One Science, Under God, Indivisible
If scientific materialism collapses,
and with it methodological naturalism,
could robust science continue?
Op-Ed by David Coppedge, Editor
A common myth propounded ad nauseam among atheists is that infecting science with “creationism” or any other form of theistic belief would bring science to a screeching halt. A God-fearing scientist could just wipe his hands over any puzzle and say, “God did it,” and that would be that. Is such a “god-of-the-gaps” scenario plausible if science returned to theism?
In this season of America’s 250th Birthday, many are recalling the Pledge of Allegiance, which includes the phrase, “One nation, under God, indivisible.” Let us borrow that phraseology and apply it to science. Could science unify under a theistic flag, ascribing its practices to a similar pledge, “one science, under God, indivisible”?
Evolutionists of all stripes, including theistic evolutionists, would be horrified at the thought. You can believe in God on your private time, they might say, but never bring God into the science lab! (Or, as the NCSE would have it, into the science classroom, either.) Science would immediately collapse and die. Science and faith are opposites. They are enemies. Keep God out of your science!
Note: the old “warfare thesis” that science is inimical to religion, as propounded by Draper and White, is largely discarded by modern philosophers of science, but it still lurks zombie-like in academia.
The anti-theist purists teach that science can only be performed with a commitment to Methodological Naturalism (MN), the belief that within science, only natural causes can be invoked to explain a phenomenon. But guess what: if you are only allowed to find natural causes, guess what you will find? Natural causes! “This inscription in hieroglyphics on this cliff is a remarkable example of millions of years of erosion.” MN (an artificial rule, not a requirement of good science) can act like blinders on a horse, not allowing it to see the whole picture. It restricts the causal toolkit of science, and has led to the unscientific culture of storytelling, explaining away rather than explaining things that display evidence of intelligent design, like foresight, irreducible complexity, and functional organization.
And yet each one of us knows intuitively and by experience that there is a difference between natural causes and intelligent causes. To disallow intelligent causes at the outset puts a straitjacket on science. Not everything in nature is designed, of course; some things can be deferred to chance, some to natural law, and some to intelligence. Intelligent design theory formalizes the ability to distinguish between them. MN puts the researcher in a logical loop, forcing repeated attempts to explain without reference to intelligence. When that fails, it launches the researcher into fantasylands of speculation. The complexity of cells, and the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, are among discoveries forcing MN to a crisis.
As we witness Darwinism stumbling on its last legs, maintaining its fading power only by force of consensus and censorship, let us consider what might happen if the unwritten rule of MN were to be discarded. Spoiler alert: no worries of a disaster. It would be good for science.
#1: Theistic Science Has a Spectacular Success Rate Historically
A look at our list of great scientists tells the true stories of 50 top scientists who believed in God, and in the Bible specifically. Many of these were the fathers of their scientific fields. Their religion was not isolated from their scientific work, but intrinsic to it. For example, Joseph Henry would pray for guidance before important experiments, and George Washington Carver would ask, “Lord what do you want me to do today?” and then would do it. Men like Newton, Whewell, and John Herschel were eminent philosophers of science, too, and they promoted Biblical faith as essential for healthy science.
#2: Things Could Hardly Get Worse Than They Are Now
Those worried about the god-of-the-gaps fallacy should look at how ridiculous the situation is now, where Darwin-of-the-gaps scientists say “It evolved!” or chance-of-the-gaps scientists explain any mystery by the Stuff Happens Law. That’s the opposite of science. Darwin imported storytelling into science, and today most biological papers contain ridiculous assertions about how things evolved, appeared, arose, emerged, developed, or somehow magically materialized by blind, unguided processes (a.k.a., sheer dumb luck). In a sense, Darwinism is already religious. It’s the worship of the goddess Lady Luck.
#3: Intelligent Design Is a Big Tent
Anti-creationists might complain that non-theists would be unwelcome in a future scientific community if MN were abandoned and Christians free to work openly in labs, universities and classrooms. Science must be “inclusive” to atheists, muslims, hindus, and everybody else.
As a preliminary rejoinder to that worry, things could hardly be worse than they are now. Darwin skeptics are summarily censored, dismissed, and persecuted as I and many others know from experience. One bright side about those wascally Christians can help defuse this fear. They believe in compassion and honesty and integrity. This would put a big damper on the fraud epidemic in science. They believe in the existence of and the vigorous pursuit of objective truth. That would put a damper on storytelling and lemming-like adherence to consensus. At JPL, I myself witnessed some of the peer pressure in scientific conferences for members to tow the line. Theists can justify the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences,” the Laws of Logic, and the reality of immaterial consciousness.
The intelligent design community is highly diverse already. It is a big tent where anyone open to intelligence as an operative cause in the world can find good fellowship. Engineers would be welcome. Researchers in the blossoming field of biomimetics would no longer have to say, just to get past peer review, that the elegant biological designs they attempt to imitate somehow “evolved” over millions of years of trial and error. When appropriate, psychiatrists could explore guilt as a true spiritual cause in mental disease, not just attributing symptoms to a chemical imbalance. Medical doctors could explore the effects of patients’ faith as causative factors in successful recovery. Systems biology would make sense. Interoception would make sense. Codes, signaling, networking and other engineering terms observable in life would help biology flourish like never before.
Science would simply run faster without the dead weight of MN hobbling it. No more obligatory appeals to the Stuff Happens Law. No more pinches of incense to Father Darwin. No more just-so stories. Theistic science might look less like adding God than subtracting MN nonsense. In fact, good theistic science can be done without ever mentioning God, the Bible, or religion at all. Scientists can discuss design principles in nature and leave the identity of the Designer in the capable hands of philosophers and theologians.
Summary
For much of history—even from ancient times—belief in a Creator or master architect of the universe enjoyed peaceful cooperation with scientific work. Design is the most natural intuition of great thinkers who view the world, from Cicero to Thomas Jefferson to C.S. Lewis. Today’s largely atheistic science is plagued with fraud, censorship, groupthink and misconduct. Face it; some of the worst atrocities in the world, including Nazism, communism, eugenics, and several atrocious genocides were justified on Darwinian grounds.
Darwin is dead. Let the dead bury their dead. ID is The Future of science. Rise up engineers, biologists, cosmologists, and all lovers of truth. Take off the MN straitjacket. Declare independence from King Charley. Pledge allegiance to academic freedom. Prepare for a new Golden Age of inquiry. Liberate science to explore the truth about the natural world unshackled from the MN tradition. Let scientists access the Cause we understand every day: intelligent design. Lovers of honest science have nothing to fear from the ID movement, and much to welcome in The Design Revolution.
David Coppedge, B.S. Education, B.S. Physics, founded Creation-Evolution Headlines in late 2000 as a way to share science news he was encountering at NASA. It has grown into a highly-trusted source of news and commentary critical of the pro-Darwin consensus, providing analysis of breaking news of interest to creationists and evolutionists, without the Darwin spin. He has authored over 7,000 entries at CEH since its inception.