Sentilong Ozukum
“Science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind” Albert Einstein.
If I were to proclaim that Science is a faith-based enterprise, many of you would conclude that my philosophically damaged brain has short-circuited and I desperately need psychiatric treatment. If I were to proclaim further that modern science is built upon Christian theological foundation, you might as well think that I have called the Pope a Baptist, Billy Graham a terrorist. Well, that is actually what I propose to discuss in this article.
Faith is not such a popular term in the scientific community. Many people have the idea that Science and Faith occupies two different realms that are incompatible; that Science is based on Evidence and Religion is based on Faith. I want to show three scientific propositions on which modern science is built that can in no way be substantiated by Evidence. I also want to further show that these three faith-based propositions are the direct product of Christian theology.
Assumption #1
THE UNIVERSE IS RATIONAL
You and I can be rational because we possess brains. The Universe doesn’t possess brains and so how can it be rational? Modern Science is based on the assumption that it is.
Assumption #2
THE UNIVERSE IS LAWFUL
You and I can be lawful. If we see a stop sign while driving down the street, we stop because we are purposeful agents. But the Universe is an inanimate object. How does an electron obey laws? If we step into the realm of Science, we will see that the Universe obeys laws which can be expressed in the language of mathematics; rules that can be expressed in the language of theorems and equations and so on.
For example: One of the central laws of science is that light travels at the speed of 186000 miles per second in a vacuum. But how do we know that? We measure countless of times and come to the conclusion. But how do we know that light travels at the same speed thousands of light years away in a distant galaxy? Has anybody measure it over there? No. We are simply forming the conclusion that since light travels at the certain speed over here, it must travel at a certain speed over there. In other words, we are assuming a lawful cosmos.
Assumption #3
THE RATIONALITY OF THE UNIVERSE IS MIRRORED IN THE RATIONALITY OF OUR OWN MINDS
This is also very strange. Our brains are made up of atoms, molecules, neurons, circuits, synapses etc. Why should the wiring within our heads correspond with the rationality out there in the Universe? Why is it that we can understand and comprehend the workings of the Universe? It is because science is based on the assumption that the rationality of the universe is mirrored into the rationality of our minds.
Here are the three Christian assumptions from which modern science has built the assumptions mentioned above.
#1. God is Omniscient and therefore He created a rational world.
#2. God is a moral law giver. He also gave the physical laws.
#3. Man is created in God’s image. So we have a spark of the divine rationality.
If we are honest to history, Science first developed only in one civilization historically known as Christendom. It is interesting to ask why Science developed first in Western civilization? Weren’t there smart people in other civilization who wanted to figure out stuffs? The truth of it is that Science developed in Western Civilization because it is based on a Christian assumption that the Universe is intelligible. Historian Joseph Needham explains that despite the wealth and sophistication of China in ancient and medieval times, Science never developed there because “there was no confidence that the code of nature’s laws could ever be unveiled and read, because there was no assurance that a divine being, even more rational than our-selves, had ever formulated such a code capable of being read.” In his classic book Science and the Modern World Alfred North Whitehead concludes that “faith in the possibility of science ... is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”
People are often taught that science was founded in the seventeenth century in revolt against religious dogma. In reality, science was founded between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through a dispute between two kinds of religious dogma. The first kind held that scholastic debate, operating according to the strict principles of deductive reason, was the best way to discover God’s hand in the universe. The other held that inductive experience, including the use of experiments to “interrogate nature,” was the preferred approach. Science benefited from both methods, using experiments to test propositions and then rigorous criticism and argumentation to establish their significance.
Can we imagine Science without Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Copernicus, Gassendi, Pascal, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Herschel, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere, Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Mendel and a host of other scientists? A good number of these scientists were clergymen. Gassendi and Mersenne were priests. Where would modern science be without these men? Copernicus, who was a canon in the cathedral of Krakow, celebrated astronomy as “a science more divine than human” and viewed his heliocentric theory as revealing God’s grand scheme for the cosmos. Boyle was a pious Anglican who declared scientists to be on a divinely appointed mission to serve as “priests of the book of nature” Boyle’s work includes both scientific studies and theological treatises. In his will he left money to fund a series of lectures combating atheism. Newton was virtually a Christian mystic who wrote long commentaries on biblical prophecy from both the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation. Perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, Newton viewed his discoveries as showing the creative genius of God’s handiwork in nature. “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets,” he wrote, “could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”
Sadly, a good chunk of the present day scientists seems to be on a mission to snuff God out of the equation. God is a failed hypothesis. Today, Science can explain everything and so there is no need for God, they proudly proclaim. As did Stephen Hawkins in his latest book The Grand Design in which he proclaims that God didn’t create the Universe but Gravity did it.
Perhaps today’s secular scientists need to be reminded of what Robert Jastrow, one of the late NASA’s leading physicist, said many years ago: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
ay the designs of this Universe lead each man to the Designer.
(Sentilong Ozukum is the author of Campus Blues and is also the editor of Fingerprints magazine. He lives at Mokokchung.)
