Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Science of the Gaps
The tension between religion and science, at a sociological level, does not exist. There are plenty of religious scientists and scientific believers, and they do not walk around all day clutching their foreheads trying to relieve the pressure of intense cognitive dissonance. On the contrary, the obvious point that there cannot be two contradictory truths denotes an agreeable and elegant unity between the two approaches, whether one views them as a tightly intersected Venn diagram or as non-overlapping magisteria that deal with separate but equally-valid truths.
All is not as peaceful as it first appears, however. With the decline of popular religious feeling and the ascendance of popular science, many religious people have come to view the claims of religion – and indeed, everything else – in a scientific light. It is not so much that there is science and there is religion and they are both avenues to the truth(s), but rather that science is all knowledge but religion can exist comfortably as its subset, as the rational belief in the irrational or whatever.
This may sound like a crazy claim to most religious people, but I beg you to consider: In the subconscious of many a religious believer today floats the notion that one day scientific knowledge will advance to the extent that we will no longer “need” G-d to explain anything. Now, this idea can be defended theologically, and often is. Someone is always quick to declare that G-d created brains and science that we may use them. Other will chime in with the more mystical claim that G-d loves us so much he wants to set us free and never see us again, like any good modern parent, and that human history and the enlightenment is humanity’s opportunity to “move out of the house.” Even more open-minded (and my favorite) is the idea that “using” G-d as an explanation for anything in our world is to make of the deity an instrument, a terrible degradation that should embarrass any mature believer! G-d, like true art, can have no purpose!
These arguments may be correct[i]; it doesn’t matter. We are motivated to make them by this slight niggling feeling in the back of our minds that in a few more years “science” (the disembodied god of wisdom from the headlines) will have it all figured out and religious understanding will be relegated to the museums and university classrooms like all good but useless things.
Really, the opposite is true. Nearly unnoticed, science is headed for a nice solid wall while stodgy old religion is taking new and compelling form in the intellectual crucible.
Instead of religion being in danger from the advance of scientific knowledge, science is in imminent danger of losing its grip on the truth with the advance of religious thought.
This deity we think of in scientific terms is the much-maligned “G-d of the Gaps,” the power that presides over things science has not figured out yet. This G-d finds expression in the religious parallel of Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from religion.” Just as ancient man believed in magic and spirits controlling the weather because he didn’t have meteorology, so he believed in G-d because he didn’t know about astrophysics or biology or evolutionary psychology. Indeed, it follows logically that as he learns more about any of these things, he will believe in G-d less. And if he still believes in G-d, it will not be that same vigorous one from the old texts who created heaven and earth and performed miracles and wonders, but rather some kind of impotent abstraction.
It is worth pointing out that this God of the Gaps derives from the assumption that G-d is a scientific proposition. That is, we postulate in the first place that G-d is the best explanation for all the things science hasn’t figured out. When science figures them out (as it certainly must and will), G-d’s domain shrinks to the yet further things science hasn’t figured out. And if science eventually closes out on all the important questions, well, G-d is no longer a good explanation for anything important.
It is equally worth pointing out that the assumption is false. As I’ve written before, G-d is simply not, in the first place, a “scientific” principle subject to any kind of falsification through empirical discovery. G-d is not Zeus, a god of thunder made irrelevant once the gap in meteorological knowledge was filled in. On the contrary, the best arguments for G-d’s existence presuppose only the most basic claims that science would agree to as well. They start with premises such as, “This hydrogen atom exists” and the like, and their logic proceeds deductively. Unless science somehow puts forth the claim that no contingent creations exist (or any other of a few equally preposterous and unlikely claims), the logical necessity of a creator is unaffected. Indeed, the logical necessity of a maintainer is equally unaffected; not only did G-d create the universe once upon a time, but due to the nature of instrumental causes he must create it at every moment from nothing. If there is an atom, there is G-d, according to the classical understanding, and learning more about Darwinism or big bang cosmology (despite recent prevarications about the meaning of the word “nothing”) will not change it one bit.
So much for the sad and misleading “God of the Gaps.” But, wait, you may wonder, what if I’m unfamiliar with classical theology and don’t recognize the arguments you’re referencing and basically find these references to scholasticism a bit medieval?
I’m glad you asked. Because we don’t really need to resort to all that at all. In fact, science’s claims to truth are weaker right now all on their own than they have been in perhaps three hundred years.
To understand the curious weakness of science at the moment, we must distinguish between the experimental data acquired through the scientific method and the theoretical underpinnings of those facts. But first, a quick disclaimer on what we mean by science’s “weakness.” I do not mean to put down or diminish the significance of the scientific pursuit, nor to deny any specific scientific findings. Instead, what I mean by the weakness of science is the way in which scientific ideas, unverified and unquestioned, punch far above their objective paygrade in the public imagination. In other words, that scientific “truth” should change one iota beliefs accepted as revelation because they both allegedly have equal claims to the truth is simply mistaken. Science does not have a claim to the truth such that any proclamation in its name should be taken seriously. In fact, the most logical approach to many disciplines within science nowadays is brutal skepticism.
First, the facts of science, the actual experimental work behind the “new study finds” we read about in the news or in pop-sci books. These are the rock-solid realities that, through the sieve of the scientific method we all learned about in middle school, banish forever false hypotheses and allow the scientist to build theoretical understanding. Except that the public is becoming more and more aware of what worries over 50% of polled scientists – the replication crisis, the stunningly pervasive inability of scientists to reproduce the effects of published experiments, rendering the broader applications of said experiments largely void. Perhaps part of the problem is that, as any honest statistics professor will tell you, you really can prove almost anything with statistics, and researchers do just that all the time. Or perhaps it’s other sources of error, such as biases, that create conditions for most published research findings to be false. The situation is not aided by the incredible pressure to “publish or perish,” or the general drift of science away from practical (and thus verifiable) concerns, or the massive problems with the peer review system which is supposed to be the scientific guarantee of honesty. In short, when confronted with the “scientific facts” on any particular issue, one must either be prepared to do all the dirty wet work of assessing the research methodology etc. oneself, or one must have a trust for published papers that published papers, at least at the moment, do not deserve.[ii] Why any of these “facts” should pose, without a lot more research, any sort of challenge to the truths of the religious believer, remains a mystery.
Things get even murkier when we make the leap to theoretical science, which provides much of the more ephemeral fodder for the quantum think pieces and string theory rumination. Unlike the social sciences or medicine, the theories of physics largely have solid foundations in demonstrated, reproducible facts. The problem is that once one departs from the strict facts, the theoretical possibilities begin to multiply, and there is no particular reason for any one of them to be true. In fact, Newton’s laws of physics, which were at one point considered the most experimentally-confirmed scientific theories of all time, turned out to be incorrect, invalidated hundreds of years after their publishing by astronomical observations and replaced by Einstein’s theory. There is no reason to think this could not happen again with today’s physics.
It is almost as if science is good at making quantifiable predictions but bad at finding general underlying truths about the universe.
The truth is that science’s problems go even deeper, to the extent that in private I have whimsically begun calling it the “science of the gaps.” Nothing written so far justifies this moniker. After all, despite the muddled state of scientific research and its weakness as an assertive force, we can still rely on science to at least in theory pick itself up, dust itself off, and to march forward to a unified theory of everything and knowledge of all of reality, thereby banishing the god of the gaps to the realm of pretty daydreams. In other words, if science has some problems and has not yet figured out all there is to know about life, it is only due to technical problems. In principle, however, science can do all of these things.
Except it can’t.
You see, science is fundamentally flawed, not so much in its chosen areas of interest, but in its failure to acknowledge it has a chosen area of interest. Because at some point in early modernity, the forerunners of what today we’d call science decided that it would be beneficial, in understanding the natural world, to ignore everything that cannot be quantified or mathematically measured. Over time, somehow people excited about all the technological progress etc. came to think that what cannot be quantified or mathematically measured does not exist, which is about as correct as a chef deciding there is no moon because it had never been mentioned in a single great cookbook.
This is not, in and of itself, a terrible flaw – after all, a chef may ignore the moon indefinitely and continue to receive Michelin stars. One might say the same of science – that everything is going swimmingly so far ignoring the unquantifiable, and it will continue so indefinitely.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Because it turns out (as the briefest perusal of science headlines today will demonstrate) that the unquantifiable has much more to do with the natural world than the moon does with cooking. In fact, if human beings are part of the natural world, then theoretically psychology, political science, history, sociology, anthropology, law, economics, literature, art, theology, morality, ethics, and philosophy should all be ultimately explicable by natural science, whether by reduction (e.g. economics is real, but is emergent from brain chemistry) or by elimination (e.g. economics isn’t real; only the laws of physics are real).
It goes without saying that, despite continuous process and the best efforts of scientists, psychology has not even nearly been reduced to neurobiology, and the social sciences have generally been unable to produce solid, easily understood, replicatable theories such as Newton’s or Maxwell’s laws. In fact, even economists (for example) admit in candid moments that at least half the time they are wrong, despite the application of all the latest methods and theories. Let us not begin to start down the road of the scientific experiments in social engineering, which have played their role in the deaths of countless human test-subjects and have left their mark in even non-scientifically organized societies through the enduring theories of eugenics, IQ quotas, and the rest. Questions of morality notwithstanding, the “scientific” approach to human behavior and human societies has yet to produce any sort of success comparable to older societies, outside of some great dystopian novels.
So, because not-easily-quantifiable things such as human nature, the experience of subjectivity, and pure reason are important to the sciences broadly defined, we must enter into the great shell game, the fantastic, audacious lie that perpetuates the science of the gaps. We say that one day, when the methods are better and the computers are fast enough and we better understand the chemistry and the genomes and the evolutionary process, we will understand all of these more difficult things. Indeed, just as once upon a time humanity didn’t understand electricity but today it is safely harnessed the world over, so, too, one day we will scientifically understand the human experience. The difference between an electric circuit and the human mind is one of degree, and the scientists simply need more time.
But this is an intellectual Ponzi scheme, which takes deposits from one place to cover its ever-expanding debts and never pays them back. It works like this: (1) Believers in scientism declare that everything can be explained scientifically. (2) It is pointed out that there are plenty of things that cannot be explained scientifically, including the very commitment to the idea that everything can be explained scientifically. (3) Believers in scientism attribute all scientifically inexplicable phenomena, from near-death experiences to the subjective knowledge of the self, as epiphenomena of the human mind. (4) It is pointed out that science does not understand the human mind. (5) Believers in scientism say that science will understand the mind one day, and that nothing exists outside of the realm of what science will understand!
You cannot hide the dirty laundry that is the unquantifiable under the heading of (mere) mental phenomena and then claim that one day science will understand the mind. In fact, science will never fully understand the human experience, because it consists of things that are not quantifiable and not reducible to material explanations. And the only reason this isn’t blatantly obvious to everyone yet is due to the shell game in which we say that all the things science, by its very nature of being a study of the quantifiable, cannot explain are things that one day it will explain, things in the brain.
I think it’s time to face it: the human mind, society, and spirit has not remained impenetrable to scientific analysis because the techniques are not yet advanced enough or the computers fast enough. They are impenetrable to science by their nature, and science has gained its prestige and perception of omnipotence by mostly ignoring them and focusing its attentions elsewhere, like a good cookbook does.
We do not go searching in even our best cookbooks for the truth, because we realize that cookbooks are excellent for the purposes they’re designed for, but those purposes are relatively practical and limited. Indeed, cookbooks preside over certain gaps in our broader knowledge of universal truths that make them unbelievably useful. Science, too, presides over the gaps left by broader, more fundamental ways of understanding.
Even if everything I’m saying is correct, it would still at this point be unfair to compare science to the lowly God of the Gaps. After all, the true power of that pejorative title stems from the development of science. The God of the Gaps is like a shy model with ever fewer scraps of clothing left to work with; the domain of what we need a deity to explain allegedly grows ever smaller with the march of scientific progress. Can the same be said about science? Is its (self-defined) limited purview being encroached upon by the development of other forms of knowledge? Isn’t religion and all that stagnant and confined to old texts that have said the same thing for centuries?
Surprisingly, it’s not. And science itself is partially to blame for it. The enlightenment and the scientific revolution continue to force religion to refine itself. In effect, science has, to the general public and even among many believers, at least partially stolen the crown of religious authority. If a priest and a scientist each make exclusive claims and say, “Believe this because I say so,” the scientist wins today ninety-nine times out of a hundred. But rather than leading to the death of theology, this loss of authority has led to a quiet but steady religious flourishing.
If one must explain how every human has a divine soul, or why suicide is a moral evil, mere declarations of authority will no longer suffice. Instead a serious Rabbi or Pastor now has to actually crack open those dusty books, try his hand at the good old schoolmasters, struggle to understand and apply concepts from a different time and place to the matter at hand. And what these Rabbis, Pastors, and even non-religious philosophers have found to their surprise is that the old books hold up surprisingly well – much better than the assumed materialist metaphysics with which so many scientists are acquainted.
Indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine that when the day comes and the scientists finally admit that they have no damn idea how to design a successful society, there might not be a theologian or two waiting in the wings with a book of Proverbs and Nicomachean Ethics, ready to supply advice that was not acquired by scientific method but that has stood some old civilizations and religions in very good stead.
One day, we will not “need” science to explain anything of true significance to the human experience. Its days as the official Best Explanation for the world around us are numbered, as it draws ever-closer and with ever-more embarrassing errors to the limits of its understanding.
Someday soon, science will hit a wall in its understanding, and the public will become aware of its inability to solve the most intractable problems of our nature. At that instant, our minds will be able to spring free from the materialist confines of scientism. In that moment, when all will seem lost to chaos, the new, leaner, modern theologies will be waiting, with answers, without the gaps.
[i] They aren’t, at least not entirely, but that is not my concern here. Suffice it to say that these errors all involve driving G-d from the world in significant ways (after all, as Aristotle would say, what is not an explanation is not a cause) and this isn’t really what most religious people want to do, I’d think.
[ii] That these are the only two choices makes the layman’s attempt to decide political issues purely scientifically laughable at best.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Look for them used through Amazon. I love his writing enough to buy them new, but have found the out of print ones that way. Also, since Amazon moved a warehouse or something into my state, we’re being charged sales tax. Used books described as in “very good” condition are often as good as new or close to it and come from places not including tax. Doing my part to starve the beast! Shabbat shalom.
I had, as in copied the link, hit CTL-K to put it in. But I did not notice the link wasn’t there when I post it. Fixed it. Thanks.
I didn’t consider the physics hair-splitting, but relevant, since the physics isn’t only “the math”, but as an initiation into way of seeing things whose initiation ritual seems to work best by starting with what Newton saw, and saving the modern improvements for later in the process; but I can see how others would see this differently. Other disciplines, like music theory, seem to work in much the same way: first learn to stick to the rules implicit in Bach’s chorales and basic counterpoint. Then later, you will know what you’re doing if you break those rules by writing parallel fifths, for instance. That people do not disparage classical music theory as “wrong”, yet would so disparage classical mechanics, says something about the perhaps-unrealistic ways we expect science to be somehow cut off from all other disciplines.
I think this confuses two dissimilar things.
Say I want to lift a weight 10ft off the ground. At that scale, simply assuming a constant level of force exerted over time will suffice to give a very accurate answer
But if I want to lift a weight significantly higher — say, 1000 miles off the ground — I’ll likely need to factor in the diminished force of gravity that far from the earth’s core.
Going back to the original example, it’s my understanding that you still use Newtonian mechanics when calculating the perapsis of Mercury because those mechanics are an accurate model of that part of the equation.
Fair enough. I always thought of Einstein expanding upon Newtons mechanical realization of Gravity to encompass the dimensions of time and light. And to better understand energy. But Einstein sought to unify his and Newtons theories through Relativity. Both amazing men who made major contributions to the world, Einstein perhaps saving ours by bringing understanding of the atom to the US and away from Germany during the war. Anyways, while I disagree on many points it’s a great read that made me think about a lot of my philosophical ideas. Great post. Thanks.
The article makes some good points, but I think its conclusion is misplaced.
The fact that some people attempt to use science to design a society is not a failing of science, but an inappropriate application of science. Society is a complex system, and what we know about them is that they are not predictable through the standard scientific techniques of reductionism and empirical study.
Macroeconomists who build simple models of complex phenomenon and attempt to use them to predict how the system will behave when inputs change are not behaving as scientists. They have no controls, no falsifiable claims, and no track record of accuracy in their predictions. Their activities are best thought of as a form of modern day phrenology, and thus cast no negative reflection on proper science. The same can be said of psychology, sociology, and other ‘soft sciences’ examining complex phenomenon and making ‘scientific’ claims about them without following the rigors of actual scientific method.
The problem isn’t with science, it’s with people who attempt to adopt the trappings of science to give credibility to non-scientific claims. That’s scientism, not science.
None of this has anything to do with religion. Science being unable to predict future behavior of a complex system in no way means that a supernatural deity must exist.
In the areas where proper scientific methodology and practice are observed, science has been spectacularly successful. The standard model of physics has stood up against countless new discoveries and attempts at falsification. Quantum mechanics, strange as it is, has had experimental validation of predictions accurate to an astonishing degree.
General relativity has been so spectacularly successful that we can use gravitational lensing as a tool, and the GPS system is incredibly accurate because it takes both special and general relativity into account in its equations. It has to, because those attributes of the universe are real, and were discovered through the scientific process.
As for Newton, he was not incorrect. He was simply describing a subset of a larger reality that was not knowable with the tools of the time. And Newton’s laws still work outside of that subset so long as you account for the changes due to relativistic effects. This is generally how science works – it’s rare that a well-established theory will be found to be completely wrong – instead, it’s typically found to be incomplete as we learn more about the effects it is describing.
Of course there are bad scientists out there who lie and take shortcuts and act politically or seek power and money through shoddy work. That’s not a refutation of science, it’s a failure of specific people. In the same way, the existence of a crooked televangelist is not a refutation of religion as a concept.
I barely understand the science (or should admit I’m not particularly interested in understanding it). But I do understand the limitations and distortions of scientism. What I’ve never understood is the ongoing struggle by some to make one (meaning science) superior to the other. I’m quite happy to celebrate science which is based on legitimate research and testing (which happens less and less) and religion, which is filled with spirit and mystery. Thanks for a fine post, Tzvi
There’s no denying Newtonian physics described things “good enough” at the time, and still have good approximate values. The major divergence is a matter of scale and application. When someone on the street exclaims, “Isn’t the sky a nice blue color today,” my response might differ depending on the accuracy I want to convey. “Yes, it’s a lovely azure shade this morning” and “Yes, this 475 nanometer wavelength of light scattered in all directions is… refreshing” are both valid answers.
What matters is the question you’re trying to answer. If all you want is the periapsis of Mercury, Newton can give you an answer close enough for most applications but strictly speaking it will contain intrinsic error at some point (before the Einstein fix). If you then want to understand why Mercury wobbles in its orbit, the calculation using Newton will be wrong.
I like this discussion, btw. It makes an apropos sub-point to the author’s post. Many in science like to say some theory or other is reality and since we understand completely now, the discussion should end about a Creator. Newton/Einstein is a good example that there is probably no end to better science replacing ok science – and maybe conclude that we just can’t possibly understand everything.
Relatively speaking.
Dan, your entire post is based on the domain that ‘Science’ purports to explain. With regard to the physical universe, science does an adequate job of explaining.
Tzvi’s point, if I understand it correctly, is that ‘Science’ extrapolates from the domain of the physical to the domain of the metaphysical.
But there is more to this universe than just what meets the eye…
My sense from your post, is that you think, given enough time and a rigorous enough method, science can indeed solve the problems of macroeconomics or sociology.
I believe that there are some things that are unknowable by science or the scientific method.
If I tell you that God has directly spoken to me, and that I know that he knows me, you would say that I cannot prove it. And you would be right, it is an entirely subjective experience, nonetheless true. Science cannot prove it.
We use reason and our senses to try to make sense of the world. Some things are quantifiable, and some things are spiritual. Science cannot measure the spirit, it’s a category mismatch.
I don’t understand the insistence that Newton wasn’t wrong. He was wrong. He did far, far better than I ever could have done, and gave us a relatively simple system that is a perfectly adequate estimate for most applications. But it’s wrong.
Newtonian physics does not match some observations:
(1) Of the precession of the perihelion of the orbits of the planets (which, as I understand it, means the change in the location of the planets’ closest approach to the Sun)
(2) Of gravitational lensing (i.e. the deflection of light rays by gravity, which is about twice the amount predicted by Newtonian physics)
(3) Of the orbit of stars in galaxies (this is not fixed by Einstein’s theory; rather, the current explanation is that there is a bunch of otherwise undetectable matter called “Dark matter”)
Speaking of gaps, as far as I know, the only evidence for Dark matter is the failure of orbiting stars to match the predictions of Newton and Einstein.
The OP reminds me of a clever line from a Babylon 5 episode: “Faith and reason are the shoes on your feet. You can travel further with both than you can with just one.”
There’s the “All models are wrong; some models are useful” approach of Box-Hunter-Hunter, and its not wrong to look at things that way. But I’m not sure that’s what’s usually meant by a model being wrong – people might usually mean “wrong” in contrast to other models which are called right (even though “all models are wrong”).
Several of the folks who’ve agreed with “I see Newtonian mechanics as more incomplete than wrong” are folks with physical training. As @danhanson noted,
It seems that physicists and engineers tend to see Newton’s laws as true all along, once they’re properly generalized. (The V = IR of Ohm’s law can be generalized, too). This idea of describing only a subset of a larger reality is not that uncommon, even in a completely “synthetic” science like pure math. I remember feeling lied to for being taught that negative numbers don’t have square roots when later we found out they did, just in C, not R. That I considered myself lied to at the time, and thought what I had been previously taught wrong, was understandable – and true, in a sense. On the other hand, how else do you learn these things but in stages? The rhythm of Newton never really goes away, I think, even under generalization.
But this intuitive sense of why “wrong” is maybe not the best word, except in the sense that all models (and all stories, even the nonscientific) are in some sense “wrong”, is tricky to describe. Maybe the following concrete questions would be a better analogy?:
Do you consider your bathroom scale wrong because it’s not a food or a truck scale?
Do you consider a doctor’s thermometer wrong for only being designed to accommodate temperatures near human body temperature? If the incompleteness of such an instrument is wrong, is a weather thermometer better? (and if it is, why not use it to measure human body temperature, too?)
So how do you measure the spirit? How does science measure the metaphysical?
Well, I didn’t say science did that, more like when the popular imagination assumes science does that, it’s reading more into the science than what’s really there.
Kilov’s and my pieces, both on religion, were promoted at nearly the same time. In that, I give a fuller expression of why I’m pessimistic about even non-scientific narratives being able to explain as much of the moral and spiritual side of life as they might suppose they can. We are by nature happy as storybound, model-making creatures. Even when we sense we’re at the place “where logics die”, where no model is enough, the afterimages of our models linger.
Admittedly, I am out of my depth as there are some heavy hitters here displaying their Physicist acumen like Midge. But I find it a little funny that a post about Scientific audacity and dismissal of religion is celebrating Einstein and diminishing Newton without considering what might have been inhibiting, or as I see it, influencing his thought when he wrote Principia. Classical academia’s influence by the Church aside, Newton was a devout Christian himself. Considering the acrimony between astronomers and the church over Heliocentrism, it makes it easier for me to understand why Newton might not want to question Gravity as divine force–in fact he addressed this when he proclaimed to not have a hypothesis as to why it exists: “It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies.”
Einstein’s precision comes from regarding Gravity as an incidental consequence to the curvature of spacetime–something that may have had him renounced as a Heretic at the time (Judaism and Agnosticism as well). In the future, quantum physicists will likely come to overturn Einstein’s Quantum Theory of Light by disconfirming his hypotheses by having the ability to run the proposed experiments. That’s how a lot of Science goes, disconfirming previous hypotheses when experiments are devised to be able to test them.
Among the scientific heavyweights at Ricochet I’m a middle weight at best, and only after a full meal.
This struck me also.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the point of this post. I thought the main idea was that science has limits. The models and theories that are the domain of science fall short of explaining the totality of the human experience. Scientific knowledge is not enough in itself to explain all facets of the universe.
So arguments about which scientific theory du jour is more relevant, seems to me to be irrelevant to the thrust of this post.
Science is useful, but not sufficient.
There is more to life, and God calls us to know him. And there is enough evidence in this world to allow us to have faith that he is, and that he cares about us.
I’d say that’s a nice summary. Well put.
I always get a kick out of the science proves that God does not exist folk. It does not and can not. God created everything. All science does is figure out how God did this or that trick and maybe borrow something from it for us mere mortals use. That is why the early church supported many early scientific endeavors. They were exploring the wonder of God’s creation.
I wonder if the OP has ever read “Lost in the Cosmos” by Walker Percy. This post, in some ways, summarizes the primary musing of that wonderful book. In it, Percy seems to set out to examine all of the prevailing worldviews of the time (early 80s as it happens) toward the end of playing out their absurdity and/or inadequacy in explaining those things which mean the most to us: Who am I? How did I get here? etc. To quote from the book:
I highly recommend reading it. In the end, he leads us to the conclusion that the very thing that we have discarded – orthodox Christianity – as outdated and irrelevant may be the only worldview that ultimately holds up. It is a very through-the-rabbit-hole path to that conclusion but well worth the trip. Percy was an American treasure.
Thanks for the recommendation Polyphemus. Percy is an American treasure.
I haven’t. I will have to check it out! Thanks for the rec.