The God of Science

Scientism, one hates to call it a religion, since it is generally purveyed as religion’s contrary (I recently saw a meme, cartoonish on both sides, that said: “Science, questions that may never be answered; Religion, answers that may never be questioned), but the word is not wholly inadequate, as has often been noted, if much too simplistically. The problem isn’t really that a faith in science is the same as a faith in God. Propositions in science are much more testable than propositions of faith. There are limits to the testability of science’s propositions and there are certainly testable propositions of faith. But the Venn moons are never in total eclipse. 

In one essential way, however, Scientism is too much like religion, and that is in the faith. Scientism has, be definition, the absence of divinity in its discoveries. That is its faith. This faith indeed approaches the absurd. That is the blindness of its faith. There’s no reason to avoid saying it: Scientism is blind in a way that is very much like the blindness of geocentrism.

How does science avoid the question of God? The answer to that question is long and involved. But a large part of it is this: by positing a God who does not act the way that an ideal human would act if he or she were raised to the position. God does not exist because God is not human-as-god.

A person, raised to the Godhead, would not create an infinite universe in which humans or their equivalents would be rarer than precious gems. All that wasted space. A human God would not let children die in fires or be eaten by dogs. A human God would not fill its trees with seeds that never sprout, would not need a billion sperm to fertilize a single egg or thousands of eggs to ensure that now and then one of them will meet a sperm and pop into life. A human God would not allow so many thousands of those fertilized eggs to fail in so many ways, would not allow so many mothers to die giving birth or so many otherwise creatures to starve in the wild, a human God would not create a world whose existence depended on earthquakes and volcanos. A human God would not be wasteful. A human God would protect the innocent. A human God protect his human children and all his creation.

If God is not the projected human ideal, no God exists.

The absurdity becomes apparent when you use these terms. God is by definition not human, by definition beyond human knowledge or understanding. We may at the frontier of our utmost powers glimpse God, but we can't know God. Every theologian knows this. (Much more will no doubt be said of this in the future, but this is not the subject today.)

In fact, “how does the universe work?” and “how does God work?” or even “how does got maintain and regulate the universe?” are not necessarily different questions. The removal of “God” from the first may or may not be valid. But it is arbitrary. The choice to remove God leads, in a straight line, to the conclusion that God does not exist. But the nonexistence of God here is only masquerading as the conclusion, when in fact it is the premise. And that’s the problem of Scientism. It wants us to believe that it does not need God in its picture of being when in fact the absence of God was the already-determined state of affairs implicit in the formulation of the question. Nonetheless, no calculations change if we bring God back into our science. Science may avoid mentioning God, but science still does everything that science does whether it acknowledges or denies the possibility of God. It does not have to genuflect or make the sign of the cross in holy water across its chest to do its job. It does not have to say grace or entreat blessings on its endeavor (nor is it of course enjoined from so doing; whether it would make a difference can’t be known, whether or not God actually exists).

God does not exist and does not maintain or regulate the universe because if I were God I would not maintain or regulate the universe the way God does. 

This is not a valid way to think about God or the universe.