Science and the Challenge to God

By Chris Park

Many people today believe that science has replaced religion as the best way of explaining everything we might like to know about the universe and about humans. But that belief assumes many things about both science and religion, how they operate, and what their limits are, which may simply not be true. This ebook outlines the nature of the modern worldview (which includes humanism, materialism and naturalism) and how that has shaped popular ideas about what is truth, what counts as evidence, and how we decide between competing truth claims. It sketches out how the debate between science and religion plays out in terms of the origin and nature of the universe and of life, and the difficulties some people have in accepting that there can be supernatural (spiritual) as well as natural (physical) reality. It then explores the nature and limitations of science as an intellectual pursuit, including Richard Dawkins' insistence that the existence of God is a scientific question. The book rounds off by looking at the nature of the conflict between science and religion, and at recent attempts to reconcile them, including looking at what some prominent scientists who also believe in God have to say about the matter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Park
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310558665

Chris Park

I am a retired academic with more than 30 years experience in university teaching, research and senior management in the UK. These days I enjoy spending time reading, writing, walking and travelling, but not all at the same time!

Book preview

SCIENCE AND THE CHALLENGE TO GOD

Copyright 2016 Chris Park

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied or distributed for commercial or non-commercial reasons. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy, and please consider downloading the other books in the series GOD MATTERS, both free from Smashwords.com. Thank you for your support.

This ebook contains material drawn from my book God: Real or Imagined? which was first published in print format by Zaccmedia in 2013. It is part of the GOD MATTERS series, the other ebooks of which are listed in ‘Other books by this author’.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Modern worldviews

3. On the origin and nature of the universe

4. On the origin and nature of life

5. Competing truth claims

6. The nature and limitations of science

7. Conflict and reconciliation

References

About the author

Other books by this author


 

1. Introduction

"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?" C.S. Lewis (1961)

Some of the strongest criticism of the idea of God has been based on the argument that science can explain everything without the need for anything supernatural or divine.

This reflects the clash of worldviews between those who believe that materialism offers sufficient explanation for all that we see in the world around us, and those who allow for or believe that there are things beyond what science can study and explain.

In this book we will look at when and how these tensions arose, explore some of the limitations inherent in the scientific approach, and consider whether and how science and religion might be reconciled.

Many people today have a sense that there must be more than this; there must be more than just the physical world we see all around us, and we must be more than just a collection of atoms and a cocktail of chemicals.

Radio presenter John Humphreys (2008), a confirmed skeptic on matters of God, has admitted It has always seemed to me that the default position for the human condition is that there is ‘something out there’. Dunno what, we shrug, but this can’t all be one big accident, can it? It is usually said in an almost wistful way, more an expression of hope than of belief. We want to feel there’s a purpose to our lives, that we’ve been put on earth as part of some divine plan, and if not divine then at least pre-ordained for some reason beyond our understanding. We want to believe that there’s more to life than this brief passage and, with a bit of luck, that there might even be something nice waiting for us when we finally turn up our toes.

Layers of reality

Despite the natural curiosity we all have and the religious instinct that many people are aware of, it is a matter of fact that some people believe in God and some don’t. But believers and non-believers share the same physical world and have access to the same evidence about that world, yet they view, interpret and understand the evidence in different ways. We can’t begin to understand the debate about God without acknowledging the importance of different ways of ‘seeing’ reality.

US theologian Marcus Borg (1998) points out that before the late seventeenth century the vast majority of humankind took it for granted that there were minimally two kinds or layers of reality: a spiritual kind and a material kind. Material reality is the natural world we see around us; spiritual reality is the supernatural world that remains hidden from sight but nonetheless affects our every-day existence in multiple ways.

Today many people including atheists and scientists are convinced there is only material reality. Many others, including believers, accept material reality but they are also comfortable with the idea of spiritual reality, on intellectual grounds (it makes sense to them) and/or on experiential grounds (they have direct or indirect experience of it).

Two main areas in which a conflict between science and religion has played out are the debate about the origin and nature of the universe, and debate about the nature and origin of life. Some would say these are the two primary battlegrounds in a never-ending war between science and religion.

Worldviews

A worldview is a lens through which we view the world around us and understand our experiences with it.

Each of us has a worldview, whether we are aware of it or not. Most of us are unable to give our worldview a name or articulate it to other people; it’s so familiar to us that we take it for granted. Differences in worldviews help to explain why we sometimes can’t make sense of someone else’s take on reality, and why other people