Misquoting Augustine Part 4

Before I get to a personal conclusion regarding Genesis, a thought occurs to me in regard to the origins debate.

Is it possible that there is confusion in the muddled idea of science that exists in the public consciousness, a confusion that extends into the science academy, science classroom, the literature, about what the limits of science are?

Everyone agrees, whether naturalist, creationist, ID advocate or theistic evolutionist, that science rightly studies phenomena in the natural realm - physical objects, measurable forces, detectable energy - all in accordance with natural law. Where the problem lies is not with science. It is a straw man to say ID or creationism rejects science. What opponents of naturalism reject is not science but the inferences made as a result of certain assumptions.



A very crude illustration will have to suffice. 

 Suppose I am a food chemist and I arrive at my desk to find a chocolate cake. It is very much up my alley as a food chemist to have the tools to determine what components make up that cake. I may after a few hours of investigation be able to determine with a high degree of accuracy what the ingredients were - how many eggs were used, how much sugar, chocolate, flour is in the cake, what kind of frosting was used. I may even be able to determine if the cake used a store-bought mix or was baked from scratch and the approximate time of its baking. But it is not likely, apart from some other form of information from some other source, that I will be able to determine from the physical evidence in front of me who baked the cake. Nor can the makeup of the chemicals and physical components tell me why the cake was baked.

I might infer that a co-worker knew it was my birthday, but that is not a conclusion based on the ingredients of the cake. I might guess that the co-worker who made the cake is a particular lady who is addicted to the Food Network and loves chocolate. I might guess any number of things and might have good reason for preferring one solution to the mystery over another, but the ingredients of the cake in and of themselves would not be enough to lead me to a conclusion apart from other evidence beyond those ingredients.

Origins science is in a similar way, an attempt to infer where we came from and why using physical data we can measure, manipulate and study. We can know that rocks contain certain chemical elements that have radioactive properties. We can know that living organisms are composed of proteins and water and that there is a genetic code that maps out the construction of organisms. But the physical facts cannot tell us the full story of origins. We need additional information - and that information does not come from science or physical data.

Naturalists fill in the blanks using a particular set of assumptions about the nature of the universe. Natural processes alone explain most things, therefore it is reasonable to assume that natural processes can explain all things.

ID and creationism simply object that it is not a necessary axiom that all things can be explained purely in terms of natural law. So the inferences made from the same data at times suggest that natural processes alone are neither sufficient nor logical. They assert that no known processes produce an increase in complex, specified information, therefore it is a leap of logic to infer that natural processes can produce the genetic codes of a multitude of different organisms.

Both look at the same data, but come to different conclusions.

A naturalist and a creationist will look at the same volcanic rock, measure it's content of various minerals the same way and come to the exact same conclusions about the hard facts of what the rock is. They will not infer the same origin of the rock. The naturalist will assume natural processes formed the rock, that a certain original state of the rock and a constant rate of radioactive decay will show that the rock is x number of years old. The creationist will object that the original amount of radioactive components is not known and that the amount of radioactive elements can be altered by outside (generally natural) forces, therefore the current makeup of the rock cannot pinpoint the date of its origin in the distant and unobservable past.

And the debate rages on. But it is not generally the hard facts of observable science that are in dispute. It is the conclusions inferred from the facts.

Those who hold to Theistic Evolution have usually adopted the methods and assumptions of the naturalist. I would contend that stance is not entirely consistent with belief in a supernatural creator. And clearly, Augustine, who not only accepted the historicity of Adam, the fall, and the Genesis flood is not a good representative of a naturalist point of view.

But my main point here is simply that I am not in any way convinced that the events surrounding the formation of the universe can be accurately inferred from the study of present things, processes or events. In short, science can tell us what the universe is in a way that is factual, but it is beyond the realm of science to refer to inferences made about why, how and when as "facts". We simply don't have all the "outside" information. We know the ingredients of the cake from empirical study, but we do not know how, why and cannot even be certain about when.