Scientism vs. Creationism: At the Extremes

There are two different kinds of unification extremists: those advocating religion as an ultimate arbiter and unifier that provides morals and metaphysics, and those advocating all and only science all the time and denying any role for other values or views in modern society. Both hold to their convenient coherent worldviews and their tightly woven tangle of views. Each denies authority to others with competing views, and they allow no room for compromise or compatibilism...

 

Both those opposing the particular science in question and those advocating all and only science as good call for laying out and playing out "the" controversy. Extremists on both sides seem to want either religion or science to win...each is taken as a straight-forward us-versus-them set of polarities.

 

These are the extremes, and most people lie in between.

 

"Untangling Debates about Science and Religion" in The Panda's Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy, ed. Nathaniel C. Comfort (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 84-85. 

In agreement with Maienschein is the International Society for Science and Religion, "we resist the insistence of intelligent-design advocates that their enterprise be taken as genuine science - just as we oppose efforts of others to elevate science into a comprehensive world view (so-called scientism)." Though these two vocal extremes receive the lion's share of the media attention, the majority of scientists and theologians cluster closer to the middle, allowing constructive dialogue between these two complementary approaches to discovering truth.

Science in the National Curriculum for England (2006).

Dr. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, "Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?" Babbage Lecture Theatre, Cambridge, May 2007. (This lecture was also delivered for the James Gregory Public Lectures on Science and Religion, St. Andrews University, Scotland, 20 December 2007.)

Francisco Ayala, Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), 177. 

"In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no esthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I and whither go I?

 

Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist, a pioneer of quantum mechanics and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics in Nature and the Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 92.

Alister McGrath

This lecture,  "Has Science Eliminated God? Richard Dawkins and the Meaning of Life?", was delivered in 2004 in the Babbage Lecture Theatre, Cambridge. The lecture was followed by questions from the audience and later a dinner/discussion at St Edmunds College. The Christians in Science--St Edmunds website links to the audio, as well as transcripts of the lecture.

Below are his opening remarks:

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak to you this evening on the fascinating topic of the way in which the atheism of Richard Dawkins is grounded in his understanding of the natural sciences. I first came across Richard Dawkins' work back in 1977, when I read his first major book, The Selfish Gene. I was completing my doctoral research in Oxford University's department of biochemistry, under the genial supervision of Professor Sir George Radda, who went on to become Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council. I was trying to figure out how biological membranes are able to work so successfully, developing new physical methods of studying their behaviour.

The Selfish Gene was a wonderful book, considered as a piece of popular scientific writing. Yet Dawkins' treatment of religion - especially his thoughts on the `god-meme' - were unsatisfying. He offered a few muddled attempts to make sense of the idea of `faith', without establishing a proper analytical and evidential basis for his reflections. I found myself puzzled by this, and made a mental note to pen a few words in response sometime. Twenty-five years later, I got round to penning those words, and you will find them in Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life.

The full-text of this lecture can be found here >>

 

For more engagement with the scientism of Richard Dawkins, Christians in Science has a helpful page: Response to Dawkins: a collection of articles, interviews and reviews.

 

John Polkinghorne

The Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS is a leading exponent of the relationship between science and religion and winner of the 2002 Templeton Prize. Following important contributions to the study of elementary particle physics, he became Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge in 1968 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. In 1979 he resigned his professorship to train for the Anglican priesthood. After posts as a parish priest and Dean of Trinity Hall, he became President of Queens' College Cambridge until 1996. He received a knighthood in 1997 for distinguished service to science, religion, learning and medical ethics. He has written a number of books about the compatibility of science and religion.

"Has Science made Religion Redundant?" CiS-St. Edmunds Lecture Series

The Limitations of Science

I am certainly someone who wants to take science seriously, but I also need to recognize that science has purchased its great success by the modesty of its ambition. It does not seek to ask and answer every kind of question that an enquiring mind might want to address. Instead it confines itself to considering solely the processes by which things happen, without asking whether there is a meaning and purpose behind what is going on. Science limits itself to impersonal experience – reality encountered as an ‘it’ – and it brackets out the personal – reality encountered as a ‘thou’.

The great secret weapon of science is its recourse to experimental testing, but once one leaves science to enter the realm of the personal, testing has to give way to trusting as the means of gaining true knowledge. We know that in our relations with each other – if you are always setting little traps to see if I am your friend, you will destroy the possibility of friendship between us. Even more is that true of our relationship with the transpersonal reality of God. The world that science on its own describes is a cold, abstracted lunar landscape, with many interesting objects in it but devoid of persons. If we are to think adequately about the rich and many-layered world in which we live, science could never be enough to give us that full understanding that it is the instinctive desire of the scientist to attain. Ask a scientist, as a scientist, to tell you all that he or she can about music. They will reply that it is neural response to vibrations in the air. That, of course is true, but hardly the whole story. The mystery of music slips through the wide meshes of the net with which science trawls experience. The insistent deeper questions of value and purpose that science brackets out are issues that religion certainly addresses. It could never be made redundant by science’s advance in other areas of human understanding.

A doctrine of creation

One way of seeing how the insights of science and those of theology relate to each other, as complementary rather than conflicting, is to consider the doctrine of creation. One difficulty that I have when I talk to my scientific colleagues about my Christian beliefs is that they almost all think that the doctrine of creation is about how things began. For example, Stephen Hawking supposes that if his highly speculative ideas about the very early universe are correct – so that time then had a very different nature and there was no dateable beginning to the cosmos – then God would be left with nothing to do. It is as if the only thing a Creator was needed for was to light the blue touch paper to set off the big bang. To think that way is to make a terrible theological mistake. God is as much the Creator today as God was fourteen billion years ago, for the real role of the Creator is to hold the world in being. Only the steadfast divine faithfulness rescues the universe from collapsing into nothingness. The doctrine of creation is not concerned with how things began but why things exist. It is the answer to the great question posed by Liebniz, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

To believe in creation means that there is a divine Mind and a divine Purpose behind what is happening in the world. To believe in creation is to believe that the universe is not just a random collection of atoms, but it is an orderly world whose patterns reflect the will of a Creator. It is to believe that history is not just a meaningless succession of one thing after another, but it is going somewhere because there is God’s purpose behind what is happening....

The full-text of this lecture can be found here >>

 

Denis Alexander

Scientific naturalism is the view that only scientific knowledge is reliable and that science can, in principle, explain everything. This paper surveys the inherent weaknesses in this philosophy, illustrated by the naturalistic attempt to extract ethics from biology. Different Christian responses to naturalism are considered. It is argued that the Christian worldview provides a more coherent explanation than naturalism for the properties of the universe and for the richness of human experience. Ironically, naturalism itself puts at risk the future health of science.   

 

Full-text

"Has Science made Religion Redundant?" James Gregory Public Lectures on Science and Religion, St. Andrews University, Scotland, 27 February 2008.

I suppose the first and most obvious point to make is that there’s no such thing as Religion, with a big ‘R’. No society in the world has yet been discovered without a religious belief system. Occasionally claims have been made of finding a new society that lacks any kind of religion, but further research has revealed that it’s there, albeit in a form not recognised by those anthropologists who first started their investigation. According to the editors of the World Christian Encyclopedia there are 19 major world religions which are subdivided into a total of 270 large religious groups, and thousands of smaller ones, including a staggering 34,000 distinct Christian groups. No wonder that anthropologists have a hard time coming up with precise definitions of ‘religion’ that everyone agrees on.

So perhaps a more manageable question to address is: ‘Has science made certain religious beliefs redundant?’ or at least certain beliefs that receive support and validation from religion. And here quite clearly the answer is ‘yes’. For example:

The earth is not 10,000 years old but 4,566 million years old. You can still find people who believe that the earth is very young, and support their belief by texts from the Bible or the Qu’ran, but science has shown this belief to be redundant. Of course the irony in this case is that the great age of the earth that was established from the late 18th century onwards was largely established by Christian natural philosophers as scientists were then called. One of the main figures in establishing the geological column was an evangelical cleric, the Rev Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), appointed as first professor of geology at Cambridge at the age of thirty-three.

Another religious belief that I think science can show is redundant is the belief strongly held by a sect in the USA that handling poisonous snakes in the middle of a service is not dangerous and you won’t die from that. Actually, that’s not true and you might well die if you get bitten, and people do. Not a practice to be recommended. Not something that generally happens in the Church of Scotland from all I hear.

Full-text (pdf)

Karl Giberson & Mariano Artigas

Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Amazon

Karl W. Giberson (PhD, Rice University) is a physicist and an internationally known scholar of science-and-religion and one of America’s leading participants in the creation/evolution controversy. He was the founding editor of Science & Theology News, the leading publication in its field until it ceased publication in 2006, and editor-in-chief of Science & Spirit magazine from 2003-2006. He has published over a hundred articles, reviews, and essays, both technical and popular, and written four books. His homepage includes additional information and some full-text essays.

Mariano Artigas (1938-2006) is a physicist, philosopher and writer. He received the Templeton Foundation Award in 1995 for his work on science and religion. He wrote The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion and fifteen other books on science and religion. He was a member of the European Association for the Study of Science and Theology, the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences, and the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. He was Consultor of the Pontifical Council for the Dialogue with Non-believers. In 2002, jointly with other professors, he created Science, Reason and Faith Research Group (CRYF), based in the University of Navarra where he taught. The aim of the Group is to promote interdisciplinary study of issues where science, philosophy and theology intertwine. He holds PhDs in both physics and in philosophy, and was ordained a priest in 1964. Wikipedia

Biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson, and physicists Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Weinberg have become public intellectuals, articulating a much larger vision for science and what role it should play in the modern worldview. The scientific prestige and literary eloquence of each of these great thinkers combine to transform them into what can only be called oracles of science. Curiously, the leading "oracles of science" are predominantly secular in ways that don't reflect the distribution of religious beliefs within the scientific community. Many of them are even hostile to religion, creating a false impression that science as a whole is incompatible with religion. Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas offer an informed analysis of the views of these six scientists, carefully distinguishing science from philosophy and religion in the writings of the oracles.

 

Reviews

"Six great science luminaries antagonistic to religious belief, among the most distinguished and best known scientists of our times, are subjected to scrutiny. The portrayal of their ideas is accurate and insightful, as well as fair. The criticisms are, by and large, gentle, but pointed. Will you be convinced? Read on. You'll be glad you did. You'll learn much and be prepared to make your own determination."

--Francisco J. Ayala, University Professor at the University of California, Irvine, recipient of the 2001 National Medal of Science, and author of Darwin and Intelligent Design

 

"One of our modern values is freedom of thought in philosophy, theology, and science as well, despite the perennial turf wars between all three. This concise biographical study, both sympathetic and critical, shows how six celebrity scientists have muddled these boundaries, using their eminence and literary skill to debunk traditional religion. Though this is a story of science "oracles" trespassing on theology's turf, it also cautions believers against a similar abuse of science."

--Larry Witham, journalist and author of Where Darwin Meets the Bible

 

"Few writers have poured more fuel on the recent science-religion controversies than such religion-bashers as Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Weinberg. In six perky profiles two Christian scholars critically, but fairly, examine the anti-religious claims of these and other scientific "oracles," finding them no more "scientific" than the mutterings of creationists.""

--Ronald L. Numbers, author of The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design