Does science need God?

An Either-Or on Science and Theism:

I have had a lot of students coming to my office of late to discuss intelligent design.  I am not going to take on the ID debate itself, instead I want to back up a step and make a more general teleological argument.

Here is the either/or:

EITHER:

Assumption:  Scientists really know truths about the world. 

Science, of course, uses an empirical method in order to discern laws.  Scientific laws (like laws in physics) are thought to be regulative and uniform.  That is, the condition for the possibility of knowledge in science is that nature is regular and uniform (intelligible).  (Unintelligent things act in ways that are governed and intelligible, like rocks predictably and uniformly falling toward earth at discernible rates). 

Genuine knowledge is based on justifiable assumptions.  Science is genuine knowledge based on the assumption of the principle of the uniformity of nature, so the principle of the uniformity of nature must be justifiable.

How to justify it?  How to explain the intelligibility of the natural world?  Well, if the effect is intelligible, then the cause must be intelligent (for how could intelligibility arise out of random chaos?).  Therefore, there must be an intelligent cause (one might say both first and final) of nature.

OR:

Assumption: There is no justified reason for thinking there is an intelligent cause of nature.

Genuine knowledge is based on justifiable assumptions.  The principle of the uniformity of nature is not justifiable, therefore science (which depends on the PUN) is not genuine knowledge.

In short, here is your choice:

a) You either think science is genuine knowledge, in which case you must be a theist of some sort (you need at least an Unmoved Mover)

b) You deny God (UMM), and so must deny that science is genuine knowledge.

That is, you can either be a theist or a skeptic about all empirical knowledge.  You can choose God and science, or no God and no science.

This seems too easy.  It might be.  There is a third option:

c) Options (a) and (b) presume a foundationalist account of knowledge.  Instead we should have a coherentist account.  In other words, one could say: I do think that scientific knowledge is genuine knowledge about the world, with a disclaimer (you decide if it is small or large disclaimer).  The disclaimer is that we admit that the principle of the uniformity of nature is unjustified, but that science is still a coherent system and so we can call it ‘knowledge’.

Those that want to deny an Unmoved Mover are probably wisest to choose c, though even that option is not without its problems.  That said, I don’t think that most of my students who think science does not need an Unmoved Mover (God) can choose option c.  Two reasons for this:  1) Most of them are really puffed up over their science and so probably don’t want any disclaimers on its legitimacy at all (they seem to think that science has ‘proved’ all sorts of things rather than science being theory) and 2) I think most of my students have a foundationalist view of knowledge. 

One could raise some questions, of course, with option (a).  For instance, must we think that intelligible effects can only arise out of intelligible causes?  (I do think there is good reason to think this, but I can imagine someone disputing it too). 

 

 

 

 

Existentialism and football

I read The Onion most everyday, and I know there is at least one other regular reader among our philosophers.  Thought I would share this little ‘philosophical’ story, where the Jacksonville Jaguars forfeited their game after realizing, thanks to the coin toss, that life is meaningless and random.

Click here.  

My favorite line: Coach Del Rio chewed Taylor out, telling him ‘Quit pondering the inconsequence of being in a universe governed by chaos and just play some football!’

The need for serious philosophical anthropology

John Paul II begins his truly brilliant work ‘The Theology of the Body’ with this assertion (paraphrased) – ‘Before we can possibly understand God we must understand man’.  This is not to say that all there is to say about God is what we can say about man, but it is to press the point that we are made in God’s image.

Novack makes a similar assertion in his new book ‘No One Sees God’.  

‘If you make mistakes about your own nature, you will make as many mistakes about God, and quite properly then reject what your inquiries put before you.  The God you will fantasize will appear to you not very great, a delusion or a snare from which others ought to be freed.  You will despise this God.’

I wholeheartedly agree that anthropology is central to inquiry about everything else, including God (I would also include ethics).  Before we argue about God, we should argue about man.  If you think we don’t know anything other than matter, then you will likely think that you are also only material.  If you don’t think the life of a human person involves teleological striving, then you likely won’t imagine the possibility of discoverable meaning.  

This will sound like a strange thing to say, but sometimes I think we worry about God too much.  We would be better served to worry more about man.  I try to do this in my Intro class, it is essentially a class on human nature.  So, theists and atheists alike – do yourself a favor and take a break from ‘God-talk’ and talk about the human experience.  Read books that can facilitate this (Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos is highly recommended).  Think about language, meaning, relationships, love and sex.

Yes, sex.  Notice that the issue of sex here is central to questions about man, and so also for questions about God.  Hitchens argues that religion comes from a ‘dangerous sexual repression’.  If he thinks that human sexuality and its meaning is central to an adequate anthropology and an adequate theology, then he concurs with JPII.  The the central thesis of JPII’s ‘Theology of the Body’ is that man can only understand himself fully as gift, and that we image/iconize the Trinity most clearly in the loving and reciprocated gift of oneself in sexual intercourse!  (An argument, I might add, that does not sound sexually repressed!)