THE AUDACITY OF MODERN SCIENCE

Some of the most audacious (and ridiculous) comments are coming these days from otherwise respected scientists and academics. I’ve just finished reading a 2013 book called “The Science Delusion” by Curtis White. Here’s a part of my review of the book.

“From a Christian perspective, one may cheer from the sidelines as one anti-faith mentality is thoroughly and wittingly dismembered, but then, we must shake our heads at the stubborn refusal to consider the possibility of a Creator God as the answer to the supposedly unanswerable questions posed in the book. Art is put forward as our best approach to the unknowable metaphysical aspects of life but, ironically, in a discussion of what it means to be an "I", the author fails to even mention the God who identified Himself to Moses as ‘I Am’
 

This book strongly challenges the philosophical self-limitations of science and the deterministic idea that we are all basically just very complex machines, but it fails to break free of a different kind of self-limitation, the idea that humanity must find its own way to explain its own existence without reference to God. The author accuses science of ruling out any knowledge outside its own but, really, he does the same thing by ruling out, in effect, the knowledge of God.”

So the book is a rather audacious attack on the audacity of science. (How could I resist doing a blog about that?!? I hope I didn’t come across as audacious in my review!)

To be clear, we are talking here about neuroscientists, evolutionists and molecular biologists who have been making grandiose claims that their scientific disciplines are on the verge of explaining things like human thought, creativity and personality. Richard Dawkins talks about ‘memes’, which are basically the cultural equivalent to genes. In other words, we inherit a set of genes that determine how tall we will be, what colour eyes we will have, etc, and we also inherit a set of views and values (memes) that determine our culture and personality. Why is this audacious? Because it’s presented as fact (or so highly probable that we may as well present it as fact) when it’s actually nothing more than sheer imagination.

The great obsession of science is to be able to explain everything – yes, literally everything! But, by ignoring the evidence for God (eg, in the brilliant natural design that we see everywhere in the world) on the basis that they will someday be able to explain these things without reference to God, these modern scientists only demonstrate their own foolishness.

(By the way, if you can't read the slogan on Dawkins' shirt, it says "RELIGION - together we can find the cure."