Overestimating the Power Of Science
Johnson, Phillip E.
lationship is always deepened and strengthened, and the gift is given if indeed it will promote this relationship. We shouldn't conclude that, since God will always do what is best for us, it...
...Neo-Darwinism is more accurately classified as materialist mythology than as science...
...The point of this discussion is that our current knowledge of genetic change is fundamentally at variance with postulates held by neo-Darwinists...
...God seeks first of all to deepen his personal relationship with us...
...What about experimental verification of the power of petitionary prayer...
...and so he argues that Christians should adopt for religious purposes what he calls "the new creation story...
...Ideally, children ask from their parents with trust and confidence for what they will truly need to live and grow toward the truth...
...Ask for evidence and all you will get are examples of trivial variations in fundamentally stable populations...
...In spite of his skepticism, however, he accepts the basic story of evolutionary naturalism because, in his own words, We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism...
...In Raymo's words, nature itself "becomes the sublime scripture," humans are viewed as the universe becoming conscious of itself through evolution, and prayer consists of rejecting miracles while giving praise and thanksgiving to nature...
...His most recent book is Defeating Darwinism-By Opening Minds (Intervarsity, 1997...
...They could make a start by learning to tell the difference between what they assume and what they investigate...
...Chet Raymo is another in the long line of scientific metaphysicians who yearn to make a religion out of science...
...edu / Bos tonReview / ].) Just to give the flavor of the article, here is a string of excerpts: The molecular revolution has revealed an unanticipated realm of complexity and interaction more consistent with computer technology than with the mechanical viewpoint which dominated when the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis was formulated...
...Petitionary prayer is only one element in a total situation of trust and confidence in God, just as asking and receiving are parts of a total family situation...
...He blames Creationists for refusing to credit the successes of science, but also comments that, when faced with new ideas, neo-Darwinists "assume a defensive posture of outraged orthodoxy and assert an unassailable claim to truth, which only serves to validate the Creationists' criticism that Darwinism has become more of a faith than a science...
...In the New Testament, James observes: "You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures" (James 4:3...
...Commonweal | 6 June5, 1998...
...It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated...
...Look at the fossils and you will see a general pattern of unexplained sudden appearances of new forms of life followed by stasis--meaning the absence of fundamental evolutionary change...
...God will indeed do what is best for us, if we are willing for him to do it...
...According to this story, nature did its own creating through unintelligent material processes, particularly the purposeless Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection...
...Shapiro takes jabs at both the Creationists and the neoDarwinists, accusing both groups of "presenting a static view of the scientific enterprise...
...On the contrary, the National Academy gave Sagan its Public Welfare medal...
...The National Academy's motives may have been partisan, but there is clearly some truth in its warning that mixing science with religion can produce a highly intoxicating brew...
...Lewontin has as low an opinion of the adaptationist "just-so" stories of the neo-Darwinists as I do...
...When scientists begin to worship their own concepts, they are tempted to proclaim vast philosophical systems rather than stick to what the data is showing...
...Despite what you were told in school and in countless public television nature programs, natural selection has no substantial creative power...
...God can reply to our prayers without going beyond the limits of physical possibility, even if the reply may be highly improbable...
...It is the atmosphere generated by this kind of prayer that enables us to relate to God as one "who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine" (Eph...
...But in neither case does this activity constitute the whole situation...
...This is similar to the way in which the mind influences the body without suspending the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry...
...The statement was intended only for use in a public-relations campaign against the creation science movement, and it has never been invoked against evolutionary pantheists, agnostics, or scientific materialists...
...If you are going to define science as applied materialist philosophy, then of course you are going to end up with a materialist creation story, one that excludes the possibility of a personal God who created us and answers prayer...
...This does not suppose that every answer to petitionary prayer is a miraculous occurrence...
...His description of the new story is more in poetic than scientific language, as befits an admirer of Teilhard de Chardin, but he clearly is referring to the standard version of evolutionary naturalism...
...And even if we truly pray well, how can we know that what we ask for is in our best interest and the best interest of alI concerned...
...The highly regarded Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin explained the true basis of evolutionary science in a remarkably candid essay in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997...
...The important questions are all decided in the assumptions and definitions...
...But how can a pollster determine this...
...It has been a surprise to learn how thoroughly cells protect themselves against the kinds of accidental genetic change that, according to conventional theory, are the sources of evolutionary variability...
...If our words in prayer spring from this kind of selfish concern, or if they reveal a desire to control God rather than to grow in his friendship and service, then they will not be answered...
...The first thing to understand about Raymo's "new story" is that scientists cannot prove that known natural forces can produce complex biological organisms...
...Valid experiments require control of all the relevant factors...
...P h | l l | p E. Johnson Overestimating the power of science n 1981, the United States National Academy of I Sciences passed a resolution saying that "Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief...
...Teilhard's comment that "less and less do I see any difference between research and adoration," which Raymo quotes with approval, is about as far from the ideal of scientific objectivity as one can go...
...The difference is that Shapiro tries to use language that scientific materialists can conceivably tolerate, whereas Behe dares to make the obvious inference that the evidence of biology points unambiguously to design, and hence to the reality of a Designer...
...In fact the new story is rapidly becoming an old story and it may not be around much longer, even in the scientific world...
...This means that experiments can neither confirm nor disprove the power of petitionary prayer...
...Indeed this field is in a state of confusion and cannot even begin to account for the information content of the simplest organisms...
...Modern science has taught us that the world is not ruled by rigid determinism...
...For a look at the way things are going, see the recent article in the Boston Review by James A. Shapiro, professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago, with the provocative title "Scientific Alternatives to Darwinism: Is There a Role for Cellular Information Processing in Evolution...
...We ask in trust and confidence, and, in the same spirit, we trust that God hears and answers us...
...and our prayers of petition are expressions of our willingness for him to do this...
...3:20...
...Phillip E. Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley...
...In short, Chet Raymo is urging Christians to rely for their salvation on a theory derived from materialist philosophy, rather than from scientific testing...
...So it was with Teilhard, and so it is with evolution-worCommonweal | 5 June 5, 1998 shipers generally...
...Scientifically, Shapiro's program is identical to that of Michael Behe, the molecular biologist (and Roman Catholic) author of Darwin's Black Box (1997...
...The world and all that happens in it are in God's hands...
...For example, the Academy makes no protest when Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) uses the authority of science to promote atheism, or when physicists promote a "theory of everything" that will allow its possessors to "know the mind of God," or when Carl Sagan proclaimed in his Cosmos series that "the Cosmos is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be...
...Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door...
...Just don't make the mistake of thinking that this new story has been validated by scientific testing...
...James Shapiro plays by the same scientific rules that Richard Lewontin does, and so he is still talking about the origin of cellular information-processing systems as a problem in "evolution...
...And it seems that, for the most part at least, this is not possible with regard to petitionary prayer...
...We shouldn't conclude that, since God will always do what is best for us, it makes no difference whether we ask him or not...
...Operating within each thing and inclining it accordingly to his purpose, God can, without interrupting the network of causal activity that holds the world together, bring about what he wants...
...They assume this crucial and highly debatable fact, regardless of the evidence...
...God was involved if at all only in the very beginning, in setting up the laws, and thereafter nature runs by itself...
...John H. Wright, S.J., is the au&or of A Theology of Christian Prayer (Liturgical Press, 1979...
...Let's gently advise the evolutionary scientists that they need to cultivate a bit more of that objectivity they are always recommending to others...
...Since scientific materialists don't hesitate to give advice to religious people, I suggest religious people should return the favor...
...But the systems he describes are analogous to sophisticated computers, and there is no known natural process that can produce anything of that kind...
...No one has demonstrated that chemical evolution can produce life in the first place...
...Is there any guiding intelligence at work in the origin of species displaying exquisite adaptations that range from lambda prophage repression and the Krebs cycle through the mitotic apparatus and the eye to the immune system, mimicry, and social organization...
...In a similar fashion, God responds to prayer with gifts of forgiveness, encouragement, and also material benefits, as he sees these are truly helpful...
...The Boston Review is available on the Web [ http://www-polis ci...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 11
