Notes from above ground

by David Shanahan

If it’s the case, as I believe it is, that there are basically only two possible explanations for the fact that we exist, that anything exists, then it is important to see which of the two explanations matches with what we know to be true. Either everything that is came about through a random process over long periods of time, the result of chance combinations of molecules and atoms, without purpose of meaning, or, alternatively, everything is designed and planned to fit into a universe with purpose and meaning. Both explanations may have differing schools of thought as to precisely how and when life began, but the fundamental alternatives are clear.

These opposite ideas have been frequently portrayed as “Science versus Religion”, but this is misleading. The prevailing view in our time, as disseminated through schools, media, and general conversation, is that religion is based entirely on blind faith without evidence or reason, while science is built upon a clear method of verification and reliable scientific evidence. We are, in that way, prisoners of our days, as this position has not always been the accepted one, and is, in fact, relatively recent and a result of blind faith on the part of society itself.

Modern science began and was based upon a belief in the fact of design and reason in nature. The philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, not a Christian, stated that people began to study nature, looking for the laws that govern it, because they believed those laws would be found. And the reason they believed that was because they believed in a law giver behind nature. The vital point is that they found those laws, they found the underlying principles that explain what they saw, the mathematical exactness by which everything, from the micro to the macro, from DNA to solar systems, operate. This is why modern science suddenly developed in Europe, not elsewhere, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Professor John Lennox, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford University, puts it like this:

“It is no accident that Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Clerk-Maxwell were believers in God.

Melvin Calvin, Nobel Prize-winner in biochemistry, finds the origin of the conviction, basic to science, that nature is ordered in the basic notion: ‘that the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods, each governing his own province according to his own laws. This monotheistic view seems to be the historical foundation for modern science’."

One of the difficulties attending this question is the misunderstanding that exists about what exactly “science” is, and how it operates. Logical Positivism in the last century gave rise to the idea that science is concerned only with what is accessible to our sense perception, and that there is no scientific reality beyond that. It also assumed that scientists are objective observers who simply report what is, what they have found through their studies. Michael Polanyi, who wrote on physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy, made the point that there is no such thing as a purely objective observer, all come to the job with personal presuppositions, a theory or world view through which he sees and finds. The observer is never neu-