Science vs. Religion-Lessons from John W. Loftus

Science vs. Religion

What is the relationship between science and religion? Conflict? Dialog? Complete separation? or something else? I want to present a piece of writing that I believe speaks wonderfully to this subject and captures many of my own issues with the topic of science and religion.

Here is a chapter from a book written by John W. Loftus called, "Why I Became and Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity" This is a great book, that exceeds the work of most of those who are called the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris). This book is a balanced and well written presentation of all the issues (philosophical, historical, ethical, etc) between theists (Christian in particular) and Atheist. The author also provides you with his own life story along the way allowing you to appreciate his work all the more. I included his citations as endnotes. These blog would not allow me to format the endnotes properly so they are merely numbered within the text to which you can find the information with the corresponding number at the bottom. So here is his work:

The Lessons of Galileo, Science, and Religion

The French philosophes, or social critics of the eighteenth century, used the trial of Galileo for propaganda purposes to show the conflict between science and Christianity, and it was. It was a conflict of sciences that the church as an institution got caught up in. The church had taken a stand on Aristotelian science and was not prepared to let the new science progress. And yet there was more to it. (1)
The problem for astronomers in this era was to explain the retrograde motion of the planets. The word “planet” in Greek literally means “wanderer,” and in the New Testament the word means “deceiver.” In the night sky the planets seem to back up and then go forward again as the weeks go by, rather than move in one direction across the sky. This observed motion is actually because the earth revolves around the sun along with the other planets. All of the planets pass each other in their yearly cycles. But since “the ancients viewed the celestial realm as the residence of the gods,” (2) the planets were defying the perfect symmetry of the heavenly realm. The retrograde motion of the planets seemed to contradict the perfect divine order of the universe, thus endangering human faith in the divine creator of the universe.
The philosopher’s task, in Plato’s words, was to “save the phenomena”—to redeem the apparent disorder of the empirical heavens. The Pythagoreans actually suggested a stationary sun, and Aristarchus posited a heliocentric theory. Yet the obstacles were formidable to these viewpoints: there was no observable stellar parallax (described later) because they lacked a telescope. There was also the commonsense notion that a moving earth would force people on earth to be knocked about. Plus the ancients believed in the terrestrial-celestial separation between the realm of the gods and of humans. They believed that the heavens operated by a different set of laws than on earth.
The reason this was a problem is because Aristotelian cosmology led to the conclusion that the earth was the center of the universe. Aristotle’s viewpoint is teleological. He concluded there were four causes for everything that exists: (1) the formal cause, “What is its form?”; (2) the material cause, “what is it made of?”; (3) the efficient cause, “What made it?”; and (4) the most significant: the final cause, that is, “what purpose does it serve?” According to Aristotle, rocks fall to earth because they seek their rightful place. And heavier ones fall faster because they have more potentiality, he said. This is a purpose-oriented answer, but it is completely untrue when falling in a vacuum. “Why does water freeze faster when it’s hotter?” He answered it’s because hot water has more potentiality. But it doesn’t freeze faster! “Why is there wind?” Aristotle claimed the wind is the result of the earth breathing. These are purpose-oriented answers. He talked as though nature is a consciously operating organism. This teleological viewpoint led to the idea that the earth was the fixed center of the universe. Why? Because all objects fall to earth, their rightful place. Therefore the earth is the center of the universe. According to Aristotle, teleological explanations are ultimate explanations for why something happens.
Ptolemy (100-178 CE) outlined the answer to the problem of the planets that held sway until Copernicus. It was very complicated and involved the notion that planets revolved around certain circular points in the universe called epicycles, thus explaining why the planets were brighter during the retrograde cycle. (By the way, Ptolemy argued convincingly for a spherical earth!)
Nicholas Copernicus had come to regard the Ptolemaic system as a “monster,” which still failed to account for or to predict observed planetary positions with reliable accuracy. Copernicus believed that “the divine creator, whose works were everywhere good and orderly, could not have been slipshod with the heavens.” With him the appearances were saved with greater conceptual elegance. He saw his work fully published on the last day of his life, 1543 CE, titled The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Yet “for most who heard of it, the new conception was contrary to experience and so patently false, as to not require serious discussion.” (3)

The Trial of Galileo (1633 CE)

By Galileo’s day in the early seventeenth century, the Catholic Church felt compelled to take a definite stand against the Copernican hypothesis for various reasons (the Protestants had done this earlier). One major reason was that Dante harmonized the Christian religion with the science of his day. When the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology was embraced by the Christian poet Dante (1265-1321 CE) in his extremely popular Divine Comedy, the ancient cosmological view “fully reentered the Christian psyche.” (4) Dante did this, according to Richard Tarnas, by “poetically uniting the specific elements of Christian theology with the equally specific elements of classical astronomy…The Aristotelian geocentric universe thus became a massive symbolic structure for the moral drama of Christianity…all of the Ptolemaic planetary spheres now took on Christian references, with specific ranks of angels and archangels responsible for each sphere’s motions…Every aspect of the Greek scientific scheme [was] now imbued with religious significance.” If, for example, a moving earth were to be introduced into that system, “the effect of a purely scientific innovation would threaten the integrity of the entire Christian cosmology.” (5)
Tarnas again: “If the earth truly moved then no longer could it be the fixed center of God’s Creation and his plan of salvation. Nor could man be the central focus of the cosmos. The absolute uniqueness and significance of Christ’s intervention into human history seemed to require a corresponding uniqueness and significance for the Earth. The meaning of redemption itself, the central event not just of human history, but also of universal history, seemed at stake. To be a Copernican seemed tantamount to atheism.” (6)
According to Christian philosopher Diogenes Allen, the Aristotelian/Ptolemy view “included values as part of the very fabric of the universe…Obligations and rights…are confirmed and supported by the physical order of the cosmos itself…It seemed to threaten the very foundations of the social, political, and moral order.” (7)
The invention of the telescope changed the debate. It destroyed several Ptolemaic conceptions: (a) They believed that the spheres of the universe were perfect, yet Galileo noticed the moon has craters; (b) they believed everything rotates around the earth, yet Galileo discovered Jupiter had four moons; and (c) they believed the heavenly bodies were eternal, yet Galileo discovered sun spots indicating that the sun was decaying. He defended the Copernican system with observations, and thus began the rise of modern experimental science. He showed by experiment how heavier rocks do not fall faster than lighter ones (contrary to Aristotle). He conceptualized tying a string from a heavier rock to a lighter one, thus making them one object. But would the combined rock now fall faster than either one, or would the lighter one drag? Such problems plagued the older view.
But look at how Galileo’s views were answered purportedly by a Florentine astronomer named Francesco Sizzi: “There are seven windows in the head: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. So also in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two unfavorable, two luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent. From all this, and from other such natural phenomena, such as seven metals, etc., all too pointless to enumerate, we can conclude that the number of planets is necessarily seven…Furthermore, the alleged satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore can have no influence on earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist…Besides all this, the Jews and other ancient peoples as well as modern Europeans have always divided the week into seven days and have named them after the seven planets. Now if we, like Galileo, increase the number of planets, this whole and beautiful system falls to the ground.” (8)
What must be understood about the trial: First, there was real debate about the geocentric system—but it was to be regarded as a “hypothesis not fact.” Second, Copernicus’s and Galileo’s systems contained ideas that were “hopelessly inaccurate,” and there was no evidence yet for things that should be notices. For instance, the proper planetary orbits were not known yet—they were arguing for more complete circles revolving around the sun; and there was “no observable stellar parallax”—individual stars should appear at different points in the sky when the earth is at its two farthest distances in its cycle around the sun. Either the stars were immensely more distant, which we now know is the case, or the earth didn’t move. Thus, the Copernican system was not yet established on scientific grounds. Third, the pope, Urban VIII, felt personally betrayed by Galileo, a former friend, because he thought one of the incompetent speakers in Galileo’s book Dialogue of Two Chief World Systems was intended to represent him.
Regardless, with the success of the Copernican revolution the belief that the universe operates uniformly by the same consistent pattern of laws is firmly established as fact. Scientists will not, cannot, and should not give in on this. Any theory that contradicts this viewpoint should be judged on scientific grounds to be in gross error, like biblical literalism, which places the earth ten thousand years old at the center of the universe.

1. The Relationship of Science to Religion

Ian Barbour presents four ways of relating science and religion. (9) Let me briefly comment on them.

Conflict. Scientific Materialism (“Scientism”) vs. Biblical Literalism

Scientific materialism (“scientism”) makes two claims: the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge; and matter is the fundamental reality of the universe. The first one is an epistemological claim. The second one is a metaphysical claim. Yet the second claim is based upon the first one, which has been shown to be very reliable through the centuries. Biblical literalism claims that a literal interpretation of the Bible sets the limits for science. It claims that a universal flood explains geology, and a six-day creation explains the origin of the universe.
J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig make a distinction here between strong scientism and weak scientism. Strong scientism states, “There are no truths apart from scientific truths, and even if there were, there would be no reason whatever to believe them.” Weak scientism, in their words, will “allow for the existence of truths apart from science and are even willing to grant that they can have some minimal, positive rationality status without the support of science. But advocates of weak scientism still hold that science is the most valuable, most serious, and most authoritative sector of human learning…fields outside science gain if they are given scientific support and not vice versa.” Accordingly, if weak scientism is true, “then the conversation between theology and science will be a monologue with theology listening to science and waiting for science to give it support.” (10) I’m an advocate of weak scientism. In the words of Steven Pinker, during an interview when he was asked if something was possible, said, “That’s an interesting hypothesis; I hope someone tests it.”
Biblical literalism was one of the problems in Galileo’s day. It is a very untrustworthy approach to science, and so it is rejected by scientifically educated people today. According to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the argument against biblical literalism is “simple.” “I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have used religious documents to make detailed predictions about the physical world they have been famously wrong. By a prediction I mean a precise statement about the untested behavior of objects or phenomena in the natural world that gets logged before the event takes place.” (11)

2. Independence

This view can be summed up in these words: Science and religion are totally independent enterprises and separated into watertight compartments. They have contrasting methods and differing languages. The rest is merely deciding who reigns over which area—turf wars. However, Barbour reminds us, “if religion deals with God and the self, and science deals with nature, who can say anything about the relationship between God and nature, or between the self and nature?” (12) Furthermore, if religious beliefs have an independent status, there must be ways of establishing religion on its own grounds, and that is something I am arguing against in this book. Unless someone can propose a mutually agreed-upon reliable scientific test to show that religion is a legitimate domain of knowledge on its own merits, it doesn’t have any independent status.

3. Dialogue

This view can be summed up in these words: There are some methodological parallels between science and religion as well as some differences. Religious beliefs interpret and correlate experience, much as scientific theories interpret and correlate experimental data. All our beliefs can be tested by the criteria of consistency with experience. But personal involvement is more total in the case of religion, since the primary goal is the reformation of the person. Science sets limits within which accounts of meaning can work. Science explains but religion reveals, science informs but religion reforms.
Donald MacKay advocates this viewpoint: “both science and theology give different kinds of explanations—with different methods and aims—about the same objects. Both explanations of the same event can be true and complete on their own levels. But the methods differ greatly.” Both of these explanations can be correct and are not mutually exclusive. Compare how an artist, poet, theologian, or astronomer might view a sunset. They can all be correct from their perspective, even if they disagree with one another. MacKay would argue that there is no incompatibility in claiming that the formation of the universe as we know it is the result of natural processes, and that “the cosmos is God’s creations.” Each explanation is from a particular conceptual framework and can be true from that framework. (13)
Howard Van Till argues in a like manner by setting the limits of the dialogue: “When scientists make statements concerning matters of origin, governance, value or purpose of the cosmos, they are necessarily stepping outside the bounds of scientific investigation and drawing from their religious or philosophical perspectives…[Similarly]…when theologians make statements or conjectures about geological processes or thermodynamic phenomena or cosmic chronology, they are necessarily stepping outside the bounds of scriptural exegesis and into the domain of modern natural science.” (14)
However, unless someone can propose a mutually agreed-upon reliable scientific test to distinguish between competing religious claims, scientists don’t know which one of them to dialogue with. Richard Dawkins makes a passionate and thoughtful case that science does not need to dialogue with religious views since they don’t have a reliable method like scientists do. He writes: “Why shouldn’t we comment on God, as scientists? And why isn’t Russell’s teapot, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, equally immune from scientific skepticism?...A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?” It is said that “science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word ‘why’ is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow?...What is the color of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention…Perhaps there are some genuinely and meaningful questions that are forever beyond the reach of science…But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?” (15)
Religion is used by people of faith to explain the gaps in our knowledge, but science has been filling those gaps one by one. There is becoming less and less room for God, as we explain more and more. Call it the God of the Gaps if you want to (see note) (16), but we are less religious today because of science. After surveying several times when theologians have retreated in the face of the progress of science, Richard Carrier wrote, “theologians have been wrong every time so far. Why keep betting on them?” (17) I just don’t see why we should.

4. Integration

The content of theology and science can be integrated. Natural theology asserts “from below” that understanding nature can give rise to and support theology, as argued by Thomas Aquinas, Norman Geisler, and Richard Swinburne. The theology of nature asserts that our understanding of the general characteristics of nature will affect our models of God’s relation to nature. Religious beliefs and scientific theories should be in harmony, such that some adjustments or modifications are called for. Arthur Peacocke and Teilhard de Chardin advocate this view. Chardin argues from evolution to the existence of God, and that at some point humans will achieve convergence to an “Omega Point.” (18) Then there is panentheism, or process theology, which is defended by Paul Davies, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne. “The World Is God’s Body.” Deism is an integrative approach that went through four different stages and traveled from England to America and France. The last stage merely affirmed that God created the universe and that’s it. Deism basically rejects revealed religion and instead affirms that reason must support any theological belief. If it can’t, then that religious belief is to be jettisoned. (19)
However, if there is any integration taking place, religious beliefs are always the ones that have been forced to integrate with science and not the other way around, so why not just admit science sets the boundaries for what we believe? Science and its theories can be tested empirically in a dialectical manner, whereas there is no mutually agreed-upon reliable test to establish religious beliefs. Scientific tests on prayer have actually shown the opposite. I suspect that with scientists who have tried to integrate science and religion, the integration has become complete for some of them. For them, science swallows up religion with nothing left over.

Here Is Some Scientific Evidence Against The Christian Belief In The God Of The Bible

Astronomy tells us the universe is thirteen to fifteen billion years old and arose out of a cosmic singularity. No account of the development of this universe can be harmonized with the creation accounts in Genesis except that these accounts were pure mythic folklore. Archaeology shows us there isn’t any evidence for Israelites being slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, or that they wandered in the wilderness for forty years, or that they conquered the land of Canaan. Geology confirms the slow evolutionary development of life in the sedimentary rock layers on a planet nearly five billion years old, just as astronomy confirms the slow evolutionary development of galaxy, star, and planet formation. Geology also disconfirms that there was a universal flood that covered the earth. Neurology confirms that strokes, seizures, and other illnesses stem from a brain malfunction and hence disconfirms that there is something called a mind or soul. Sam Harris points out that if God created us with minds, then there is no reason to expect that he also created us with brains. Modern medicine has achieved astounding results that such superstitious practices like exorcisms, bloodletting, and supernatural healings are delusional. Psychology confirms that who we are and how we behave are determined to an overwhelming degree before we reach the age of accountability. People are not evil so much as much they may be sick. People are born with different propensities for evil based on their genes, and these propensities are acted upon by upbringing and environment. There is no rebellion against God. If God is omniscient, then like the ultimate psychotherapist he knows why we do everything we do, and since this is the case, there can be no wrathful God.

Science Has Also Displaced God

There are four cosmological displacements:

1. The Copernican theory of the heliocentric universe defended by Galileo (1600s). Man was no longer the center of our particular solar system.
2. The discovery that our solar system is not central to the Milky Way galaxy, but located on the periphery, out on a spiral arm (c. 1900). Man was not even central in his own galaxy.
3. The discovery that our galaxy is only one of billions of galaxies (c. 1930s). Man isn’t even central to the universe as a whole. We are insignificant.
4. The possibility that there are an infinite number of universes, called a multi-verse. God is no longer needed.

The Origins Of Experimental Science

Christians claim that “the fully amplified Judeo-Christian view of creation was, historically, a very significant factor in the rise of science…Furthermore, it appears that no other historic views had the same fruitful logic and suggestiveness that could give science momentum…Science makes sense only in a certain kind of world—the kind that was in fact first envisioned by Christian theism.” (20)
What motivated Newton to quantify the movements of objects? The history of scientific notions about motion itself reveals various ideas, depending a great deal upon religious and philosophical views, beginning with Parmenides and Zeno, who denied there was motion. Ockham simply believed there was no need to posit the existence of motion since the simpler explanation is that things just reappear in a different place. And yet Ockham, Zeno, and Parmenides all saw the same things we do today. So for them to see things differently, people had to adopt different philosophical assumptions. Without a change in these assumptions, science would never have arisen; this is true. The question is whether they came from Christian theism or not, and even if they did, whether this proves anything at all.
Michael Polanyi, Ian Barbour, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper all examine the art of scientific discovery and what it takes to understand science. (21) It’s more than just one fact built upon another. On the one hand the philosophical foundations had to be in place for there to be some initial discoveries, although on the other hand, it must be acknowledged that surprise discoveries cause a change in their assumptions. I maintain that this whole process of discovery is just a two-way street, both changing the other in tandem, dialectically.
It’s claimed there are four foundations, or bases of science. Let’s take a very brief look at them: (1) Einstein said, “The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” (22) While this may be true, for all I know, if so, it doesn’t say anything about Christianity per se, and it doesn’t say whether there is an external world independent of the perceiving subject, nor that this cannot be defended from a naturalistic standpoint, either. It would only support that claim that such a belief helped to establish science. Historically, even false beliefs have caused science to advance, as Karl Popper has shown. For that’s how science progresses, he argued, by informed conjectures and guesses, which in turn are refuted for better ones, and so on. Does anyone want to say that just because Galileo had a false understanding of the way planets revolve around the sun that his model of the universe didn’t help science progress? Newton’gs theory of gravitation helped science progress too, and while it is still close enough to be used in contexts that only require a close approximation, it was wrong and eventually superseded by Einstein’s relativity theory. As we shall see shortly, the Greek philosopher/scientist Thales was wrong to suggest water is the source of all things, but his naturalistic method was probably more important to the advancement of science, which excluded supernatural explanations. Besides, the fact is that Einstein probably did not believe in the supernatural anyway. (23)
(2) The intelligibility of nature—that we can understand nature to some degree. Immanuel Kant is reported to have said, “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” This seems strange coming from Kant, who did not think we see reality itself, the “things in themselves.” That being said, many aspects of the world still defy our comprehension or ability to describe them. Does anyone truly understand quantum mechanics?
(3) The uniformity of nature—that nature is ordered according to patterns we generalize into laws, and that these laws operate uniformly throughout the whole universe. Let me elaborate here. The notion of the uniformity of nature presents us with the “riddle of induction.” What justifies the belief in the uniformity of nature such that scientists can be confident in induction as a scientific method? When speaking of this problem, Paul Kurtz argued, “All other positions face a quandary similar to that hurled at the scientific humanist—though compounded. It is unfair to burden the scientific humanist with the ‘riddle of induction,’ for there is a ‘riddle of intuition’ or a ‘riddle of subjectivism’ or a ‘riddle’ for any other method. The intuitionist, mystic, or subjectivist can only justify his position by assuming his method to do so, thus committing a petito principi (begging the question). The burden of proof rests with these alternative positions…If all positions involve some question begging and are on the same ground in this regard, we may ask: ‘Which is the least self-defeating?’” (24)
In truth, the uniformity of nature is a good model for understanding the universe, which has a great deal of support that is continually being tested in light of observations from distant galaxies, and that may be all we can claim. Philosopher of science Bas Van Fraassen has gone farther in a detailed argument that there are no natural laws. While he agrees there are “regularities,” he argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He develops an empiricist view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. Van Fraasen argues that no adequate account of the concept of natural laws has been given, although science can continue without recourse to such laws. I’m certainly no expert in this area, but we should hesitate before claiming that nature operates by uniform natural laws. (25) Victor J. Stenger, who agrees with Van Fraasen, has argued that “the laws of physics are not restrictions on the behavior of matter. Rather they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior. (26)
(4) The adequacy of scientific language and mathematics to adequately describe the world. It has been said that “humans invent abstract mathematics; basically making it up out of their imaginations, yet math magically turns out to describe the world.” (27) But science works as a way of investigating the world because the world behaves in a manner that can be investigated and can be described (in part) by formal mathematical language. Mathematics was not made up. It came as the result of empirical observations. Before people decided 2 + 2 = 4, they took two sets of two, put them together, and counted the result. This is just part of the whole anthropic principle as applied to science. If the world didn’t behave regularly, then we wouldn’t even be here to learn about it in the first place.
Science is a joint effort, performed in various fields of specialized research, where discoveries of the past become stepping-stones for progress in the future. Science proceeds on the basis of past research in a multifaceted array of separate specializations. Scientists don’t have to continually “reinvent the wheel,” for instance. There is little room in science for very many fundamental assumptions. The main exception is the philosophical notion that our senses reliably reflect a mutually shared experience of this world. But that’s an assumption we all make precisely because without it we cannot live a normal life.
Dr. Joshua Sharp, assistant research scientist at the University of Georgia, described it to me (via e-mail) like this: “The assumption of science is that the universe that appears to exist actually exists, and that our observations of the universe relate to the actual universe in some repeatable way. This assumption can only be supported by circumstantial utilitarian evidence (with it, we can predict the future), but we have acquired mountains of utilitarian evidence for it! This assumption has led us to certain mathematical models, including logic. Science can present no evidence for or against solipsism or the Matrix; assuming that what we observe in some way approximates a universe that actually exists. But we can justify a belief in logic. We did not assume logic; we assumed the universe and developed logic by observing how the universe works.”
With modern science we simply don’t need metaphysical assumptions, since a good scientist could be an atheist, a pantheist, a deist, or a Muslim. The bottom line, if nothing else, is that science justifies itself pragmatically. We needed some assumptions to help get science off the ground and to jettison the superstitions that held us back from discovering it. But those beliefs which we might have called assumptions in a prior era are now known as the bedrock facts of science because, if for no others reason, they produce solid results. The assumption for Galileo was that the universe operates by the same set of laws. Now this is no longer considered an assumption at all. It is a well established fact! So pragmatic justification alone is all we need. It’s surely all that anyone has to go on. To reach the moon we must do thus and so. We did thus and so and we reached the moon. Therefore doing thus and so gets us to the moon. As Stenger writes, “The validity of the scientific method is justified by its immense success.” (28) Why would we need a worldview to see this? According to Karl Popper scientific knowledge progresses based upon “conjectures” or “guesses,” which are falsified and replaced by better “conjectures” or “guesses.” I see no good reason to suppose this body of knowledge is dependent on any worldview considerations. Moreover, the results of science are breaking down superstitions around the globe too. So in a way, as science progresses it’s tearing at the heart of religious beliefs everywhere by providing the answers that religion always promised but failed to deliver.
Paul Kurtz sums up what the pioneers of modern science did by telling us they actually “abandoned tradition, mysticism, revelation, and faith, and proceeded directly to the Book of Nature. They eschewed hidden occult explanations for natural causes. They rejected purely speculative metaphysics and sought hypotheses and theories that were verified by empirical observation, experimental prediction, and the precision and power of mathematics. Scientific progress could only occur when the theological and philosophical authorities of the past were discarded, and a fresh bold approach to nature was adopted.” (29)
Richard Carrier is doing his doctoral dissertation on science and early Christianity, which will be published when he’s done. According to him, to say “‘our concept of science is an outgrowth of Christian theology’ is no more true than ‘our concept of science is an outgrowth of pagan theology.’ Modern science grew up in a Christian context, but only by re-embracing ancient scientific values against the grain of the original Christian mind-set. In turn, those ancient scientific values grew up in a pagan context. As with Christianity, that’s not causality, it’s just circumstance.” Moreover, “most Christians were uniformly hostile to the whole system of scientific values, condemning them as vain, idolatrous, arrogant, and unnecessary, if not outright dangerous. It took a long, gradual process to finally change minds on that score.” In the end, Carrier argues, “Christianity was bad for science. It put a stop to scientific progress for a thousand years, and even after that is made science’s recovery difficult, painful, and slow.” (30) And I think history would bear this out. Every major innovative scientific advance was made difficult by the Church, and still is today.
Let me put it this way. Christians claim their faith gave rise to modern science even though the Bible literally contains talk of a six day creation, a three-tired universe, a worldwide flood let loose from the firmament above, nine-hundred-year-old men, talking snakes and donkeys, a sun that stood still, and a hell in the deepest parts of the earth, and they still want to claim their faith gave rise to science? That’s balderdash (sorry, I can’t resist)! Science itself has completely undermined these views, forcing thoughtful Christians to reinterpret their Bibles over and over again. Furthermore, if Christianity gave rise to modern science then why are these apologists silent about the fact that it didn’t begin among Christianities that existed in the Byzantine Empire, Russia, or Egypt? This fact alone helps us see that cultural factors were the dominant ones.

Methodological Naturalism

Methodological naturalism best describes the method I use to evaluate any claim, which is the basis for my skeptical control beliefs. The phrase “methodological naturalism” is believed to have been coined by the philosopher Paul de Vries, then at Wheaton College, who introduced it at a conference in 1983 in a paper subsequently published as “Naturalism in the Natural Sciences.” De Vries distinguished between what he called “methodological naturalism,” a disciplinary method that says nothing about God’s existence, and “metaphysical naturalism,” which “denies the existence of a transcendent God.” (31)
This method assumes that for everything we experience there is a natural cause. (32) Paul Kurtz defined it as well as anyone when he wrote that it is a “principle within the context of scientific inquiry; i.e., all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events. To introduce a supernatural or transcendental cause within science is to depart from naturalistic explanations.” It is argued that methodological naturalism lead to philosophical (or ontological) naturalism, whereby it’s claimed all that exists is nature. Again in Paul Kurtz’s words, philosophical naturalism is “a generalized description of the universe. According to the naturalists, nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles, i.e., by mass and energy and physical-chemical properties as encountered in diverse contexts of inquiry.” (33)
The ancient Greek philosopher/scientist Thales was probably the first person known to adopt a methodological naturalist standpoint. He asked the significant question, “What is the source of all things?” His answer was that water was the source of all things. His question led to the beginnings of Western philosophy as we know it and with it provided probably the most important basis for science itself. His answer was a naturalistic one that did not rely on any supernatural explanation. He assumed a natural explanation for the source of all things, even if today with the periodical table of elements we know his answer was faulty.
We who live in the modern world operate on this method ourselves every day. This method is the foundation of modernity. It is what defines us as modern people. In today’s world all modern educated people base their deductions on the method of naturalism in a vast number of areas. Before the advent of science, in previous centuries people either praised God for the good things that happened to them or they wondered why God was angry when bad things happened. If someone got sick, it was because of sin in his or her life. If it rained, God was pleased with them; if there was a drought, God was displeased, and so on, and so on. Science wasn’t content to accept the notion that epilepsy was demon possession or that sicknesses were sent by God to punish people. Nor was science content with the idea that God alone opens the womb of a woman, nor that God was the one who sent the rain. Now we have scientific explanations for these things, and we all benefit from those who assumed there was a natural cause to everything we experience. Because of this, we have some control over the natural processes of life. Because we seek to understand the forces of nature, we know how to make life easier for ourselves, with fewer diseases. We can predict the rain. We know how babies are conceived, and how to prevent a host of illnesses. There is no going back on this progress, and it is ongoing.
Christians themselves usually assume a natural explanation when they hear a noise in the night. They usually assume a natural explanation for a stillborn baby, or train wreck, or an illness. Even a Christian police detective assumes a natural cause when investigating a crime. If Christians were placed back in time with the same modern mind-set they have today, they themselves would ask for evidence if someone claimed that an ax head floated or a donkey talked. But because it’s in the Bible, they adopt it unquestionably, and I find that to be holding to a double standard. Why do they operate on a double standard like this? Ancient people didn’t even have a firm conception of natural law. For all they knew, anything could happen in nature when acted upon by God, gods, or goddesses. Ancient people just didn’t have the required scientific understanding of natural laws we do today in order for them to question a miraculous story when they heard one. Scientifically literate people today are simply not gullible enough to believe any such story. All of us ask whether an unusual event can be explained naturalistically, unlike ancient people.
In scientific disciplines methodological naturalism is a way to gain the truth about nature, and it has astounding results. Many scientists go so far as to claim that since it works, then nature must be ultimate, but that doesn’t follow as a scientific claim, for the later conclusion is beyond the scope of science; it is a metaphysical claim. Although, as Barbara Forrest argues, it’s a conclusion that makes a great deal of sense. Forrest examines the question whether methodological naturalism entails philosophical (or ontological or even metaphysical) naturalism. In her own words, “I conclude that the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion give (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.” (34)
Scientists believe that methodological naturalism has had so many successes in the past that it will prove fruitful in understanding how we humans got here on the planet earth too—that there is a natural explanation for it all—even if there are several problems to work out yet. Creation scientists believe that there are too many problems to work out and that a supernatural explanation is needed to explain human life. Mainstream scientists think that creation scientists have given up way too early in the game on a method that is rock solid throughout history. Creation scientists stress that methodological naturalism in a not a final statement on how the world works, whereas many mainstream scientists think that the reason the method works so well is because nature alone must be the final reality. This naturalistic method has brought in modernity and jettisoned superstition. It is what defines us as modern people. And while it seems to me that as yet there is no repeatable experiment that can show that nature is ultimate, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility, and there are some very good conceptual schemes for how it may have taken place. (35)
To see why admitting supernatural claims into scientific discussions should be prohibited, consider David A. Shotwell’s conjectural hypothesis that “each subatomic particle is inhabited by a ghostly little gremlin.” According to this hypothesis, “each gremlin maintains the existence of its particle by a continuous creative act and is in instantaneous telepathic communication with all the others. By this means they cooperate to produce the universe and its lawful behavior. This hypothesis ‘explains’ everything that exists and every event that occurs.” The reason he advances this hypothesis is to show that “if you admit the supernatural into your calculations, anything goes. That is why a supernatural explanation is useless to a scientist…It provides no direction for research, suggests no testable hypotheses, and gives no reason to expect one result rather than another from any observation or experiment.” (36)
Christians like Plantiga object to the use of methodological naturalism in many areas related to their faith. They cry foul. They argue that their faith provides them with the control beliefs to interpret the evidence regarding the origins of the universe and of the human race. And they cry foul when it comes to the strict adherence to that method when analyzing the claims of biblical miracles. Robert T. Pennock tried to address their concerns in chapter 4 of his book Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism. (37) The author argues against the new creationists for failing to realize that science is committed to methodological naturalism and not philosophical (or ontological) naturalism. Methodological naturalism is a much weaker position, he argues. It does not deny the existence of supernatural entities, per se. it simply assumes for the purpose of inquiry that they don’t exist. It operates on the assumption that in the context of scientific inquiry only natural processes and events happen. He wrote: “The methodological naturalist does not make a commitment directly to a picture of what exists in the world, but rather to a set of methods as a reliable way to find out about the world—typically the methods of the natural sciences, and perhaps extensions that are continuous with them—and indirectly to what those methods discover.” (38)
According to Pennock, adopting methodological naturalism would prevent biblical creationists from appealing to divine causes as an alternative to evolutionary ones. He points out that just as Christians shouldn’t do this when it comes to the scientific study of origins of language because of the Tower of Babel story, they shouldn’t do it when it comes to the scientific study of our origins because of the Creation stories, either. The adoption of methodological naturalism, he argues, would rule out these kinds of explanations without at the same time preventing religious beliefs in nonscientific faith contexts. Therefore, Pennock claims methodological naturalism, is contrast to ontological naturalism, is compatible with the belief in God, As such, believers should have nothing to fear from it. Doing so keeps science free of God, and as such, science can continue to progress unhindered by these religious beliefs.
Surely this will not satisfy Christian theists like Plantinga, who wrote, “a Christian academic and scientific community ought to pursue science in its own way, starting from and taking for granted what we know as Christians.” He continues, “What the Christian community really needs is a science that takes into account what we know as Christians. Indeed, this seems the rational thing in any event; surely the rational thing is to use all that you know in trying to understand a given phenomenon.” But do you notice what he’s doing here? Plantinga is forced into retreating to Bayesian background factors to support a weak position. He’s trying to explain the evidence away. He’s retreating to what is merely possible; that while methodological naturalism has worked very well in understanding our world, it’s possible that it doesn’t apply across the board into the Christian set of beliefs he’s adopted from the Bible. And he’s right. It is possible. But again, how likely is it that it works so well on every other area of investigation but that it shouldn’t be used in investigation the claims we find in the Bible, which form his background beliefs? I will argue later, when it comes to the distinctive miraculous claims that a Christian firmly holds to, that they are believed based upon the evidence found in history, and history can at best show us probabilities. To be blunt here, many claims can be rationally denied in history, even if they happened. That’s right. Even if they happened! And of those events in the past which we are confident took place, they still leave room for a lot of doubt about the specifics. There are always additional unanswered questions. As such, history is a slender reed to lean on in the face of the onslaught of science (see my chapter 8).
Michael Martin sifts through this whole issue and tries to find a justification for methodological naturalism that doesn’t commit the Christian believer to ontological naturalism. (39) Martian asks, “If you reject Ontological Naturalism and yet believe that Methodological Naturalism is an appropriate stance in the context of science, how can Methodological Naturalism be justified?” As I understand him to say, after surveying several possible justifications for this, Martin suggest this one: “Do not use explanations in science that cut off further inquiry unless inquiry-blocking explanations are the only plausible ones that can be thought of…in the long run!” This, Martin argues, “is compatible with scientists acting for long periods of time as if certain explanations are ultimate relative to their evidence and background theories. But such a practice would not block inquiry because in contrast to explanations in terms of God, it would be possible fore these explanations themselves to be explained as science progresses.” Then he concludes by saying, “Although the prospects of a metaphysically uncontroversial science are not encouraging, I see no reason why science cannot be conducted in a way that does not block inquiry, and I suggest that Methodological Naturalism should be justified in terms of not blocking inquiry.” And as such, according to Victor J. Stenger, “methodological naturalism can still be applied without implying any dogmatic attachment to metaphysical naturalism.” (40) That being said, Dr. Joshua S. Sharp, told me (via e-mail): “Since no one can precisely determine what the ‘the long run’ means, it is impossible to predict which areas will always prove resistant to future non-inquiry-blocking explanation. Therefore, supernatural explanations can never be justified for scientific phenomena.”

Notes

(1) See Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1989), pp. 26-49; Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; and Timoth Moy, “The Galileo Affair,” in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? ed. Paul Kurtz (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 139-43. To read the primary documents of the Galileo trail and aftermath in order to decide for yourself on this issue, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and his Retrying Galileo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). I maintain that for the medieval person influenced by Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the Copernican theory was a very serious threat to the faith. I also maintain that the Church had no business telling Galileo what he could think or write. It’s appalling to me that the Church ever had that much power to stifle science and freethinking like this.
(2) Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 49.
(3) Ibid., p. 251.
(4) Ibid., pp. 248ff.
(5) Ibid., pp. 195-96.
(6) Ibid., pp. 253-54.
(7) Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, pp. 41, 42.
(8) Francesco Sizzi, Dianoia Astronomica, 1611.
(9) Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1990); and Ian Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (New York: HarperCollins, 2000)
(10) William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 347.
(11) Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “Holy Wars,” in Kurtz, Science and Religion: Are The Compatible? pp. 74-75.
(12) Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science, p. 16.
(13) See Donald McKay, Brain, Machines and Persons (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 19ff.
(14) See Howard Van Till, The Fourth Day (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 197-198; and Howard Van Till, Davis A. Young, and Clarence Menninga, Science Held Hostage (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988).
(15) Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Miffin, 2006), pp. 55-56.
(16) I can agree with Robert Larmer that there isn’t anything wrong with arguing from the gaps in our knowledge to the existence of a God. See his “Is There Anything Wrong with ‘God of the Gaps’ Reasoning?” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52 (2002): 129-42. However, if he’s correct, then I can legitimately argue from the fact that science is closing these gaps to the nonexistence of God. It’s not a large step to take. Since it’s reasonable to think there will always be gaps in our understanding, the only question left is which set of control beliefs best explains why these gaps are being closed. The point is that Christians must admit that the scientific method is indeed extremely fruitful, but then deny it should be applied to an investigation of the Bible and its claims of miracles, including the origin of the universe. They have to deny what seems to scientifically literate people undeniable, or at the very minimum, most probable. They must apply a double standard here, for while they accept it in all other areas of their lives they deny it when it comes to the Bible. Why the double standard?
Christian philosopher W. Christopher Stewart objects to the “god of the gaps” reasoning because, as he says, “natural laws are not independent of God. For the Christian theist, God upholds nature in existence, sustaining it in a providential way.” From his perspective this is true. But his rationale for objecting to the god of the gaps reasoning is a bit strange. He says, “To do so is to make religious belief an easy target as the gaps in scientific understanding narrow with each scientific discovery.” “Religion and Science,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael Murray (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 321-22. Now why should he be concerned with this unless science truly is leaving less and less room for the supernatural? He’s admitting the evidence does not favor his faith. He’s trying to explain away the evidence. I dare say that if he still lived in a prescientific era before science could explain so much he’d be arguing this is evidence that God exists!
(17) In Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2005), pp. 87-88.
(18) Arthur Peacock, Theology for a Scientific Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper Perennial, 1976).
(19) J. O’Higgins distinguishes between four types of Deism in “Hume and the Deists: A Contrast in Religious Approaches,” Journal of Theological Studies 23, no. 2 (October 1971): 479, 480, which is summarized in Norman L. Geisler and William D. Watkins, World’s Apart: A Handbook on Worldviews (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989), pp. 148-49.
(20) Michael Peterson et al., Reason and Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 212, 214. See also the works by Stanley Jaki, Science and Creation (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974); The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin (South Bend, IN: Regnery, 1978); and The Road of Science and the Ways of God (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978); J.P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989); Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and recently by Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007), pp. 83-111.
(21) Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Barbour, Religion in the Age of Science; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959), and his Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routeledge, 1994).
(22) Albert Einstein said this in an essay titled “Maxwell’s Influence on the Development of the Conception of Physical Reality” (1931)
(23) On this, see Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 13-19.
(24) Paul Kurtz, The Transcendental Temptation (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991)., pp. 57-58.
(25) Bas van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
(26) Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007). See his book The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006).
(27) “Science Finds God,” Newsweek, July 20, 1998.
(28) Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis, p. 37.
(29) Paul Kurtz, “An Overview of the Issues,” in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? p. 11.
(30) John Hick argues for the same thing in An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 327-29.
(31) Paul de Vries, “Naturalism in the Natural Sciences,” Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986): 388-96.
(32) For discussion of this see Alvin Plantinga’s essay “Methodological Naturalism?” parts 1 and 2, which can be found at www.arn.org and in the journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (49 [1997]). Barbara Forrest’s “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection,” Philo 3, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000): 7-29, along with Michael Martin’s “Justifying Methodological Naturalism,” can both be at www.infidels.org/library.
(33) Paul Kurtz, “Darwin Re-Crucified: Why Are So Many Afraid of Naturalism?” Free Inquiry (Spring 1998): 17.
(34) Forrest, “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection,” pp. 7-29.
(35) For a naturalistic account of the beginning of this universe, see chapter 12 of Paul Davies, Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature (New York: Touchstone, 2002).
(36) David A. Shotwell, “From the Anthropic Principle to the Supernatural,” in Kurtz, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? p. 49.
(37) Robert T. Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
(38) Ibid., p. 191.
(39) Martin’s “Justifying Methodological Naturalism,” as found at www.infidels.org/library.
(40) Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis, p. 29.

She's Coming!

Well it's been awhile but all I can say is August has been a slow month.

I spent the last two weeks teaching multiple summer camps for all the grades 1st through 6th. I had no co-teacher for any of the classes and had to make all the lessons from scratch so the weeks certainly had some challenges but for the most part the camps went well and the kids seemed to have fun.

This week will be my first official vacation from school and the most exciting part of it is that Angelina is coming from California to visit me. She arrives Monday morning at 5am. Jong Woo's father is going to take me to pick up Angelina for which I am very grateful. A taxi would have cost between 50 and 70 dollars (one way) and the buses would have taken quite a while and been a pain with Angelina's luggage. All that to say I'm so happy that I was able to find someone to pick Angelina for me.

Angelina comes bearing many gifts for me including multiple books, a new hat and a 3 month refill of my medication. woo-hoo.

I wish I could say I had an amazing week planned out but for the most part we are just going to play it by ear. I've set up multiple dinners for her to meet some of my friends and that's about all. We roam around the city and I'll show her different places I like to go but for the most part I don't think we will be doing anything amazing or touristy. Really I just can't wait to have a close friend around to just hang out with and talk for hours to. It's going to be a great week, I know it.

Cosmos-Initial Thoughts about Carl Sagan's book

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject…And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them…Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate…Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.
Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7, first century

I think Seneca was ahead of his time by realizing that we would be ahead of his. So much of what I know I take for granted forgetting how much of it was unknown to those who came before us. Yet everything that I know, that we all know, is built upon the shoulders of those who came before us. And in thinking about that I can’t help but wonder what those who come after us will discover and know that we cannot even imagine? What will people look back and laugh at about our beliefs, theories and worldviews? Before an idea is learned it is invisible to the point of nonexistence but once that idea is learned it becomes as clear and obvious as the daylight. And as always I am searching for more daylight.

I have been reading the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan. So far I have only read the first three chapters but I have read them each three times both out of enjoyment and in an effort to absorb all the information they have to offer. Sagan is a wonderful writer and has a way of making very complex scientific knowledge accessible to those of us without a strong scientific background. He weaves history and stories throughout the pages to connect science to the human experience.

So far perhaps the simplest and clearest thing I have taken away from Sagan’s work is that the universe is inexplicably vast, far beyond anything I can grasp. So large in fact that the idea of or need for any God or gods seems to just vanish. The Judeo-Christian God in particular seems so tiny and insignificant compared to the universe in which we reside. The biblical worldview crumbles under what we now know about the galaxy in which we live and the other galaxies that surround us. I am well aware how many people take the greatness of the universe as proof of some type of designer or creator and yet all I see them doing is creating a creator or designing a designer that simply is not needed scientifically or philosophically. In fact more often then not the creator that is created creates more problems than it solves. Our search for who we are and where we come does not need a god to explain it even if one were to exist.

I want to share just some of Sagan’s own writing to give a taste of both the grandness of the Cosmos and of the writer Sagan himself. All of this comes out of the first chapter in Sagan’s book titled Cosmos.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Those explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure – in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be.

The dimensions of the Cosmos are so large that using familiar units of distance, such as meters or miles, chosen for their utility on Earth, would make little sense. Instead, we measure distance with the speed of light. In one second a beam of light travels 186,000 miles, nearly 300,000 kilometers or seven times around the Earth. In eight minutes it will travel from the Sun to the Earth. We can say the Sun is eight light-minutes away. In a year, it crosses nearly ten trillion kilometers, about six trillion miles, of intervening space. That unit of length, the distance light goes in a year, is called a light-year. It measures not time but distances – enormous distances.

The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. No planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the Cosmos is mostly empty. The only typical place is within the vast, cold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seem achingly rare and lovely. If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion (1033, a one followed by 33 zeros). In everyday life such odds are called compelling. Worlds are precious.

From an intergalactic vantage point we would see, strewn like sea froth on the waves of space, innumerable faint, wispy tendrils of light. These are the galaxies. Some are solitary wanderers; most inhabit communal cluster, huddling together, drifting endlessly in the great cosmic dark. Before us is the Cosmos on the grandest scale we know. We are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light-years from Earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars – billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone. Within a galaxy are stars and worlds and, it may be, a proliferation of living things and intelligent beings and spacefaring civilizations. But from afar, a galaxy reminds me more of a collection of lovely found objects – seashells, perhaps, or corals, the productions of Nature laboring for aeons in the cosmic ocean.

There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. In all the galaxies, there are perhaps as many planets as stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. From eight billion light-years away we are hard pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded, much less the Sun or the Earth. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.

The universe really is amazing. Each time I read those numbers about the distances between planets, stars and galaxies or the number of stars and planets that exist I keep hoping they will suddenly be comprehendible but they aren’t. I read those numbers and I understand the words but I have no real conception of what they mean in that I have never had any experience that could be even closely associated with those numbers. What do you do with numbers like a hundred billion (number of galaxies) or ten billion trillion (number of planets and stars)? All I can say is sit back take some time and enjoy it. Marvel at it. And not many years ago I would no doubt have taken one more step and seen God in those numbers and rather than marvel at the universe I would marvel at God. But again as I have been shown that God is not needed in any scientific or philosophical explanation of our existence I no longer include him in them. He may serve to fulfill some sort of emotional desire many humans have but I no longer am included among that number.

I had some short but valuable exchanges this week with a friend concerning this topic, “the greatness of the universe,” and the existence of God. It led me to some new thoughts concerning the Christian worldview verses the scientific one. Both Christianity and science hold an odd duel view of humanity as being at the same time both significant and insignificant but they conflict concerning where and how this significance and insignificance coexist. The scientific worldview believes in humanity’s potential. It believes in our ability to better ourselves and our world by the use of our powers of reason and inquiry. The typical Christian worldview on the other hand sees no potential for greatness in humanity rather human nature is fallen and corrupted leaving us helpless to do anything except sin and ravage the good world God created. Humanity’s only hope is in God. And so we see where science would say we are significant, in our potential is the same place where Christianity would say we are insignificant. But moving to the other side of the coin Christianity sees great significance in humanity’s place in the universe. Humanity is the pinnacle of creation created last as God’s crowning achievement. For Christianity humanity truly is the center of the universe. Everything that happens in the universe is somehow connected to us, our lives and our fates. Our lives may be short but they matter more than anything else that happens in some other galaxy. Science on the other hand leads to a different picture of the universe. It exposes humanity as a small and, cosmically speaking, fairly insignificant part of the universe. The universe does not center around us or this planet. In fact we are in the far out skirts of our own galaxy and live lives measured in mere years in a universe whose existence must be measured in aeons if it can be measured at all. So here where Christian sees humanity as significant, our place in the universe is the place where science would say we are insignificant. So are humans the center of the universe but helpless to better themselves, as Christianity says or are humans cosmically unimportant but with all the potential for greatness as science would say? I truly hope the later.

So moving forward in my search I have to follow science and say I don't think we are the center of the universe, we just aren't that important, cosmically. But that is part of what makes our journey this far so amazing. Humans have pushed forward throughout history in search of truth and have come to discover more and more about the universe including that there is far more to it than just ourselves. In this way I see a level of humility in science and the use of reason that I just do not see in Christianity.

These two worldviews also approach the concepts of truth and mystery very differently. For Christianity, particularly evangelical forms, God has revealed the (his) truth. This means he has provided all the answers for this life that matter, which funny enough mostly pertain to achieving life after death, but then calls for a quiet acceptance of everything else left unanswered. Basically, we should be grateful for what “truth” we have been given and not demand more. Mystery becomes like a work of art in a museum, it can be gazed at and appreciated for its beauty but it must never be touched. Science, on the other hand, views truth as something to be gained through research and empirical evidence. Truth must be discovered not revealed. For science mystery is more like a mountain range, something to be gazed at and appreciated for its beauty but also charted and explored. The scientist works for truth while the Christian waits for it.

Death is the great mystery which most of us fear, even if we pretend not to so I can understand people’s desire for answers (comfort) concerning it. And that is where the Christian God becomes so attractive, he promises you life after death all you have to do is accept him. But this acceptance requires you forfeit any further genuine search for truth and instead be satisfied that you have all the truth you need. Instead of encouraging the best attributes of humanity, our capacity for reason and desire for knowledge, the Christian God pats us on our head and tells us to not ask questions or use our minds but rather merely to do what we are told and he promises us a treat (heaven) if we are good. Now, for me that trade off just isn’t worth it anymore. Surrendering the pursuit of knowledge of the heavens for a life in heaven is not worth it. I say, not without hesitance, that I value knowledge above life. Truly, Adam and Eve made the right choice, mythically, because if eternal life is coupled with eternal ignorance that seems to me more like a punishment than a reward. (Maybe that will be my hell) So I say let us be brave enough to use our minds to search for the truth without the fear of discovering our own inconsequentiality. We may not live forever but let us remember that our knowledge is as much for those who will come after us as it is for ourselves. We will not unlock all the mysteries of the universe but let us not stop trying just because some god asks us to. Who knows maybe we’ll find out what he’s been trying so hard to hide from us all these years.

My Long Day

Well summer vacation has official started. What that means is the kids and the normal teachers are all off. By normal I simply mean the regular grade teachers. A few teachers like myself and one of the other English teachers still have to come to school every day. So for the next two weeks I do not have any classes but am still expected to come to school and be in my office from 8:30am to 4:30pm. Needless to say that is quite a bit of time each day to fill with lesson planning or other forms of work but I’m sure I’ll find something to do.

But this entry is about Monday. Last Friday I was told by one of the English teachers that there was going to be a teachers’ trip on Monday. “What does the mean,” I asked her. She tried to explain that all the teachers were going to go on a trip to a lake somewhere. I was not overly excited about the idea but said okay. She then quickly added that she and my co-teacher would not be going. “What!?,” I said Apparently both her and my co-teacher had other obligations and would not be able (have to) attend. What this meant is that I was about to go on a trip with all the teachers from my school except the ones who speak English. I asked her how long the trip was going to be and she told me we would probably be back around 9 or 10pm. “Really!?” My heart sank ever deeper. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get out of going. But the weekend came and I just put it out of my mind.

Now when I tried to sleep Sunday night I struggled even more than usual. I do not think it was directly related to the trip the next day but it was odd to have to fight so much to sleep. I only slept about 4 hours before I had to get up and go to school. Now I was not really sure what to wear for the day. I wanted to wear shorts and sandals but did not know if that was okay. I knew I was going to be around the principle and vice-principle so I ended up deciding it was better to be safe than sorry and I just wore a pair of khakis and a polo. I would soon discover that being “safe” doesn't always keep you from being sorry. I also grabbed my backpack, instead of my man purse, and threw in a hoodie “just in case” and a book since I figured I wouldn't be doing a lot of chatting on the bus ride.

I ran out the door to discover that it was raining; always a good sign, right? I had gotten into the habit of walking to school in sandals and shorts and then changing into my pants at work because in the rain my shoes and pants, from my knees down, would end up soaking wet and would take a long time to dry. But I did not want to change in part because I didn't want to be carrying my shorts and sandals around with me all day so I just went to school. But as expected by the time I got to school my legs and feet were quite wet. So while that was not a surprise what was a surprise was that as I approached the school I saw all the kids had come and were also entering the school. I thought summer vacation had already started so I was very confused about why the kids would be there. This stirred in me a mixture of terror and joy; terror that I did in fact have class that day and was now unprepared for it but also joy at the thought of not having to go on the trip with all the teachers. Is that as sad as it sounds? I also noticed that a large number of moms had also come with the kids and were just standing around outside the school.

I was eager to get up stairs because I had sandals and a different pair of pants up there that I could change into that would be dry. But when I got upstairs to my room all the doors were locked. The school never provided me a key for the English room. My co-teacher has one and usually the door was either already unlocked from the day before or he had arrived and the room was open. But Monday my co-teacher was not coming to school so I had no way to get into my office. Irritation now joined confusion, sleepiness and soaking wet on the list of un-enjoyable experiences I was having only a few hours into my day. I went looking for someone who could help me. After about 15 minutes of wandering the halls (really just walking from my room back down to the other English room and back again many times) I found one of the other English teachers. She grabbed me and said she needed me. Before I knew it I was being dragged to the school office and then the principal’s office to sign some papers confirming my upcoming vacation days. Okay, fine I thought though I was not sure why it seemed so urgent since those days are a month away. Finally I explained to her about needing to get into my room. So we went back into the office and after about 10 minutes of watching them root around in various draws and cabinets they said they could not find a key for my room. So we went down to the first floor into a different administration office and again I got to watch them look around until they pulled out 3 large key chains with 10 to 15 keys attached to each one. It looked like they had some sort of mark or writing taped to each key and they slowly started examining each one trying to find the right one. Finally they handed the English teacher one of the key chains with a specific key. We went upstairs and it worked.

During this time I had also asked about why all the kids were there. I found out that they had a small ceremony congratulating them on another semester completed and then they would be going home. The ceremony was only one period so basically all the kids came to school so they could be there for 40 minutes and then head right back home. This explained why so many of the moms were just hanging around. Now while this news calmed any fears I had about having to teach any classes unprepared that day it reaffirmed my suspicion that I was going to have to go on the day trip with all the other teachers. By the time I got into my room I only had about 10 minutes before all the kids left and they started herding all the teachers toward the bus that they chartered. Basically I never got to change out of my clothes. The pants were fairly dry by this point but my shoes were still wet enough to be bothersome. I checked my e-mail and then we were off.

On the bus ride I sat next to Lim Suk Ju. Lim is his family name so I just call him Suk Ju (sounds like Soak Jew). He is one of the fifth grade teachers and besides the other English teachers he is the person I know the best. He likes to talk with me and his English is not bad depending on the topic. I found out that my co-teacher had actually talked to Suk Ju and asked him to keep me company. It is funny when a person doesn't know a lot of English (or any language I am sure) because subtlety is not really possible. So Suk Ju told me that my co-teacher said he “had” to talk to me. I laughed a little and questioned him, “did you not want to talk to me?” Suk Ju immediately started saying “no, no, no” showing he understood my question and how I was taking his words but he didn't have another way to say it. “No I like talking with you but I have to talk to you.” I tried to explain to him the difference between the words “have/had” and “get”. It was fun. During the trip he noticed my I-Pod so I showed him my music. I was very surprised to discover which bands and musicians he had heard of. Some of the ones he knew did not surprise me like Michael Jackson, Nirvana, even Coldplay and Green Day. But he knew a lot more rap/hip-hop than I would have ever thought like, Kanye West, OutKast, Eminem and The Black Eyed Peas. And then there were just other random ones from different genres that he knew like Jason Mraz, Alicia Keys, Sum-41, The Offspring, Avril Lavigne (yes I have her on my I-Pod), Placebo and Snow Patrol.

Before we got to our destination we stopped for lunch. It was fine nothing wonderful. Suk Ju tried to make sure to talk to me but at the big table other people began having conversations with him so I spent more time sitting quietly than anything else. With the stop it took us over three hours to get to where we were going. When we got there it was already 2 so at that point I knew we were not going to get back to the school until pretty late. I had been warned that it would be 9 or 10pm but I just didn't want to believe that but now I knew it was true. From the parking lot we could see a large lake. I was told that it was the largest human made lake in Korea. As we walked around I also saw multiple statues and discovered they were all made for the Olympics, which Seoul hosted in 1988. We headed down a large hill towards the lake. Once there we filed onto a medium sized boat. It was motorized and filled with seats facing each direction so people could look at the view. The boat puttered along and took us to the other side of the lake, which is where the trailhead is. The trail leads to a very old Buddhist temple at the top, which is still being used by Buddhist monks. The temple location is almost a thousand years old. The original temple had been destroyed during the Korean War but was rebuilt on the same spot with the same design. The hike was probably my favorite part of the day. By this time Suk Ju started hanging out with some other people. I began the hike next to the group but soon found myself breaking away in part because they really were hiking quite slowly in an awkwardly large herd and also because it allowed me to turn on my I-Pod and enjoy some music during the ascent.

I got to the top in about 30 minutes and by the time I did I was drenched in sweat. At this point my khakis and polo had proven not to be the best outfit for this adventure further the backpack with a hoodie proved to be nothing more than a nice blanket to insulate the heat trying to escape from my back. Better safe than sorry had turned into very, very sorry. All the other teachers were in t-shirts and shorts or some sort of hiking gear. It was clear from the beginning I was the only one who was not aware of what we were going to be doing that day. I still have not become accustomed to the humidity. It was only are 80 or 85 degrees but I couldn't walk 10 steps without sweating and even when I’m not sweating here I just feel moist and sticky. All the places I have lived Denver, Phoenix, Oakland and Pasadena even when they were hotter than it is here they never felt like this. I miss LA. It really is worth the high rent. Okay enough whining.

At the top the temple was beautiful. The temples I have visited are set up as multiple buildings of different sizes. Each building is basically just one room and has one or multiple shrines in it and usually statues of the Buddha. Many of the rooms have places for candles and incense. At this temple there were seven or eight different structures. I walked slowly around and enjoyed each room. All the designs and color are just so amazing. As you visit multiple temples you see that certain shapes, patterns and colors repeat themselves over and over just like for temples and churches in the West. But of course the Buddhist patterns and colors are so different than the ones that I am used to it is hard not to be but taken in by the newness of the experience. After about 20 minutes some of the people from the group I started with began showing up and looking around. For the next 30 minutes more and more of our group made it to the top. I was done looking around as the last members of our group made it to the top. By that point Suk Ju and a few others had also been there awhile so we decided to head back down to the boat. As we went down I discovered that one of the girls spoke English quite well but was nervous about speaking to me. So the three of us chatted the whole way down and she became more and more comfortable as we went. When we got back to the dock there was a long line of people waiting for the boat to come and take them back to the other side. According to the schedule the boats would come to the dock every thirty minutes. I knew we were looking at, at least a three boat wait and that was assuming everyone from our group got back though I was fairly sure would happen since we were looking at an hour and a half wait. As we waited I was encouraged to see that the boats came more often than the sign said. It was one about every 15 minutes. More and more of our group started to show up to the point where it seemed like we could jump on the next boat, this was the third boat so to this point we had had only a 45 minute wait. But when the boat came and our group started getting on it soon became clear that we weren't all going to make it onto that boat. I would say about half of our group made it on the first boat and funny enough it was the group who had arrived at the dock last. Finally we got our turn and made it back to the other side of the lake. In all, we were at the lake and temple for about three hours but an hour of that was spent standing at the dock.

When we got back on the bus it was a little past six so I once again got a little hopeful that perhaps I would be home by 8 or 8:30pm. But alas it was not to be. After about 30 minutes of driving the bus pulled over at a restaurant and we all got out and had dinner. This restaurant was really just a house in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't another building in sight from it. We were still up in the mountains somewhere. Dinner was actually pretty good. By this point Suk Ju and most of the guys were drunk or at least fairly tipsy. And the more they drank the harder it was for any of them to speak English so by this point I just sat and watched people converse. Like most dinners the actually eating only took 10 or 15 minutes but the 15 minutes before the food gets there and the 30 or 45 minutes of hanging out afterward was just one long scene of watching people’s reactions to their conversations. I of course don’t have a clue what they were saying but I am starting to notice a difference between when I listen to conversations now and when I first arrived in Korea. I am starting to be able to distinguish words and clear sounds. Basically I have no idea what the words mean but they are actually starting to sound like words instead of just noise. Still an hour of listening to words you can’t understand is fairly dull.

When we got back on the bus I was finally getting a little excited. It was 7:30 by this point and we had been driving for a little over 30 minutes so I thought okay 1 and a half hours to go that puts us home at 9pm. I mentioned the time to Suk Ju and then he told me that we actually had gone the opposite direction of the school to go to the restaurant. So instead of being half an hour closer to the school we had moved half an hour further away. I couldn't believe it. I asked why the heck we did that and he said the restaurant we went to was one that the principle really liked and wanted to go to. My head just dropped to my chest and I slouched over in sadness. That moved my calculation of 9pm back to 10pm assuming all went well. We did end up making one more stop about 15 minutes later. It was just at a large gas station rest area type of place so that everyone could use the bathroom before we got back on the road. This is the type of stop I couldn't really be too upset with. Anytime the bathroom is an option I take it especially before long car/bus trips. I had actually been fairly disciplined all day with the amount of water I drank trying to keep it to a minimum so that I didn't need to use the restroom that often. Still this stop cost me another 15 minutes.

So finally we were on the road headed towards home for sure. Now the bus we had been riding was fairly nice and high tech. It had a large TV and a P.A. system that allowed people to speak into a microphone at the front of the bus and be heard by everyone in the back. My seat was actually right below one of the speakers. I have found that a lot of Koreans still tend to yell or speak quite loudly when they have a microphone basically acting as if they didn't have one, which is tough on the ears when your right next to the speaker in a small enclosed space like a bus. I had put my ear buds in and was trying to listen to my I-Pod but one of the teachers up front was going on and on about something. Then suddenly everyone started cheering and pointing my direction. Suk Ju got up from his seat and went to the front of the bus allowing me to see that they were pointing at him not me. Suk Ju took the mic and music started playing and then the TV started flashing pictures of people dancing. Then it happened Suk Ju started singing. I was in a karaoke bus. The lights on the bus were turned off and they had multiple little disco balls that made lights flash everywhere like we were in a club. The singing was deafening from my seat. I couldn't hear anything from my I-Pod. I kept cranking up the sound more and more to the point where it was hurting my ears as much as the speaker right by my head. The rest of the trip was spent with various teachers going up to the front and singing karaoke music. Now every song was in Korean, no surprise there, but I was amazed to discover that even though I couldn't understand any of the songs I could still tell who was good and who was not. And there were a lot more people who were not good at singing than those who were, in part I am sure it was because by this point most of them were drunk.

The ride home was looooooooong and painful, I mean that literally by the time I got off the bus my ears were ringing. It was about 10:30pm when we finally pulled up to the school. I jumped off the bus as fast as I could. All the teachers were standing around waiting for the gates to be opened so they could get to their cars but I just said good-bye to Suk Ju and took off towards home. I walked in to my place around 10:45pm and just collapsed. I am not social by nature so even if I had done this exact same trip in America with all English teachers I am sure I would have been fairly drained by the end of it but not like this. This trip was over twelve hours a majority of which was spent on a bus and being constantly surrounded by conversations I couldn't understand in an environment that impeded any attempt of mine to enjoy my own music, podcasts or read a book. But relax, it’s over.

Impending Summer

As is so often the case I find myself both relaxed and worried. This week is probably going to be my easiest week of work since I began teaching here. It is the last week before summer vacation for the kids. Each class I teach is two hours and it has been only the first hour of each class that we are actually doing any work. The second hour has been merely a party where the kids get to bring snacks and we show them a video for fun.

The work that we have been doing that first hour is going to what we call our English Village. This is a large room in the school in which they created different sections where the kids must practice their English for specific settings. There is a restaurant, a store, a bank and an airport all set up. This week they are going to the restaurant and the bank. I have been acting as the waiter and cashier for the kids at the restaurant. They have to practice ordering off a menu, which includes main dishes, appetizers, desserts and drinks. Then they have to pay for their meal using fake American money we gave them. The word appetizer has probably been the hardest part for everyone.

Now everyone can see the menu as they wait in line to order so it is kind of interesting to see how well the kids understand how money works. Most of the kids ordered and then after I tell them how much they owe they have to lay out their money on the counter and try and figure out how to give me the right amount. They had to pay the exact amount I was not giving them change. They all had enough money and the correct denominations to pay the exact amount so figuring out how to give me seventeen dollars instead of just twenty was part of the exercise. But there were a few kids, mostly girls, who ordered their meal and handed me the exact amount even as I was adding up the total. After buying their meal the kids then went over to the bank where they deposited the money they did not spend with my co-teacher. That was another fun thing to see, when the kids found out they had to put the rest of their money in the bank some of them started buying less in order to have more money left over for the bank, again mostly girls, and some just went all out and tried to spend all their money, which was not possible with the prices, and these were mostly boys. Ah the odd things you notice when you take lunch orders for seventy kids.

The worst part about it has been that this section of the school has absolutely no air conditioning and only a few tiny windows. I have been sweating to the point of actually dripping onto the counter in front of me. The kids have noticed the heat too and the longer we are there the faster the kids order so they can go to the bank and then get back to the classroom where there is air conditioning. Sadly that was not an option for me I had to be in there for everyone’s order. As the days have been getting hotter the school has finally allowed us to control the air conditioning in our own rooms. Since then I have discovered that my co-teacher and I do not share the same feelings about what is a comfortable temperature. This does not surprise me but being in the room with him reminds me a lot of Phoenix. In Phoenix it would be triple digits outside but when you walked into a store or movie theater the temperature would drop 30 or 40 degrees and there would be freezing cold air blowing on you constantly. Basically, my co-teacher likes it cold.

Now in two weeks my Summer Camps begin. These camps are intensive language sessions for all the grades. So for one week the kids will have four hours of English a day; two hours with me and two hours with the 3rd and 4th grade English teacher. There are three major changes I will be facing. First I will be teaching alone, second I will be teaching all the grades (1st-6th, not just 5th and 6th), and third I have no set curriculum but rather must create all my lessons from scratch just like I have been doing with my after school classes. I also must coordinate my lessons with the other teacher so that we are working together even though we won’t actually be working together. Now my concerns change depending upon the age of the kids. With the younger kids the lesson planning is far easier (the alphabet, colors, animals) but teaching alone is far more scary. They are just beginning and don’t know any English so I just don’t know how you get started when the teacher and the students don’t speak the same language. Then as the kids get older (4th, 5th and 6th graders) I become less concerned about being alone with them since I have experienced that before rather I am far more concerned about lesson planning as their lessons need to more difficult yet not to difficult. Finding the proper middle ground between too easy and too hard has been fairly difficult with my after school classes. So the rest of this week and all of next week will go towards planning for my Summer Camps. I can tell you that my concerns will not subside any time soon but if nothing else at least I have some time to relax while I worry about it.