Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)
The Role of Science in Western Culture
The ultimate irony of the debate between science and faith is that the argument is already over, and science has won. The scientific worldview has conquered all others, at least in America and the more modern parts of the world. It’s everywhere, influencing practically everything we do. Seriously. Planning a party? Do you ask your pastor to say a prayer to beg God not to rain on your event? Or instead do you check your favorite weather report to find out what the odds of fair weather are for your special day? The fact that the second approach is the only one just about any of us would seriously consider shows how much of what we believe is based on science, not on religion. We no longer believe that weather is caused by the whim of a fickle God who can be coaxed to do what we want, but rather that it is the result of natural forces that scientists can measure and predict the effects of. Even the most religious among us watch the weather report to plan our day, not to laugh at how impertinent it is.
Or think of what we do when someone we love is critically injured. If we’re not Christian Scientists, we call 911 or rush them to the hospital, then we might pray for God to get involved, often asking him to help the doctors and nurses practice their science well. In a way, we’ve managed to demote God to the role of physician’s assistant.
Every day, we do things that people a few generations ago would have thought impossible, mainly because science has shown that it can be done. We climb aboard an airplane and, despite its great weight, we trust that it will lift off and fly us to where we’re going. We watch events happening on the other side of the planet, probably unaware that the picture is being carried by satellites and lasers over glass “wires.” We point our phones at an interesting scene, record a video, and then send it to five friends around the country. Each of these activities began with scientific theory that was confirmed by experiments and then applied to technology. The only way this technology is possible is because of how well the scientific process has been able to give us a deeper understanding of how our world works.
Although we are not aware of it—and in fact, we probably would deny it—we in the Western world have come to believe more firmly in Isaac Newton than in God. We go about our days assuming that the physical rules that Newton discovered control how the world around us will behave, in part because those rules have been declared to be laws that seem to be more reliable than any of God’s moral laws. We understand that things fall when we let go of them, not just out of habit or because of supernatural forces pulling them down, but because they are obeying a law of gravitation that Newton said controls the whole universe. When we feel how hard it is to move something heavy, we know that Newton’s law of momentum explains why it’s so difficult, not that the darn thing is just being stubborn. Even though we may be only vaguely aware of how Newton’s ideas came to be accepted as laws (by first being worked out as mathematical formulas that were then verified by countless experiments), we have come to accept their authority without quibble. On the other hand, when someone is caught doing something bad, even something truly evil, the best we can do is pray that justice will be done, and usually we assume that it is up to us as a society to make sure that it is.
The place that Newton holds in our culture is mainly because he stood at the beginning of the scientific revolution that came to define how we look at the world. Newton’s theories were among the first to be systematically tested, both by analyzing the math behind them and through scientific experimentation. This turned into a virtuous cycle of sorts, where the truth of Newton’s groundbreaking insights was ever more firmly supported and the process of scientific experimentation itself came to be increasingly accepted as the most reliable way of revealing the truth. What happened as a result was the birth of the Enlightenment, when Western society turned away forever from blind obedience to authority and turned instead to the scientific method as the most trusted path to knowledge. In the Christian world, even the Bible became the subject of scientific study by scholars, scholars who often reached conclusions that disturbed the faithful and sparked a backlash against using science to study things that should be kept securely within church walls.
In spite of this limited backlash, though, even the most religious people in America accept the basic validity of the methods and assumptions of scientists. Yes, some people are offended by certain scientific theories because those theories seem to deny something that they believe God revealed through the Bible—in effect, calling God a liar—and yet those same people will often try to use other scientific theories to disprove the ones they disagree with. For example, fundamentalist Christians who think that Darwin’s theory of evolution contradicts the story of the creation of life in the book of Genesis will often claim that Newton’s laws of entropy prove that evolution is impossible. After all, they say, Newton’s laws say that everything is moving from order to disorder, so evolution must be impossible because the new life forms that supposedly result from evolution are usually more complex than the ones that came before. These “proofs” rarely stand up to close examination, though, because they almost always twist these laws or just flat out apply them wrongly. Even so, the fact that fundamentalists attempt to use science to discredit science shows how much the scientific point of view is actually accepted by people who, if asked, would heatedly deny that their worldview depends more on science than on revelation.
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