The conventional wisdom is that people who work in science MUST be evolutionists and are rational in their conclusions, which are always based on incontrovertible evidence. On the other hand, people who believe the universe was designed intentionally by a super intelligent entity, commonly called “God”, aren’t able to think rationally about the big questions.
But is that the case? Is that a fair representation of the two sides?
Not only that, but are there really only two sides? Or are there shades of opinion in between the two extremes?
“New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins paint believers in an intentionally created universe as willfully denying evidence in favor of believing things that are obviously untrue. But is that the case? Letting Richard Dawkins define people of faith is a little like letting a Nazi define Jews or a white supremacist define African Americans. Maybe it would be better to let Jews define themselves.
To demonstrate how people of faith are not willfully ignoring evidence, let’s do the following exercise:
Look around you. Wherever you are, unless you are sitting on a rock in the middle of a forest or on a beach somewhere, like as not you are seeing man-made objects all around you. If you are at home or in some other building, you see the walls, ceiling and floor, plus doors, windows, furniture, etc., of the room. If you are in a car, train or plane, you see the seats and the walls and windows surrounding you.
Is your first reaction, “How amazing that this room/car/plane, etc., came to be through unguided, chance? How amazing that the environmental conditions were such as to cause chemical reactions to self-assemble the wood/glass/steel/plastic/leather etc. that is surrounding me right now”?
Of course not. You know instinctively that what you are seeing is man-made. You know without giving it a lot of thought that someone saw the building where you are as a completed whole before it was built. In fact, someone, an architect or contractor, imagined the shape and layout of the building before even visualizing it on paper in blueprints and elevations. Once they had put their idea on paper, then they specified the materials and processes of construction with great specificity, so that the workers who would do the work of construction would know exactly what must be done to achieve the building in the form originally visualized by the designer.
Not only that, but the architect or contractor was on site during construction to ensure that the work proceeded according to his plan. Otherwise the subcontractors may misinterpret the plan and make a mistake. Catching such mistakes are important to the overall result.
My wife and I have built two houses. We drew the basic design of the second one and had blueprints made from our crude drawings. However, during construction, I noticed that the front porch roof we had indicated on our drawings had not been built. I asked the general contractor, “Where’s the porch roof?”
“What porch roof?” he replied. He had not interpreted the plans correctly and had not made allowance for the construction of a porch roof. At that point it would have been very expensive to tear apart what had been done to add a porch roof, so we lived in the house 33 years without a porch roof.
So things don’t always go according to plan, but none of us would look at our house or any building and say that there was never a plan at all. So why are many people willing to look at the natural universe and say there was no plan; that the universe exists as a result of blind chance and happy accidents?
Or is there even any such thing as a “happy” accident in a universe where there was never any purpose to anything that has happened?
Of course I recognize the difference between man-made objects and Nature. However, the more science learns about Nature, the more obvious it is that everything in the natural world plays by VERY specific rules.
To people of faith, the attitude that there is no plan to the universe is odd, because scientists who have this attitude take it as a given that natural law exists. If there is a law, didn’t there need to be a law giver?
No scientist has ever claimed to have MADE or WRITTEN a natural law. They always know that they are in the business of DISCOVERING natural laws. The laws were in place long before human beings became self-aware enough to think about such things.
In fact, it is not too strong a statement to say that, without natural laws which are predictably consistent and reliable, science would not exist. There would be no consistent chemical reactions, for example, for the chemist to reliably predict the outcome of combining various chemicals and subjecting them to various processes to create new materials and products. Without natural law, NASA and other nations’ space programs could not send rockets to dock with the International Space Station or send probes to explore Mars and beyond.
Without natural laws, scientific experiments which must be peer reviewed and duplicated to confirm their results could never be established because each time a particular experiment was conducted there would be wildly different results.
The first scientists, Copernicus, Galileo, and many others believed they were exploring God’s creation and so they expected to find order and symmetry and predictability, whether looking at the stars or the atom. They believed that there was a plan and by observation they could discover it.
How odd that so many scientists today insist that God cannot exist, even while they too assume they will find order, symmetry and predictability in the universe.
The logical conclusion for a person of faith, on the other hand, is that without God, there could be no science!
