Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Supernatural

This one goes out to all those hard science people out there:

I am a historically, literarily, theologically bent fellow. As such I have very little problem accepting/assiging mystery to the world around me. I have been wondering, however, how do my friends in the sciences deal with the supernatural? The aim of the sciences is to measure, categorize, and define the world and thus (it appears to me) erase mystery.

Discuss . . .

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are those who love and value the mysteries of life and those who desire that there be none. For the latter, when mystery appears, their objective is to unravel it. For the former, their only response is to marvel. For me, unraveling the mysteries can be interesting, but often it can take the magic out of the world around me. All in all though, I'm glad that those people are out there who take the time to understand this world since they seem to come in handy all the time. However, I kindly request that they keep me in the dark and let me enjoy the mysteries of life.

Jay said...

Oh, the frustration of having missed your question when you asked it. I have your blog RSS'd so that I'll know when you write, but I missed it with all my craziness of having just moved.

Your question is a good one, and predictably, Melissa answered it well. If you read my rantings at my blog, I am certainly a "natural" kind of guy.

I would answer your question as this:

Science and religion are good for different things. Science limits itself to natural explanations only because of its methodology. Simply put, if you claim that a supernatural being is responsible for doing something, how can that statement be shown false? The investigation ends right there, because there's no way to further study something that's been explained as "God did it."

In the same way, science can never speak directly to God. It can't prove Him, it can't disprove Him. So we choose faith, we choose to believe in God. If we're doing that for scientific reasons, I'd say someone is very confused.

While my faith certainly compliments my science, and brings ethics and metaphysical perspectives to my science, it doesn't exist ON my science.

If you've got a little time, I wrote an article on intelligent design (a subject I'm quite passionate about) that really gets after this idea of bringing the supernatural into science. You can read it here.

In the comments on the post, a friend had some problems with what I wrote, and she asked me,

"How could you stand witness to the incredible detail and perfect structure and function of the tiny insects, how could you stand beside the immense ocean and cathedral forests without attributing it to something more than survival of the fittest?"

I think my answer to her was a really good one and sums up how I feel.

"The same can be said for a sunset. Can you watch a sunset (which can be particularly beautiful here in west Texas) without attributing it to something more than gravity? I believe both are a result of God’s providence. But I think we’ve shown both are a result of natural mechanisms."

Being a scientist, I'm not out to destroy mystery. Because no matter how much we study, I think we're still surrounded by mystery. As much as we've learned about physics and biology, we have huge fundamental questions that we have poor understandings of.

Some, we very likely will never have answers for. Others, who knows what we'll uncover.

But even if we learn things that take the "mystery" out of events, like gravity or natural selection, that shouldn't cause a Christian any stress. Everytime I see a beautiful sunset, or spend time in nature in pursuit of birds and other animals, my spirit is overwhelmed with the most metaphysical of entities -- love, appreciation of beauty, and a desire that others would appreciate it too.

-- Jay