It’s Not Scientific!

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! Before I get to tonight’s blog, I’d like to state first off that I do have some responses coming to emails. I try to break as much as I can on Sunday however. I do not know when I will be able to answer for sure. Tomorrow, I have to have gallbladder surgery. If there’s no new blog tomorrow, don’t worry. I could just be not feeling up to writing a blog.

We’ve been looking meanwhile at atheist sound bites. Right now, I’d like to answer the charge that evidence is not scientific.

What is surprising is that in our day to day experience, we would never make such a charge. It doesn’t mean that we don’t look at evidence. It means that we know the evidence is not scientific. When I was preparing to propose to my wife, I looked at evidence for that decision being the right one. (It was) None of that was scientific. You would not test it in a lab.

Yet somehow, we think that when it comes to religion, science should be the decider. If a claim is made that is directly scientific, by all means test it scientifically, but if it is not, then you simply cannot test it scientifically. The question “Does God exist?” is not a scientific question. It is a question relating to metaphysics rather than to physics. (Something that made me think even the title of Stenger’s book was hysterical. When the title commits a category fallacy, you know you’re in for some fun reading)

Does that mean science is useless? No. Consider fine-tuning as an example. Suppose it is agreed that the universe is fine-tuned. That can lead to us drawing philosophical inferences that there is a god of some sort. That can in no way however tell us who this god is. Is it the god of Christianity or the god of Islam or some other? For that, we will need to study philosophy and the claims of any religion we think could match the deity we believe created.

What it means is that we do not elevate science to the position where it is the final authority. Why do we get tempted to put it there? It is because we are all a materialistic people who believe in getting all that we can get and focus on the material. When that is the way a people think, is it any shock that that which tells us about the material is what matters most?

In this, we have lost sight of such concepts as beauty, morality, truth, and goodness. Each of these has been attempted to be relativised by someone. Why? They are not scientific. It is a result of swinging the pendulum too far. In no way should we slow down science or cease doing it. We should rather increase our efforts to understand the above topics that matter far more to all of us. Many young people today can tell you Newton’s Laws of Motion. All good and well. How many can tell you definitions of beauty, morality, truth and goodness?

Give science its proper place, but don’t give it every place.

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