On 12/20/2021, Stephen Meyer, a professor, narrated a Prager U video entitled, Are Religion and Science in Conflict? I took notes on the video and will comment on them.
Meyer: “Can you believe in God and in science at the same time?”
My response: Yes, I say as a rational believer in good divinities.
Meyer: “New Atheists, Neil DeGrasse and Richard Dawkins say no. They believe that religion gets in the way of science, more science means less God.
These are old ideas expressed over 100 years ago by English doctor John Draper in a book, History of The Conflict Between Religion and Science. Draper was deeply influenced by Darwin’s then new theory of evolution. Draper saw organized religion as a direct and existential threat to the advancement of science. “Religion and science are absolutely incompatible; they cannot even exist together . . . Mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.’
Are science and religion always and inevitably in conflict—well, not exactly.
In fact, the giants that established modern science—Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton---were deeply religious men. They saw no conflict between science and religion—on the contrary, they thought in studying science, they were discovering God’s design and revealing it to man. In fact, Judeo-Christian tradition led directly to modern science notes Historian of science, Joseph Needham.
Needham asked two questions: Why There and Why then? There is Europe in the 16th and 17th century. Why didn’t modern science start somewhere else before then? The Egyptians built the pyramids. The Chinese invented gun powder, the compass and block printers. The Greeks gave us philosophy, and the Romans built roads and aqueducts. But none of them gave the world science.
None of these countries developed the systematic method to investigate nature as done in Europe in the 16th and 17th century. This realization led Needham, Ian Barbour and Herbert Butterfeld, science historians, to ask why the scientific revolution occurred where and when it did.”
My response: The rise of modernism, Protestantism, capitalism, democracies, and the scientific revolution occurred in Europe and that seemed to have grown out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and I think Meyer is onto something.
Meyer: “These science historians concluded that only the Judeo-Christian West had the necessary intellectual presuppositions to give the rise of the science a nudge. What was this X factor and why did it occur.
Their conclusion: “What were these presuppositions? All three presuppositions have their origin in an idea that it was the Judeo-Christian creator God that fashioned an ordered universe.
Presupposition 1: These scientists assumed the intelligibility of nature, that nature had been designed by the mind of a rational God, the same God that made the rational mind of human beings. Thus, the men assumed their minds should carefully study nature so they could understand the order and design God had placed in the world.
Presupposition 2: They assumed an underlying order in nature that was best expressed by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, ‘There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the order of nature, a conviction he attributed to a belief in the rationality of God.’
This idea led to the unprecedented use of mathematics to describe the orderly process in the world and inspired the invention of better tools like the telescope and microscope to see that order.”
Presupposition 3: They assumed the contingency of nature. This means God had many choices on how to make an orderly world. Just as there are many ways to design a clock, there are many ways to design a universe.
To discover how God made the world, scientists cannot just deduce the order of nature in ways that seem most logical to them by merely using reason alone to draw conclusions as the Greek philosophers tried to do.”
My response: I read in Wikipedia that Meyer is dismissed as a pseudoscientist, preaching intelligent design theory as a professor of philosophy and science at the Discovery Institute in Seattle.
I know that Wikipedia has a decided Progressive slant and pass off as truth what may be misinformation, but I also know that the old logical positivists dismissed metaphysical and cosmological speculation like what Meyer offers as anti-realistic, metaphysical nonsense that no self-respecting, hard-core physicalist philosopher or atheistic scientist would accept as true for one second.
With all of that in mind, and no background in Meyer or his role in the intelligent design movement, I will just say that intuitively I like the idea that Judeo-Christian metaphysics about smart God creating an orderly cosmos, a world run on rational principles emanating from and consistent with the internal consciousness and Logos of the Creator that God then applied to set up and regulate the ordered world. I will keep an open mind on it all for now, but the principle of reason was there operating in the Bible from Genesis forward as the mind of God controlling and regulating the physical world and all creatures and flora in it.
If we are made in God’s image and likeness, could not pious believers and scientists seek to understand God through prayer, reflection, and by empirically study the world, God’s handiwork as practicing, competent, reasoning scientists?
Meyer: “They thought the perfect form of movement was circular so planets must be circular in orbits, but that was something Kepler later refuted by careful observation.
Because of their theological convictions, new scientists knew they would have to observe, test and measure in order to understand God’s design. For these men, nature was like a book, a form of divine communication intelligible to human investigation. For this reason, they also developed the concept of The Laws of Nature implying God’s governance over the material order.
Science was a way to decipher that order. The belief that science and religion are in conflict is a popular belief today but that need not be so. The history of science shows scientists and laymen alike owe a great debt to Judeo-Christian tradition. Without which tradition we would live in a much more primitive world scientifically and morally.”
My response: Any level of rancor and mutual scoffing at each other, by scientists seeing God with a hand in nature versus materialists and naturalist scientists that see only the material world as existent (physical monists), is unfortunate and unproductive. There is no need for persecution of, intolerance towards and complete dismissal of opposition’s point of view.
We cannot with certain knowledge prove or disprove that God exists, let alone that prove or disprove that God is the Great Watchmaker. Meyer seems like a credentialed, authoritative expert in this field, so let us give him a fair hearing, and I need to delve much deeper into this man that I just learned about today.
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