Posted on 08/27/2015 3:34:21 PM PDT by The Looking Spoon
One time while listening to a radio show a Christian scientist who was being interviewed was asked how he answers those who believe you can't have faith in God or be religious AND be a scientist. His answer to that is about as good as it can ever get.
He says he tells those people that "science is understanding God's handiwork." I agree with that 1,000,000%. If God created everything, then it's only logical He created the processes by which everything works. In other words, He created science.
The notion propagated by atheists that you can only choose one, or that religion and science contradict each other is as convenient and childish as it is totally false.
I say all of that as a backdrop for the latest musings from a scientist who is atheist who says...Anything that goes into a black hole is really entering another universe. This is true for three reasons:
1. Science
2. Because Stephen Hawking said so.
3. Science some more...
Look, I know there's like, A LOT, I don't know about astrophysics, and by a lot I mean pretty much everything. Half the time I look up in the sky I confuse planes for shooting stars...sometimes when I do that it's actually night time.
I get it that there is a lot of education and application of it going on in Stephen Hawking's noggin. So I'm not opposed to him spouting speculation out of his highly educated ass.
What I can't stand are people who think scientific speculative theory is fact that can't be questioned by even the slightest skepticism unless you're some troglodyte who spends every waking minute hoping that the power grid goes Galt on the planet and sends us all back to the stone age.
Take this exchange I found between three readers in the comments section, the commenters are delineated by my additions in bold...
Thoughtful comment: I love how science goes back and forth - on and on about this issue and the public does not question it. Science has fallen to pride - they can prove little - speculate much and denigrate alternative views sounds like people seeking grants and media attention.Translation: Daydreams about celestial entities that are so far away it would take thousands of years of traveling at the speed of light to reach them is "science" on the same level as a defibrillator and an iPhone? To science worshipers denial that black holes are actually a one-way portal to alternate universes is to deny all of modern technology?Bozo response 1: Oh man this is the funniest comment I have read in a long long time. Next time you are in hospital take a look at the science all around you.Bozo response 2: Science is the reason you're able to post your inane comments> Let me guess - you're into religion?
This coming from people who think they're going to save the planet from religion with their faux-atheistic intelligence. They have their heads stuck so far up inside a (very smelly) universe that can only be entered through their own personal black hole they don't realize that "science" has effectively become their deity. The resulting conduct is just as irrational, if not more so, than the religious types they level criticism against for having the very same faith in God that they hold in science.
The would say the difference is God is make-believe...as opposed to a black hole being a door to another universe. That's real.
I realize that two comments on one internet article do not a generalization make. That's the beauty of the internet, it stores all sorts of science is my religion/religion is crap memes. The two bozos blockquoted above aren't the exception, they are the result of an education with such memes.
Fortunately there were also many comments by people who did have a brain in their skull:
Medical science is real science. Theory and concepts unconnected to empirical evidence or facts is just fantasy. Can anybody show any empirical evidence that other universes exit? If not, then it is just a mathematical fantasy, not science.So, thankfully, there's that, still...for now.
One cannot love science as much as these pinhead fake science nerd hipsters like to profess, and not be so in awe of the vastness and complexity of creation to not see the face of God in all of it.
One only needs to look at a video showing the scale of everything in the universe from the smallest thing we can see tot he largest and not feel humbled by what he has created. Only an arrogant roach would think they we even begun to pick at the secrets creation to be so smug as to discount that there is a God.
The first sentence in Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” In the ‘beginning’...; God created the ‘heavens’....Space/TIME/; and the ‘earth’.....Matter. There it is, The whole thing science has been searching for since forever, Space/Time & Matter all in one fell swoop. Most of this was just ‘discovered’ by men in the last 100 years or so.
Our understanding is but a grain of sand on the beach of God’s knowledge.
I grew up in a family with generations of MD’s and PhD’s/researchers/inventors. They were all Christians with the view you have. The ones I have known would and do laugh at someone who claims theories are facts. Settled science? That is not possible in science in most cases. Everything in the past is subject to challenge with new discoveries in the future. That is a fact of science and how it progresses. You have to be humble in science if you are real.
Popes of the past are the ones who punish people in the West for new discovery that contradicts current knowledge and theories. We changed all that in the Western tradition of science. Now it’s the algores of the world who act like Popes.
You truly stunt science (with or without religion) with the view of the atheists you describe. One of my sons is a scientist. He laughs at the notion of “settled science” among Marxists/atheists or just plain dummies repeating crazy slogans. The “settled science” of man-made climate change makes him laugh; it’s such a silly notion given all that affects the climate with or without mankind. The climate is never stagnant.
His grandfather always said that if you truly want to know the truth, just look at the solution being proposed by politicians to solve the problem they say exists. Taking the political game of man made climate change.... Does a global socialist government’s control of currency, taxation, healthcare, energy, land use and food, (or any one of these) being proposed by the global climate freaks, make sense for the solving the supposed solution of keeping the climate from changing? The answer is no. The climate is guaranteed to be in flux as it has been throughout history. It is natural for the climate to change. A Christian might say, it is the way God created the earth - a climate that changes - so far as we scientifically know anyway. So the politicans’ proposed solution exposes the lie of the claimed problem.
Note the form of scientific action: "If A is true, then B should result. I perform an experiment to test A, and the result is B. Therefore A is true." As any logician will confirm, this is a logical fallacy known as "affirming the consequent." After all, there might be many other reasons why B followed the test of A, and A had nothing to do with it. However, because there is a knowable order in the universe, this process actually works. We do get cause and effect sorted out.
I approach science from the opposite direction, specifically the scientific method. I compare “doing science” with playing a game of chess.
Both have rules exclusive to what is being done. And if you have done either while carefully following the rules, you have done just that.
That is, if you play a game of chess while following the rules, you have played a game of chess. You cannot extrapolate or interpolate from that.
The same with a scientific experiment. If you carry out an experiment according to the rules, you have done just that. And if someone else can follow the same rules and get the same results, the experiment is “scientific”. But it only shows just that experiment, nothing can be extrapolated or interpolated from it.
Now granted, there are any number of rules you can add to a game of chess. Or take away. But the end result would *not* be a game of chess, because it was not done following the rules.
And the same with science.
One of the biggest mistakes that scientists make is assuming that the abstracts, like mathematics, they use in their experiments, actually create reality, rather than just abstractly describe it. It is “Adam’s conundrum.”
That is, God created reality, then created Adam to label and describe it. Adam saw a dog and decided to call it a dog. But then he confused labeling something with creating it. “It wouldn’t be a dog if I hadn’t called it a dog.”
thx for posting those.
You may enjoy this definition from a 1959 Catholic reference book, “Origin of Man” The original was written in French by a Priest/Theologian but I think the translation holds up well:
The Coming of Science
Just as philosophy replaced poetry and mythology in explaining the origins of the world and of man, so has science for the last few centuries taken over the quest from philosophy.
Science differs from philosophy in that it is concerned not with the “final causes of things”, but with their proximate and immediate causes. It refuses to go beyond the facts. A scientific fact is a fact of physical observation, a fact registered by the senses and by the innumerable instruments which man has called in to supplement his senses. The facts once observed and registered are subjected when possible to precise verification in the form of experiments. But science ventures beyond the facts in attempting to explain them. This she achieves by first framing hypotheses and then, after verification, giving them the force of laws if their validity as explanation is confirmed. From this it follows that a hypothesis leads on to fresh observations, and is thus a kind of working tool. But a hypothesis aspires to become a scientific law, and becomes one as soon as it has successfully passed the test of experiment which it has itself set in train.
He also has some other thoughts on atheism vs. Theism but I am heading out the door right now, will post later.
Cheers!
My pleasure
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Another book I really enjoyed that is peripherally related to the subject at hand is this one...I've always been a collector/reader of all things C.S. Lewis, so it was interesting to read his works juxtaposed against those of Freud:
Now I’ve got two on my list...thank you Sir.
You’re quite welcome!
The deeper you get into physics, the more you understand that there is no other possible explanation for all matter except for a Supreme Being.
But God understands that his creation is curious. He has given us so many wonderful things to discover.
Try some of the late Fr. Stanley Jaki’s books.
I will definitely look into them...This is what I love about FR :-)
Thanks!
I believe that God “derived” the initial function value that we discovered as mathematics.
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