Edward Kenneth A.

Dragas

Block 4 Political Science

The God of Science

Science and religion are often represented as rivals vying for a place in our hearts and
minds. Science proposes the Big Bang Theory which said that the universe was formed from
the explosion of a densed atom while religion proposes Creationism which states that a divine
being made the universe according to his will. Debates have been going on since these two ideas
contradict what really created the universe. Such divide are tearing the two most important
centers of human society apart. But what if science and religion can co-exist?
Discussion of the idea that our universe is fundamentally intelligible is even more
profound. Through science and the use of mathematical rules, we can and do understand how
nature works. The fact that our universe is intelligible has profound implications for humankind
and perhaps for the existence of a divine being.
The notion that science and religion are irreconcilable centers in large part on the issue of
evolution. Charles Darwin, in his 1859 book The Origin of Species, explained that the myriad
species inhabiting Earth were a result of repeated evolutionary branching from one common
ancestor. But what if evolution is really a God's tool? Darwin never said anything about God.
Many theologians maintain that it would be perfectly logical to think that a divine being used
evolution as a method to create the world.
Still, science does contradict a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis in the
Bible, on the origin of the universe which says that God created heaven and the Earth and the
species on it in six days. Scientific evidence shows that the universe was actually formed about

13.7 billion years ago, while the Earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first humans
date back only a hundred thousand years or so.
But many religious people argue that the Bible must not be taken literally, but should be
read allegorically. They said that one simply cannot read the Bible as a scientific text, because it
is often contradictory. For example, in the Bible, Noah takes two animals and puts them on the
Ark. But in a later section, he takes seven pairs of animals. If this is the literal word of God, or
was God confused when he wrote it? Absolutely not. Scholars during that time have different
interpretations of such phenomena so they have different accounts of what happened.
Furthermore, they said faith alone can lead you to the real truth, the real message of God. Many
scientists directly contradict such notions for they want evidence as proof of the existence of a
supernatural being.
But what if there is really a God who makes the rules in our universe which science
discovers? Science is young. The term "scientist" may not even have been coined until the early
19th century. Ironically, modern physics initially sought to explain the clockwork of God's
creation. Geology grew partly out of a search for evidence of Noah's Flood and so are many of
formal and empirical sciences we know of today. Without these religious scholars who were the
first to study these sciences, such developments would not be made.
One interpretation of the collection of unlikely coincidences that lead to our existence is
that a designer made the universe this way in order for it to create us; in other words, this
designer created a dynamic evolving whole whose output is our creation. Many take exception to
this idea and argue instead that our universe is but one of an uncountable multitude that has

happened to create us. Other ideas are that there are as yet unobserved principles of nature that
will explain why the strengths of the forces are as they are.
To me, neither argument is in principle against an intelligent design. The designer is
simply clever enough to have devised either an evolving multitude of universes or to have
devised a way to make our present universe create us.
We do know a lot about the design of the universe, so clearly the design is in good
measure intelligible. But why is it that we can understand nature so well? One answer is that
evolution favours organisms that can exploit their environment. Most organisms have a set of
wired instructions passed from older generations to newer generations.
Over the evolutionary history of Earth, organisms that can learn how to manipulate their
surroundings have prospered. Humans are not unique in this trait but we are definitely the best at
learning. So in other words nature has built us to understand the rules of nature. All of this rests
on the predictability which results from nature obeying rules. As we have learned about these
rules we have discovered that they can be expressed in purely mathematical form. Mathematics
has a validity that is independent of its ability to describe nature and the universe. One could
imagine mathematics with its complex relationships being true outside of our universe and
having the ability to exist outside it. The outcome of humankinds investigations into nature is
science. The fundamental tenet of science is that there is an objective reality which can be
understood by anybody who is willing to learn.
The only way I can imagine a universe without rules is for every action to be the result of
a divine being who controls and oversees us all. As the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley

would have said it, ese es percipi, which means to be is to be perceived. Given we are
intelligent, we can imagine sharing this aspect with a God who made us in his own image" and
frequently oversees our actions even if we dont directly see him. Such a thing is almost beyond
comprehension as everything would need to be the result of premeditation. Events would appear
to occur by pure random chance. Furthermore the level of detail required for godly oversight is
absolutely beyond human comprehension. Each of the hundreds of billions of cells in our bodies
operates within a complex set of biochemical reactions, all of which have to work individually
and as well as collectively for just one human body to function. So for a start our God would
have to ensure that all these processes happen correctly for every one of the trillions of living
organisms on earth.
We are all the stuff of the universe, absolutely embedded within, and subject to, the rules
which govern nature. Because we are self-aware, one can argue that the universe is also selfaware. Without an intelligible design it would be impossible for humans to have free will as all
actions would be as a consequence of the will of God. Free will is a fundamental element of
religion. For example, the Christian statement God made man in his own image implies both
free will and intelligence for humans. Intelligible design is thus a necessary condition for the
existence of a God. Rene Descartes, a mathematician/philosopher also believes the same thing.
He said that there must have been a perfect being responsible in placing the idea of the perfect
being in your mind.
There is, of course, no way to prove religious faith scientifically. It is hard to envision a
test that could tell the difference between a universe created by God and one that appeared
without God. There is just simply no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have

anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator. Instead, science and
religion can operate in different realms. Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions.
How did the universe evolve to the form that we see? But it is woefully inadequate in addressing
the 'why' questions. Why is there a universe at all? These are the meaning questions, which I
think religion is particularly good at dealing with.
So I think science and religion should go hand in hand.
We all know the subjective reality of experience. I personally feel the power of the
redemption which is at the core of Christianity or to any other religion out there who offers the
same agenda. Each of us has access to that through our own free will to exercise choice.
Brian Greene, a world-renowned physicist and author of The Fabric of the Cosmos:
Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality once said, "The universe is incredibly wondrous,
incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we
have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of
words, it is okay with me."