Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith ”” namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.
Read it all. The key book in my mind in this whole area is Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge.
I am somewhat aghast at the glibness of this article, with both science and historical inaccuracies throughout. Let me first put Hebrews 11 in one corner, describing succinctly what Christians define to be “faith”. This is not in the first instance the “faith” that Davies misappropriated to describe science.
What good science assumes is that objective reality is unitary. This is only semantically similar to “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord thy God is One!” But from assuming that an objective reality exists in common for all observers and that its parts are not mutually contradictory (e.g. what is ‘mass’ is the same for all balances), a set of common observations can be seen by all observers. From these “laws” can be deduced as they help explain why all observations seems to be within error bands on similar phenomena. But these laws cannot be proven, other than to state that the laws do not contradict themselves or observed phenomena. But if somebody measured some proveable “sink” for energy, out goes the Conservation of Energy (aka the “first law of thermodynamics”). Indeed, this might happen soon if astronomy could ‘measure’ what is happening in black holes.
But theology proceeds from different directions. Decartes ontologically started with the assumption that his thinking (and conceptualizing God) objectively proved that God existed. More simply, if one admits to the existence of a ‘higher being’, then that highness allows that being to order the universe. God the lawgiver, more or less as in Exodus through Deuteronomy. God theologically doesn’t have to explain himself, and at times to various observers appears to contradict himself. But those observers have no theological right to chuck out whatever divine laws they perceive as being contradictory by their own perceptions. This is completely different from the scientific case, which Davies appears to forget.
Moving on from comment 1, I would admit that by theological faith an observer could approach the unitary truth of the physical world as being just one manifestation of how divine law is righteously ordered. But that faith is precisely what Paul speaks of when he says that “the world as we see it is made up of things unseen”. That observer would have faith that the reality that he sees is divinely ordered and consistent with what is divinely revealed through scripture and prophesy.
God gives us free will, and does not take away our need to make a faithful commitment to His ordering of this world and the next. If science could [i]prove God’s existence[/i], then personal faith or prophesy would be unneeded. But historically (as Newton’s biography might show, if Davies actually researched the man and his works) that is not the case.
Tom Roberts [#1] writes: “I am somewhat aghast at the glibness of this article, with both science and historical inaccuracies throughout.”
Tom, I’m somewhat aghast that you regard Davies’ article as glib. He’s a major thinker in the field of science-and-religion, as well as a physicist himself.
As far as theology and science proceeding from different directions, John Polkinghorne (Cambridge particle physicist turned late-call Anglican priest) extols the virtues of what he calls bottom-up thinking, that of proceeding cautiously from observation to theory, which I would note has the added attraction of comporting with the First Comandment. Theology, in contrast, seems to tend to be top-down in nature: Things must be the way that so-and-so has conceived them to be, therefore we must brand as heresy any observation or insight that might contradict that conception.
DC- good thinkers sometimes write bad articles. Other times they are just wrong. And then there are editors who can much up things as well, but I don’t think the latter is the case with this short article.
Without reading a great deal of Polkinghorne, there is at:
http://www.crosscurrents.org/polkinghorne.htm
“JP: Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don’t start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like. If the experience of science teaches anything, it’s that the world is very strange and surprising. The many revolutions in science have certainly shown that. If that’s true of our encounter with the physical world, it’s likely to be even truer of our encounter with God.”
In this Polkinghorne errs similarly to Davies, but I can see in much of his other thoughts that he is primarily a top down theologian despite his evident abilities to synthesize concepts from observable phenomena. But here is the error that Polkinghorne makes: these prior appreciations of phenomena were [i]reevaluated objectively and revised into what is now regarded as a true explanation of those phenomena.[/i] That process does not need any theological justification, and doesn’t even need Polkinghorne’s “general principles” as it could objectively devise its own internally consistent laws. What Polkinghorne is attempting, in a theologically righteous manner for which I sympathize, is to presume that theology and general scientific principles are consistent. But that is not a [i]scientific necessity.[/i]
Again, if science was comprehensively predictive, then we would not need theology. In fact, we would not even need free will or God.
Incidently, the one ‘general principle’ that Polkinghorne doesn’t seem to challenge, scientifically, is the “God” concept. Especially the one with the upper case ‘G’. So he does seem to do the ‘top-down’ conceptualizing in certain circumstances. Again, I’ve not comprehensively read him, so I cannot say when he allows for this and when not. However, in this he differs greatly from Davies who appears to think that top-down and bottom-up give the same results.
It was said of Carl Sagan that he denied the supernatural while, at the same time, attributing supernatural powers to the material world.
Tom Roberts [#4] writes: “… if science was comprehensively predictive, then we would not need theology. In fact, we would not even need free will or God.”
I can’t think of any scientists who believe that science is, or is likely ever to be, comprehensively predictive. I would guess that most working scientists are acutely aware that the more we learn, the more we find there is yet to learn.
Even so, scientists keep plugging away, which I would think demonstrates a deep faith that their work isn’t for naught (else why would any sensible person spend a lifetime doing it?). For many of them, their faith isn’t in a Creator per se, but it’s a start.
I don’t think you can make these sorts of statements about what science “is” without falling into a sort of Platonism. Science only exists (scientifically, anyway) as a pattern of human thought and behavior.
I’ve followed the cosmologists enough of late to conclude, with Davies, that they are falling into the kind of religious thinking that he is remarking upon. Given the gross lack of real knowledge, all the discussion of “the multiverse” falls squarely under the heading of “we have to find a origin of the universe that doesn’t involve God.” It’s the kind of speculation that science fiction rightly claims as its territory (and for that matter, fantasy in general so claims), but it is also certainly a religiously motivated investigation. One would be better of saying, at this stage at least, that someone had better start producing some definite evidence for such a thing before anyone is under any obligation to take it seriously.
As a professional scientist and an orthodox believer with an interest in this area, I only wish to say that the subject of science and theology is a remarkably subtle one in which a lot of good contemporary work is being done by Anglicans. A good resource from Polkinghorne is his book, Science and the Trinity (in which, among other things, he critiques Paul Davies). To whet your appetite, Polkinghorne has this quote on p. 61 of the book, “I shall make what some of my scientific colleagues might think was an over-audacious claim, that a deeply intellectually satisfying candidate for the title of a true ‘Theory of Everything’ is in fact provided by Trinitarian theology’.â€
Another orthodox Anglican theologian with a background in the sciences who is doing exceptional work is Alister McGrath of Oxford University, who recently published a magisterial trilogy on science and theology. The three volumes, entitled Nature, Reality, and Theory, are summarized in his briefer book The Science of God (T&T;Clark, 2004).
Finally, I came across Michael Polanyi in the 1960s when he was still alive and writing against scientific reductionism. He has a powerful critique of modernist thinking in culture and the sciences, and speaks as a scientist about how scientists actually come to know about the world in a meaningful way. A shorter and perhaps more accessible book than Personal Knowledge is his book Meaning, published posthumously co-authored with Harry Prosch (U. Chicago Press, 1975).
#8 I’ll give you one hypothesis why they do it: they get paid to be scientists. The payments are both monetary and in terms of professional status. When they get paid better to be, say, managers, they often switch activities.