Dr. Higgs who's famous 1964 paper detested that his boson be called the God particle. "I am an atheist!" he exclaimed. It would appear many commentators here would say the same. As is helpful in many problem solving exercises between entrenched camps on one side of a theory or another, I offer this discussion about science religion and philosophy.
Really, tombs should be written to draw a line around these topics, but the already mountain of tombs sit in dusty libraries lost to human knowledge. It is one of my biggest beefs about the lack of rigor found in Canadian and probably American education.
The study of the classics has pretty much disappeared. So we do not appreciate from whence came our ideas of science--except as regurgitated by those who failed in their charge to really educate us.
So let me take a quick snap shot to try to build a few bridges. Science Philosophy and Theology were once considered the sciences. Many trained to some extent in the sciences believe theology has been dumped, and philosophy, well one holds its nose to it--but science, ah science! It is understandable because science has shown us so much; answered many of our kind of questions; it therefor holds a place of honor in our minds. At the graduate level, as one studies the philosophy of science and math, one begins to appreciate how philosophy is very much intertwined and pervades science. With the logic of philosophy man-kind would still be trying to figure out the wheel. Logic and Reasoning are integral to science. Philosophy drives the mechanism and direction of it, and without philosophy we could never add one plus one and come up with two.
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I suspect that at this point most of you are still with me. At worst giving grudging acceptance that philosophy must be given place, even if you would not be prepared to say science is really an off-shoot of philosophy--that's fine. With Philosophy and Science (P&S hereon), we have been able to understand how we have come to be on this planet at this time in the universe. We are able to look back 14 billion years and pick up the count nano-seconds from the instant of the big bang, trace the formation of subatomic and atomic particles, we have seen them combine together and form hydrogen stars that live short lives, super-nova and give breed to stars of more and more complex isotopic composition, to the point where we are today with a yellow sun, and rocky worlds that orbit in "goldie-lock" zones.
As these things were taking place, Theology went into a place of profound introspection. Its absence from academic thought bred an idea that just like we may have thought philosophy had nothing to do with science, so P&S had nothing to do with Theology. That is a profoundly ignorant point of view, and I don't mean to use "ignorant" as an insult, but draw it close to ideas of being uninformed. During the time of Theology's estrangement various apologists, defenders, and assassins were loosed into the arena of thought. I use these three terms as classifiers not pejorative in some way.
There arose in those times a branch of theology called Deism. Deism is reflected in the idea that says "If there is a God, a creator of all things, then He wound up the universe established a few laws, and then pretty much has no more to do with us." I think perhaps the majority of astrophysicists would have an affinity for this view. Stephen Hawking talked of it in "A Brief History of Time", and Roger Penrose took a run at it in "The Large the Small and the Human Mind." Einstein was also very theological as a Deist. To the deist, God exists in that part of the universe we cannot yet explain. And when we finally do understand what we haven't been able to explain, then God will disappear altogether (that by the way is a belief statement-rife with theology).
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Some scientists like Pascal and Newton found themselves of a Christian theology that was not deistic. To them they understood God to be both transcendent (Like the Deists) but also imminent: Intertwined inextricably from his creation, a God who suffuses the universe and perhaps holding all reality together. These are belief statements however. Science has boundaries that are supposed to be at the edge of "belief and reason". So really a true scientist-who is atheistic, should have nothing to say about the validity of God's existence, for by science it is not informed of these things.
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One of the galling aspects of the way Science and Faith interject, is when theologians trammel on scientific holy ground. Everyone would recognise the despised creationists at that juncture. Believe me when I tell you that among theologians, there is equal dismay to find ignorant men creating a science book out of a theology.
How is that, do you say? Well to us, science is a fantastic way of describing the processes of nature, the universe, biology, and even science politic. Science if you will is about process. Theology is not about process. Theology is about purpose. Prior to the middle ages, philosophers and scientists when posed by the question: Why does this tree grow? would respond: to give us shade, or provide a nesting place for birds. The science that we know today has been distilled from those ways of thinking, and honed by empiricism and rationalism so that it appropriately avoids purpose. The principles of causality prohibit it. Why are we here must end up at why did the big bang happen. Is it ok to recognise science has limits? Despite the best efforts of some evolutionary anthropologists to make theological comments about how we came to ask the question why, there simply is a boundary where science cannot explain ie hope, love, faith and probably other existential things that virtually all human beings know. Knowledge today has fantastic science, pretty good philosophy, but is beggarly in theology. That really is a loss. For instead of treating it with hostility, perhaps these other pursuits of knowledge can nevertheless inform us.
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