science and faith

I missed out on blogging about last week's Christianity: A History. It addressed colonialism - presented by a descendant of West Indian (formerly West African) slaves - again, thought-provoking and challenging.

This week, Prof. Colin Blakemore presented on science and faith: the impact of the enlightenment and beyond - via the peculiarities of the scientific creationists, ultimately to the question of whether science will make faith redundant. I suppose I should describe Blakemore as my colleague, since we both work for the same division of the University of Oxford. He's been subject to personal attacks by animal rights activists, on account of his experimental methods: and this is, in the genius of this series, his qualification to present this topic, since it deals in large part with the persecution (and execution!) of those whose science displeased those with power.

The breadth of the interation of science and faith today was rather striking. Two of the interviewees were an exceedingly sane astronomer-monk (who gave atheist Blakemore a run for his money) and an exceedingly fundamentalist astrophysicist at the Creation Museum in Ohio (whose position was essentially that scripture always trumps all other evidence). The latter - for all his learning - can't really be said to be following the scientific method, methinks.

But therein lies the problem. This is profoundly a modern argument. Blakemore says "as a scientist today, I'm free to put forward any argument, provided I can back it up with evidence" - by contrast with, say, poor Gallileo. But we all know that is simplistic. There are lots of things you're simply not allowed to study today. But he avoided that territory. He went to see the LHC, where they're looking for the Higgs Boson, the misleadingly-named "God particle", as if understanding the first microsecond (or nanosecond, or whatever it is) of the life of the universe will complete the jigsaw of understanding the wonders of creation.

In fairness, he did go and talk to an Anglican priest of the Sea of Faith connection, but I don't think he could see the point. (Not that I'm entirely sure I do, but perhaps for different reasons). But he really did seem keen on setting up the classical dichotomy - science versus God. And he didn't once ask the question about what proof would look like. The argument is absurdly circular: scientific method assumes that we can create evidence for things; that everything has an explanation if only we can find it; and that if our existing explanations do not explain everything, we must go and refine those explanations, testing them against the evidence. There's no room in that method for God, so it's hardly surprising that there is no scientific evidence to bring to bear on his existence (and so, according to Occam's rasor, no reason to suppose that existence). It seems dishonest to argue from a lack of evidence, when no evidence is possible.

But he ended with what I do take as a challenging thought-expriment: science is telling us more and more, not just about how we are made, but also about how our minds work - it's entirely plausible that in future it will be able to tell us, reliably, why we think as we do, and why we believe things. Then what happens?



[unrelated aside: just watching the first HD episode of The Simpsons. HD rocks.]