A scientist refutes the religion of science

Ian Hutchison is a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. Here he rebuts the idea that science is the ultimate way of knowing about the Real.

 

"Scientism" is used to describe faith in science. Prof. Hutchison is a Christian. In an address at the Veritas Forum, he spoke of three hypotheses to explain why he believes in the resurrection of Jesus:

Hypothesis one: We’re not talking about a literal resurrection. Perhaps it is just an inspiring myth that served to justify the propagation of Jesus’ exalted ethical teachings. A literal resurrection contradicts the known laws of nature. Maybe scientists can celebrate the idea of Jesus’s spirit living on, while his body remained in the grave.  

Hypothesis two: We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers.  

Hypothesis 3: I was brainwashed as a child. ... But no, I did not grow up in a home where I was taught to believe in the resurrection. I came to faith in Jesus when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University and was baptized in the chapel of Kings College  on my 20th birthday. 

  
Hypothesis two wins:

        To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. ...

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen. 

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. 

It is refreshing that a scientist understands the principle of "limit questions." Limit questions are those that are outside the realm of a particular field of knowledge. For example, suppose you attended a concert by the London Symphony. As you are leaving afterward, you overhear a man in front of you say, "Speaking as a cardiologist, it is my medical opinion that this was the finest performance of Saint-Saux's Symphony Number Three in C Minor ever presented anywhere."

Immediately you can see that such a statement is simply nonsense. It may well have been the best-ever performance of the symphony, but true or false, it is not a medical question and so his opinion "as a cardiologist" has no authority at all. The quality of a concert is a limit question for physicians. It is outside medical science’s realm of knowledge and expertise.

This is exactly the mistake that many scientists, such as the late Stephen Hawking, make. When they denounce Christians for affirming the resurrection, they claim that science has proved it was impossible. But as Prof. Hutchison explains, miracles are inherently limit questions for science.It gets worse. Comes now Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong, whose research shows that fewer than one percent of published scientific papers published in scientific journals actually follow the scientific method. 

“We also go through journals and rate how well they conform to the scientific method. I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field … were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method” said Armstrong... .

Scientific integrity requires scientists and non-scientists alike to recognize that there are limits to scientific knowledge. Failing this is the main error of the New Atheist movement, whose advocates insist that,

·       only science reveals the Real, 

·       only science can discover truth 

·       scientific knowledge is exhaustive and inherently unlimited. 

But these claims are themselves not testable with the scientific method. They are not scientific claims at all, but claims of faith in science, or scientism. Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist and geneticist, explained in The New York Review of Books in 1997 (link) that scientism has a…

... prior commitment to materialism. 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, 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 ... . Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

This is not evidence of an inquiring mind. The intellectual atheists' veil was further pulled back by Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief.  It's that I hope there is no God!  I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind… This is a somewhat ridiculous situation… [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist. (The Last Word, pp. 130-131, quoted by fellow philosopher Edward Feser.)

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, put it this way:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. … 

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was …liberation from … a certain system of morality.  We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom…. There was one admirably simple method in our political and erotic revolt: We could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons. (Ends and Means, 270-273)

However, affirming the resurrection of Jesus is not wishful thinking, it is the most reasonable conclusion based on the non-supernatural facts and circumstances surrounding the issue. Note well, please: that the resurrection of Jesus did occur is the ending point of examination of the facts, not the beginning point.

The resurrection of Jesus is foremost an historical question, not primarily a scientific one or even, really, a religious one. And so there will be limits of what science can declare about it just as there are limits on what science can declare about any other historical event. For example, it cannot be "scientifically proven" that Gen. George Washington led his army across the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, to attack Hessian forces at Trenton, N.J. That is an historical question, not scientific one.

I posted about alternative explanations of the historical events just recently, so I'll not revisit them. Today, let's just deal with one, which is the claim by many scoffers and skeptics that Jesus never really existed in the first place. But what happens when, live and on the air, an atheist holding that position runs into a non-Christian, world-recognized scholar who says that position is silly? Well, this.

Update: Michael Polanyi, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester: "Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete and a false pretension. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific statements, and this is untrue... ." Read more.