Practical Poison

I'm not sure how I got on their radar, but my Facebook feed will occasionally offer me posts from a group called Science and Atheism. They tend to post short videos defending atheism and knocking religion. Where exactly science comes into this is beyond me, seeing as science and religion are quite compatible while the arguments for or against God are ultimately philosophical. But that's a question for another time.

Occasionally I will take a moment and watch their short videos. You really never know what you might learn, and you should know your enemy, right? This particular one asserted that believers invented God as an explanation for things. To be fair, that's a plausible philosophic argument. But it strikes me as hollow: it dismisses talk of God without actually considering any of the arguments that He exists. But that too is for another time. 

My point today is this: don't the folks who preach to us (and it is a form of preaching as it tends to take on a kind of religious quality) that we must follow science urge us to do so because we need answers to our questions? Don't they assert (rather strongly) that if we would all just become scientists we would eventually have all the answers? 

The trouble is science can't have all the answers, for science is ultimately very rote and therefore a comparatively low form of knowledge. Science can tell us that injecting a body with poison will kill it...but it does not, it cannot, answer the question of whether we ought to inject a body with poison. This morning I simply want to point out that such scientists as the one I gave two minutes of my life to this morning are speaking with a bit of a forked tongue. Don't go to religion to find explanations, come to us, they say. Come to Science. Left to itself, that's really saying nothing more than 'Don't do things his way, do them my way' and all shall be well. 

I will deign to say, that hardly strikes me as scientific.