Science and Faith - Part 1

For those of you who don’t know me well (which is about two-thirds of my regular readers, the other third being my wife) I’m a Christian. I’m also quite well versed in the “hard” sciences (physics, astronomy, geology, some biology, and a little chemistry). Some people find it hard to rationalize faith with science. I believe this inability is a direct result of a misunderstanding of science.

Science deals exclusively with what can be consistently measured in the universe. If it can’t be seen and measured it doesn’t belong in the realm of science. If someone else, following the same procedure as I do, can’t get the same results as I did it’s not science.

Modern people don’t understand how radical the scientific method was when it was first proposed. I’ve read that at one time mathematicians were debating at length over whether the weight of an object had any effect on how fast it would fall under gravity. Some argued that the acceleration of gravity was independent of mass, some argued that a heavier object would fall faster. Then a man by the name of Galileo did something that was so completely unheard of that the mathematicians must have gaped in wonder, he actually took two iron balls, one considerably heavier than the other, to the top of the Tower of Pisa, and dropped them to see what would happen. I’ve personally seen similar tests done in Physics classrooms, and the results were always the same as what Galileo got, the two objects hit the ground at the same time. (Interestingly, one of the astronauts who landed on the moon brought a hammer and a feather with him and dropped them. In the absense of air the hammer and feather hit the ground at the same time too.)

Let’s set up a simple experiment to use as an example. Let’s say I am going to take a marble and drop it from the roof of my house and measure how long it takes to hit the ground. So I need a marble, and a stop watch and my house. I can use a tape measure to determine how high the marble will be when I drop it, and I can calculate how long it should take to hit the ground. I can then use a stop-watch to measure how long it actually does take. I ignore anything that doesn’t affect the outcome of the experiment, I don’t care what color the marble is or what day of the week it is. So I climb up on the roof, drop my marble, and a seagull swoops down, grabs the marble in mid-air, and carries it away. He drops the marble ten minutes later, at which point it hits the ground. Do I claim that it took the marble ten minutes to hit the ground? I do not, because the seagull wasn’t part of the experiment.

Pay attention now, this is important. If I perform this experiment a hundred times, or a thousand, or a million, and hundreds of other people perform exactly the same experiment thousands or millions more times, and in no case does a seagull swoop down and grab the marble, does that disprove the existence of seagulls? It does not, for exactly the same reason, seagulls aren’t part of what we’re measuring.

Science, by definition, is repeatable, it deals with the general case. Science can say that, given a set of conditions (for instance height from which the marble is dropped) we expect a certain set of results (time to hit the ground). If something else comes into the system (like a seagull) the results are unusable.

So, the science of medicine can tell us that if a person has a particular disease he or she will probably die within a certain amount of time. Medicine can tell us that there is no known cure for such a disease. Then God can swoop in and perform a miracle and heal the person. This doesn’t discount the value of medical science, nor do people who are not healed miraculously disprove the existence of God. God exists outside of our universe, He is unpredictable (God works in mysterious ways) so His actions cannot be accounted for in science.

This is part one of this topic, where I’m trying to lay some groundwork. In part two I intend to deal with some issues where faith and science collide and hopefully make some sense of the issues. If you have any such issues you'd like to see discussed let me know in the comments.