A person who commented on yesterday’s post had some things to say with which I agree, even though s/he meant them as a criticism. Nevertheless, it does allow me to make a couple of points. Speaking of religious scientists s/he said:
There’s only a problem when they invoke god, also known as magic, to solve scientific problems. That’s not doing science. It’s called preaching. Competent scientists don’t say “Then a miracle occurs” when they can’t answer a question.
“If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.” — Jerry Coyne
The poster is absolutely correct though I do partially disagree with the Coyne quote. The poster is indirectly referring to a position that continues to be popular among some Christians. It has been nicknamed the “god of the gaps.” What does that mean?
The phrase God of the gaps refers to a view of God as existing in the “gaps” or aspects of reality that are currently unexplained by scientific knowledge.
The phrase is generally derogatory, and is inherently a direct criticism of a tendency to postulate acts of God to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account. Rather, theologians look for evidence of God’s actions within natural processes. . . .
In the 20th century Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terminology in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison during World War II, which were not made public until years later. Bonhoeffer wrote, for example: “…how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”
Dietrich Bonhoffer–among others–has already pointed out the fallacies of that position. One fallacy is that as scientific knowledge expands, that type of argument means that God gets driven away farther and farther from human reality. The other thing is that it makes God a god of the illogical rather than the God of all reality. This type of position tends to completely opposes God and science for every advance of science means a decrease of God.
Frankly, this type of position tends to be found only among some of the Young Earth Creationists, and not even all of that group. I can remember hearing it in some sermons that would use the line from Colossians that says that in Christ all things hold together. The sermon would go on and try to quote some “scientific” facts to show that atoms should be blowing themselves apart, etc. Or, the sermon would talk about the inability to find a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and explain that this was because the missing equations were the places in which God was directly at work holding the world together. (Note, I have never heard that argument made by an Orthodox clergyman.)
Nevertheless, the poster reacted with exaggeration when s/he appeared to say that scientists who are openly religious essentially hold to this position. In fact, his/her post confirms what I said yesterday about those who love to quote some of the extremists from the other side in order to have an easy straw man to attack. There are many religious scientists doing significant research, including cosmological research, who see missing knowledge as an encouragement to keep on trying to find the explanation. The reason is precisely that they do not have a god of the gaps but rather have a much better integrated view of the universe.
A philosopher called Arthur Holmes expressed some of that integrated viewpoint in his book, published many years ago, called All Truth is God’s Truth. It is a book worth reading as it talks about the “divorce” that happened between science and religion in the Middle Ages, but also seriously speaks about an integrated theory of knowledge.
It is that type of integrated viewpoint about which I am speaking.
===MORE TO COME===
Oh yes, and then there;s the other side of the er, coyne, as posted on a friend’s blog a few years ago. His blog has since closed, but I thought this was a keeper:
Jan. 8th, 2006 08:01 pm That fool Dawkins
“Rational debate about the existence/ non-existence of God, and the ethical implications thereof, is good. It belongs to human dignity to seek to discern what is true.
There is an academic discipline which studies questions such as what constitutes a warranted belief, what religious language ‘means’, whether it has a possible reference and what it means for our conceptions of the good life. That discipline is philosophy. There is also an academic discipline whose remit of study includes the atrocities committed in the name of religion. That discipline is history.
So why, when Channel Four want to air a programme about these issues do they give air-time to a biologist with no training whatsoever in either discipline? Moreover one whose previous pronouncements in this area have only been published because he has piggy-backed on his (justified) scientific reputation and which, considered in their own right, are unworthy of a moderately bright A-level student..
Yet another example of the ignoring of the humanities in mainstream culture and, in spite of the irrationalism of our age, the persistence of the Victorian cult of the polymath scientist. Boo, hiss.”