The deification of science

[ribozyme]

Someone has accused me of deifying science (in another thread which this was deleted
because that discussion of off topic… I will not contest that accusation, but I will ask one thing concerning this issue:

Would one regard science being deified if one adheres to the theory of evolution instead of believe that God created some creatures discretely in contrast to them being descended from a universial common ancestor?

Why should one abandon empiricism and embrace so-called divine revelation? He also noticed that I think that science will eventually show that God is unneccessary in the natural world and that science will make God disappear. I will not contest this, as while I was studying biochemistry in my own free time (mainly from Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry fifth edition) and reading peer-reviewed articles about the in vitro evolution of nucleic acid enzymes (see my signature for an example of a nucleic acid enzyme and my user name ), I realized that life simply is molecules; life is a self-sustaining system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. I also appreciated the ability of Darwinian evolution to generate novel structures (again my signature is an example of this as the molecule is able to act as an RNA polymerase). To me, this I think this shows that God intervening in nature is unneccessary.

Also he criticized me for getting upset when someone insults (he used quotation marks under
“insults”) some scientists. I only get upset because people wrongly accuse them of being
dogmatic (see: creationontheweb.com/content/view/4537)
Sarfati:

The main feature of [Gerald Joyce and David Bartel’s] research is that they have already assumed the conclusion… That is, they assume a materialistic origin of life by faith, and are merely trying to work out some remotely feasible scenario to make their faith seem reasonable.

As far as I am concerned, Professor Joyce does not believe in a personal God (I don’t know about Professor Bartel though) and he most certainly does not believe in anything dogmatically. To the contrary, he advocates skepticism in science as opposed to dogmatism. Would anyone want to challenge this?

Well, what is the deification of science? I am not address this question to any one particular person though? How am I (or scientists in general) guilty of this?

 

[Trelow]

Science is the study of the physical order. It is not in opposition to theology. They pursue the same Truth, through different means.

 

[JimG]

Would one regard science being deified if one adheres to the theory of evolution instead of believe that God created some creatures discretely in contrast to them being descended from a universial common ancestor?

I wouldn’t consider simply accepting the theory of evolution to be in itself a deification of science.

As for God discretely creating some entities without regard to evolution, Catholic theology would consider the human soul to be one such entity, (regardless of how the human body may have evolved.) It would also consider the angels and God himself, as purely non-matierial beings, to be not subject to evolution.

I realized that life simply is molecules; life is a self-sustaining system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

Well, most things are composed of molecules, including this post and yours. But was your post a simple result of inevitable molecular interactions, or did thought and volition have anything to do with it?

 

[Darrel]

The universe just created it’s self one day according to science. The fact that it was created is obvious, yet people require proof to believe anything. So it realy is just a matter of faith. The funny part is that common sense points to creation since the universe exists at all. Scientist must have a ton of faith in evolution to believe the universe just up and created it’s self one fine day without a shred of evidence to prove it. Scientist believe in what they can’t see or prove so I guess that means there is a deification of science.

-D

 

[Orogeny]

Scientist must have a ton of faith in evolution to believe the universe just up and created it’s self one fine day without a shred of evidence to prove it.

Would you care to explain which part of evolution deals with the creation of the universe?

Peace

Tim

 

[Montalban]

Science is the study of the physical order. It is not in opposition to theology. They pursue the same Truth, through different means.

(Christian) Religion says there is a God. That is a religious truth.

Science (as it is taught in most schools) can’t say that there is. Science doesn’t therefore doesn’t come anywhere near the same truth.

 

[Montalban]

Someone has accused me of deifying science (in another thread which this was deleted
because that discussion of off topic… I will not contest that accusation, but I will ask one thing concerning this issue:

Would one regard science being deified if one adheres to the theory of evolution instead of believe that God created some creatures discretely in contrast to them being descended from a universal common ancestor?

We Orthodox have a different approach
“Long ago (in the 4th century!) one of the Church’s teachers Vasilius the Great wrote about this. He advised the Orthodox Christians neither to rely upon the scientific data in order to provide foundation for their faith in Christ, nor to try to disprove them, because “the scientists permanently disprove themselves.”

pravoslavie.ru/english/age-of-earth.htm

The idea that we would attach our faith to the shifting structures of science is foreign to us.

Why should one abandon empiricism and embrace so-called divine revelation?

Empirical observation need not be by experiment, but by observation; one of the meanings is…
“depending upon experience or observation alone, without using scientific method or theory, esp. as in medicine.”
dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=empirical

Therefore when the Apostles observed Jesus had come back from the dead they took it to be true because they’d observed that it was so.

The idea of deifying science seems strange.

What do you think of Scientism?

 

[Trelow]

(Christian) Religion says there is a God. That is a religious truth.

Science (as it is taught in most schools) can’t say that there is. Science doesn’t therefore doesn’t come anywhere near the same truth.

Science teaches the truth of the created order. You can honor the artist by studying his works. The trick is to remember that they did not create themselves.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Well, what is the deification of science? I am not address this question to any one particular person though? How am I (or scientists in general) guilty of this?
*__________________
*
The deification of science (especially atheistic science) comes mainly through the modern tendancy of science to limit all knowledge to scientific categories. Accordingly, there is no order of provable being outside the order we know through our senses and the logical processes of induction and deduction. Science therefore does not concern itself with the soul, God, the supernatural in general (except to deny them all). Even those categories of experience once considered separate from science are now coming under the scrutiny of science. For example, aesthetics, morality, human destiny, etc. In this sense science has been deified, or elevated, as the sole arbiter of knowledge. For many scientists,with this elevation comes a certain arrogance and pomposity toward religion. Naturally, with arrogance comes a certain tendancy toward the irrational … such as supposing that the theory of evolution makes God and religion irrelevant … to be dismissed with a flick of the intellectual wrist.

 

[ribozyme]

We Orthodox have a different approach
“Long ago (in the 4th century!) one of the Church’s teachers Vasilius the Great wrote about this. He advised the Orthodox Christians neither to rely upon the scientific data in order to provide foundation for their faith in Christ, nor to try to disprove them, because “the scientists permanently disprove themselves.”

pravoslavie.ru/english/age-of-earth.htm

Hmm… you are criticizing science for being science. Science involves the falsification of hypotheses.

 

[Liberian]

Ribozyme,

If I may address one small part of your opening post, I disagree with your contention that science will eventually show God to be unnecessary in the natural world. If the natural world does not have a supernatural component, then our thoughts are strictly the results of the chemical reactions and electrical impulses in our brains. If that is the case, then there is no reason to suggest that our thoughts mirror the outside world in any relationship besides cause and effect–in other words, there is no reason to suggest that our thoughts reflect “the truth” in any form. Certainly there are evolutionary pressures that would cause our abilities to recognize predators and food accurately, but that shows simply that our thoughts are good survival traits, not that they are true. And this holds for our thoughts about the existence or the nonexistence of the supernatural: if we begin by assuming that the supernatural does not exist, we conclude that there is no reason to believe that our assumption is correct.

Incidentally, this is a favorite argument of scientists against religion: religion is a good survival characteristic in a primitive society, but that does not make it true. The same is true for our thoughts in general, if the natural world is all that there is.

Quite frankly, I don’t think any amount of scientific discovery is going to refute this argument. The exclusion of the supernatural, as a philosophy, is inconsistent with itself.

 

[Cristiano]

Science is not about the truth, because it is not about the why but it is about the how. If you look at science and physics in particular you will see that all the theories are simple and often incomplete models of what people perceive as reality. The idea is to find the simplest and most probable model, not the true one. If you go a step forward you move into the realm of faith (e.g. string theory) and it is still called physics, thus science. If you look at mathematics (a priori knowledge) people still make a living out of conjectures instead of using only rigorous demonstrations and so on.

 

[VociMike]

Would one regard science being deified if one adheres to the theory of evolution instead of believe that God created some creatures discretely in contrast to them being descended from a universial common ancestor?

Is this an assertion that evolution requires the non-existence of God?

Why should one abandon empiricism and embrace so-called divine revelation? He also noticed that I think that science will eventually show that God is unneccessary in the natural world and that science will make God disappear. I will not contest this, as while I was studying biochemistry in my own free time (mainly from Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry fifth edition) and reading peer-reviewed articles about the in vitro evolution of nucleic acid enzymes (see my signature for an example of a nucleic acid enzyme and my user name ), I realized that life simply is molecules; life is a self-sustaining system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

So where did the molecules come from? Where did the atoms come from? Where did the laws of physics that governs their behavior come from?

Science is wonderful, because it shows us so much of the creative mind of God, and secondly because it gives us many opportunities to alleviate drudgery and suffering, but it doesn’t answer any of the really important questions. It tells us how the parts of the machine behave, but it doesn’t even try to tell us where the machine came from, or why there’s any machine at alll. (And I say that as a degreed engineer)

 

[Montalban]

Hmm… you are criticizing science for being science. Science involves the falsification of hypotheses.

No, I’m recognising science for being science. As a ‘test for truths’ religion offers truths that don’t change (at least as far as Orthodoxy goes), so I’ll stick with it as the over-arching determiner of truth in my life.

Science truths (if you want to say that there’s a truth in science) change all the time.

 

[Montalban]

Science teaches the truth of the created order. You can honor the artist by studying his works.
The trick is to remember that they did not create themselves.

The problem with this was shown up with Neptunism. Neptunism was a belief that the world’s layers were laid down by gigantic seas. It seemed to coincide with Genesis (the Great Flood). People could have then said "We have science to show how God worked on the world).

But Neptunism is now a discarded theory, people favour Vulcanism.

Thus to the people who tied their faith to explanations of science were left standard - hence my quote earlier from St. Basil.

See
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptunism
for tiny article on Neptunism

 

[dulcissima]

He also noticed that I think that science will eventually show that God is unneccessary in the natural world and that science will make God disappear. I will not contest this, as while I was studying biochemistry in my own free time (mainly from Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry fifth edition) and reading peer-reviewed articles about the in vitro evolution of nucleic acid enzymes (see my signature for an example of a nucleic acid enzyme and my user name ), I realized that life simply is molecules; life is a self-sustaining system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. I also appreciated the ability of Darwinian evolution to generate novel structures (again my signature is an example of this as the molecule is able to act as an RNA polymerase). To me, this I think this shows that God intervening in nature is unneccessary.

Ribozyme,

Do you think that we will ever be able to assemble a group of molecules from scratch and create a human being? If we know exactly what the components are do you think it is possible? To me this just seems completely impossible, because human beings are much more than a collection of molecules.

If you look at the similarity between chimpanzee DNA and human DNA, but then look at how vastly differfent humans and chimps are, don’t you kind of get the impression that there is something very, very different about humans? I find it very difficult to believe that God played no part in our creation and is completely irrelevant.

I would suggest that in addition to your science books, you might also want to check out some of the Great Books…Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas…to help round out your perceptions of knowledge and truth.

 

[ribozyme]

Ribozyme,

Do you think that we will ever be able to assemble a group of molecules from scratch and create a human being? If we know exactly what the components are do you think it is possible? To me this just seems completely impossible, because human beings are much more than a collection of molecules.

If you look at the similarity between chimpanzee DNA and human DNA, but then look at how vastly differfent humans and chimps are, don’t you kind of get the impression that there is something very, very different about humans? I find it very difficult to believe that God played no part in our creation and is completely irrelevant.

I would suggest that in addition to your science books, you might also want to check out some of the Great Books…Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas…to help round out your perceptions of knowledge and truth.

Hmm… I don’t think a human can be generated in THAT way… I do believe however that we will be able to do that with life itself…

 

[Montalban]

Hmm… I don’t think a human can be generated in THAT way… I do believe however that we will be able to do that with life itself…

Do you believe in abiogenesis?

 

[nucatholic]

Science is by its nature opposed to dogmatism. Any scientist who is dogmatic with his/her findings is not taken seriously because the scientific method is meant to be open to new data and new interpretation. Let me ask this question: what other method of gaining knowledge about the world has been more successful than scientific inquiry? Is it faith? Didn’t faith once tell us that the earth was the center of the universe and that it was flat? Is there any way that we can prove anything asserted by faith? The most important acheivement in history was when the great philosophers turned from scholasticism to a new method of inquiry that was not based on “authority” but rather committed to actually observing things. Platonic Forms aren’t relevant today except to introduce the method of philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas believed without evidence (unless you consider faith evidence) that women were just defective men. No doubt these were great thinkers of their time, but not exactly the sources you want to go to for a well rounded education on the workings of the universe.

 

[Montalban]

Science is by its nature opposed to dogmatism. Any scientist who is dogmatic with his/her findings is not taken seriously because the scientific method is meant to be open to new data and new interpretation.

There is not one scientific method, but many.

Many scientists allow their philosophical views of the world (materialism) to dominate their scientific outlook

Let me ask this question: what other method of gaining knowledge about the world has been more successful than scientific inquiry?
Is it faith? Didn’t faith once tell us that the earth was the center of the universe and that it was flat? Is there any way that we can prove anything asserted by faith? The most important acheivement in history was when the great philosophers turned from scholasticism to a new method of inquiry that was not based on “authority” but rather committed to actually observing things. Platonic Forms aren’t relevant today except to introduce the method of philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas believed without evidence (unless you consider faith evidence) that women were just defective men. No doubt these were great thinkers of their time, but not exactly the sources you want to go to for a well rounded education on the workings of the universe.

If you believe that science is to be the over-arching, or supreme determiner of truths then you’re sailing close to Scientism, which itself is un-scientific.