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| A Call for Reformation in the Sciences |
| Author: Roderick McDonald Entered on: 5/21/2006 |
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| There is much in the news recently about introducing "intelligent design" into biology curriculum. On one side, for example, Pat Robertson calls for God's wrath on the city of Dover (Pa.) for voting "God out of your city", whereas on the other, Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, describes the fight over evolution to be "so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment". Krauthammer affirms that "juxtaposing religion and evolution is nonsensical". He warns of science being redefined to include faith and the supernatural. He affirms that each discipline, science and religion, should be kept in its own place. For example, mocking the intelligent design position, he states "that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says. 'I think I'll make a lemur today.'" The irony of the conflict is that those criticizing intelligent design as being unscientific embrace a philosophy that is equally unscientific. It is not a battle between science and religion, but of one religion (or philosophy) against another. For example, many evolutionists, while on the one hand denying the personal influence of religion or a subjective world view, on the other, with religious zeal, purge and censor scientists who hint at doubting Darwinism. The world view that affirms a sovereign, creator God is a threat to their materialistic world view. With honest insight, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin states: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs ... because we have a prior commitment to materialism... Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.” (Lewontin) The scientific peer-review process is another example of this irony. Acceptance and publication of peer reviewed science journal articles guide the science. Scientific pursuit is driven by which articles get published. The process is valuable. It is useful, for example, to advise government policy makers how they should rule in a development along a salmon river. Yet the review process always includes the question, "Is this paper interesting or significant?" If not, it will not be published. "[The] reviewers are doing much more than checking the experimental methods, data collection, and the appropriateness of the conclusions, and thus their beliefs and values enter into the process at many points." (Dewberry) So what are the competing world views or philosophies? The Materialist (or Naturalist) believes that this universe is "the whole show", that it exists "on its own" in space and time, that it is a closed system of cause and effect, and outside this system nothing else exists. "The Supernaturalist believes that one Thing exists on its own and has produced the framework of space and time and the procession of systematically connected events which fill them." (Lewis, pg 17) Francis Schaeffer simply describes materialism as the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system as compared to the uniformity of natural causes in an open system. Today, most scientists operate from a materialistic world view. There once was a time when science operated from a supernaturalistic philosophy. "The early scientists shared the outlook of Christianity in believing there is a reasonable God, who had created a reasonable universe; and thus man, by use of his reason, could find out the universe's form. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Copernicus (1475-1543), Galileo (1564-1642), Kepler (1571-1630), Faraday (1791-1867), and Maxwell (1831-1879) looked upon the universe, and carried on their work as scientists, in this framework." (Schaeffer, pg 226) The resulting Copernican Revolution was the beginning of modern science. So what are the implications for the evolution debate? The question is not that evolution is scientific and Intelligent Design is unscientific, but that both are bound to a philosophy or world view. The Intelligent Design debate is framed as religion encroaching on the sacred domain of science. In truth it is a battle of world views. Who has the authority to determine the world view under which science progresses? "At the dawn of modern science, it was the Catholic Church that argued that the authority of science rested with the community of practitioners (theirs, of course). It was the Copernicans, especially Galileo, who argued that the authority of science and truth rested with the individual scientist. Moving the authority of science to the individual scientist was one of the key steps in the Copernican Revolution and the foundation of modern science. We have essentially come full circle. We just replaced one priesthood for another." (Dewberry) Charles Krauthammer, Insulting Science and Religion, Washington Post, Dec 2005 Francis Schaeffer, Trilogy, Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL, copyright 1990 Richard Lewontin, New York Review of Books, Jan 9, 1997 Charles Dewberry, World, interview by Marvin Olasky, Jan 14, 2006 C. S. Lewis, Miracles, Touchstone Books, copyright 1947 |
