HEELCATCHER

There is a common conception in our culture that Science has all the answers to life and has conquered the superstitious myths of religion, particularly Judeo-Christian belief.

This is a myth in itself.

Here are a few observations that need to be remembered as you consider the religion-science debate:

1. There is a difference between science, which is based on observation and experimentation with repeatable results, and Science, which is a philosophical worldview. The scientific method cannot address the origin of the universe or the emergence of life. There is no repeatable experiment to show something emerging out of nothing or life emerging out of non-life. Thus, when Science speaks on these issues, it enters into philosophy (and even magic) not true science.

2. Philosophical Science operates out of presuppositions just as religion does. It makes certain assumptions which govern how it interprets data. It also has its own "gurus," dogma, and heresy. Consider the recent firestorm over the scientific article which dared to mention the idea of a "Creator" in the design of the human hand. No scientist (no human for that matter) operates from a purely "objective" viewpoint. We all bring our subjectivity, perspective, presuppositions, and, dare I say, faith to the table.

3. The scientific movement didn't emerge despite Christian faith rather it emerged because of Christian faith. 

Science arose only in Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. …If the universe was created in accord with rational rules by a perfect, rational creator, then it ought to yield its secrets to reason and observation. Hence the scientific truism that nature is a book meant to be read. (Rodney Stark, Ph.D., Sociology, University of California Berkeley)

The vast majority of early scientists (51 of the 52 major scientific figures during the Scientific Revolution) held a strong Judeo-Christian worldview and saw their work as a way of discovering the rational order in a universe created by a Rational God.

4. Less than 50 years ago, the dominant, dogmatic scientific view was that the universe was eternal and had no beginning. The scientific community strongly resisted the idea of a "beginning" to the universe because the reality that the universe emerged out of nothing would insinuate a Creator. Science still has no adequate answer for how a complex universe randomly emerged out of pure nothingness. All Science can do is credit "quantum fluctuations." See this insightful video by MIT-physicist, Gerald Schroeder, on the meaning of "quantum fluctuations."

5. Materialistic Science is in itself self-defeating. If there is nothing metaphysical or spiritual to the universe, then the very thoughts of Science are merely random, chemical reactions within the human brain that cannot be trusted and certainly shouldn't be argued over. Why argue that your random meaningless neurological chemical reactions are more true than my random meaningingless neurological chemical reactions? Materialistic Science, in the end, leads to biological determinism and to the death of free will.

6. Materialistic Science can't answer the bigger questions of life. Who am I? Why am I here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Materialistic Science has no materialistic explanation for human consciousness, our imagination, our hunger for purpose and meaning, moral ethics (especially compassion for the weak), love, or life itself (i.e., what is the materialistic difference between life and non-life?).

7. True scientific discovery should be the gateway to wonder not atheism. When Darwin first proposed evolution 150 years ago, he believed the "simple cell" was an unsophisticated blob of protoplasm. Today, we know that the "simple cell" is more complex, with more inter-connected moving parts, than we could ever imagine. We also know that the information encoded on a strand of DNA is enough to fill a mountain of encyclopedias. The complexity, beauty, and mystery of the universe, of nature, of the human body, of the brain, of life itself should move us to increasing humility and wonder.

The typical response to these observations is that Science has already disproven the Bible. This is a "straw man" argument that simplifies a complex debate. At best, an honest skeptic could say that "the jury is still out." The Bible has been scoffed at before only to discover that it is quite amazing in its historical accuracy.

For instance, like mentioned above, fifty years ago many scientists denied that the universe had a beginning. Now they generally accept that the universe amazingly (and unexplanably) emerged out of pure nothingness….what theology has historically called creatio ex nihilio.

It is also fascinating that what looks like "substance" to us is actually just energy held together by strong nuclear forces. 

By a fraction of a microsecond following the creation, the primary material object of the big bang was concentrated as exquisitely intense energy. There are many types of energy,  but the form most manifest microseconds after the creation was electromagnetic radiation–in simplistic terms, something akin to superpowerful light beams. …Every physical object in this vast universe, including our human bodies, is built of the light of creation. (Gerald Schroeder, God According to God, pp. 28-29).

And God said, "Let there be light" and there was light (Genesis 1:3).

Physicist Gerald Schroeder also presents an interesting theory of how our scientific understanding of time dilation (that time is not constant but relative to velocity and gravity) could indicate how the six days of creation from God's perspective could look like billions of years from ours. I don't agree with his conclusions (and honestly don't understand his formuli and calculations) but one thought does stand out–our conception of time is not as simple as we think it is.

In the end, one has to decide to exercise faith in something…either in the current theories of materialistic Science or in the Scriptures or in something else.

Perhaps I am a fool in the world's eyes for believing in Scripture…for believing in a Creator, for believing in the inherent dignity of humanity, for believing in a moral fall that explains the evil in this world, for believing in a prophesied Messiah who died for our redemption, for believing in the bodily resurrection, for believing in eternal life. 

But I will be a fool for the love, hope, and purpose found in Jesus Christ.

For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)

Lately I have been fascinated by Gerald Schroeder's books. He has a Ph.D in physics and earth sciences from MIT. I don't agree with everything he writes in the theological realm but he makes me think about the amazing nature of our universe and the incredible complexity and beauty within it.

Here is an extended quote from his book, God According to God, that was too good not to post:

"Stephen Hawking, in his A Brief History in Time, the most widely sold science book every written, teaches the world about the potential power of random events to produce meaningful complex order, such as in a work of literature.

"It is a bit like the well-known hordes of monkeys hammering away on typewriters. Most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets" (Hawking, p. 123).

It is a compelling premise, but totally off base… I am surprised that Professor Hawking would have let this slip occur. Nonetheless, it convinced one of the world's leading literary magazines, The New Yorker, to devote its Christmas and New Year's cover of 2002 to showing monkeys hammering away on typewriters. As Hawking predicted, most failed to get the sonnet. But, behold, there in the lower right-hand corner is a very happy monkey. He got the sonnet.

I don't know many sonnets. In fact, when I thought about this, I only knew the opening line of one, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." There are not quite five hundred letters in that sonnet. All Shakespeare's sonnets are about the same length, all by definition fourteen lines long. Can we get a sonnet by chance? If Hawking says so, it must be true. But is it?

Let's consider 500 grab bags each holding the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I reach into the bag blindfolded and pull out a letter. The likelihood that it will be s for the first letter of the sonnet is one chance in 26. The likelihood that in the initial two draws from the first two bags I will get an s and then an h is one chance in 26 times 26. And so on for the 500 letters. Neglecting spaces between the words, the chance of getting an entire sonnet by chance is 26 multiplied by itself 500 times. That seems as if it may be a fairly big number. And it is. Surprisingly so.

That number comes out to be a one with 700 zeroes after it. In conventional math terms, it is 10⁷⁰⁰. To give a sense of scale for reference, the known universe, including all forms of matter and energy, weighs on the order of 10⁵⁶ grams; the number of particles (protons, neutrons, electrons, muons) in the known universe is 10⁸⁰….

Chance does not produce intelligible text and certainly not a sonnet, not in our universe.

But so convincing is Hawking's argument that the students at Plymouth University in Britain convinced the National Arts Council to put up 2000 pounds [~$4000] to try the monkeys' typing skill. With that stipend they rented a monkey house at the Paignton Zoo in Devon and placed a computer keyboard inside. The Times (May 9, 2003) reported on the results under the headline, "Much Ado, but Monkeys Fail Shakespeare Test."

For a month, six monkeys hammered away on the keyboard. They failed to produce a single English word. Surprised, since the shortest word in the English language is one letter long? Surely the monkeys must have hit an a or an I in all their efforts. But think about it. To make the word a, a space on each side of the letter is required. That means typing: space, a, space. If there are 100 keys on the computer keyboard, neglecting the fact that the space bar is somewhat larger than the letter keys, the probability of typing space, a, space is one chance in a 100 times 100 times 100, which comes out to be one chance in a million.

Random guessing in a spelling bee is always a losing proposition. And that is for a single-letter word.

So why does the monkey premise make the cover of one of the world's leading intellectual publications? The reason is distressingly simple. If you are fed from your earliest days the saga that unguided random reactions produced life, then…certainly you'll believe the untruth that sonnets will come popping out of your random letter generator" (Schroeder, God According to God, pp. 35-37).

And, on top of that, in the pure evolutionary scheme of things, there is no keyboard and there are no monkeys. The beauty of the Shakespearean sonnet must miraculously emerge out of nothing.

Who says that science doesn't believe in miracles?