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.

Praying at the altar of science

We overvalue science in our modern world. We truly do. Oh, this isn't to belittle the great engineering feats which science has made possible, nor the advances in medicine which make our lives longer and healthier, nor even things such as television or the Internet which offer the possibility of making our mental lives better, even when they merely entertain. All of that is well and good, so far as they go. The trouble lies in the attitude that science makes us better simply because it's science. We act as though science has value, or gives virtue.

Not necessarily, if at all, can science do that. It may offer the opportunity to be a better, more virtuous people. But it does only that, and we are speaking somewhat anthropormorphically in attributing that much to it really.

Can science define or defend the value of a human life? Can it teach us that stealing is wrong; indeed, can it define theft? Can it say anything about our responsibility towards the environment or, more importantly, one another?

Obviously not. To be sure, it may tell us that if we continue on such and such a road we might drive ourselves into extinction. But that's all it can do. Whether we ought to do such and such else so that we will not become extinct is a question of value. Science only tells us what will happen should we construct a building without the proper strengths, or perhaps even what may happen if we continue on a certain course with no variation. It does not, will not, and cannot tell us what we should do with the information it supplies.

People make those judgments, and they are not argued in the realm of science. They're argued in the realm of philosophy, the realm where we might actually be able, by conscious debate and a reasoned consideration of who we are rather than merely that we are, conclude what are and are not good things to do. Science provides facts; however useful they may be, they are ultimately very rote and, by themselves, without meaning. We provide value and virtue. We are above science.

Science by itself lacks virtue. Those who pray at its altar pray to a valueless void.

Science wants too much to be right sometimes

There has been for years a tremendous hue and cry from certain quarters about how science is the answer to all of our questions, and religion and philosophy are dying. Even the revered (perhaps overly revered) physicist Stephen Hawking has recently came out and said the the universe didn't need God for its creation. That is all very well; he is, after all, trying to sell a book, and it seems that whatever must be done for publicity is all right. That's hardly a reasonable approach to truth, however. Any truth, in fact: scientific, philosophical, or theological. Yet why should we stand on moral grounds when science and progress are all that matter?

Well, perhaps because what we need to do in this day and age is to take a step back and ask ourselves: can we indeed trust science?

It can be found that the scientific world is rife with scandal, should the media decide to take as a hard of a look at the world of science as they do with religion. Indeed, scientific fraud is at least as well represented within our history as scandal sometimes seems within things religious. The Piltdown Man comes to mind, or the Cardiff Giant. And before you begin grousing that those are old news stories made in times where we hadn't progressed enough scientifically to see they were frauds, let us remember two things: it was decades before science acknowledged the error of the Piltdown Man, and that science can be as rigorous in its unwillingness to bend as they accuse religion of being.

Piltdown Man was made of the jaw of an orangutan on the skull of a human. It is difficult to believe that anthropologists way back in 1912 could not have noticed that with little more than a cursory review of the evidence. Yet that did not happen. Why?

Could it be because the purveyors of science, and by that we mean the people who make money off of it, at the time were so married to the Theory of Evolution that they would not even think of it as a hoax because it seemed to blend so well into their pre-established arguments? It could be easily alleged that their desire for, ahem, orthodoxy, could not allow them to search for the actual truth, until it was so obvious that even the priests of science had to yield.

But it is not only the older hoaxes which call attention to the arrogance of what often passes as modern science. As recently as the late 1990's we had the fraudulent researches of Jan Hendrik Schön, who made up his research yet was hailed as a rising star among scientists. And there's Shinichi Fujimura, a Japanese archaeologist who buried his own artifacts to be dug up later. His fraud went on for almost 25 years before discovery.

Then, in 1996, we had the Sokol Affair, where physicist Alan Sokol submitted and had published a paper in the journal Social Text which was totally fraudulent. He had announced on the day the article appeared later in Science Wars that his work was an experiment to “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The experiment was quite the success. Yet he was basically accused with a violation of academic ethics rather than hailed by exposing the lack of a healthy skepticism which is supposed to be so important to the scientist.

A similar incident occurred in 2006, known as the Rooter Paper, where a computer randomly generated a paper which then submitted to and accepted as legitimate by a scientific conference.

This is not to say that all science and all scientists are bad. Yet it is interesting to note that the fraudulent scientists are viewed as outside of true science while the sins of religion are seen as inherent to religion. Is that good science, or bad philosophy?

The bottom line is that science, like religion, is practiced by human beings. Human beings who are as subject to lie and cheat if they feel sufficiently threatened as anyone else. Our lesson is not to take science at face value merely because it clothes itself in the garb of truth any more than we take religion as purveyors of truth without an honest review of their credentials. Because the biggest liars might just be on the biggest stage, and may be wearing, not robes, but lab coats.

There Should Be no War between Science and Religion

There is a war going on, a war for the collective mind which is society. Some term it a war on science; others, a war on religion. But must there be a war between then?

Huffpost Politics offers today an interesting piece featuring a man both seriously scientific and seriously religious. You may find it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/25/francis-collins-davos_n_4635338.html?ir=Politics&ref=topbar The article is centered on one Dr. Francis Collins, a devout Christian and, believe it or not, geneticist. His science is so respected that no less than Pope Benedict XVI appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Collins in Huffpost this morning says simply, "...you know, if you are a believer in God, it's hard to imagine that God would somehow put this incontrovertible evidence in front of us about our relationship to other living organisms and expect us to disbelieve it." We may argue about exactly how incontrovertible the evidence might be, as much of it appears mere conjecture. Still, if the Almighty deigned to create through an evolutionary process, who are we to argue? Are we special because of our physical appearances or due to our sentience?

We believe the latter. If we are made in the image of God, then surely that image is more like retrospection than rock. It is thought which makes us more real than any given liquid, solid, or gas. If God is Spirit, them form and matter are not, or are, at least, less so. We are more like God because we can think and consider and not because we might have the tensile strength to hold a suspension bridge up. True, knowing tensile strength is important, especially if we want the bridge to be safe for others like us. We should want that knowledge.

Science and religion do not contradict one another. Or, if we are truly interested in all which God commands, we must accept knowledge in all its forms, facts, and minutiae. This means that science must respect religion. It means as well that any serious religion must accept good science too.

An old military maxim states that you should not fight battles you cannot win. Religion should not fight science because it cannot win. Neither, then, shall science defeat religion. Why should it be expected to? It was created by the same God.