Someone who blogs under the name “whyevolutionistrue” goes to great pains to make sure that Richard Dawkins is absolutely opposed to any kind of religion other than atheism, in case any of us thought otherwise, and at the end writes this:
Now that Dawkins has verified this, it would be nice to see Rosenau, Mooney, and Kirshenbaum correct their postings. And they need to stop pretending that the existence of religious scientists and religious people who accept evolution proves that science and faith are compatible. We settled that issue long ago. The issue is philosophical compatibility. Is that really so hard for anyone to understand?
What he fails to understand is that far from being incompatible, science needs religion–or more precisely, needs God the Creator of the Universe.
It boils down to this: if there is no God, then the universe is simply an accumulation of matter that at its core is utterly random and chaotic; what came to be, came to be simply by pure chance and accident, and the apparent orderliness which we perceive is simply an illusion, an island of order in an megaocean of chaos. Sheer probability will tell us that in a sufficiently large area of chaos, there will appear small areas of apparent order. (And we won’t get into the ramifications of the fact that probability itself assumes a fundamentally ordered universe.)
But science is based on the premise that the universe is indeed ordered, that it can be coherently investigated and explained–and that therefore it was created.
Along the same lines we can make an updated version of Pascal’s wager: if there is no God, then any order and meaning we give to it is arbitrary and imposed on existence by our minds, and not by any internal characteristic of existence. Therefore, we may as well believe in God, since if we are wrong, we are merely adopting one out of a number of possible arbitrary impositions of meaning.
Tags: faith, Pascal's wager, science
October 7, 2009 at 7:05 am |
Evolution is true. Creatures evolve, that is an observable fact. But, other than for the very simple changes, natural selection cannot be what drives evolution. It is impossible. The more I think about the numbers, the incredible odds against change happening in such useful ways, the inertia and entropy within existence, the more convinced I am that there is something intelligent or akin to intelligence at work in evolution. This does not have to be a god. But the refusal of most scientists to contemplate this added dimension of evolution (even if it is a purely non-divine scientific one) has left them with a bloody great elephant in their Darwinian room. One day this elephant will break free and cause incredible damage to the reputation of science which has so vehemently insisted for so long that natural selection is a fact and not just a theory.