TThanks for your thoughts. I especially like your insight that atheists also "walk by faith".They always want to oppose "rational "atheism to blind unreasoning religious faith.
-----Original Message-----
From: MckenNeil@aol.com [mailto:MckenNeil@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 12:55 PM
To: shuanr@boo.net
Subject: Re: Science and religion: two ways of knowing
I like very much your statement
Indeed , the biblical writers had they know how much greater and more
wonderful
universe was than they envisaged, would surely have found even greater
reason to praise God.
My view is that, by placing theology and science in opposition, both are
impoverished. Christians need not fear those aspects of science which are
firmly based on evidence. For example I recently showed how Genesis
accommodates the big bang quite easily if we understand the Hebrew word for
day (yom) and also understand relativistic time (a gift from Einsteinian
physics). Where there is poor theological interpretation and/or speculative
science, then conflict can - and does - occur.
Science and blind faith
Do Christians have to accept things by blind faith, without any scientific
evidence to support them?
Let's begin by defining exactly what is meant by modern science:
It is the study of the material Universe as described by
space/matter/energy/time relationships.
Next, what does science do:
It seeks to explain the mechanisms by which matter is organised according to
information as expressed in the "laws of nature" and all the equations which
govern the processes of interactive behaviour of matter.
So, what is science not:
It is not able, nor concerned with, anything outside the realm of
matter/energy/space/ time.
It has no bearing (by definition - see above) on anything supernatural,
divine, eternal. Scientists who make statements about God or the impact of
science on faith are not talking as scientists, but just as ordinary, deluded
little atheists.
What about ‘blind’ faith?
Scientists, even atheists, proceed with a good degree of faith, because they
need to believe that matter/energy etc. are organised according to
information which is accessible to scientific investigation, so that "laws"
are expressible mathematically. Geneticists are a good example: they are
concerned with the decoding of the information encoded in DNA. The
information is already there, awaiting their efforts at discovery.
Where does information come from?
Information always comes from a source of information. I am giving you
information which I have learned from someone else, and so on. The great
question is: where did the original information that built the Universe come
from? Speaking as a highly qualified scientist, the answer is that we do not
know, and in fact do not care very much as our job is to discover mechanisms
and relationships, not ponder philosophical questions.
In the beginning are assumptions!
So you see, even the most hard-boiled atheist has to proceed on the basis of
some sort of faith, taking some things for granted, in the hope that they
will be explained someday. Science is based on some pretty large assumptions
such as the existence of natural law and other forms of ordered information.
But science has no explanation of how the laws of physics ever got started in
the primeval big bang. The atheist has to say, "In the beginning nothing …"
The Christian can do better: "In the beginning God …" We have an answer to
the question of where information and order come from.
Summary
Albert Einstein made some useful comments about this:
"Those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science
were, all of them, imbued with the truly religious conviction that the
universe is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for
knowledge." - Published in the Christian Register, June 1948.
"...The scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are
related to, and conditioned by, each other...
...The highest principles for our aspirations and judgements are given to us
in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition..." May 19th 1939.
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