What is Science?
“Hold on to your butts.”
Science is a fantastic tool for studying the physical universe. It reveals how things work and helps us improve our lives in countless ways. And it affects everything; health, travel, entertainment, communication, work, government, pizza (you can order from your bathtub!), etc. We hear much about STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math, and for good reason. Human beings are changing the world - for good and bad - in countless ways through scientific enterprises.
Science is incredible
What is science, exactly? It is a method or system for answering questions about the physical world. The Scientific Method is a way to test hypotheses and come up with better explanations for the things we observe. Scientific observation is a method of using our senses and our tools (some of them incredibly complex) to know what exists in the universe and what it is like. Through experiments and observation, we are able to form better theories about how things work, from atoms to galaxies.
The results of the scientific enterprise are incredible. When you consider how our lives and knowledge have changed in the past few generations because of scientific discoveries, it’s hard to even imagine what our ancestors’ experiences of the world must have been like.
Our lives are shaped by the science and technology we use. Many of our grandparents grew up with radio instead of television. They had to go to theaters to see movies. Their cars were death traps, and they were killed of all kinds of preventable diseases. They communicated through hand-written letters, and they went to a library for information. They could not have imagined what their grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s lives would be like. (Who could have predicted the Snuggie ™?)
Science is incomplete
The temptation that many face today is to make a god of science. It’s not hard to do - first of all, humans are idol-factories; our sinful pride steers us away from worshipping the true God, and so we look for anything else to idolize. Secondly, science has done more for us than many of the gods of the past, so it’s easy to focus on its achievements and think that its power and potential are unlimited. And so we have seen the “New Atheists” (who never seem to say anything new, and are much less thoughtful than the Old Atheists) who claim that science has dethroned God and made Him irrelevant.
Such accusations are no threat to the Christian who knows his or her history, theology, or even science. Because we know two things: First of all, God is a lot bigger than “an explanation for things we don’t know” (what philosophers call God of the Gaps). And second, that science, great as it is, has limits. It has one job - to figure out the physical universe - and it’s really useless for anything else. So, when people try to stretch science to cover other areas, it has a tendency to tear.
Science cannot answer questions about why anything exists or happens, only how. Science cannot answer moral questions, because morals are not subject to experimentation or (direct) observation. Science cannot fully explain human consciousness or relationships, and when evolutionary psychologists try, their answers are shallow and incomplete. (I’m convinced you can learn more about psychology from any one of Shakespeare’s plays than you can from any five psychology textbooks.) Science cannot explain all kinds of supernatural experiences that people claim to have (though it can debunk some of them). Science is great, but it’s not great for everything.
Science is imperfect
In addition to being limited in scope, science is imperfect in practice. That’s because it is carried out by imperfect creatures (humans). Even the best scientists are prone to bias, error, ego, and blindness. That’s why we’ve created a system of checks and balances by review and replication, and standards for conducting experiments and observations. But of course, even our systems are far from perfect. We can only do the best we can and trust that we’ll gradually draw nearer and nearer to a more complete understanding of reality.
Science is amoral
Thirdly, science is amoral. Because it is a tool of great power, it can be (and has been) used for tremendous good and incredible evil. It has been used to cure diseases, and it has been used to create chemical weapons. Science has been used to make our lives easier and longer, but also to destroy natural environments and create injustice and inequality. Science itself cannot provide us with a moral framework for thinking about the world, just as a hammer can’t help you decide whether you should use it to build a house for a needy family or bludgeon your neighbor and take his lawn mower.
Because science cannot provide our morality, we have to get it from philosophy - and everybody does, even if they claim otherwise. Christians get their morality from God, who has revealed Himself in the Bible and the Church. Many Secularists tend get their morals from a kind of utilitarianism (do what does the most good for the most people). There’s nothing in science that tells a person to be moral, but we Christians believe that as creatures made in the image of God, people have His law written on our hearts and, deep inside, we know what He wants us to do.
Science is a gift
Science is great. I am thankful for good scientists and all of the ways they’ve made life better. But science is not God. Science is just one tool for understanding the universe we inhabit and for enacting our will upon it (which we’re called to do as stewards of God’s stuff). Science is a gift from God, and, while even Atheists can do it well, I believe that they are relying on their creator to do good science whether they realize it or not.
Despite what Atheists, Agnostics, and other secularists might have you believe, science makes a great tool and a terrible philosophy. While it can explain many fascinating things, it cannot explain the things that matter most: Why do we exist? What is love? What is relationship? Why do we think and feel? What is our eternal destiny? (Just how much wood woulda woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? And what is “chucking” in the first place?)
Science does not, cannot, and will never be able to answer some questions. And that’s okay. That’s why we have worldviews like Christianity - to tie everything together and make sense of ultimate reality. Let’s celebrate science and do it well, but keep it in its rightful place as one way of knowing one type of truth. Long live science, as science.