Is it a testable claim that god made science? I think the answer is "Yes!"
If this idea is examined in any detail at all we have to wonder why god might have taken so long to 'make' science. Its not altogether evident in any of the bronze age texts is it?
When he finally began to reveal science to his chosen natural philosophers how did he do it? It seems that god more-or-less allowed the ideas and concepts to leak out gradually during the last few hundred years.
Did his earthly representatives encourage science when it began to grow and explain some mysterious aspects of the universe? I think the answer to that is also quite emphatically "NO!"
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| A Catholic version of Galileo at the inquisition, facing a kindly and just looking inquisitor. (Yeah - right!) |
I don't recall any stories about Galileo claiming that his ideas had been revealed to him by god. If they had been revealed like that, why would he have withdrawn them under duress? Christians claim that Galileo never lost his faith throughout the whole saga. Well - what would you expect him to say? It is disrespectful and disingenuous to make such a claim.
The christian church spent so much time and effort trying to eradicate science that it stopped participating in the field. It would be hard to claim that (e.g.) The Vatican's appointed scientists have contributed much to 'real' science.
Its no use choosing a different god and claiming that Allah has done any better. The middle-eastern world was leading science until islam became properly established, but now it is stuck in medieval times, in science, in law and in moral terms.
It seems clear to me that no god made science happen in any way, and in my view this observation adds further to the considerable body of evidence that there was never any god to make science or anything else.
I think we may have a misunderstanding here...by saying that God made science, I was simply meaning, God made everything, and we by observing, have simply unpacked s tiny fraction of it, as one might unpack a Christmas present! or, to put an artistic flavour to my point, it is rather like admiring a beautiful painting and then understanding the particular mix of paints...for some, doing such analysis takes away the beauty, and for others like myself, it enhances the beauty.
ReplyDeleteHowever, once you attempt to take God out of the picture, then you have something that when analysing the picture or the science or whichever way you choose to look at it, becomes fragmented in the analysis and so peculiar attempts to explain the paint mix such as evolution are suggested...whereas if one begins with the premise 'In the beginning God...' the whole analysis and picture comes together perfectly.
PE: think you might enjoy this... http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b015yr4h/Start_the_Week_God_and_science_with_the_Chief_Rabbi_Jonathan_Sacks_Richard_Dawkins_and_Lisa_Randall/
ReplyDeleteJust a bit of mischief, because I don't believe a word of it myself, but if you think God created science, what if he did it so you could discover the lies in the Bible?
ReplyDeleteI mean, if the Bible was good enough, we shouldn't need science to discover anything, should we?
And yet so much science is conflicting with, if not downright contradicting, almost all of the claims in the Bible about the universe, about the solar system, and about Earth and life on it. And even the 'history' in it is proving impossible to verify scientifically...