Overstepping boundaries: law, science, and atheism

Allow me to begin with a simple declaration: science cannot disprove the existence of God, and any attempts to do so are greatly overstepping the boundaries of science’s authority.

You see, even if we did evolve from protozoa and then mastered the sciences, modern atheists would still be using science as an authority in regard to questions that science cannot ever answer, which is ironically a very large evolutionary step backward for the human race.  It is a step backward because science only tells us “how;” it does not explain “why,” “what,” or “who.”   

For instance, a biologist can tell you (very partially) how a baby functions, but he cannot tell you when a baby becomes a baby.  The movie Come What May explained that determining humanity based upon biology is impossible: if you take any human being, consider their existence the day before today and ask if they were human then.  Try to continue until you come to a day when they are not (just to save you time, it should be noted that you’re going to end up back at conception).  As such, biology is useless when asking what you are: both the developing fetus and the grown man are fully human.

Asking science who you are is even more ridiculous, since science tells us that a person changes all their cells every seven years (on average).   If science were the only tool for acknowledging human existence, we would have to renew copyrights every seven years as well as free all jailed murderers and child molesters.  After all, a person cannot serve sentences for an almost completely different biological being’s crimes, making our blatant disregard for biology’s role in personhood and social structure almost comical.

The same happens when people try explaining the meaning of the universe (or conversely, the lack thereof) through physics. Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss recently partnered up in their incredibly informative and entertaining lecture called “A Universe from Nothing,” in which they sought to explain one of the most troublesome questions ever asked by mankind: why is there something rather than nothing?  Their conclusion was that the universe must necessarily exist because the laws of physics will not allow nothing to exist: when the amount of regular matter and dark matter become imbalanced, regular matter will be created.  This, they stated, was proof enough that God could not ever have existed, since matter’s very existence is governed by laws.  They went on to say in the most demeaning terms that philosophy and theology were completely useless, as they are fanciful nonsense reserved for only the most imaginative of weaklings.

But Richard and Lawrence forgot about a couple of things: if a God were to have created the universe, it would be silly for Him to create something which would invalidate its own existence.  The universe must either have laws to govern the existence of matter or it would not exist, so Richard feigns intellectual honesty when pretending God would demand otherwise.  Richard–by even hinting at this–is pretending to be surprised by the fact that law exists for everything temporal, as if the sole purpose of science wasn’t to determine which laws affect what. Was he perhaps expecting to find some sort of non-law which invalidates his entire pursuit of scientific knowledge? 

Because science only exists to understand laws, physics will eventually take the physicist to a point at which he will begin to wonder if the universe makes any sense at all.  At our most scientifically knowledgeable point, at which every law has been discovered and we know every single reason that atoms and quarks and galaxies behave the way they do, we will run into a very special problem.  The most rudimentary laws will be known, and The Law becomes The Law simply because it is The Law, not because it is derived from other laws which govern it.  And where will scientists go from there?  Will they then determine that existence has no creator, simply because they know that existence functions a particular way? 

If Dawkins can publicly claim that Christians use religion as a sort of weakling’s escape from reality, perhaps now is the time to say the same for Dawkins, since he’s pretending that science will give him all the answers he wants, when he is engaged in a very dead-ended and woefully misplaced pursuit of atheism.  He has elevated science beyond what it is capable of, just like deciding to use your feet as hands when you have perfectly good hands to use.  As such, Dawkins is a willfully self-handicapped and de-evolving being, incapable of properly utilizing the tool his ancestors handed down to him.

Finally, we must recognize that if any fundamental laws exist, they exist because they were placed there by something beyond them which both creates laws and is beyond physical laws, otherwise the universe could not exist.  Although Lawrence claims in his lecture that these laws are set in place by a sort of “universe generator” which spawns universes with differing physical laws to govern each of them, he fails to acknowledge that a universe generator  must then also be explained by physical laws, in a sort of “turtles all the way down” explanation of reality that only a Hindu could appreciate.  

In reality, the creation of physical laws–in terms humans can understand–would look something like this: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”  And therein lies a crucial point: the elementary laws are spoken into existence, whether by a “universe generator” or the Almighty.  These laws are not given authority by other laws, making the existence of the law-creating universe known as “God’s territory,” ironically the same kind of scientifically lawless territory Dawkins claims to deny strictly on the basis of its scientific lawlessness.  This most absurd argument hinges on his belief that a dimension which creates lawful and populated dimensions cannot itself be populated by a being empowered by the lawlessness of that dimension.  

As such, we must understand that something beyond the laws cannot be understood solely by the laws themselves (although the laws do provide us with basic statements about that something beyond us), so we must look for that something in the form of revelation, and revelation alone.  There simply is no other way to understand a being inexplicable in this universe’s physical terms: the character must be revealed in terms we can understand, although using the terms we understand can falsely be interpreted as “being contained within the laws we understand.”  So even the proposal of a universe in which our laws did not apply would suggest that we would not be able to study it: our human existence is absolutely predicated upon a specifically calibrated universe, so why pretend?

So where do we go from here?   First, we must give science its proper place and stop pretending as though science and theology cannot be compatible: true theology must provide an explanation for the inexplicable (such as the origin of the universe) while not embracing obvious fallacies.  Second, we must see if a particular theology’s explanation of God’s character is compatible with our understanding of existence beyond time and space.  Last, we must understand that our origins and personhoods are going to remain mysteries through all except revelation, and we must accept our intellectual confinements humbly, instead of pretending to use limited fields of study to understand everything.  We can use humanity’s insider perspective to point us toward irrefutable truth, but introspection cannot be our everything.  We must look for revelation, and look for it with all of our being.

In closing, God spoke through creation; and whether or not Richard acknowledges this, we all heard Him.  Make sure you listen, because life is short and the answers you need for your own personal safety are only useful until the day you cease to be governed by the laws of this universe.  After that, you’re in God’s territory.

To hear what God Himself has to say about your existence, there’s no better place to go than the Bible.  For those of you who’d like a little less revelation and perhaps a little more  science and philosophy (which when studied honestly leads to a pursuit of revelation), I highly recommend bookmarking and watching the following videos and articles.  May the God beyond our understanding bless you this day, and grant you knowledge of Him.

God and space/time/astronomy (how the universe proclaims God’s existence):

The Privileged Planet

God and genetics (why macro-evolution is impossible by Darwinian standards):

Unlocking the Mystery of Life

God and the human mind (next chapters accessible at the end of the page):

Mere Christianity, chapter one

The case for Christ’s existence and the historical validity of the gospels (must read):

The Case for Christ

This entry was posted on 21. December 2009 at 20:44 and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print