to me a very eloquent and accurate way of talking about science between the years c3,000BC to the the present day. And it is true to say that, for instance, Newton observed gravity but couldn't tell us much about it's effects on space and time, Einstein filled in many of the gaps, and then quantum physics took things down to the subatomic level, all the while incorporating the previous theory into the new way of looking at things, rather than overturning it or disproving it.

However, as this process continues, the extent of our knowledge becoming both greater and more refined, we will converge on some really fundamental truths.

I mean, even if, incredibly, it turns out that the basic tents of Christianity are correct and that an anthropomorphic God created the Universe and all things in it, God Himself must ultimately become subject to the endeavours of science.

If Richard Dawkins woke up in the Christian heavan, the first thing he'd do, besides feeling like a right muppet, would be to ask the big man how it all worked....where is heaven, what medium does it exist in, what is the mechniam by which a soul inhabits a physical body during life etc?

Eventually, we'd all be able to measure Him, probe Him and write books about Him.

Frank Tipler said something like this

"either theology is complete nonsense, having no merit at all, or it must ultimately become a branch of science".

I'm no scientist, so let me know if I've overlooked a key part of the definition of science that rules-out any involvement with religion and the subjects religion examines.

But to me, science is just the search for answers about the world around us.
 
Conners, I've been thinking about this and I'm less convinced than I was of the utter separateness of science and religion. But I'm still not sure I agree with you. For me, if science were to start trying to evaluate religious and metaphysical claims it would have to go through such a revolutionary change that I don't think it would really still be science. You seem to be saying that all the questions we can ask should eventually be either answered or revealed as meaningless. I think that although we can't tell where the precise limits of science might be, there is a definite limit to the kinds of question that science can ask or hope to answer (or even dissolve).

I've heard scientists making claims that many branches of knowledge will eventually become part of science. For example, Edward Wilson argues in 'Consilience' that all sorts of things, including stuff like literary, philosophical and cultural studies, will eventually be scientific. (IIRC). This can be pretty baffling and tends to confirm my theories that scientists reveal their own naivety when they blunder into disciplines. He should stick to the bees, methinks. Theology is a more borderline case because it sometimes make claims that initially seem to belong in the same sort of area as cosmology, say.

I agree that what seems theoretically unfalsifiable/untestable today can become falsifiable eventually - for example, if I remember right many of Newton's astronomical theories made predictions that were unfalsifiable at the time but which could later on be tested when measuring equipment had improved.

However, I think that you are not taking into account something fundamental about what religion is supposed to be. Would a God who could be probed and tested in double-blind controlled experiments be a god at all in any real sense of the word? If Dawkins woke up in heaven, then the truth behind the universe would presumably not be something that could be explained to him discursively - God could perhaps tell him a bit more about science, and this would be the sort of thing we could have discovered anyway, the sort of thing any other scientist could have explained to him just as well. But any real religious experience of seeming to understand how and why it all works, of direct experience of the divine, might well not be something that could be communicated in words or equations.

Seems to me that perhaps the most basic question of religion is 'Is this all there is?' Is the universe we experience through our senses the only dimension of existence, or are there more mysterious levels of existence? If I ask this question, surely science is fated always to reply 'I don't know if this is all there is. But here's some more of it. And some more! And more!" How can it get beyond the world of experience? Often all it has to offer is occam's razor - just saying that as our experience is all we have, we should avoid believing in stuff outside our experience. But what we experience is determined by the sensory organs we find ourselves equipped with...

But I'm neither particularly religious nor a scientist, and I admit that it could well be that all sorts of claims that we now think of as religious will one day be either disproven or revealed as meaningless. I suppose it comes down to whether or not you think the universe's ultimate nature is intelligible to the human mind.
:confused:
 
in my learnings i have formulated my own belief that God created evolution as a self-righting/self-balancing autonomous device so he wouldn't have to work as hard.

ofcourse, when i would say this in catholick school, everyone would make fun of me...the nuns didn't like it, either.

i go both ways...it's more fun:D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top