Debate about science and religion continues

Abstract

The ongoing national debate about the teaching of evolution in our public schools is best served by clearly distinguishing the experimental sciences from the historical sciences like Darwin’s theory of evolution. The historical sciences invariably bring into play the totality of the human experience and thus the debate.Scientists, philosophers, and theologians accumulate knowledge when analyzing different aspects of reality and search for particular hypotheses or models to fit their respective subject matters. Of course, a main goal is to integrate these kinds of knowledge into an all-encompassing worldview.Religious concepts and beliefs are based on the notion of divinity, so one must posit the existence of the supernatural, which transcends nature but may contain all or part of it. The overwhelming majority of Americans subscribe to the existence of such a realm.A first, reasonable, and useful definition of science is the study of the physical aspect of nature, and its subject matter is data that can be collected, in principle, by purely physical devices. Therefore, the laws of experimental science are generalizations of historical propositions—that is, experimental data. Note that consciousness and rationality are purely nonphysical, since purely physical devices cannot detect them. In addition, life cannot be reduced to the purely physical, so living beings are both physical and nonphysical.Human rationality develops formal logic and creates mathematics to summarize data into laws of nature that lead to theoretical models covering a wide range of phenomena. However, scientists deal with secondary causes. First causes involve metaphysical (ontological) questions, which regulate science. Without the ontological, neither the generalizations nor the historical propositions of the experimental sciences would be possible.An extreme form of reductionism supposes that all that exists is purely physical and that the nonphysical aspect of reality follows from the purely physical and the laws governing their interactions. Unfortunately, this is often what is in the mind of the public when discussing evolution. For that reason, one must spell out what prior information is assumed in evolutionary theory; otherwise, people would associate Darwin’s evolution with a particular worldview, for instance, atheism. In addition, it ought to be emphasized that advances in medicine and other practical applications of biology are based essentially on the results of laboratory experiments and not the history of the evolution of life on Earth.The public should be made aware that the laws of experimental science are quite consistent with most theological presuppositions. It is in the study of unique historical events—say, in cosmological or biological evolution—where the conflict between science and religion may arise. For instance, the Christian faith is based solely on the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, his death, and his resurrection. Absent those historical events, there would be no Christian faith. Experimental science has nothing to say regarding any particular historical event.Isaac Newton’s mechanics and James Clerk Maxwell’s electrodynamics are excellent prototypes of scientific theories. No designer or theological considerations are needed in the theories themselves except when considering the nature of the humans who created the mathematical schemes. Therefore, the consideration of humans in any theory must be based on the integration of science with other kinds of knowledge—theology, for example.The question of origins, especially the origin of man, poses a most difficult problem—in particular, the emergence of life from the purely physical. Surely, the results of experiment are used to analyze all extant data in the historical sciences; nevertheless, the fundamental problem of origins is more a historical rather than a scientific problem.Finally, Peshkin indicates, “a proposition is not a scientific theory at all unless it’s falsifiable in principle.” Of course, if one is to apply Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability, a theory must make unambiguous predictions. In weather forecasting, the physics underlying the dynamics is well known, and given the initial conditions, long-range forecasting is very limited indeed. Surely, the evolution of life on Earth is a much more complex system, so the claims made by those advocating evolutionary theory can never really be falsified.© 2007 American Institute of Physics.