R: God Is Sooner Found in the Laboratory Than the Library

One day in Syracuse, Archimedes was sitting in his bathtub thinking about math. The king of Syracuse had commissioned the mathematician to figure out how to measure the volume of his enormous crown, and Archimedes was at his wit's end measuring the complex object. Archimedes noticed that the water in his tub was displaced when he sat down, and suddenly he had solved the problem. He could determine the volume of the king’s crown by measuring the water displacement it caused. The old mathematician leapt up out of his tub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting “Eureka, eureka!” meaning “I have found it!”

Scholars spend their lives chasing such a eureka moment. In every discipline, professors and practitioners search for breakthroughs and discoveries. The sciences and the humanities have different focuses, different methods, different skillsets, but are unified in that they seek the moment of piercing clarity when a sudden discovery makes everything else make sense. But the greatest eureka moment is not discovering a theorem or deciphering a manuscript. It is finding God. Only by knowing God can we make sense of the world, and only in the light of God can the work of the laboratory and library have meaning. Our debate asks whether such a eureka is better achieved in the sciences or in the humanities.

The affirmative may focus on man as the image of God. By better understanding God’s creation, humans chief among it, we can better understand God. Furthermore, by making man’s life longer, healthier, and safer through scientific advances, we honor God by honoring his image. After all, “as you did to one of the least of my brothers, so you did to me” (Matthew 25:40). The negative may argue that people, and hence God, are better understood by the wisdom of past generations, most especially through Scripture. God chose stories and poems to reveal himself, not theorems and axioms.