The incomparable John Lennox on science and Christianity:
A superb series; listen to it all starting Here.
Science and Christianity
1
Category Archives: Science
Science and Magic
The other evening I watched the new Harry Potter film, The Half-Blood Prince; it isn’t as good as the book. But it did get me thinking about the hypothetical existence of magic and its relationship to the material and supernatural. According to Arthur C. Clarke, magic cannot exist and, if it seems to, that is merely because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; magic, in Clarke’s view, is simply science in disguise. David Bentley Hart makes an interestingly similar – but considerably more subtle – point: magic is preoccupied with the manipulation of the material world and, as such, has more in common with science than the transcendent:
In truth, the rise of modem science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it invokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural—in the theological sense of “transcendent”—but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modem science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence, there was not really any late modem triumph of science over magic, so much as there was a natural dissolution of the latter into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, “magic” and “science” in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according to relative degrees of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to a single continuum.
I’m not sure what Albus Dumbledore would make of that but, for any atheist who might be eager to comment, please use your God-given grey cells to understand the point before using them to animate your fingers at the keyboard.
Like or Share this:
God and science
Contrary to contemporary atheist superstition, a scientist can be a Christian:
Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, has been named by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health. What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.
Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.
This isn’t news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible. They are not.
Like or Share this:
Mind games
A fascinating article in Discover Magazine makes the case for a biocentric universe: a universe that is brought into being by a biological entity – specifically, consciousness or mind – rather than the reverse. Both quantum theory, which has demonstrated that the behaviour of a particle is determined by observing it and relativity, which has proved that things like distance and time are not as absolute as common sense would dictate, make the case for a universe that is shaped by consciousness.
Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.
For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.
Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.
One of the consequences of this is that it creates a scientifically plausible case for both the origin of the universe being in God’s mind and for the idea that his mind alters the universe now: if our minds shape reality, how much more can God’s in what we call the miraculous.
Like or Share this:
The truth is out there
I’ve always enjoyed reading science fiction from H. G. Wells to Arthur C Clark; and now the BBC:
Alien life ‘may exist among us’
Never mind Mars, alien life may be thriving right here on Earth, a major science conference has heard.
Our planet may harbour forms of “weird life” unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.
This “shadow life” may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.
He has called on scientists to launch a “mission to Earth” by trawling hostile environments for signs of bio-activity.
“It could be right in front of our noses – or even in our noses,” said the physicist.
After a good deal of digging, I have discovered an alien life form that lives up people’s noses.
Here it is:
