The Necessity of Mixing God and Science
Lawrence Krauss says that God and Science don’t mix, something that our own Claudia has contended, vociferously at times. Pursuit of logic is a passion with many scientifically-minded people and the pursuit of logic – and logical explanations – can become the object of single-minded devotion. In some cases this process leads to great truths and technological advancements; in others, the forest is lost among the trees and the researcher with it. Whither Krauss? I’ll not presume to guess but his word choices create distortion more than they reveal truth.
It is certainly true God and individual scientific experiments do not mix. The scientific method by definition calls for the isolation of as many variables as possible so that the one(s) under test can be definitively tested and explained. In an individual test, therefore, there can be no allowance for the divine. If there is, the experiment is fatally flawed.
Nevertheless, God and science are inexplicably intertwined.
As a software developer I understand the process of examining a seemingly chaotic circumstance, looking for order and root causes, and defining an explanation for behaviors, both expected and not. It is a very logical endeavor when all of the facts are known but one also relies heavily on intuition when they are not. The software test, like the scientific experiment, is imagined by intuition and defined by its absence. Yet pristine logic at the application layer does not mean that the programmer can ignore the fundamental truths of the operating system and development platform. They still exist, whether our analysis considers them or not. True knowledge of the system considers all factors, liked and despised alike. Truth requires it.
Likewise, science is, when all the ideology, agendas, and personal pride is stripped away, the pursuit to understand the principles that govern the universe God created. That truth does not diminish scientists or dull the luster of their accomplishments. Rather it increases them for to learn about the world around us is to know a fraction of the mind of God.
This makes the assumption that God created the universe, and depending on your viewpoint, that is proven, not proven, or not currently provable/unprovable.
Admit it Marc, you knew writing this that it would bring me out of the woodwork to comment
I will say this categorically. Faith has no place in science. That is NOT to say that a religious person cannot be a good scientist. Many (though they are a minority) are and some stellar examples (like Newton) were in the past. What is does mean is that the religious scientist cannot apply the same standards they use to judge the “truth” of their religion to their scientific studies. “Truth” in science is much more demanding, based on evidence derived under the rules of the scientific method. No personal revelation, no faith, no matter how deeply held, will convince a single referee that your postulates are true.
Intuition is a tricky subject, but there is no reason to think that it is “divinely inspired”. I will never, no matter how inspired I feel, come up with a brilliant idea for nuclear reactors. That is because I lack the knowledge of nuclear physics and engineering that I would need for this “intuition”. I might however get a brilliant idea for molecular biology, a subject I’m deeply in touch with. Intuition is a poorly understood phenomenon that happens in our brains but that derives from the knowledge we already have there. Though intuition (and creativity) are important, they need to be backed up with vigorous experimentation to meet the standards of science.
Science is beautiful, and knowledge of the Universe only contributes to the awe that it provokes, the humbling feeling of privilege to witness the majesty and deep complexity of galaxies and molecules. In my mind, the gods men have created for themselves do not do justice to the universe they ascribe to such supernatural beings. Simply put, the Universe is simply so much bigger, so much more beautiful and complex than any god man has created. Science gives us understanding, within our paltry capabilities, of the Universe, and no god is needed for science to advance.
On the face of it, a “faithless” scientist would be the ideal. However, it seems to me that such scientists would be the type who only make incremental discoveries, and that it is those who believe in a God/Intelligence of some sort who discover the breakthroughs Why? Because the atheist has eliminated from consideration anything that does not make sense.
We can test this theory by looking at what proportion of science Nobel winners are proclaimed atheists.
What Claudia said, and
The operating system and development platform are known, concrete, and measurable.
There are direct measurable evidences of their existence and effect so of course they should be considered.
But God (if it exists) has left no measurable evidence and so is irrelevant to scientific inquiry.
You have left out a startling number of variables.
J Story, the VAST majority of Nobel Prize winners are white and a highly disproportionate number of them are (ethnically or culturally) Jewish. Can we derive from this the notion that white people and Jews make better scientists? As Jeb said, you leave out an astonishing array of variables.
What little is known about religiosity in the scientific realm indicates somewhat the contrary to what you state. The National Academy of Sciences admits only elite scientists amongst it’s ranks. Within it, only 8% of members claim to believe in a personal god.
In what is entirely anecdotal, in my field, biology, I almost never encounter highly religious people. I’d say that the vast majority are atheists or agnostics, with a healthy dose of deists and a few soft theists. I’ve never met a religious fundamentalist who was a scientist (I’m supposing that’s a lot of cognitive dissonance for one brain) but I imagine there must be at least a few. Of course, I do live in Europe, and I understand that the US has a higher proportion of religious scientists, though they are still outnumbered by the non-religious ones.
However the numbers matter less than distinguishing cause from effect. Even if you could demonstrate (which I highly doubt) that the majority of the best scientists in the world are religious, that would still not indicate their religiosity being the cause of their scientific capacity. Atheists are vastly under-represented in prisons (which is kinda funny, considering we are so often vilified as lacking morality), but that does not indicate that atheism makes you more moral. Correlation does not necessarily indicate causation.
[edit]: Upon review of the data, I’ve noticed that the statistic of NAS member beliefs is very old, from 1998. However the tendency seems to be a severe decline in belief as time goes on, so it’s quite possible that even fewer NAS members hold theistic beliefs today.
There is no intrinsic relationship or lack thereof between religious belief and scientific ability. Brigham Young University, for example, has a hard-science faculty 100% composed of religious believers, but I don’t think any fair analysis of their research would find it across-the-board lacking in scientific merit as the anti-theist prejudice would predict.
Who makes that argument?
A disturbingly large number of militant atheists who claim that all religious believers are stupid bigots.
Claudia;
I don’t want to doubt your experience but I hope you do understand there is quite a distance between a deist (or a “soft” theist) and a religious fundamentalist.
Or maybe I misunderstand. Hopefully, you don’t assume that anyone who has a firm, practicing faith is a “religious fundamentalist”
How large is that number compared to the number of people that say that morality is impossible without God?*
How does it compare to the number that would refuse to vote for someone because they don’t believe in a God?
I don’t doubt that the people you describe exist, but they are a tiny minority within another tiny minority. Even Dawkins and Myers don’t go that far in their considerable criticism of religion and religious people, so I have a hard time believing that their numbers are very large.
* I grew up in the Bible Belt and have heard that often from as early as I can remember, often from well meaning people who are otherwise scrupulous about avoiding offense.
Yes, you misunderstood. I mentioned deists and soft theists separately from fundamentalists precisely because I consider them to be very different people indeed. I apologize if this wasn’t clear.
I’ll admit I find it odd how someone who’s entire life is dedicated to advancing knowledge through rational study of available evidence could simultaneously hold a firm belief in something they know has no basis in available evidence. However the fact that I find it odd is meaningless in the face of the fact that I know it happens and that I haven’t seen any particular evidence that this harms their ability to pursue their professions.
Religious fundamentalists are a whole different animal, and I’d be highly surprised to find very many of them in the sciences, and even more surprised to find them in biology, where evidence for an old earth and evolution are so basic to the area. At least I’d be surprised to see fundamentalist Christians or Muslims (I don’t know the Orthodox Jewish position on the subject), I suppose fundamentalist Buddhists and Jainists wouldn’t necessarily have the same issues.
I should note that I’ll take a soft theist scientist any day over an incurious atheist.