From: jfb@macsch.com (John Baskette)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Science and God
Date: 25 Jan 93 05:34:25 GMT
Organization: MacNeal-Schwendler Corp.

Hello.  Someone wrote to me some thoughtful email regarding an
earlier post of mine.  Unfortunately, I lost his email address
because the method I choose to save his letter stripped and deleted 
the header information.  Please feel free to write again!

Naturally, I feel that his questions and my answers are interesting
enough to post to the net.  I will not post his questions because
it was private email, but I am posting my answers with enough added
context to make my answers comprehensible.

In my prior post I said: 

>> Question:  Do scientists propose the existence of entities
>> that cannot be directly observed and that seem mysterious?  
>> (Hint: Have you seen any quarks lately?  If you have what
>> is it?)

This statement could be construed to imply that scientists may be 
making untestable hypotheses about entities.  What I meant was 
that certain scientific hypotheses and the "God" hypothesis have much 
more in common than many realize.  Often people will try to claim that 
the concept of God has no meaning because the idea of God has no 
empirical testability.

I agree that theories involving quarks are testable, but the idea of 
the quark is somewhat abstract and the empirical tests are indirect.
Perhaps the idea of a black hole is similar.  We cannot detect a 
black hole directly, but we can observe different forms of radiation
that are emitted by objects being destroyed as they enter a black 
hole.  The big bang is an event that we will never observe directly.

The Christian understanding of God is capable of some level of 
empirical testability.  If Christianity is true then all the facts
pertaining to the reliability of the New Testament and the gospels 
ought to be consistent with the hypothesis that Jesus really lived,
died and rose from the dead.  If the Christian God exists, then we
should find that what we observe in the universe is consistent with
the kind of universe that Christian revelation says God created.
As I mentioned in my post, the young-earth creationist version of 
Christianity appears to be falsified.  Human nature, also, should
be like the Bible describes.  The Christian interpretation of 
reality will also account for varieties of religious experience.

This does not mean that using the idea of God as an hypothesis
in science is a good idea.  The idea of God is too powerful,
complex and drastic of a solution to invoke to solve scientific
problems.  It can too easily solve problems and is too difficult
to falsify.

My understanding is that religion and belief in God address a 
different set of questions than does science.  I understand 
science to be the systematic study of the objective material
world in order to understand what it is and how it operates.
Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only peripherally with
those issues.  The primary focus of religion is values.  Values
concern morals and the meaning of life and existence.

One of the reasons I am a Christian is my conviction that life 
is meaningful and moral values or "oughts" are absolute truth in 
some sense.  My intuition about life is that imperatives such as 
respect for life, love thy neighbor, etc. have an absolute 
nature about them that goes beyond accidents of evolution. 
These values are transcendent.  If they are transcendent, then
we must ask how they can exist.  Meaning and values can only 
reside in minds.  This leads to a transcendent mind or God.

My earlier statement was not intended as a criticism of science per se.
I would concur with the idea that there are those who put undue faith
in the conclusions of "science".  I find that scientists are often 
far more uncertain about much of their understanding and conclusions
than are many of their followers.  Ironically, religious believers
are often guilty of this.  (An example is the book "The Fingerprint
of God" by Hugh Ross.  Hugh Ross has some good credentials, but his
book takes a rather fundamentalist approach to both the Bible and 
the Big Bang theory.  He is very dogmatic about the Big Bang and 
1980's cosmology because in his mind it proves Christian revelation.
He is more dogmatic than I think most cosmologists are.  I still 
mostly like his book although some of the reasoning is suspect.)  I do, 
have great respect for the amazing accomplishments of science.
In other venues, I contribute to refuting pseudo-scientific nonsense
such as certain forms of "scientific creationism", velikovskyism, 
Satanic ritual abuse witch hunts, etc. 

My criticism is of the belief that the primary difference between
science and religion is not ontological -- concerning different facets
of reality -- but epistemological -- religion is non-rational and 
based only on faith (often blind faith) while science is rational 
and based on reason. 

In my earlier post I argue that science makes certain assumptions
about the universe that are believed without proof such as the 
uniformity of natural causes, the rational and ordered nature of the 
universe, and that the laws of logic prevail throughout the universe 
(i.e. the laws of logic are universal and invariant).

Some people argue that the assumptions that science accepts by faith 
are not based on revelation as is religious faith but are justified 
by the past successful history of the assumptions. 

The point is that the scientist's justification of certain assumptions
based on the history of the success of certain assumptions is not 
based on reason.  The fact that certain ideas have held true in the 
past is not a sufficient rational justification for the idea that 
these ideas will continue to hold for the future.  Only perfect or 
complete inductions are rationally valid.  The necessarily 
incomplete induction of the past performance of certain assumptions 
by itself does not permit us to conclude anything about the 
unexamined future performance of these assumptions.  Additional 
assumptions are needed.  It is these additional assumptions that 
constitute the content of the faith of the scientist.

The understanding that religious faith is based on revelation is
commonly held.  At one time I would have agreed.  What I think now
is this:

   Ontology precedes epistemology in the order of being, but
   epistemology precedes ontology in the order of knowing.

(This saying is not original -- I heard it from a friend of mine
 Bob Passintino.)

What I am saying is that I find that very few, if any people 
become Christian's as the result of being convinced by a rational
argument.  Most believe either because that is what they have been
taught by their ancestors, or they believe because they turned to
faith in Christianity as a result of a crisis in their own life 
that Christ was able to resolve.  In respect to actually becoming
a Christian, revelation comes first.  People believe the revelation
and experience Christ before they have formulated their rational
reasons, such as they are, for believing.  (This is not always
the case.  There have been some cases where an individual through
dialog has been convinced sufficiently of the possibility that
Christ is who He said He was to convert, but this is rare.)

I find, however, that few continue to believe in Christ and the
Christian faith without struggling with doubts and formulating 
reasons why they believe.  These reasons employ the same kinds 
of methods that people use to justify beliefs in general including
rational considerations.

It is interesting to look at the kinds of justifications that 
Christians give for believing.  Some examples:

"I believe because I have experienced being Born again!  I know
 Christ lives because he lives in my heart.  This is something
 that you cannot understand by reason, you must experience it!"

Is this argument an example of justifying belief only on faith?
I think not.  It is a kind of rational argument that argues 
this way:  Whatever explains my Christian experience is true.
Either my experience is explained by some rational scientific 
process that does not require the supernatural or my experience
is explained by Christianity.  My experience is such that it cannot 
be explained by any rational scientific process, therefore my 
experience must be explained by Christianity.  Therefore 
Christianity is true.

 How about this one:  "You can't prove Christianity, you just have 
 to believe."

This justification makes less sense than the last one, but it has 
become very popular.  Why?  Because these individuals have looked 
at the arguments used to justify Christianity as valid and have 
concluded that the arguments are not sufficient to justify faith.
So they have done something quite remarkable.  They conclude that
rationally speaking they must become fiedists.  They use rational
arguments to arrive at this conclusion.

The fact is that religious belief is not based strictly on faith 
and revelation.  This is one aspect of what I was saying in my 
original post.

John Baskette  jfb@macsch.com