“Non­sense. There are so many phe­nom­ena that would raise the specter of God or other super­nat­ural forces: faith heal­ers could restore lost vision, the can­cers of only good peo­ple could go into remis­sion, the dead could return to life, we could find mean­ing­ful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intel­li­gent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been sci­en­tif­i­cally doc­u­mented gives us added con­fi­dence that we are right to stick with nat­ural expla­na­tions for nature.”

From this arti­cle argu­ing that reli­gion and sci­ence are essen­tially mutu­ally exclu­sive. It makes some inter­est­ing points.

But I won­der why the obser­va­tions of objec­tive wit­nesses to the life of Jesus who inde­pen­dently con­firm four of his five “mir­a­cles” don’t count as “sci­en­tific doc­u­men­ta­tion”.

“Many reli­gious beliefs can be sci­en­tif­i­cally tested, at least in prin­ci­ple. Faith-based heal­ing is par­tic­u­larly suited to these tests. Yet time after time it has failed them. After see­ing the objects cast off by vis­i­tors to Lour­des, Ana­tole France is said to have remarked, “All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a sin­gle glass eye, wooden leg, or toupee!” If God can cure can­cer, why is He impo­tent before miss­ing eyes and limbs? Recent sci­en­tific stud­ies of inter­ces­sory prayer–when the sick do not know whether they are being prayed for–have not shown the slight­est evi­dence that it works”

The other thing that often annoys me about athe­ists is this idea that we can some­how fab­ri­cate a mir­a­cle to test God. That’s not log­i­cal. God would, by the very nature of being God, be the one who sets the rules and the tests. Not the other way around.

It’s anal­o­gous to the sce­nario in the Hitch­hik­ers Guide to the Galaxy where there’s the final rev­e­la­tion that mice are con­duct­ing exper­i­ments on humans. That idea is pre­pos­ter­ous. That’s why it’s funny. We are in no posi­tion to demand that a God — a being by nature supe­rior to us — com­ply to our test­ing para­me­ters. I can under­stand how the lack of reg­u­lar mir­a­cles would be frus­trat­ing to those wish­ing to observe God. But I don’t see how it’s a rea­son to rule out the idea of God.

The other prob­lem with this guy is that he’s try­ing to accom­mo­date plu­ral­ism and reli­gion and reli­gion and sci­ence at the same time. He almost rules out the pos­si­bil­ity of reli­gion on the basis that more than one reli­gious idea exists. He should per­haps first pull the log out of his own eye before going for that one.

Sci­en­tific con­sen­sus is less likely than reli­gious — and sci­en­tific posi­tions are much more likely to be influ­enced by an exter­nal fac­tor (like funding).

Sci­ence allows you to set what­ever hypoth­e­sis and test­ing method­ol­ogy you choose. It has great free­dom. This is the prob­lem with sci­ence though — you can’t set method­ol­ogy when you don’t have the author­ity to do so.

The idea of test­ing God also falls over because “sci­ence” (or its advo­cates) insist on oper­at­ing in a closed sys­tem — rul­ing out God and any­thing super­nat­ural. So you get a state­ment like this:

“That alleged syn­the­sis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and sup­ported by agreed-upon evi­dence, logic, and rea­son, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsup­port­able or even fal­si­fied. In other words, the price of philo­soph­i­cal har­mony is cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance. Accept­ing both sci­ence and con­ven­tional faith leaves you with a dou­ble stan­dard: ratio­nal on the ori­gin of blood clot­ting, irra­tional on the Res­ur­rec­tion; ratio­nal on dinosaurs, irra­tional on vir­gin births. With­out good cause.”

And this:

“Sec­u­lar rea­son includes sci­ence, but also embraces moral and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, math­e­mat­ics, logic, his­tory, jour­nal­ism, and social science–every area that requires us to have good rea­sons for what we believe. Now I am not claim­ing that all faith is incom­pat­i­ble with sci­ence and sec­u­lar reason–only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the uni­verse flatly con­tra­dict sci­en­tific obser­va­tions. Pan­the­ism and some forms of Bud­dhism seem to pass the test. But the vast major­ity of the faithful–those 90 per­cent of Amer­i­cans who believe in a per­sonal God, most Mus­lims, Jews, and Hin­dus, and adher­ents to hun­dreds of other faiths–fall into the “incom­pat­i­ble” category.”

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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