Guest Post: Giberson on Science and Christianity (Or, Why God Likes Math and not Postmodernism)

May 14, 2012 By peteenns 8 Comments

Today, Karl Giberson concludes his six-part series of excerpts from his new book The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in a Fine-Tuned World . Karl Giberson, noted speaker and writer about the intersection of Christian faith and science. (See first post for intro; see his complete bio here.)

In this sixth excerpt, Giberson tells us what he thinks about God and science and how the two fit together.

Excerpt #6: How the World Looks to Me

I try to be cautious but not timid in drawing connections between the wonder of the world and belief in God. I don’t think the profound character of mathematics, which I find especially provocative, proves that God exists. But I do think it makes belief in a reality that transcends the physical world entirely reasonable and, I would argue, necessary.

I don’t see how we can deny the existence of a transcendent realm where, at the very least, the truths of mathematics eternally reside.

The challenge is defending or even describing the thought process by which one moves cautiously from the mystery of mathematics to the reality of the transcendent, to the existence of God, and finally to a worldview that includes belief in the God of the Christian tradition. Such a journey involves far more than reflection on math, of course, but there really isn’t any simple road in place to even make such a journey.

This does not suggest, however, that such a journey is inappropriate or can be made only by constantly taking irrational leaps of blind faith. Many thoughtful people—and I am one of them—have made that journey.

The world as we are coming to understand it is far too complex to be understood by simply collecting facts, drawing conclusions and weaving the conclusions into an all-encompassing tapestry of illumination. Careful thought demands, of course, that we pay attention to the reasoning process and watch out for errors. But as we work our way from simple experiences to deep conclusions about the way the world is, we constantly find ourselves forced to go beyond mere generalizations from facts.

It is as though we have carefully assembled our house by following the blueprint to the letter, only to discover, as we pass through the front door, that our new house is grander than we anticipated.

One of the twentieth-century’s deepest thinkers, the Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi, articulated this feature of our experience in his immortal phrase “we can know more than we can tell.” Polanyi, who had a profound understanding of science and its limitations, argued that our quest for truth makes meaningful use of hunches, intuitions and creative imaginings. The layers of understanding that we wrap around our experiences are, by definition, larger than those experiences.

When Paul Dirac suggested that it was important to have “beauty” in one’s equations, what did he mean? We don’t even have a clear concept of mathematical beauty, much less an aesthetic yardstick to measure it. Freeman Dyson wrote, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” What could Dyson possibly mean by this deeply metaphorical statement? What details suggested this to him?

If Dyson and Dirac were run-of-the-mill physicists working at some minor state university or apologetics project somewhere, their comments would be dismissed. But they are two of the greatest mathematical physicists in the history of science, with deep, deep insights into the world. They are rightly respected for the equations and theories they discovered and developed. But these equations and theories are just the part of what they know that can be explained. The reality is that they know more than they can tell.

Geniuses like Dyson and Dirac transcend their disciplines in ways that allow them to speak freely in ways denied to lesser thinkers. Their reputations are such that they can acknowledge the mysteries of the world without raising suspicions that they have some hidden quirky agenda, or that their achievements were some sort of fluke.

Let me conclude by making some connections between science and religion, and showing why I, as a Christian and a scientist, find such wonder in the world, and why, despite the red flags, I think Christians stand on solid ground.

Christians all have a theology of nature, no matter how vaguely conceived. We believe the world we live in is a creation, and we cannot experience it as anything else. That belief illuminates the world for Christian scientists. The belief in the reality of God informs the experience of the wonders of creation.

But our experience of the wonders of creation also informs our understanding of God. If we think of God as rational or loving or artistic or merciful or just or creative, those concepts and definitions take shape in the world we live in, not in some other reality, whatever that might be. If we find the world filled with wonders that move us spiritually or point beyond themselves or inspire us in ways not captured by our explanatory nets, we need not simply shrug our shoulders about why that might be.

I think we can reasonably embrace the idea that there must be a transcendent reality in which these experiences are grounded. This, of course, is natural theology, and we must refrain from loud cheering as we draw our conclusions. But there is nothing simple-minded or naively modernist about seeking comprehensive understandings of they way things are, even if we have to “tell less than we can know.”

My own thinking about how all this fits together comes from my own internal conversation between my theology of nature, which grows out of my Christian faith, and my willingness to take seriously, if cautiously, the insights from natural theology, that are rooted in my appreciation for science and the world disclosed by its insights.

The rational character of the laws of nature suggests that the universe is built a foundation that points beyond the physical. This evidence suggests the existence of another reality that we have to take seriously. This is a hint of God, as I have titled my book. If the universe is grounded in the rationality of God, then it makes sense. If not, the universe is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury (and equations) but signifying nothing.

The fine-tuning of the universe is either an implausible coincidence, a lottery created by the multiverse, or evidence that a Creator designed the universe for life. The third option is the one I choose, and, while qualifications and cautions are in order, I think it is the most reasonable of the options.

The Christian tradition informing my values highlights the significance of humans, created in the image of God and given dominion over the earth. I believe that life more or less like that of our species is built into the structure of the universe—that we are intended in some sense to be here, but in a way that does not diminish the value of any other forms of life or give us license to exploit.

The natural trajectory of life toward cooperation and relationship suggests to me that this is more than the simple outworking of some survival equations from game theory. Our deeply rooted affinity for community is a part of the way things are supposed to be. We are intended to love one another. The appreciation that evolutionary biologists now have for the importance of community reveals they have arrived at insights that Jesus shared with his followers in the first century.

This dialogue between my theology of nature and my natural theology enriches both conversation partners and provides a coherent synthesis that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts. I know more than I can tell. But I am fully convinced that we can know things about the world. We are not mired in local provincial worldviews.

I have never understood the strong form of postmodernity that makes the strange claim that we can know nothing for certain. I once challenged a leading scholar of postmodernity who insisted that all scientific truth was constructed by the social activities of the scientific community rather than discovered, making every scientific claim relative.

NASA photograph of what appears to be a round earth

“Is the earth round?” I asked her, a professor at one of Boston’s leading universities. She hesitated for a rather long time without answering, and said something irrelevant. “Surely we can know the earth is round?” I persisted. “That claim isn’t constructed, is it?” I said, with growing impatience. “Isn’t the claim that the earth is round a discovery about the way the world actually is?” I pressed her further, but still she would not admit that we can know that the earth is round. The conversation ended with me storming off in a most un-Christian manner, muttering to myself that I had just had a conversation with the biggest blockhead in New England.

I understand that we are living in a postmodern age and have to accept a certain modesty in our claims about the way the world is. Modernity, built on the confidence that one could start with the incontestable facts of the world and build systems of explanation and meaning, has passed. It passed largely because the facts of the world weren’t always as incontestable as we had hoped, and because those facts were often so small that they couldn’t support anything worthwhile. That was an important lesson.

In hindsight we can now see how the prejudices and unexamined assumptions of earlier generations shaped their understanding of the world. Nineteenth-century scientists—all of them male—found ample “evidence” that women possessed an inferior intelligence. Twentieth-century racists designed IQ tests that confirmed their prejudices about the relationship between race and intelligence. We can see that the sexist and racist theories of yesterday were indeed socially constructed, fabricated from ambiguous observations stitched together with prejudice and wishful thinking. We now understand that everyone is embedded in a worldview that shapes their reflections on the meaning of life and even what they think are the facts of the world.

Confident assertions that all knowledge claims are socially constructed go way too far, as my conversation with the postmodern scholar about the shape of the earth makes only too clear. Any theory of knowledge that can’t endorse the claim that the earth is round should be discarded. In fact, many scientific claims are so well-established that only an irrational skeptic would have reservations.

Can we seriously doubt that atoms are real, that the earth orbits the sun or that mammals are warm-blooded? In what sense could the theory of gravity be a “construction”? Do airplanes fly successfully on a socially constructed theory of aerodynamics? Sensible people on planes believe that planes fly because scientists have discovered actual laws of aerodynamics, not made them up.

The obvious truth of so many scientific claims explains why strong versions of postmodernity are so irrelevant to science. I have never, in fact, met a postmodern scientist. Not one. Most scientists don’t know what postmodernity is, and when it is explained to them, they are skeptical that anyone could hold such beliefs.

Scientists who think about the nature of knowledge claims—and this includes me—almost all sign on to an idea known as critical realism. We believe there is a real world “out there” to be discovered through careful scientific investigation—not constructed from prejudice, duct tape and fog. We must not claim for our conclusions, however, more certainty than the evidence warrants. And we must not assume that our conclusions about the world are absolutely certain, even though they may be so probable that such an assumption would create no problems.

All knowledge claims—including those made by science—can be placed along a spectrum that runs from “merely possible” truths at one end to “essentially certain” truths at the other. If we number this spectrum from 1 to 100, we would place the belief in life on other planets at 1, since it has no evidence supporting it but is clearly something that could be explored from a scientific perspective.

On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps at the point 99.9, we place the belief in the roundness of the earth, since we cannot even imagine how it could be wrong (although we admit that absolute certainty is not warranted, since our knowledge is finite). Other scientific claims lie between these two. I might put the existence of multiple universes at 40, the 5 billion year age for the earth at 95, and the fusion theory of how stars shine at 92. No such scale actually exists in the scientific community, but every scientist will acknowledge that some of their ideas are more certain than others.

Critical realists believe that the world is known through a spiraling discovery process where we continually circle the phenomena we are trying to understand, getting closer and closer as we understand it better, but never reaching absolute certainty. A gap always exists between the thing we want to understand and our very best theory of how that thing works. The gap can be small or large, but it never entirely vanishes

We can also use critical realism in our theology. We can accept, as a starting point, the existence of a transcendent reality—God—that exists “out there.” The starting point for this belief can be based on our faith tradition, our personal experience or even the arguments of the natural theologians. It doesn’t matter where we get our ideas—Dirac got some of his ideas from beauty—as long as we are prepared to test those ideas against our experience of the world.

We acknowledge—in theology, as in science—that we can understand this reality only through dialogue, as we constantly test and refine our understanding. Spiraling in on the truth. Theological results will never have the grand simplicity of the theory of gravity, but that is because gravity is simple and God is complicated, not because gravity exists and God does not.

As a critical realist who takes both science and theology—and a lot of other things—seriously, I am drawn to make connections between all the various things I think are true. I am mindful of the cautions discussed earlier, of course. But there is a big difference between the claim that, say, the fine-tuning of the universe proves the existence of God, and the more modest claim that fine- tuning fits comfortably, supportively and logically within a worldview grounded in the belief that God is the Creator of all that is. This is both an easier claim to make and a much more profound claim.

The same is true for all the hints of God. As traditional natural theology arguments, the various scientific pointers, from the beauty of sunsets to the mysterious carbon resonance, are just hints. They don’t take us very far. But as components in a larger worldview, they provide valuable confirmation.

The Christian worldview, with its belief in a God who creates and is revealed in the exemplary life, death and resurrection of Jesus, is the starting point from which we examine the mystery of our existence—the wonder of the universe. We live in a world of immense beauty, from sunsets to equations, from music to children’s laughter. We live in world of great meaning and find ourselves bound to each other by love—a love that seems as deeply embedded in reality as atoms and molecules.

But we also live in a world of great suffering. Wars, natural disasters, sickness and death all conspire to drain the meaning from life and replace it with despair. Human selfishness and frivolous indulgence tempt us toward apathy. But the Christian worldview demands that we view those features of our world as the alien interlopers, superficial anomalies to be dispatched and dissolved. The beauty and wonder of the world is the real part.

As we come to understand this world, we discover the deep and profound adequacy of the Christian worldview as it illuminates so much of what we experience, informs so much of what we do and calls us to the highest standards of service to our fellow human beings and the creation in general.

If I have been enticed into brashness
by the wonderful beauty of thy works,
or if I have loved my own glory among men,
while advancing in work destined for thy glory,
gently and mercifully pardon me:
and finally,
deign graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that.
Amen.
—Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World (1619)

 

 

Filed Under: culture wars, Evangelicalism, faith and intellect, Karl Giberson, postmodernism, science and faith, The Wonder of the Universe 8 Comments

Guest Post: Arguing for God Based on the “Design” of the Universe is a Bad Idea

May 12, 2012 By peteenns 8 Comments

Today, Karl Giberson continues his six-part series of excerpts from his new book The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in a Fine-Tuned World . Karl Giberson, noted speaker and writer about the intersection of Christian faith and science. (See first post for intro; see his complete bio here.)

In this fifth excerpt, Giberson tells us that arguing for God based on the “design” of the universe is a bad idea.

Excerpt #5: Be Cautious with Design Arguments

Design arguments have been around forever and expressed in various ways. Most of them fall into what we call natural theology, which is the process of inferring something about the existence and nature of God by the inspection of nature.

The story of creation in Genesis launches the discussion in the Judeo-Christian tradition when it speaks of God ordering nature and driving back chaos. On the fourth day “God created the sun, moon, and the stars to give light to the earth and to govern and separate the day and the night. These would also serve as signs to mark seasons, days, and years.” All this suggests design and purpose. Job speaks of God making “water drops evaporate” so the clouds can “shower abundantly on mankind.” (Job 36:27-28 HCSB). The psalmist expresses awe at the grandeur of the night sky but remarkably does not comment on the grandeur of his own existence:

When I observe Your heavens,
the work of Your fingers, . . .

what is man that You remember him? (Psalm 8:3-4 HCSB)

In the New Testament, Paul speaks of the created order testifying clearly to the reality of God, arguing that “the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20 KJV). Biblical scholars have interpreted this to mean that an open-minded seeker can infer the existence of God by studying the creation.

As theologians reflected on the nature of the creation these arguments were repeated and refined. Augustine in the fourth century, Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Luther and Calvin at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century—all were understandably convinced that the world had a grand design that was readily discernable. After all, nobody had any other explanation for why birds were adapted to fly, fish to swim and constellations to mark the seasons.

By the time we get to Isaac Newton in the latter part of the seventeenth century, we have the first carefully constructed scientific arguments. Newton, as we learned in high school,explained how gravity from the sun keeps the planets in their orbits. This explanation replaced previous medieval explanations that included the possibility that the planets moved because angels pushed on them. (It also replaced Galileo’s explanation that they moved because of a “circular inertia,” which turned out to be as much a fantasy as the pushing angels.) But Newton’s theory didn’t explain why the planets all go around the sun in the same direction and in almost the same plane. In fact Newton could not imagine any natural process that could produce such elegant design, so he argued that God must be the explanation.

About two centuries later the most famous design argument was developed by William Paley whose Natural Theology Darwin read voraciously as a young scientist. “Suppose I had found a watch upon the ground,” asked Paley, “and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. . . . [W]hen we come to inspect the watch, we perceive . . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. . . . [T]he inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.” Paley goes on to compare the watch to an eye, arguing that if a watch implies a watchmaker, then an eye implies an eye-maker. The eye-maker, of course, can only be God.

Newton’s argument about the planets and Paley’s about the watch have the same logical form: We find something in nature that appears too ingeniously arranged to have been produced by known natural processes, so we infer that a Designer from outside the natural order—God— must be the source of the design.

Their arguments differ, however, on the question of purpose. It was not clear to Newton or anyone of his day exactly why the planets needed to be going about in the orderly way they were observed. If the order was indeed provided by God, no explanation for it could be discerned other than the creation of order for the sake of order. In contrast, the designs that Paley highlighted were clearly purposeful. Our eye is remarkably designed for a purpose other than to elicit awe at its complexity. We see with our eyes. We don’t do anything with Neptune’s nice orbit, other than admire it.

Arguments that the universe is designed are complicated. We certainly live in a remarkable universe with many features that inspire awe. Many of those features connect in astonishing ways to the habitability of the universe. The psalmist’s wonder at the heavens has only grown stronger as we have learned more about those heavens. The universe certainly does not become ever more boring and bland as we come to understand it.

But we also live in a world with earthquakes, plagues and tsunamis.

Our sun will burn out at some point, incinerating the earth in the process. The prospects of securing our future by colonizing other planets seem remote. The long-term prognosis of the universe, by the cold logical lights of science, is not good. Its temperature will continuously drop as it expands for billions of years. Eventually there won’t be enough heat left for any form of life, and finally there won’t even be enough heat for atoms and molecules to interact. This sterile icy blackness is frightening to contemplate. No matter what we do as a species, we and our cultural achievements are destined to perish.

No simple overriding explanation that makes sense of everything comes into view as we learn more about the universe.

And experience with past arguments raises red caution flags. For example, Newton’s design argument about the planets was an argument from ignorance that now bears the label “god of the gaps.” There was a gap in Newton’s explanation for the planets. He could explain why their orbits were elliptical and what kept them in their orbits. But he could not explain the uniformity of their orbits, so he invoked God as the explanation to plug this gap—hence the label for such arguments—god of the gaps.

A century after Newton, French physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace dispelled the mystery of the structure of the solar system. He showed that a better understanding of gravity and how solar systems originated could explain the things that Newton attributed to the direct action of God. Laplace’s work did not refute the existence of God, of course. But it did dismantle Newton’s argument that the planetary orbits must have been set up by God, thus eliminating an argument that some had been using to argue for God’s existence.

In a similar way, Darwin’s theory of evolution offers an explanation for the design that Paley marveled at in the eye. Scholars of Paley’s generation knew nothing of natural selection, mutations or genetics, so they could not imagine how nature might craft something so remarkable as an eye. Paley’s argument, like Newton’s, turns out to be another god of the gaps explanation that disappears with further scientific insights into the way the world works.

So this is the first red flag to note—design arguments are all-too-often based on gaps in our knowledge and will disappear when those gaps are filled.

The second red flag concerns the apparent purpose of any design.

“Design” can point in many directions or no direction at all.

The science museum in Boston has a grand contraption that does nothing except move balls around to no end. The only possible purpose is to impress a visitor with the juxtaposition of complex design and lack of purpose. There is likewise no significance to the patterns of the stars that we call constellations. The “design” of the Big Dipper is simply interesting.

The fine-tuning of the universe for life, on the other hand, encourages us to wonder if life may be important in some way. But it does not specify which life forms are relevant and why. And we must note that some features of our world exhibiting a high level of design—like the AIDS virus or the poison of the rattlesnake—seem to have the purpose to destroy human life. If rattlesnakes could reflect on their existence, they could marvel at the carbon resonance that makes that existence possible.

A third red flag we must note is bad design. If marvelous design in the universe motivates reflection on the possibility that God created the world what do we do about the counterarguments?

Consider asteroids. A gigantic asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and so disrupted the ecosystems and the atmosphere of the earth that the dinosaurs went extinct. Absolutely nothing prevents the same thing from happening again. We are protected today largely by the vastness of space and the structure of our solar system with large outer planets that “vacuum up” a lot of stuff that could hit the earth. These various protections make collisions of the sort that wiped out the dinosaurs unlikely. But they offer no guarantees.

If the Goldilocks features of our universe are intended to make it habitable, then why does the universe also have anti-Goldilocks features?

Many such issues complicate the process of figuring out why the universe is the way it is. And as we have learned somewhat reluctantly in the last few centuries, the great explanatory power of science disappears entirely when questions of purpose enter the conversation. Science is quite extraordinary at telling us how the world is but quite unable to tell us why the world is like that. Science illuminates the remarkable features of our universe that make life possible, but it goes silent when we ask whether any particular life form is the reason why the universe is the way it is. That deeply religious question has to be explored somewhere else.

These challenges caution us against naively selecting—cherry-picking we call it—a few Goldilocks features of the universe, assuming the friendly design work is for our benefit, and jumping to the conclusion that everything points simply and unambiguously in the direction of God as Creator.

 

Filed Under: culture wars, evolution, Intelligent Design, Karl Giberson, science and faith, The Wonder of the Universe 8 Comments

Guest Post: Science is Reliable (Sorry, Skeptics: No Grand Conspiracy against God)

May 11, 2012 By peteenns 14 Comments

Today, Karl Giberson continues his six-part series of excerpts from his new book The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in a Fine-Tuned World . Karl Giberson, noted speaker and writer about the intersection of Christian faith and science. (See first post for intro; see his complete bio here.)

In this fourth excerpt, Giberson tells us that science is reliable. Yeah, no grand conspiracy. Just some discoveries about how the physical world operates.

Excerpt #4: The Reliability of Science

Science has discovered much about the universe. The scientific enterprise provides amazing insights into the natural world, and I believe that those insights are reliable, steadily improving and most likely true. Caution and humility are in order, nonetheless, because science is a finite human enterprise with all the limitations that entails.

Skeptics of various sorts, from young-earth creationists to agnostic postmodern literary critics, sometimes dispute the claims of science, pointing to past scientific ideas that have been overturned or areas of present controversy. The settled and secure science of today, suggest these critics, may pass into history, joining the settled and secure science of long ago in the graveyard of wrong ideas.

There is some truth to this caution, but it really should be nothing more than a caution, like a seatbelt put on with no expectation of needing it. During every major, and even minor, transition in science there are people who hold to traditional views; there are examples of tenacious and irrational loyalty to the status quo.

There are many examples of celebrity skeptics. Einstein wouldn’t accept quantum mechanics. Galileo wouldn’t

Einstein: stubborn scientist

accept Kepler’s calculations that showed that the planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular. Fred Hoyle wouldn’t accept the evidence for the big bang and developed a theory to oppose it.

Those eager to reject the claims of science invoke these anecdotes as if they are typical. If we don’t like the fact that science has determined the age of the earth to be billions of years old, we cling to the hope that this conclusion, like the once-secure claim that the earth is stationary, will soon give way to a new and more congenial understanding.

After all, for two thousand years educated leaders insisted that a mountain of evidence pointed to the earth being stationary and at the center of the universe. And now no scientist believes that. Similarly, Newton’s ideas were supplanted by those of Einstein. Quantum mechanics, black holes, multiple universes and string theory have blown everyone’s mind at some point over the past century.

Is there no good reason to believe that the new ideas of tomorrow will be different and perhaps more appealing than the ideas of today?

The answer, in a nutshell, is no.

The idea that science constantly changes is largely fiction, based on our lopsided familiarity with scientific revolutions and lack of awareness of ongoing ordinary science. The typical scientific advance—the sort that is presented in almost every one of the thousands of scientific papers published each year—is one that extends, encompasses and absorbs rather than refutes old understandings. Only rarely do new ideas require that old ideas be discarded.

Even truly revolutionary ideas are often compatible with many previous ideas. Consider Copernicus’s ideas—the gold standard for scientific revolutions. His new model for the solar system included the all-important but long-established ideas that the planets were different than the stars, that the planets all had their own orbits, that the stars maintained predictable patterns, and, of course, that the earth was round.

We overlook the significance of this because science often establishes its conclusions with such clarity that they seem trivial, and thus their enduring character seems inconsequential. But the discovery and measurement of the shape and size of the earth, for example, was an amazing achievement.

Similarly, Newton’s ideas have not been discarded; they simply have been shown to have a restricted domain of application. When I teach mechanics to engineering students, I use a textbook based entirely on Newton’s laws of motion. If Newton’s own treatment wasn’t so opaque, we could still be using his book from the seventeenth century. The revolution that “toppled Newton” was the discovery of certain extreme situations where his theory did not work. It was not the discovery that his ideas were wrong in any simple sense. NASA still launches space shuttles and puts satellites into orbit using Newton’s laws, which work perfectly for those situations. The repeated discovery of new planets—as exciting as it was at the time—simply expanded the domain of application of Newton’s theory of gravity.

The application of scientific ideas to technological devices provides another reason for being comfortable with science. Scientific insights that have given rise to technologies like computers, cell phones and lasers have a certain pragmatic credibility and are unlikely to be supplanted. If those ideas were not true, then building devices based on them would be impossible. Almost all the physics of the first half of the twentieth century is validated every time your computer powers up. No matter what you think about the strangeness of quantum mechanics, the devices based on it work.

The prudent approach to science is to accept its central ideas as good descriptions of reality, developed by scientists, working with integrity, who are motivated to find out how the created world functions. The central ideas in any scientific field—whether it be cosmology or medicine—have been hammered out by a community of well-informed and highly skeptical scientists. To achieve consensus with such a group is no simple task.

Appreciating the consensus character of science is crucial to navigating scientific controversies like those that swirl about global warming, the big bang or biological evolution. The central ideas of science are never based entirely on the work of a few scientists.

While certain great scientists like Darwin or Einstein may provide the initial flash of genius, the idea flows from the margins of science into a much larger world until thousands of skeptical specialists are thinking hard about it. Many of those specialists are looking for an ingenious flaw in the theory, just as Einstein tried heroically to come up with a good reason to reject quantum mechanics.

The simple fact that quantum mechanics survived a quarter century of assault by Einstein should convince us that the theory must be reliable. But this same fire refines every idea in science. The moment a new idea appears in the scientific literature, critics spring into action, motivated by everything from self-defense to curiosity to an enthusiasm for knowledge to a desire to be famous.

New ideas from the fringes lobbying to get into the scientific conversation can be taken seriously but not uncritically. They may be the explanations of tomorrow, or they may pass like the “cold fusion” claims from the 1980s, which I suspect you have never heard about, despite making a great stir at the time. There is presently a lot of excitement about multiple universes.

I am skeptical that these ideas will endure, but the right people are proposing them in the right way, so we have to take them seriously. We should not dig in our heels, as some did against the ideas of Galileo, and cut off discussion. These ideas may withstand the scrutiny they are receiving now. For truly controversial ideas, we should look closely at who is saying what, and why they are saying it. Great scientists, from Newton to Einstein to Dyson will often end their illustrious careers exploring oddball ideas that would sink the careers of lesser scientists.

And of course one should always be skeptical of the way that zealous scientific crusaders misuse science to make some larger point that has nothing to do with science. Atheists claiming that Darwin forces us to abandon belief in God are the best example of this.

The most difficult part of science for an outsider to navigate is scientific controversy.

Many ideas in science—and many other fields, for that matter—are opposed by dissenters. Often these dissenters have Ph.D.s and are well-credentialed. They may have written books and hold appointments at respected universities. How are we to know if the controversial idea held by the dissenter, and being opposed by people too invested in the status quo, is the new science of tomorrow? Is it possible that the status quo is on its way to becoming the science of yesterday, and its champions are just the faithful few who just can’t let go? If two scholars holding opposite ideas are pitted against each other and both have comparable credentials, what do you do?

Consider the case of Francis Collins and Michael Behe, who are both Christians, although that is not technically important for the point I am making.

Collins is a well-respected geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project and, as of right now, directs the National Institutes of Health, overseeing the largest biomedical research budget in the world. He has written several books, including the bestseller The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. In 2011 he and I coauthored The Language of Faith and Science: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions. In both of these books, in his public presentations and in his many research papers he affirms the theory of evolution and the adequacy of that theory to explain the development of life on this planet.

Michael Behe is a fully credentialed biochemist tenured at Lehigh University, a respected research institution. He has published more than a hundred research papers and has written two bestselling books: Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution and The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. In both of these books he denies the theory of evolution by natural selection, claiming it cannot account for the development of life on this planet. He promotes intelligent design as a superior explanation.

Who is right—Collins or Behe? And how do we decide? Almost all the controversies about science within the evangelical world—and elsewhere—come down to this sort of situation— multiple experts, often impressively credentialed, but with opposing views. Behe and Collins both claim to speak for science.

I want to suggest that, despite the apparent symmetry of the two sides in this case, that Collins should clearly be preferred over Behe. Collins promotes scientific ideas that are shared by tens of thousands of other credentialed scientists.

The pages of leading science magazines discuss those ideas. Scientific meetings put those ideas on their programs. Grants are awarded to study those ideas. Biotechnology companies research new products based on those ideas. Some pharmaceutical companies even have products for sale based on those ideas. In contrast, Behe’s ideas are shared by a tiny number of scientists, and most of them are less credentialed than he is. Collins’s group of colleagues is hundreds, perhaps thousands of times larger than Behe’s.

The ideas about intelligent design promoted by Behe are almost nonexistent in scientific magazines. Some of the ideas, in fact, have never been written up and submitted to a science journal. They appear only in his popular books. Behe’s ideas are not discussed at scientific meetings but only at gatherings of like-minded Christians who are often suspicious of science. They are published primarily in books that are not peer reviewed in the way that scientific research is peer reviewed before it is published. No grants are being awarded to study these ideas and no companies are interested in creating products based on them.

Behe represents a common phenomenon in American culture—the heroic but lonely outsider defending a view rejected by the majority. He is like the handful of historians who say the holocaust never happened or, if it did, that Darwin caused it. Or the handful of climate scientists who deny global warming. Or the champions of the existence of actual cases of alien abduction, some of whom are credible scholars.

This is not to say, of course, that Behe is wrong. Holding a minority view is not the same as being wrong. Most of the major ideas in science were once minority viewpoints embraced by a few renegade thinkers marching to their own drummer. But it does mean that Behe’s views cannot properly be called scientific, in the normal definition of that term.

Science works by achieving consensus, and only those ideas that have secured the allegiance of the scientific community can legitimately be called scientific. Other ideas might be up-and-coming; they might even be true. But they cannot be considered genuinely scientific ideas until they have persuaded the majority of scientists. And scientists, by temperament, are hard to persuade.

Next post: “Excerpt #5: Be Cautious with Design Arguments”

 

Filed Under: culture wars, evolution, science and faith, The Wonder of the Universe 14 Comments

Guest Series: Karl Giberson and The Wonder of the Universe (3)

May 10, 2012 By peteenns 1 Comment

Today, Karl Giberson continues his six-part series of excerpts from his new book The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in a Fine-Tuned World . Karl Giberson, noted speaker and writer about the intersection of Christian faith and science (see first and second posts). (See his complete bio here.)

In this third excerpt, Giberson tells us about how water comes from exploding stars and, if the conditions are just right, exists in liquid form, which–if I remember my grade school science classes–is necessary for life.

Excerpt #3: The Wonder of Water

Large stars near the end of their lives regularly explode as a matter of course. With the force of a billion atomic bombs they strew their contents over unimaginably vast regions of space. It is, of course, a once in a lifetime event for the star—a literal going out with a bang. And even though recorded history is just a few thousand years long—and stars live for billions of years—we have some examples of such explosions that were noted by careful observers.

Crab Nebula

In A.D. 1054 what is now the Crab Nebula exploded in a flash of light bright enough to be seen in daylight for weeks. Astronomers in Korea, China, Japan, North America and the Middle East all recorded the supernova, as it is now called, although Europeans did not. It seems that Europeans, convinced that the heavens were perfect and unchanging, managed to delude themselves into not seeing this new star, which must surely have been quite visible.

Large Magellanic CLoud

The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe witnessed another supernova in 1572. Like his predecessors, he could not believe that such a dramatic change in the heavens was possible, but, apparently unlike his predecessors, he had enough confidence in his observations to know that he was seeing something remarkable. Brahe’s protégé, Johannes Kepler, witnessed another supernova in 1604, and then there were no more visible from earth until 1987, when a star exploded in a nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

A supernova explosion fills a massive region of space with the elements created inside the star; the powerful explosion, though, follows known laws of physics as it distributes its contents about the universe. A vast cloud of chemically enriched material, trillions of miles in diameter, results from the event—an event absolutely critical for enabling life.

The grand cloud that results from the supernova resembles the original cloud out of which the star formed in the first place, with one important difference—it contains a substantial roster of different materials, and not just hydrogen and helium. This time around gravity has more to work with, beginning again to gather the material in the huge cloud back into balls. The largest chunk at the center becomes another star—one that starts out with heavier elements, in addition to hydrogen. It is the ultimate recycling project, but, unlike recycling on earth, the atoms getting recycled remain in mint condition, no matter how many times they are used.

Some of the smaller balls end up orbiting about the second-generation star. These smaller balls contain many different atoms, and some of them have a curious molecular combination of hydrogen and oxygen. In most parts of the universe these molecules are in the form of a solid. In the others they are a gas. But on balls that are exactly the right distance from the central star, the molecules are liquid, an all-purpose, seemingly magical liquid called water.

Water is found in several places in our solar system. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and while oxygen is far less common it is readily available to combine with hydrogen and form water. Water in the form of ice is a major component in comets and can be found in trace quantities in the atmosphere of Venus, under the surface of Mars and possibly even on some of Jupiter’s moons.

(We have to keep in mind, however, that more than 99 percent of the mass of the solar system is in the sun, so the distribution of elements elsewhere is almost irrelevant from the perspective of the solar system as a whole. The earth has a lot of water, but the earth is a tiny, insignificant speck compared to the sun. And because the water tends to cover so much of the surface, it is easy to overestimate the total amount. Astronomers are not sure exactly where the water on the earth came from. Constructing the early history of our solar system is an enormous challenge.)

From a purely scientific point of view, water is a molecule like any other—and there are lots of molecules. The laws of physics and chemistry describe its behavior, and there are no deep mysteries embedded in its familiar structure. But the laws of physics and chemistry conspire to make water unusual in ways that are critically important for life.

Most peculiarly, water expands rather than contracts when it freezes. This makes ice lighter than water, so it floats. Floating ice insulates the water beneath it from the cold temperatures of winter. Absent this layer of insulation bodies of water all over the earth would freeze solid. If ice were heavier than water, the layer of ice that formed on the top would sink to the bottom and another layer would freeze on top and sink until the entire body of water was a solid piece of ice. This would kill almost every life form in the water.

Water is also an effective solvent. Waste products from our bodies dissolve readily in water and can then easily be expelled. But wait—as they say on television—there is more. Water is also a remarkable coolant capable of absorbing heat and carrying it away from our bodies in the form of sweat. And water stores heat in our bodies, helping keep us warm in cold weather. Magical.

The creation story in Genesis records that God gathered the waters. In the King James Version that I read as a child it says, “God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.” In ways that the original readers of Genesis could never have imagined, the gathering of the waters was a cosmic process that took billions of years and involved all the laws of physics and chemistry. The water that we take for granted that covers so much of our planet and makes up so much of our bodies was forged in the nuclear furnace of a star that exploded in the suburbs of the Milky Way galaxy billions of years ago.

That water now cycles endlessly through the life process here on earth—cooling, cleansing and nurturing us. It irrigates our crops, nourishes our livestock, cleans our clothes and gets turned into snow at ski resorts. In those parts of the world where it is plentiful, clean and fresh, we take it for granted and play with it. In Quebec City they construct a hotel out of ice every winter to attract tourists and invite hardy souls to hold their weddings there, wearing parkas and snow boots. We think nothing of using thousand of gallons so our lawns will be green rather than brown in the heat of summer. Water is like air—plentiful and useful.

In parts of the world where fresh water is rare, its value is more apparent. There is a school in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe where children used to walk a quarter mile during their breaks to get a drink of water. I used to walk to the hallway to get a drink when I was in school. World Vision, one of many organizations helping with water problems around the world, installed a well near the school that the children now use to get water. On school days a group of laughing, happy children can be seen working the oversized pump that takes several of them to manage. The water that emerges from its modest faucet is welcomed in ways that few North Americans can appreciate.

For those school children the water is simply a welcome part of their diet and lifestyle now. Some of the children that stay in school and go on to university will eventually discover that the precious fluid summoned from beneath the earth by a few children cranking on a lever was created billions of years ago, deep in the heart of a star, via processes of unimaginable subtlety. Those that have learned to worship God will no doubt marvel and give thanks.

Water exists because the universe has a set of laws that guide its steady development from the big bang into the present. If we suppose that water and the life it enables are of no consequence, then we can dismiss these laws as irrelevant. On the other hand, if we believe that God is the creator of life and that life has a purpose, then these laws take on a new character. If God is the Creator, then these laws exist because God created them. And these laws work because God upholds them from moment to moment. Viewed by these lights, the origin of water and life are creation events, intentionally enabled by the Creator of the universe.

Next post: Excerpt #4: The Reliability of Science

 

Filed Under: evolution, Karl Giberson, science and faith, supernova, The Wonder of the Universe, water 1 Comment

Speaking of Culture Wars: Evangelicals and the Bible (Again)

May 9, 2012 By peteenns 19 Comments

Today, Rachel Held Evans posted on how Christian culture wars may be winning battles but losing a generation. Younger Christians are growing tired of having the Good News defined by their leaders going into default battle mode whenever a controversial social or political issue comes up.

I agree with Rachel’s observation, and it struck me immediately that it is applicable to my little dysfunctional corner of the world: evangelicals and their uneasy relationship with critical biblical scholarship.

Defending a particular way of understanding what the Bible is and how it is to be understood are staples of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism was founded to stay “true” to the Bible, which means contending against the theories of much of biblical scholarship deemed unacceptable to a “high” view of Scripture.

No, I am not condemning all evangelicals, but anyone who is at all active in this subculture can relate without much difficulty. Evangelicals have a long history of protecting the Bible from perceived “attacks,” and they have been remarkably successful in passing down that defensive legacy, and throwing under the bus those who raise serious voices of dissent.

But a growing generation of younger evangelicals has grown suspicious of the tremendous expense of energy needed to sustain the status quo. They live in a world where evolution is true, world religions intermingle, evangelicalism has lost its political and cultural luster, and where biblical scholarship has convincingly offered alternate paradigms for understanding the Bible.

The faith of their evangelical heritage no longer defines their spiritual journeys, and so these evangelicals are ready to deal with the Bible as it is rather than shuffle their feet in embarrassment. The pleading voices of evangelical gatekeepers have become a distant echo of their parent’s faith, yet they find the shrill badgering of the New Atheists spiritually and intellectually obscene.

They are looking for a path forward that is both intellectually fresh and spiritually healthy. They want to follow Jesus, even discover what they means here and now, rather than taking on issues of past generations and fighting battles that they feel define a cultural moment rather than the Gospel.

In my opinion, the future of spiritually vibrant and intellectually engaged evangelicalism depends on their success. That horse is already out of the barn and there is no turning back.

 

Filed Under: academic freedom, belligerence, Bible wars, culture wars, defending the faith, doctrine, Evangelicalism, evolution, faculty firings, faith and intellect, fear, fundamentalism, inerrancy, new paradigms, Rachel Held Evans 19 Comments
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