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Topics / Faith and God

The challenge

“Science has disproved God”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Science hasn't disproved God, and it can't. Science measures the natural world. Asking it to rule out the one who made nature is like asking a metal detector to rule out wood. And look who built the lab. Isaac Newton wrote that the order of the solar system came from an intelligent and powerful being. The man who first proposed what we now call the Big Bang, Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. I'll go further. A universe with a beginning and laws written in math looks to me like the work of a mind. That's my reading of the science, not a lab result. You'll say today's scientists are skeptics. Pew surveyed them, and about a third said they believe in God. Let me ask you this. What experiment would disprove him? Explaining how the engine works doesn't mean nobody built the car.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Science studies nature by measuring it. It has no instrument that can rule out a cause beyond nature.

  2. Believers built modern science. They expected order in the universe because they believed a rational Creator made it.

    In the General Scholium added to his Principia, Isaac Newton argued that the elegant order of the solar system came from an intelligent and powerful being.

  3. Faith and serious science still share a lab today. A real disproof would have ended that.

    A Pew Research Center survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found about a third said they believe in God.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: That's just God of the gaps. Every time science fills a gap, God gets smaller.

Nate: God of the gaps is a bad argument, and I'm not making it. My case rests on what we know: a universe with a beginning and laws written in mathematics. Learning how gravity works doesn't tell you why there are laws at all. It makes that question bigger.

The lines

Sources

  1. Georges Lemaître, Nature, The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory (1931)
  2. Francis S. Collins, Free Press, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006)
  3. Pew Research Center, Scientists and Belief (2009)
  4. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, General Scholium, second edition (1713)

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