I’ve been asked privately to write publicly about my perspective as a “person with a strong scientific education and worldview… coming to know or believe in God’s reality and divinity.” With an eye toward the “lack of scientific evidence for the divine;” an eye toward the “lack of a need” to rely on supernatural or divine explanations when constructing an appreciative theory of the world.
This will take me more than one post, but I think I will enjoy the assignment.
Let me turn first to the concept of “scientific evidence for the divine” or a “need” to include supernatural or divine explanations. I know that many theists, the intelligent-design folks in particular (and maybe also the blokes responsible for that Creation Museum in Kentucky) claim that there is plenty of scientific evidence for the divine.
I think their arguments are not useful, because they are based upon faulty premises, and most especially upon sloppy definition of terms.
I say there is no scientific evidence for the divine, and no need to include supernatural or divine explanations when constructing a scientific theory of the physical world. In this post I’d like to elaborate on that, before going on to explain why this has not been an obstacle to my coming to Church practice as an adult or to continuing it — even as my conviction that there is no scientific evidence for the divine has become firmer.
Begin as always by defining terms: What do you mean by “science?”
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They Might Be Giants can help us out here. From their kids’ CD Here Comes Science:
“As the philosopher Rudolf Carnap once said, ‘Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.’”
That’ll do. A little closer look at that “experimental verification” thing, via the Wikipedia article “Scientific Method:“
Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable, to guard against mistake or confusion in any particular experimenter. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure. Theories, in turn, may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.
Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible, to reduce biased interpretations of results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, giving them the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them.
My working definition of science is the body of human knowledge that is added to by forming hypotheses, constructing experiments or proposing observations that can be repeated or replicated by others, and using the results of the experiments and observations (the “scientific evidence”) to test the hypotheses. The utility of science is its ability to generate predictions about the future: if I do such-and-such under specified condtions, this outcome will result. This property of science is intimately bound up in the requirement that experiments, tests, and observations are repeatable: every test that deserves to be called “scientific” is a test that can be performed under similar-enough conditions to produce a consistent result.
The result of these tests — scientific knowledge — consists of statements about what happens. Science tells you what happens. This is the short soundbite.
Note the tense of the verb.
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The definition logically implies two things which we can use to clarify what is not science, even if many people call it that.
(1) If I have a hypothesis and I cannot test it — if I cannot “find a way to show what would happen if [I] were incorrect” — then I cannot make any scientific statements about the truth or falsity of the hypothesis. I have no scientific evidence.
I may be able to speculate convincingly. I may be able to estimate the probability. I may be able to report a gut feeling. I may be able to present a collection of other scientifically tested hypotheses that are not inconsistent with the hypothesis under study. In other words, I may have many statements to make about my hypothesis, but none of them are scientific ones. And so, in the formulation, reporting, and defense of this hypothesis, I am not performing science.
Theoretical physicists find themselves in this boat sometimes. They are often in the business of proposing hypotheses that cannot possibly be tested with existing technology (and occasionally that can be proved to be impossible to test under any technology). You can read entire books on the subject of whether string theory, for example, is actually “science” or whether it deserves instead to be classified as metaphysics. Proposing hypotheses that might possibly be tested some time in the future when technology has improved is an important part of scientific work, but it is not sufficient to be called “science” because it does not generate any evidence and therefore generates no new additions to the body of human scientific knowledge.
(2) If I have a hypothesis and I can test it to produce evidence, but the test cannot be repeated by anyone working independently of me, then the test and the evidence and any statements I make about the truth or falsity of my hypothesis are also not scientific. If no one can repeat my experiment, then no one can judge conclusively whether I am mistaken or confused or lying.
(This is different from repeating an experiment but failing to reproduce the result. I mean, the experiment cannot be performed a second time.)
We have stated that science is based on direct experience. If I am the only person who can have a particular experience, if the experience cannot be communicated to the wider human community, then it cannot become part of science — except in a very limited way, as part of the body of my personal knowledge, the so-called science limited by my own head. It cannot become a part of the body of general human knowledge.
Now it may be that the evidence I present is convincing. It may be that I have documented my observations in perfect accord with all the procedures accepted by the scientific community. It may be, further, that I have previously demonstrated trustworthiness, and still further, that I am charismatic enough to cause people to desire to align their conclusions with mine. Therefore I may be able to cause a large number of scientists and people with scientific training to agree with my conclusions. My analyses may make their way into scientific journals and textbooks and be taught in science classes. They may be called “science” according to the common usage of the term (“stuff that gets taught in classes of chemistry, biology, physics, geology, etc.”) My statements may even be true. But they would not be “science” according to the precise definition of the term which I have proposed.
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And yet there are many such statements which we find useful, and indeed, which we accept and discuss as if we were confident they were true. We would even say that they are part of the body of human knowledge. Indeed they are — just not part of the body of human knowledge that depends on direct experience.
For example, there is another discipline of human knowledge which we call “history.”
If science tells you what happens, then history tells you what happened.
History is not unrelated to or independent of science. Like science, it is based on the examination of evidence. This evidence is not merely imaginary. It includes a wide variety of tangible material: natural objects, landscapes, artifacts, documents, linguistic structures, cultural practices. Historians often rely on technology to discover and interpret evidence; those technologies having been developed, tested, and refined by individuals relying on scientific knowledge and the scientific method. And so, for example, we have useful technologies such as radiocarbon dating, or x-ray imaging of an artifact to see beneath the surface, or audio recording devices to make it easier to accurately transcribe interviews, or the methods developed by archaeologists to systematically catalogue and describe the remains left at the site of some historical event.
But note this: You can only dig up the shard of pottery once. After that, it’s been dug up. No one can ever dig it up from its original resting place again.
The shard of pottery, dug up, is real evidence, but it is historical evidence, not scientific evidence. It cannot be incorporated into a theory of what happens. It can only be incorporated into a theory of what happened.
With apologies to George Santayana: History is not, in fact, replicable.
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This does not mean that history is inferior to science. However, it operates under different limitations and different rules. Because it cannot be replicated, persons engaged in historical research can and must rely on indirect rather than direct experience. They must rely on reports. And they are allowed to (indeed they must) subjectively interpret the evidence they find in order to reach conclusions about it. As in scientific research, historical researchers can and should strive to be unbiased in the sense of removing sources of error that originate from non-rational attachment to ideas. But because the evidence they investigate is not in the form of repeatable experiments, there is no analogous way to adequately guard against mistake or confusion (or outright lying). The best they can do is document their findings as scrupulously as possible and offer a coherent argument to defend their interpretations. And then show how those interpretations fit, without contradiction, into what is already commonly accepted — or else, to show that what is commonly accepted should now be rejected.
This looks a little bit like scientists defending their hypotheses and using them to add new statements to a scientific theory. But because of the lack of repeatability, the evidence is not scientific evidence, and so we can’t use the term “theory” as scientists understand it.
The work of historical research is to add new statements to a narrative. Historical researchers are engaged in constructing and refining a narrative of what happened in the past all the way up to the present moment.
Normally, the term “history” is only applied to those parts of the narrative that involve human beings, sometimes even only literate human beings. The narrative before human beings or before preliterate human beings is then called “prehistory.” This distinction is common enough that I wish to note it with some respect, but for these purposes I prefer the more expansive definition of Stephen Hawking’s famous title A Brief History of Time. Regardless, the narrative under construction is a continuous narrative. The only discontinuity introduced by human beings is that we produce a new kind of evidence when we start writing. That continuity implies a unified field of knowledge, and so I’m going to go on using “history” to mean the set of statements about what happened — including what happened before there were people around to comment on what had happened to them.
The inevitable conclusion is that much of the work we often call “science” really belongs to the construction of that narrative of “what happened” — what happened once and can never happen again. Archaelogy, for example, is sometimes considered a science; and perhaps if we look deeply enough we can find some archaeologists testing repeatable hypotheses; but generally archaeology is concerned with using artifacts and other physical evidence to construct a narrative of what happened at a particular site. Paleobiology “uses biological field research of current biota and of fossils millions of years old to answer questions about the molecular evolution and the evolutionary history of life” — well, when it is answering questions about what happens when DNA, RNA, and proteins evolve, it is contributing to science, but when it is answering questions about what happened during the evolutionary history of life, it is contributing to the narrative — to history. A forensic anthropologist contributes to science when he or she experiments with blades and bones to find out what kind of marks are left by what weapons; but contributes to history when he or she examines a set of remains and expresses a judgment about the cause of death. We cannot re-animate the corpse and kill it again to see if the same thing happens.
Note that history is not inferior to science. Historical evidence is not inferior to scientific evidence. It includes the best available information about much that is important to human beings. But it is worthwhile distinguishing clearly between the construction of the “theory of everything that happens” that is the domain of what we properly call science, and the construction of the “theory of everything that happened” — the world-track — that is the domain of what we properly call history. The distinguishing mark of science is replicability.
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If the distinguishing mark of scientific evidence is replicability, there never has been any scientific evidence for the divine. Because to look for God using the scientific method, to look for scientific evidence of God, is to look for a God who appears at the push of a button: a God who can be made to seem to obey us. And this is, I think, not what people mean when they say “the Divine.”
When we find something that appears at the push of a button, so to speak, we call it “a law of nature.” It will never appear supernatural to us because it will only appear natural. Because, in fact, the natural universe in the present (but not in the past) is precisely the domain where repeatable observations can be made.
I believe that “the supernatural” has never created any evidence that could ever be correctly called “scientific.” I expect that a real “supernatural,” were it real, never would create any such evidence. Therefore the absence of such “scientific” evidence has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of the statement “The supernatural is real” (equivalently stated: “There are realities other than the natural universe”).
My interlocutor might object: Is this a long way of saying “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence?” Because if the evidence has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a statement, why say anything about it at all?
No; it’s a long way of saying “Common human practice demonstrates that absence of scientific evidence is never in practice taken as evidence of absence, because we persist in pretending to make meaningful statements about what happened in the past.”
In other words, there’s at least one other kind of evidence besides scientific evidence that we all use. We stipulate that it is useful even if it is not entirely reliable and even if it is inherently subjective. I’m willing to rely on it to construct my mental model of the world, and chances are good that you do too.
And this concludes part one.
(Part two is here.)
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