How It Used to Be....
It is important to remember that the earliest scientists, those pioneering thinkers of the later Middle Ages, saw themselves as religious believers in pursuit of the secrets of creation.
Virtually all of the early innovators of the period -- Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton -- believed that God sought to reveal himself through man's exploration of the physical universe.
"They perceived their intellectual breakthroughs as foundational contributions to a sacred mission," writes philosopher Richard Tarnas. "Their scientific discoveries were triumphant spiritual awakenings to the divine architecture of the world, revelations of the true cosmic order."
For Newton, nature reinforced the existence of a Deity who should be worshipped for "the creating, preserving, and governing of all things according to his good will and pleasure."
Skepticism....
Over time, religious belief became more and more removed from the scientific quest.
Even if God existed, the new scientists reasoned, he was indifferent to the word he had made.
Neither the laws of nature nor the principles of science required the assistance of a Creator...
The discoveries in biology by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century seemed to confirm the growing skepticism.
The relentless struggle for survival through evolution -- whereby the strongest ad ablest organisms devoured the weakest -- ran afoul of the God of Mercy.
Had Darwin written a beatitude, it might have been this: "Blessed are the cunning, the brutal, and the heartless, for they shall inherit the earth."
"The more we know of the fixed laws of nature," Darwin wrote, "the more incredible do miracles become."
It would not be long before nearly the entire scientific community would agree with him.
As philosopher Peter Gay has written, science seemed to have all the facts on its side -- and none of these facts involved a deity. "Science could give the deists and the atheists great comfort and supply them with what they wanted -- Newton's physics without Newton's God."
Scientism
More recently, a new generation of scientists has identified a "anthropic principle" [the mysterious arrangement of physical laws that seem uncannily suited to support human life] at work in the universe.
Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle famously admitted that his atheism was shaken by his discovery that carbon atoms seemed fine-tuned to accommodate human life. "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology," he concludes, "and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."
Although such thinkers might hint of an Intelligence behind the universe, this admission doesn't touch the underlying outlook of the modern scientist.
By this I mean scientism, the belief that science can explain every facet of human existence from nature itself. Under this view, there is simply no role for any Force or Power or Intelligence outside of nature....
What's important for us is that this mind-set is not confined to men and women in white lab coats. It shapes the unconscious assumptions of nearly everyone living in the West.
What natural laws explain
Think about it this way. Natural laws work exceedingly well. They keep airplanes flying and cell phone buzzing.
They help tomatoes grow in our gardens and babies grow in their mothers' womb. They seem to explain nearly every phenomenon that appears on the horizon.
It is science that has allowed us to understand and harness the natural world, a world that apparently functions without any help from another world.
What natural laws do not explain
It is not that the agnostic has a scientific explanation for the big questions about human existence -- the origin of life, the tug of conscience, the capacity for love, the fears of death.
Evolution, in fact, offers no answers to these questions.
What Darwin and the scientific community offer is an impression, the belief that science can provide answers to all these questions eventually......
-From The Searchers, by Joseph Loconte, Chapter 1.
And that's the problem - our blind faith in the assumption that science is in the process of explaining everything - and someday, it will explain everything - our origin, our purpose, our future. So we go ahead and push God out of the picture, with the view that someday He will be totally eliminated by newer scientific discoveries.
What happens to that "anthropic principle" - That inexplicable observation that somehow, some way,
our earth seems uncannily fine-tuned to accommodate human life? Like the earth adapted to us, not we to it?
I guess that goes by the wayside, too.
Jesus declared, I tell you the truth,
no one can see the kingdom of God
unless he is born again.
--John 3:3
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