[Nature magazine]: Science and Faith

I think the biggest problem when trying to reconcile science and religion is that they are really dealing with two different questions.

It seems to me that science is trying to understand the how of the Universe. How did the universe come to be?

Religion seems to me to be trying to understand the why of the univers. Why did the universe come to be?

The tools and methodology of science has done a good job of telling us what mechanisms and sequence of events has led to the universe we now see but it has done little to explain why?

Someone could use the scientific method to reconstruct going how we as humans came to be by following a long process of factors that happened to turn in a way that led to humans but they can't explain <b>why </b>those factors turned that way than say in some other way so we wouldn't be.

 

I don't think those are mutually exclusive. Science asks why, religion asks how.

Why does the apple fall when dropped from the tree?
How did man come to inhabit Earth?

 

The difference is that science will seek an empiracal answer to those questions while religion will say "because God deemed it so."

I agree they're not mutually exclusive but I'm deeply troubled when people substitute faith for rationality but also when people believe that everything can be explained rationally.

 

why does there have to be a why?

 

I disagree. I'll explain it from my Christian viewpoint, because I don't want to speak for another faith. I associate with many of these whacky Christians and those of other faiths. I know that the answer of why is often met with a shrug from believers who aren't as well educated in science as others...like me for example. But Christians exists in every industry and discipline, science, included. (see my sig).

The Bible doesn't seek to answer the question of how. Here's the Bible...the first few books of Genesis are a prologue...they tell the story of a Creator and a series of "falls" of that creation..places where it becomes disconnected from the Creator. And the Bible from that point on is about how God seeks to restore that connection...to and through the Jewish people and on through the world. The Old Testament has tons of places where God tells the Israelites that it's not enough for them to just be a blessing unto themselves...but that they should be showing the glory of God to the rest of the world. Of course, Christians believe He worked through them in Christ...from, by no coincidence, those same Jewish people. So it's a very Star Warsesque story...a backstory with a fall...and then a long story of redemption. It doesn't explain cell development...or cosmological factors...or species extinction..or any of that. The closest it gets to a scientific explanation is by merely explaining that a Creator created the world and everything in it over some span of time. Past that, it doesn't seek to be a science book.

 

Why put the answer to your question in your own question, Mr. 'who's buried in Grant's tomb'?

 

B-Bob --

thanks for the links...thought you might like this, as well.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vi...Research and Scholarship - Science - MainPage

 

sweet! thanks!

 

Great article thanks B-Bob.

 

MadMax;

That was exactly my point in my earlier posts.

Science does a good job explaining the how while religion explains the why.

Science can tell me by explaining through a logical progression of how I came to be but it can't explain to me why I came to be.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Science_and_Culture

http://www.skepdic.com/creation.html

http://www.skepdic.com/ctinfo.html




Obviously, it is very important to be aware of the kind of theory one is confronted with--scientific or non-scientific--before one sets out to try to defend or refute the theory. If the theory is non-scientific, it would generally be useless to try to defend or refute it by empirical data. If a non-scientific theory is not self-contradictory and is consistent with the evidence of experience, it cannot be shown to be false. Of course, unlike scientific theories, non-scientific theories cannot be empirically confirmed either.This does not mean that non-scientific theories can't be checked against observation and experience. Any theory, to be reasonable, must be consistent with what is observed and experienced. But since empirical predictions are not meaningful tests of non-empirical theories, the fact that a non-scientific theory is consistent with experience is hardly a confirmation of the theory. But, since a self-consistent non-scientific theory cannot be refuted, it cannot be empirically tested; metaphysical theories cannot be empirically confirmed to any degree, as scientific theories can.

Are scientific theories therefore superior to non-scientific theories? Or, to put it another way, is science superior to religion, art, ethics, metaphysics, etc.? Such a question is absurd. Asking whether science is superior to religion or philosophy is like asking is `intelligence is superior to love?' or `is justice superior to good health?' Not all questions or values which human beings find worth pursuing and committing themselves to can be approached scientifically. There can be no doubt that scientific theories fulfil a vital human need. But so do non-scientific theories, whether they be in the field of cosmology or religion, art, morality, knowledge or even science.
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To some extent, all theories are personal. Yet, that does not mean that all theories are epistemologically equal. Some theories are richer, more sensible, more useful, more elegant, more powerful and more reasonable than others. It would be presumptuous, and probably not very useful, to try to establish a complete set of a priori conditions which a theory must meet before any reasonable person should accept it. It may well be that theorizing, whether scientific, philosophical or pseudoscientific, issues from the same human motive to unify and give order to experience, to make sense out of the many different aspects of existence, and to find significance and richness in human experience.

http://www.rathinker.co.kr/skeptic/ch9samp.html

 

You can watch Brian Greene's PBS special on string theory online here in its entirety:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html
The last segment of the first hour, titled "Science or Philosophy?" considers the criticism you mentioned.



http://www.skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html
Intelligent design (ID) refers to the theory that intelligent causes are responsible for the origin of the universe and of life in all its diversity.* Advocates of ID maintain that their theory is scientific and provides empirical proof for the existence of God or superintelligent aliens. They believe that design is empirically detectable in nature and in living systems. They claim that intelligent design should be taught in the science classroom because it is an alternative to the scientific theory of natural selection.

The arguments of the ID advocates may seem like a rehash of the creationist arguments, but the defenders of ID claim that they do not reject evolution simply because it does not fit with their understanding of the Bible. However, they present natural selection as implying the universe could not have been designed or created, which is nonsense. To deny that God has the power to create living things using natural selection is to assert something unknowable. It is also inconsistent with the belief in an omnipotent Creator.
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ID isn't a scientific theory and it isn't an alternative to natural selection or any other scientific theory. The universe would appear the same to us whether it was designed by God or not. Empirical theories are about how the world appears to us and have no business positing why the world appears this way, or that it is probably designed because of how unlikely it is that this or that happened by chance. That is the business of metaphysics. ID is not a scientific theory, but a metaphysical theory. The fact that it has empirical content doesn't make it any more scientific than, say, Spinoza's metaphysics or so-called creation science.

ID is a pseudoscience because it claims to be scientific but is in fact metaphysical. It is based on several philosophical confusions, not the least of which is the notion that the empirical is necessarily scientific. This is false, if by 'empirical' one means originating in or based on observation or experience. Empirical theories can be scientific or non-scientific. Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex is empirical but it is not scientific. Jung's theory of the collective unconscious is empirical but it is not scientific. Biblical creationism is empirical but it is not scientific. Poetry can be empirical but not scientific.

On the other hand, if by 'empirical' one means capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment then ID is not empirical. Neither the whole of Nature nor an individual eco-system can be proved or disproved by any set of observations to be intelligently or unintelligently designed. A design theory and a natural law theory that makes no reference to design can account for Nature as a whole and for individual eco-systems.

Science does have some metaphysical assumptions, not the least of which is that the universe follows laws. But Science leaves open the question of whether those laws were designed. That is a metaphysical question. Believing the universe or some part of it was designed or not does not help understand how it works. If I ever answer an empirical question with the answer "because God [or superintelligent aliens, otherwise undetectable] made it that way" then I have left the realm of science and entered the realm of metaphysics. Of course scientists have metaphysical beliefs but those beliefs are irrelevant to strictly scientific explanations. Science is open to both theists and atheists alike.
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More from http://www.skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html
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Two scientists often cited by defenders of ID are Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box (The Free Press, 1996), and William Dembski, author of Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Dembski and Behe are fellows of the Discovery Institute (http://www.discovery.org/), a Seattle research institute funded largely by Christian foundations. Their arguments are attractive because they are couched in scientific terms and backed by scientific competence. However, their arguments are identical in function to the creationists: rather than provide positive evidence for their own position, they mainly try to find weaknesses in natural selection. As already noted, however, even if their arguments are successful against natural selection, that would not increase the probability of ID.
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