Pacific Views

OK, God did it. What Then?

Over the last few days, I've used a fair amount of space talking about the attempt to push creationism into science education under the new-and-improved PR phrase 'intelligent design.' I understand the motives of the people pushing this to some extent, having been raised as such myself. But I got to wondering the other day, what happens if they get their way?

Scientific investigation is predicated on curiousity. Which means that the curious are in luck because the world is large, complex, and full of secrets. I feel confident saying that we will never know everything there is to know, even at the lightning speed by which people are gathering new information. And that's a good thing, because the whole motivation for discovery is the perception of one's own ignorance.

In fiction, the term for explaining the inexplicable and seemingly impossible through supernatural intervention is the deus ex machina. Such plot devices wave away the development of motivations, smooth over impossible situations, and answer questions that the characters could never have answered on their own. The answers and solutions become easy, like magic. The loose ends are tied up and everything is explained.

Such thinking applied to questions of natural science would answer every question with their own literal deus ex machina. "It happened because God did it." In a mind that should have a question and an impression of lack of knowledge, there is a certain 'answer' instead. That's the same thing as saying that something happens just because it happens, which is emphatically not any kind of science.

It might be painful to admit gaps in our understanding, but considering all the professions and fields of study available, it's only reasonable to admit that sometimes you just don't know. It isn't possible to know everything about politics, business, economics, world religions, cultural studies, human nature, law, military tactics, etc. That doesn't even begin to cover mathematics and the physical sciences, which are considered to be much harder, even though any answers you do come up with through the sciences are easier to verify than with studies in the humanities.

Creationists, or people who would like to mix religion and science, would like the scientific community to replace every "we don't know" with "God did it." But here's the thing, even if God did do it, so what? What does that mean in regards to getting answers about how things work? People used to believe that evil spirits caused epilepsy, and in all the time they believed that, they didn't learn a thing about the material causes and mechanisms of the disease.

This is no different than believing that God is the cause of wealth distribution. Is there a supernatural dispenser of good and bad financial luck? Because if there is, then it's easy not to study correlations between health, education, or socioeconomic background with future wealth or poverty. Nothing can be done about the problems of poverty if some deity has decreed it. There's no point in asking uppity questions about whether or not the well off swindled their way to the top or earned their lucre fair and square, because clearly that same deity favors them. More to the point, it implies that no one could expect any plan of action to make things different, and might explain why Machiavelli was such a big fan of state-approved faith.

That mindset is absolutely antithetical to figuring out the material cause and effect relationships of anything in our environment, and it doesn't stop with science, the most obvious expression of curiousity. Simply put, you can't learn anything at all if you think you already know it, you have to have what Buddhism calls "the beginner's mind." You have to be willing to admit you don't know yet and the conscious intent to look for the answer in spite of it. You have to do so knowing all the time that you will fail many times along the way because you don't entirely know what you're doing.

So what I'm curious to know is what changes in scientific research creationists would like to see as a material result of badgering people into rejecting evolution as a set of working assumptions? Do we stop investigating the mechanisms by which bacteria and viruses change? Do we give up on classifying organisms by their apparent relationships, and instead get to wondering if chimpanzees were put here because God planned ahead for human medical testing? Do we stop studying heredity & genetics? I'd like to know.

After many years of gathering information and making detailed observations, Charles Darwin became curious about whether species had simply been placed here in their present form or had developed by some other means. Louis Pasteur's observations over the years led him to postulate that disease and contamination was caused by microorganisms. Fortunately, neither of them waved off their own questions by deciding that there could be no possible other answer than the equivalent of 'just because.'

Posted by natasha at November 19, 2004 02:40 PM | Faith | Technorati links |