Science vs religion (pt 2) the creation of science

Science, as a field of study, was created by human beings. In fact, the early Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus is recognized as the father of science and today is science’s birthday.

 

On May 28, 585 BC, some 2,595 years ago today a total solar eclipse cast the Greek island Miletus in shadow. Thales was the only person who understood what was happening. Every other human being in the vicinity credited the midday darkness to the anger of a deity. Thales rejected supernatural explanations and invented the Precept of Science.

The Precept of Science is that every observable effect has a physical cause.

The Precept of Faith is coined in the novel, The God Patent, by a Christian Evangelist character named Foster Read in the following excerpt:

Foster turned back to the whiteboard. “The Precept of Faith is based on the fact that believing in God, accepting Jesus, and obeying the commandments have no value unless they are done by choice. Free choice. If you could win the lottery by praying, then why have faith?”

Ryan said, “It wouldn’t be much of a lottery if everybody who prayed won.”

“Right, belief requires faith and if acts of God could be directly and reproducibly verified by experiment, then there would be no reason for faith. The Precept of Faith means that we cannot observe God directly.” Foster held the marker like a conductor’s baton. “The next ingredient is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The Uncertainty Principle defines a boundary between processes that can be observed, real processes, and processes that can’t be observed but still must be accounted for, virtual processes.”

Foster goes on to demonstrate a way for God to “work in mysterious ways.” It involves the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle one of whose properties is that there are effects that must be accounted for that are not observable.

Now, whether or not Foster was right isn’t the point. The point is that religion and science approach problems differently. As an evangelical Christian, Foster believes that the descriptions of the physical world in the Bible are the absolute, unquestionable, literal Truth. So once he accepts that observable effects must have physical causes, he then must solve the problem of how God acts in the world. He can’t touch the question of whether or not God acts at all, or even exists. The point is that if he were practicing the scientific method, he wouldn’t be burdened with an answer prior to asking the question.

Of course science and religion have different properties. Science is predictive. This is what makes Creation Science or Intelligent Design non-science; we can’t use their explanations of physical phenomena to predict other phenomena. Who would a pharmacological company rather hire, a well educated Creation Scientist or a biochemist?

(You are welcome to republish the text of this article, but not the images, without needing further permission, provided that you attribute the work to its author, Ransom Stephens, Ph.D. – the author of The God Patent, a novel set in the trenches of the science-religion culture war.)