There are two important points to make here. Well, three. The first and foremost important point to make is "science" is an incredibly broad term, as it can refer to many, separate things. Following that, as I've discussed before, science (as the general concept that is generally meant in this context) and religion exist side by side - they are not and have never been 'at war'. The third one is that science itself is what holds science back.
Or should I say, scientists. Or even "scientism," a phrase coined to refer to the those who commit to 'worship' of science. I can do things in whatever order I choose.
I have a few links here, the first is an article about science being broken. It goes into the failures of the scientific community to properly peer-review studies, even when being told that they are participating in a study that is studying the effectiveness of peer review, and other things highlighting the problems that science faces from within its own ranks.
While the first one was titled "Big Science is Broken," this article is titled "Science isn't broken." Well, gee, why would I link two articles of opposite views to make my point?
Because the title of the first article is wrong. The meat of the article is correct, but "science" isn't broken. People are. We are broken, we are fallen, we are finite, biased, and flawed creatures. A perfectly designed system can still fail when subjected to the natural flaws of humanity. It was one of the first things that ever happened.
But what the second article attempts to say is that science isn't broken, it's just that the systems in place make it hard for scientists to... science things, without "cheating". This, however, is an unsatisfying conclusion. We can't accept self-admittedly flawed science because "it's just really really hard, guys!".
I.e., science is too hard for scientists. It's too hard for them to be unbiased, for them to really think critically, to really care about what they're studying, and to care to try and find out what is true rather than getting the results that they want.
The fact of the matter is that as long as science is performed by flawed people, we cannot place our unwavering faith in it. And what's being shown now is not only that is this conclusion completely true, but it's more true than it's ever been. People are terrible at science, in this "progressive and enlightened" future moreso than they were in the past. Science used to by and large be carried out for the sake of it, funded by people who had few if any ulterior motives, while nowadays many people are just trying to get as many government payouts as they can. Science is so expensive that people cannot do it without getting donations, and people do not donate to the research of causes they don't like.
Science doesn't do or say anything. Science is a limited tool that is utilized by people for us to try and better understand the world around us. But what happened is that we started to worship science - and therefore, scientists. Everyone wanted to be a scientist because they wanted the respect, they wanted to be one of those "smart people". We can see this day to day by the amount of people who act like they're scientists when they aren't, from Bill Nye (engineer, not scientist) to your common every day 16 year old on Facebook posting edgy anti-theism memes.
Where before we perhaps had scientists who were genuinely interested in scientific progression, who genuinely wanted to understand how the world around them worked, we now have a wider pool of scientists - which includes a great number of people who don't intend to use the tool for its pure and truth-seeking powers, but to make people believe the things they want them to believe by forcing studies through that may not actually prove anything, or may actually be distinctly opposite from the truth.
Now, I'm not saying every scientist doesn't care about scientific progression and is actually just using their status to promote their own agendas, nor am I saying that never happened before these recent times. What I am saying is that the information and data being compiled and analyzed by scientists is just as likely to be flawed, misinterpreted, or purposefully manipulated as any other kind of thing. Because scientists are people, and people are flawed.
We see reckless numbers of studies on the same subjects that promote different results. In the same breath we'll see a study that definitely proves that homosexual parents are 100% the same as heterosexual couples and another one that shows that homosexual parents are worse than heterosexual ones. Whatever your personal belief is, know that you can definitely manipulate scientific results to prove that you're right!
So who do we believe? Well, the average person will simply believe the study that coincides with their beliefs, just like the scientist who possibly fabricated the study in the first place made sure that their interpretations of the results showed the things they wanted it to show.
What do we end up with? We end up with a situation in which we had something we thought we could trust being shown to be just as untrustworthy as any other given thing. Leave it to people to ruin things for people.
Should we dismiss the merits of science? Of course not. Science, when utilized properly, is a very useful tool for us to understand the world around us. The problem is that we are unlikely to be able to find a disclosure on each scientific study stating "the scientist or scientists who put this study together were purposefully studying this topic because they wanted to prove [x/y/z] thing, so it's possible that these results are biased."
What options are we left with, then? Well, don't get too optimistic. We can definitely take some steps in the right direction, for instance reading past the title of an article proclaiming that a new study has just definitively proven [thing that supports your beliefs], and actually taking a look at the study in question. Many an article has been written proclaiming a result that's completely different from the study it's citing. The articles written about scientific studies are more or less a second-hand source, which opens it up to even more biased re-interpretation.
We can learn more about what makes good science and what makes bad science. As we can see (if you read both of those articles), one of the biggest problems is that you can manipulate which data and what kind of data you use for your study and still have it be "legitimate." So, really get into the meat of the study. Look at the sample sizes, the populations involved, and we can probably get some good insight into the biases that might be present if we look at the study itself in context of what current popular beliefs are and what sorts of things people are trying to prove. It would be unlikely that a study about chipmunks is being biased by political agendas (though I suppose it's possible).
So... science is not broken, it's just easily manipulated, and frequently is. Scientists tend to get in the way of science moreso than anyone else. Pseudo-scientists who are really just college kids who aren't even majoring in any field of science also help to degrade the reputation of science. Furthermore, since the government can fund scientific studies and then subsequently demand that the results of those studies aren't published when they don't prove what they wanted, we can see that politics probably gets in the way of science far more than religion does.
So what about "religion hindering the advancement of science" that we talked about?
As mentioned many times before, science and religion go hand in hand. If there is a Creator of all things, then He created... science. He created everything, thus, science is really just the discovery of the world that the Creator created.
How, then, could religion ever get in the way of science? Well, it's important to understand what people mean by this.
Generally speaking, religion "gets in the way" of science when scientists attempt to do immoral things in the name of science. For example, psychologists used to do tons of terrible studies on people that would have violated any compassionate person's moral standards. A code of ethics was installed so that psychologists couldn't emotionally scar (or physically damage) people anymore. This is easily something that "got in the way" of science.
Anti-theists also tend to believe that religion is "getting in the way" when religious people debate, contest, or deny scientific findings. There are obviously religious people who have been tricked into thinking that science is an enemy of God who will very unscientifically deny and argue against scientific advancement, but my biggest question here is how they are actually stopping anyone. If some misled religious devotees are hellbent on believing something that science "said," that doesn't... actually... stop anything. Go on. Continue. You are not restricted by the beliefs of people who disagree with you.
The problem of course starts when religious people debate, contest, or deny the implied conclusions of certain scientific findings. A straight forward example is the argument of common descent that is derived from the fact that all living things are made up of DNA and the more similar looking and operating two life forms are, the more similar their DNA. Darwinists have used this indisputable scientific fact - that we all have DNA and share similarities and what not - as proof of a common ancestor.
Apparently, I'm standing in the way of science when I say "Well, wait a moment, how exactly does this not make complete sense in the context of a Creator? If I make a sculpture of an ape and a sculpture of a human being both out of clay, how many differences do I really have to make?"
See, similar DNA among similar creatures doesn't prove anything one way or another. What happened is that scientists, due to their preexisting biases, concluded that similar DNA is clearly evidence of a common ancestor! When I point out the logically obvious reality that it could easily be evidence of a common Creator, I'm "standing in the way of science!" Brilliant.
"But wait!" the atheist shouts, "What about Galileo and the early Catholic Church? That's our best and most used example of the church getting in the way of science!"
Galileo is a good example of a distorted truth being repeated so many times that everyone now believes it. The real story of Galileo, summarized, involves being told not to proclaim things without evidence, still doing so, and then being put on house arrest with all the comforts of living, including a servant, for insulting the Pope who invited you to prove your claims in the first place.
See, Galileo actually didn't prove that the earth revolved around the sun the way that we understand it now. People back then already had evidence that the earth revolved around the sun, and a lot of that information was found around - wait for it - churches. Copernicus, a Catholic monk, actually did the studies about the earth revolving around the sun. He was just sort of a meek and socially awkward person who didn't want to go public with his findings. Galileo took Copernicus' findings and ran with them, because he was actually sort of an unapologetically brash man. He also stated several times that God had actually given him divine power over the discernment of astronomy. Yeah, so, what the Catholic church had an issue with was that - Galileo running around proclaiming that God made him an astrology-prophet.
Some of Galileo's claims were actually disproven, as Copernicus was actually the one who did all the leg work, while Galileo took it and ran around proclaiming himself something of a genius - and that everyone who disagreed with him was an idiot, including the Pope, which Galileo astonishingly basically told him to his face. Since the Pope was also basically the king, he put Galileo on house arrest for heresy - not for saying the earth revolved around the sun, but because he declared to have divine powers and also called the Pope stupid.
Sources? Here, here, and this book.
It's kind of unfortunate that the atheist's go-to for the church trying to halt scientific progression is actually all based on a lie. Another one they try to use now is stem-cell research.
We have two points to make here. Our first point is, interestingly, not all stem-cells come from embryos and fetuses:
A third source of stem cells, known as multipotent stem cells, can be found in many types of adult tissue such as bone marrow, adipose tissue (fat), and umbilical cord blood. Adult stem cells are needed every day to replenish a variety of cell types in our body that normally wear out and die in large numbers. Examples of cells that need to be constantly replaced are blood, skin cells, and the lining of our intestinal tract. Areas of the body not previously thought to contain stem cells, such as the brain, have in recent years been discovered to contain these self-renewing cells.
Our second point is that we have not come across religion getting in the way of science, but rather morality and ethics. Just as psychologists who were doing emotionally damaging and sometimes physically and developmentally horrendous ethically irreconcilable things to people "in the name of science," we come across the ethical and moral question of abortion, purposefully creating embryos for science, and a "whose life is more important?" dilemma.
As I've gone into before, stem cell research from unborn little humans is not a question of science but of morality. This isn't a religious question but a moral one. The topic has merely been conflated as being religious in nature, but it exists separate from religion. There are secular organizations against abortion! It's outright false to insist that only religious adherents are against abortion.
So what we come across now is that morality is really what "gets in the way of science." Now the question we have to ask is "is that wrong?"
This question gets pretty deep. Is it okay to "hinder" scientific advancement because of our morals, our humanity, and our respect for people's lives?
I would argue that of course it is. As I went into before about purely logical worldviews, when we ignore our humanity - our emotions and our compassion - we end up with some pretty gruesome results. Morality is more important than science as it is what keeps us human. What good is arguing about the advancement of science if it ends up destroying us?
But we have one more contest about religion hindering science - the idea that a scientist should not hold any religious beliefs. While this is only somewhat related, what we find is that people believe that the religious cannot be scientists, or more generally, scientists should not ever hold any beliefs that are not provable with science.
There is not much really to present here in the form of an argument, as this belief is rooted in personal bias and anti-theism rather than any actual argument. What we see here is that non-religious scientists believe that religious people cannot be good scientists because they believe in the false concept of religion v. science, that religion is anti-science and therefore religious beliefs will hinder a scientist from doing sciencey things.
This is all conjecture. Especially when we see that many prominent scientists in very advanced fields such as astrophysics, physics, and cosmology actually tend to find that science points toward a Creator. As with my example earlier, much of the evidence "for naturalism" is actually simply neutral evidence that proves nothing being imbued by biased scientists with a biased conclusion.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that a scientist with a belief in a Creator could possibly be unscientific considering that no one who believes in a Creator doesn't believe that that same Creator created everything - including the very thing they are studying. Scientific advancement doesn't disprove God - you do not disprove a Creator by finding out how the creation operates. If anything, belief in a Creator will simply cause the religious scientist to have a greater appreciation and reverence for that which he is studying - because he knows that it was created with love and care by the same Creator who created him.
No comments:
Post a Comment