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Man who fought for Pluto writes about God

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by

mwkruse
in

From the Ventura County Star: Man who fought for Pluto writes about God (HT: Presbyweb)

Astronomer feels 'intelligent design' isn't creator's plan.

Too bad about Pluto — the planet, not the Disney dog — and that humiliating descent to mere "dwarf planet" status in our solar system.

Don't blame Harvard University's Owen Gingerich. He led the International Astronomical Union panel on how to define a planet, which wanted to keep tiny Pluto among 12 planets on an expanded official list. Instead, the world's astronomers voted down Pluto and recognized only eight full-fledged planets.

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Both Gingerich and Collins believe in God as the creator of the universe, yet neither advocates the much-debated "intelligent design" movement. This theory holds that earthly species are too complex to have occurred without guidance from some intelligent power (for instance, God).

That's religion, not science, Gingerich objects, although as a believer he's personally impressed with divine intelligence as he surveys the astonishing structures of the cosmos. He also thinks Darwin's theory of evolution has more potential for explanation than devotees of intelligent design do.

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He complains that some fellow scientists overreach — and build support for intelligent design — when they turn evolution into an argument for atheism. That's ideology, not science, he maintains, and should be resisted for the same reason that intelligent-design thought doesn't belong in science classes.

Comments

6 responses to “Man who fought for Pluto writes about God”

  1. Ted Gossard Avatar
    Ted Gossard

    Michael,
    I tend to agree with this argument, though wouldn’t mind further help in understanding why.
    I mean, it’s okay, and good for a scientist to have faith. Alot of them do.
    But to insist that one must inject faith into scientific study seems to go out of bounds as to what science is. And faith, after all, enables people to understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. So with that thought, faith would have to be a prerequisite to enter into a “science” of intelligent design? Just thinking and wondering about it.

    Reply
  2. Michael Kruse Avatar
    Michael Kruse

    Hey Ted. I really muffed this post. I inadvertently double posted the first two paragraphs and left out the two critical ones. Hopefully it makes more sense now.
    I’m not sure I understand your question. Did you read the article linked? I think he was making the case for not injecting faith into science, which is what he believes ID does.

    Reply
  3. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Prof. Gingerich says, “Somehow, the universe appears to be rigged.” And this differs from the ID claims of astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez… how?
    Really, I’m at a loss to figure out exactly what constitutes “real science” and what doesn’t. Need a Christian pretend to be a materialistic determinist to do “real science”?
    It may be that I just don’t understand. I willingly concede that the metaphysical or philosophical move is the last to be made in the pursuit of scientific truth, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why it’s wrong in the end to make it. After all, that’s how we figure out what the data means. What’s the alternative? Stare at raw numbers, or fossils, etc.?

    Reply
  4. Michael Kruse Avatar
    Michael Kruse

    Great observations Andy. Thanks.
    I think you have hit on the key issue and that is what is science or “real science.” Science is ONE (not the only) way of ascertaining and building knowledge about limited aspects of our existence, namely the natural world. (Revelation would be another way we build knowledge about our existence.) Wikipedia says (emphasis mine “…science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on empiricism, experimentation, and METHODOLOICAL NATURALISM, as well as to the organized body of knowledge humans have gained by such research.” That is a good working definition but also key to science is the scientific method. Again, from Wikipedia (with my emphasis added):
    “Scientists use model to refer to a description of something, specifically one which can be used to make PREDICTIONS that can be TESTED by EXPERIMENT or OBSERVATION. A hypothesis is a contention that has been neither well supported nor yet ruled out by experiment. A theory, in the context of science, is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a certain natural phenomena. A theory typically describes the behavior of much broader sets of phenomena than a hypothesis — commonly, a large number of hypotheses may be logically bound together by a single theory. A physical law or law of nature is a scientific generalization based on a sufficiently large number of empirical observations that it is taken as fully verified.”
    Say we study the affects penicillin on one hundred people with an infection. Ninety-nine of them recover very quickly but one becomes deathly ill. What do we conclude?
    A.) Most people are positively affected but God strikes one out of one hundred with severe illness?
    B.) There is some natural reason (like an allergy) that causes some people to have a bad reaction?
    How would you test for A? How do you develop a theory that can predict future events and is verifiable by testing? It can’t. It isn’t a scientific theory. This is the “God of the gaps” approach. We just assume “God did it” when something seems beyond our explanation. This is what ID does. The most scientists can tell us scientifically is that we have no natural explanation yet.
    The problem is that some scientists have moved from “methodological naturalism” to “ontological naturalism” and claimed that science demands such a conclusion. One may believe ontological naturalism is reality but you can not get there through science because by definition science has self-limited itself to study of the natural world. Christians rightly reject this overreaching claim but then turnaround also violate the standards of science by trying to interject there own supernatural ontology through things like ID.
    There is not only a danger to science from this but also to Christianity. What happens if we make “irreducible complexity” as an article of faith pointing to God and the a few years down the road? This has happened at times in the past where others have used the “God of the gaps” approach. There is an adage that says that a marriage of science and religion soon makes religion a widow.
    To me, the needed response to the ontological naturalism of some scientists is not the interjection of a Christian ontology. It is to return to the reality that science is one useful source of knowledge grounded in METHODOLOGICAL naturalism.

    Reply
  5. Ted Gossard Avatar
    Ted Gossard

    I think I heard him interviewed on NPR not long ago.
    My point is simply that I think one’s faith, while it can be impacted through science (God’s general revelation) is not a prerequisite to do good science. So that I find myself in agreement with what I understand to be Gingerich’s argument.
    Those who either want to go to “intelligent design” or “atheistic evolution” are forcing onto science something that science is not designed to answer. That is, pure science in the sense of observation, hypothesis, testing, etc. (You can tell I’m only an admirer of it).
    What people do with “good” science is something between them and God in the end. Since God’s revelation in creation is a light to them, pointing to his existence and nature.

    Reply
  6. Michael Kruse Avatar
    Michael Kruse

    Well said Ted, and in many fewer words than it took me. 🙂

    Reply

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