Science and Religion
Warning: Undefined property: linknotes::$are_links in /var/www/vhosts/basil/kbsite/blog/wp-content/plugins/linknotes.php on line 73
This is in reference to a discussion about the Intelligent Design movement also ocurring on OrthodoxyToday Blog. S.F. Danckaert writes in response to Fr. Hans Jacobse’s response to my comment on an earlier post.
I guess, at some point, we must define our terms. What is Darwinism? Who are Darwinists? Most biologists would not, I think, describe themselves as “Darwinists,” even though natural selection is an inveterate part of their science.
I recognized that we were talking about more than simply natural selection when Fr. Jacobse identified “Darwinism” as a cosmology. Natural selection, as a model for evolution, does not entail spontaneous generation (though Lamarck’s acquired inheritance, an earlier model of evolution, explicitly entailed spontaneous generation in large measure) or anything else before the dawn of biological life.
Philosophically, the quesion always comes down to: What kind of knowlege do the natural sciences give us? And how do they acquire that knowledge? Currently the answer is, “Through empirical data and experimentation,” except for sciences like archaeology and paleontology which obviously gather data outside of experimentation. Thus, the primary feature of scientific knowledge is its empirical verifiability.
Thus, you can see that a philosophical question requires an answer a priori, if only implicitly, before we can begin the scientific enterprise. To answer this question about empirical verifiability in the positive excludes non-empirical realities like God, souls, angels, demons, and the like. Not because they are not real or not subjects of true knowledge but because they are not empirical.
What is the weight of God? What is the appearance of the soul? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? These questions are silly not because their subjects are silly, but because they are absurd, like asking, “What shape is blue?”
Science attempts to describe the natural world in terms of the natural world. Is such an enterprise incompatible with religion? Is it consonant with religion? The battle over “evolution and creation,” however it gets hashed out, regardless of which labels are used, seems to be mostly about prolonging the Modernism/Fundamentalism debate. Both sides were aberrant in that fight. It seems that those who are still fighting in terms of “Darwinism” or “evolution” versus creation (as if they were opposed) are trying to find some middle ground: some scientific pursuits are compatible with religion, but some are not.