The conflict between biblical apologists and scientists has existed since scientists evolved from their philosopher progenitors, walking perhaps a bit more upright and armed with a potent mix of observation and reason. The 20th century, however, suggested a trend toward a new age of enlightenment as it enjoyed a profound cooling of the outright hostility that had in centuries past sent untold numbers to their deaths labeled as heretics or worse. On the cusp of the millennium, the Catholic Church even went so far as to offer an official expression of regret for the denouncement and trial of Galileo and at least a tacit acknowledgement of the value of the theory of evolution.
That such a progressive trend could not be maintained should perhaps not come as a tremendous surprise. But the source of its arrest is not the Catholic Church. Rather, the new enemy of reason is far less catholic and far more local. Call them what you will—neo-creationists, intelligent design proponents, Creation “scientists”—but these religious soldiers are staging a war on any system of thought that reveals their quaint mythology for what it is: an outdated collection of parables written by men but ascribed to a supernatural origin, diluted by centuries of selective translation and editing but still held by many as a paragon of supreme truth.
Whether we’re talking about the Torah, Bible, or Koran is immaterial here, since each scripture makes the same claim: Divine truth, as inspired by God, was transcribed by certain chosen prophets and left to be the law of mankind. These writings not only tell us how to behave on the way to where we’re going (which, in the case of Christianity and Islam, is a day of ultimate judgment), but they also tell us whence we came, namely in a flash of creation, when we appeared essentially as we are, with no history of evolution from inferior forms.
For an increasingly vocal group, it seems of the utmost importance to confirm every facet of this story as literal truth and inveigh against any person or idea that challenges it. It is therefore that the stories of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, the formation of the earth some nine billion years later, and the gradual emergence and evolution of life in increasingly complex forms are threatening and offensive to this group, which sees such theories and their supporting evidence as efforts to belie the history of the world that it holds so dear.
Differences of opinion are nothing new to mankind, and those differences have either resulted in irrational, violent conflict or reasonable debate. Somewhere skewed from the middle we find the current dispute between evolutionists and proponents of “intelligent design,” which is the vogue term for creationism at the moment. But while the creation-versus-evolution discord of the past has been clearly along religious and secular lines, the current challenge is far more insidious in that the front lines have been drawn in American science classrooms by a group bent on redefining religion as science.
Many excellent articles have been written about the details of this debate (which, any scientist could tell you, is not a scientific debate at all) and its repercussions, so I won’t repeat what has already been adequately argued by others. Rather, I’d like to respond to an accusation that has come up now and again: It has been said that science has become a religion unto itself. Such an accusation, I believe, demands a response, not because of its preposterousness, but because of its basis in the slightest germ of truth. Namely, for science to exist, it does rely on a certain degree of faith.
Let me start, appropriately enough, at the beginning. Science does not have a birthday, necessarily, but there are certain key events in the history of science that show its maturity and development into the system of thought and collection of knowledge we have today. Perhaps the most fundamental, all-encompassing science, physics, grew out of something called natural philosophy. Originally, especially in the days of Plato and Aristotle, it was believed that an appeal to pure reason was sufficient to lay out the truths of the universe.
Aristotle’s concept of gravity was perfectly reasonable, for instance. He believed that the weight of an object was an indication of its attraction to the ground, and he therefore believed that an object at a certain weight would fall to the ground at a certain rate and that an object of twice that weight would fall to the ground at twice the first object’s rate of descent. It was a completely reasonable argument. It was also completely wrong.
It was not until Galileo conducted controlled experiments that it was revealed that the weight of an object was irrelevant as it applied to its descent in free fall. In other words, a pebble would fall to earth just as quickly as a cannonball. Furthermore, each object would accelerate on its way down. It was a fascinating, if counterintuitive, observation. But it wasn’t until the work of a man who was born on the day Galileo died that the details were worked out.
Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, is considered one of the crowning achievements in the history of human thought. Building upon the work of Johannes Kepler, Newton provided a mathematical description of the behavior of objects under the influence of gravity (though exactly what gravity was remained essentially undefined). Mathematically, what Newton came up with was an expression that showed the gravitational attraction between two bodies as something proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It's what became known as his Law of Universal Gravitation.
The language of science is universal because it is expressed chiefly in the universal language of mathematics, which the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss referred to as the “queen of the sciences.” But while the language of science depends on axioms—logical starting points that are taken as self-evident truths without proof—as its basis, science does not. In fact, when David Hilbert threw down the gauntlet to fellow mathematicians at the turn of the 20th century with what became known as “Hilbert’s problems,” hitherto unresolved issues in mathematics, his sixth problem was the challenge to axiomatize all of physics. The problem has since been abandoned and is generally regarded as impossible. (After all, how would we find a “self-evident truth” to describe the fundamental force of gravitation when its behavior confounded the pure reason of Aristotle?)
It is at this point that we come to the issue of faith in science and mathematics. Any logical system requires a starting point, a foundation on which the rest of the system is to be built. In mathematics, this starting point is known collectively as the system of axioms and postulates, which are fundamental ideas that are considered self-evident and are accepted without proof. After all, to require proof would rely on an earlier, more fundamental concept, which further demonstrates by reduction the need for a set of fundamental logical building blocks. An example of an axiom is the following statement: “Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” The statement is so obvious that one might wonder why to even bother codifying it. But the entire system of mathematics is based on and derived from a very compact set of similarly obvious axioms—and a few postulates whose self-evidence has been questioned. In fact, the denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate, which states that through any given point not on a line there passes exactly one line parallel to that line in the same plane, has created several logically consistent forms of geometry known as non-Euclidean geometries. In set theory, the Axiom of Choice, which I won’t define here, is a source of considerable controversy.
Axioms and postulates are mathematics’ collective leap of faith. Once that leap is made, the entire system is built on the power of pure reason and logic, and mathematics is the only science in which indisputable proof is possible within its own system.
The rest of science, unlike mathematics, has observation rather than axioms as its basis. But there are at least two leaps of faith that are required to make science meaningful, with one arguably more important than the other. The first leap of faith is essentially philosophical. Namely, science progresses based on the belief that there are answers to the questions we can ask. It is important to realize that the issue is not about our ability to find those answers, but rather whether the answers exist in some kind of platonic, ethereal sense. Stripped down, it is almost like saying that the value of asking why we are here depends on knowing that we are indeed here. It is also fair to point out after this example that of all the types of questions science is equipped to answer, those beginning with why present probably the greatest challenge and the least tendency to tractability.
The second leap of faith in science is just as fundamental, but it is not so ethereal as to have no place in some of physics’ most important theories. The understanding of our universe depends on the belief that the physical laws that we observe and describe locally obtain universally. In other words, we take it on faith that gravity does not obey an inverse-square law in our cosmic neighborhood while obeying an inverse-cube law elsewhere in the universe. We take it on faith that what we know as carbon has a universal atomic weight of 12.011. We take it on faith that the speed of light is unchanging throughout the universe. Without this level of faith, the practice of science is meaningless, an exercise in local bookkeeping and functional technology. Fortunately, every piece of evidence we observe suggests that our faith is justified.
It is important to realize that science is not one static thing. Rather, scientific knowledge is the concatenation of observations and analyses into a system that explains what has come before and predicts with high accuracy what is yet to be observed. When a theory fails to match up with experimental results, it is revised or discarded. Further, part of the scientific process is the replication of previous results by other scientists. As part of its design, science is self-correcting. And in this manner, science distinguishes itself as anything but a religion in every way, save for the enthusiasm and devotion of its practitioners. Religion, on the other hand, has one unchanging story bolstered only by its contempt for revision.
If what we know as nature began with the universe, then perhaps the cause of the universe’s creation can be justly called supernatural. Furthermore, nothing in the canon of scientific laws precludes the existence of a supernatural lawmaker. God and science need not be mutually exclusive. But while there is no evidence sufficient to deny the existence of God once and for all, there is also no evidence sufficient to support his existence. Without such evidence either way, I believe the only choice is one of wary agnosticism.
While there is perhaps not enough evidence to deny the existence of a supernatural creator of the universe, I do believe that the preponderance of the evidence, together with pure reason, is sufficient to deny the version of God that is presented in every scriptural text available on earth. From my perspective, the existence of incompatible and contradictory religions is incongruous with the presence of a benevolent creator god with a personal interest in our lives and our reverence for him. As the “choice” of which religion to practice is more often made by geography and the lottery of birth than by genuine contemplation, I see no value in the idea that God has peppered his creation with religions true and false, leaving his flock to determine the right path on the way to either damnation or salvation. Such is a consideration removed from scriptural inconsistencies, biblical scientific impossibilities, and the general knowledge of man’s penchant for exaggeration of stories, especially as they are handed down from generation to generation. Religious scripture is, in my opinion, only of value as a model of man’s need to grapple with his origins and fate in a world filled with birth and death.
Let us conclude with a thought experiment. Imagine that I have discovered a chemical agent with powerful amnestic effects, capable of wiping every human memory clean. On one clear day, I release the compound into the air and let it circle the globe while I erase every computer drive and burn every book on the planet. Mankind’s memory will have effectively been erased. All his accomplishments, all his science, all his religion are gone. It is my contention that as mankind shakes off the fog of amnesia and works to build a new world, the fundamental questions of birth and death—both ours and that of our universe—would again send us on the search for answers. And I believe that such a search would once again produce religion and science. The difference, of course, is that all of the religious history is now gone; all the stories of the prophets have been erased, as have been the stories of creation and the predictions of destruction. All would have to be created anew. Would this confusion be sufficient to elicit a communiqué from God? (And if so, couldn’t our current times be called sufficiently confusing?) My conjecture is that the religion of this hypothetical future would bear little resemblance to the religions of the present other than in its treatment of a creation myth, a few laws of morality (and its attendant creation of a priesthood to enforce that morality, presumably largely made up of the authors of the new scriptures), a tale of how things are going to wind up at the end, and perhaps even a supernatural explanation for what happened to everyone’s memory on that one clear day.
But science, when it emerged, would go through the regular series of false starts and corrections and eventually arrive at a system almost indistinguishable from the one we have today. Why? Because science is a representation of the observed, an attempt at grasping truth by using the best evidence available to us. Such a conjecture is based on reason and no small degree of faith that what we can learn through science sets us on a path that brings us ever closer to truth.
That such a progressive trend could not be maintained should perhaps not come as a tremendous surprise. But the source of its arrest is not the Catholic Church. Rather, the new enemy of reason is far less catholic and far more local. Call them what you will—neo-creationists, intelligent design proponents, Creation “scientists”—but these religious soldiers are staging a war on any system of thought that reveals their quaint mythology for what it is: an outdated collection of parables written by men but ascribed to a supernatural origin, diluted by centuries of selective translation and editing but still held by many as a paragon of supreme truth.
Whether we’re talking about the Torah, Bible, or Koran is immaterial here, since each scripture makes the same claim: Divine truth, as inspired by God, was transcribed by certain chosen prophets and left to be the law of mankind. These writings not only tell us how to behave on the way to where we’re going (which, in the case of Christianity and Islam, is a day of ultimate judgment), but they also tell us whence we came, namely in a flash of creation, when we appeared essentially as we are, with no history of evolution from inferior forms.
For an increasingly vocal group, it seems of the utmost importance to confirm every facet of this story as literal truth and inveigh against any person or idea that challenges it. It is therefore that the stories of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, the formation of the earth some nine billion years later, and the gradual emergence and evolution of life in increasingly complex forms are threatening and offensive to this group, which sees such theories and their supporting evidence as efforts to belie the history of the world that it holds so dear.
Differences of opinion are nothing new to mankind, and those differences have either resulted in irrational, violent conflict or reasonable debate. Somewhere skewed from the middle we find the current dispute between evolutionists and proponents of “intelligent design,” which is the vogue term for creationism at the moment. But while the creation-versus-evolution discord of the past has been clearly along religious and secular lines, the current challenge is far more insidious in that the front lines have been drawn in American science classrooms by a group bent on redefining religion as science.
Many excellent articles have been written about the details of this debate (which, any scientist could tell you, is not a scientific debate at all) and its repercussions, so I won’t repeat what has already been adequately argued by others. Rather, I’d like to respond to an accusation that has come up now and again: It has been said that science has become a religion unto itself. Such an accusation, I believe, demands a response, not because of its preposterousness, but because of its basis in the slightest germ of truth. Namely, for science to exist, it does rely on a certain degree of faith.
Let me start, appropriately enough, at the beginning. Science does not have a birthday, necessarily, but there are certain key events in the history of science that show its maturity and development into the system of thought and collection of knowledge we have today. Perhaps the most fundamental, all-encompassing science, physics, grew out of something called natural philosophy. Originally, especially in the days of Plato and Aristotle, it was believed that an appeal to pure reason was sufficient to lay out the truths of the universe.
Aristotle’s concept of gravity was perfectly reasonable, for instance. He believed that the weight of an object was an indication of its attraction to the ground, and he therefore believed that an object at a certain weight would fall to the ground at a certain rate and that an object of twice that weight would fall to the ground at twice the first object’s rate of descent. It was a completely reasonable argument. It was also completely wrong.
It was not until Galileo conducted controlled experiments that it was revealed that the weight of an object was irrelevant as it applied to its descent in free fall. In other words, a pebble would fall to earth just as quickly as a cannonball. Furthermore, each object would accelerate on its way down. It was a fascinating, if counterintuitive, observation. But it wasn’t until the work of a man who was born on the day Galileo died that the details were worked out.
Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, is considered one of the crowning achievements in the history of human thought. Building upon the work of Johannes Kepler, Newton provided a mathematical description of the behavior of objects under the influence of gravity (though exactly what gravity was remained essentially undefined). Mathematically, what Newton came up with was an expression that showed the gravitational attraction between two bodies as something proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It's what became known as his Law of Universal Gravitation.
The language of science is universal because it is expressed chiefly in the universal language of mathematics, which the great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss referred to as the “queen of the sciences.” But while the language of science depends on axioms—logical starting points that are taken as self-evident truths without proof—as its basis, science does not. In fact, when David Hilbert threw down the gauntlet to fellow mathematicians at the turn of the 20th century with what became known as “Hilbert’s problems,” hitherto unresolved issues in mathematics, his sixth problem was the challenge to axiomatize all of physics. The problem has since been abandoned and is generally regarded as impossible. (After all, how would we find a “self-evident truth” to describe the fundamental force of gravitation when its behavior confounded the pure reason of Aristotle?)
It is at this point that we come to the issue of faith in science and mathematics. Any logical system requires a starting point, a foundation on which the rest of the system is to be built. In mathematics, this starting point is known collectively as the system of axioms and postulates, which are fundamental ideas that are considered self-evident and are accepted without proof. After all, to require proof would rely on an earlier, more fundamental concept, which further demonstrates by reduction the need for a set of fundamental logical building blocks. An example of an axiom is the following statement: “Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” The statement is so obvious that one might wonder why to even bother codifying it. But the entire system of mathematics is based on and derived from a very compact set of similarly obvious axioms—and a few postulates whose self-evidence has been questioned. In fact, the denial of Euclid’s parallel postulate, which states that through any given point not on a line there passes exactly one line parallel to that line in the same plane, has created several logically consistent forms of geometry known as non-Euclidean geometries. In set theory, the Axiom of Choice, which I won’t define here, is a source of considerable controversy.
Axioms and postulates are mathematics’ collective leap of faith. Once that leap is made, the entire system is built on the power of pure reason and logic, and mathematics is the only science in which indisputable proof is possible within its own system.
The rest of science, unlike mathematics, has observation rather than axioms as its basis. But there are at least two leaps of faith that are required to make science meaningful, with one arguably more important than the other. The first leap of faith is essentially philosophical. Namely, science progresses based on the belief that there are answers to the questions we can ask. It is important to realize that the issue is not about our ability to find those answers, but rather whether the answers exist in some kind of platonic, ethereal sense. Stripped down, it is almost like saying that the value of asking why we are here depends on knowing that we are indeed here. It is also fair to point out after this example that of all the types of questions science is equipped to answer, those beginning with why present probably the greatest challenge and the least tendency to tractability.
The second leap of faith in science is just as fundamental, but it is not so ethereal as to have no place in some of physics’ most important theories. The understanding of our universe depends on the belief that the physical laws that we observe and describe locally obtain universally. In other words, we take it on faith that gravity does not obey an inverse-square law in our cosmic neighborhood while obeying an inverse-cube law elsewhere in the universe. We take it on faith that what we know as carbon has a universal atomic weight of 12.011. We take it on faith that the speed of light is unchanging throughout the universe. Without this level of faith, the practice of science is meaningless, an exercise in local bookkeeping and functional technology. Fortunately, every piece of evidence we observe suggests that our faith is justified.
It is important to realize that science is not one static thing. Rather, scientific knowledge is the concatenation of observations and analyses into a system that explains what has come before and predicts with high accuracy what is yet to be observed. When a theory fails to match up with experimental results, it is revised or discarded. Further, part of the scientific process is the replication of previous results by other scientists. As part of its design, science is self-correcting. And in this manner, science distinguishes itself as anything but a religion in every way, save for the enthusiasm and devotion of its practitioners. Religion, on the other hand, has one unchanging story bolstered only by its contempt for revision.
If what we know as nature began with the universe, then perhaps the cause of the universe’s creation can be justly called supernatural. Furthermore, nothing in the canon of scientific laws precludes the existence of a supernatural lawmaker. God and science need not be mutually exclusive. But while there is no evidence sufficient to deny the existence of God once and for all, there is also no evidence sufficient to support his existence. Without such evidence either way, I believe the only choice is one of wary agnosticism.
While there is perhaps not enough evidence to deny the existence of a supernatural creator of the universe, I do believe that the preponderance of the evidence, together with pure reason, is sufficient to deny the version of God that is presented in every scriptural text available on earth. From my perspective, the existence of incompatible and contradictory religions is incongruous with the presence of a benevolent creator god with a personal interest in our lives and our reverence for him. As the “choice” of which religion to practice is more often made by geography and the lottery of birth than by genuine contemplation, I see no value in the idea that God has peppered his creation with religions true and false, leaving his flock to determine the right path on the way to either damnation or salvation. Such is a consideration removed from scriptural inconsistencies, biblical scientific impossibilities, and the general knowledge of man’s penchant for exaggeration of stories, especially as they are handed down from generation to generation. Religious scripture is, in my opinion, only of value as a model of man’s need to grapple with his origins and fate in a world filled with birth and death.
Let us conclude with a thought experiment. Imagine that I have discovered a chemical agent with powerful amnestic effects, capable of wiping every human memory clean. On one clear day, I release the compound into the air and let it circle the globe while I erase every computer drive and burn every book on the planet. Mankind’s memory will have effectively been erased. All his accomplishments, all his science, all his religion are gone. It is my contention that as mankind shakes off the fog of amnesia and works to build a new world, the fundamental questions of birth and death—both ours and that of our universe—would again send us on the search for answers. And I believe that such a search would once again produce religion and science. The difference, of course, is that all of the religious history is now gone; all the stories of the prophets have been erased, as have been the stories of creation and the predictions of destruction. All would have to be created anew. Would this confusion be sufficient to elicit a communiqué from God? (And if so, couldn’t our current times be called sufficiently confusing?) My conjecture is that the religion of this hypothetical future would bear little resemblance to the religions of the present other than in its treatment of a creation myth, a few laws of morality (and its attendant creation of a priesthood to enforce that morality, presumably largely made up of the authors of the new scriptures), a tale of how things are going to wind up at the end, and perhaps even a supernatural explanation for what happened to everyone’s memory on that one clear day.
But science, when it emerged, would go through the regular series of false starts and corrections and eventually arrive at a system almost indistinguishable from the one we have today. Why? Because science is a representation of the observed, an attempt at grasping truth by using the best evidence available to us. Such a conjecture is based on reason and no small degree of faith that what we can learn through science sets us on a path that brings us ever closer to truth.
