The Limitations of Science

by David George

Science was one of my favorite subjects in school. It ranked second only to history. I especially enjoyed science when I got to high school and I realized that science had entire disciplines within it that I could study: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Geology, Astronomy, etc. So I took AP Chemistry & AP Physics my senior year of high school for the fun of it. (I realize that I have a strange concept of fun.) In fact the biggest disappointment in my college academic career is that I couldn’t fit any geology classes into my schedule in 7 years. That still irks me to this day.

Webster defines science as: “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena.” Inherent in this definition is the inability of science to explain supernatural phenomena. That is where religion comes in to the picture. Throughout all of human history man has been unable to explain all of the phenomena that he has experienced through just natural laws and processes. Now in many instances, supernatural explanations were given to natural phenomena that simply were not understood. For instance the ancient Greeks believed that lightning struck the tallest trees in the forest because the gods were trying to humble them.

But just because natural phenomena were incorrectly explained in the past, we can’t presume that all phenomena that we experience have natural causes and supernatural explanations are just symptoms of ignorance. That would be a great presumption and presupposition. But in fact that is the great presupposition of Naturalism, the philosophy that manifests itself in the Big Bang theory, Darwinian Evolution and most science textbooks. Webster defines naturalism as “the system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws without attributing supernatural significance to them.”

Naturalism masquerades as science because it holds scientific investigation as the supreme source of knowledge. That would be true in a world in which there are absolutely no supernatural phenomena, but what would happen if something supernatural took place? What if a stone suddenly turned into a loaf of bread? If a Naturalistic observer found the loaf of bread after the transformation took place and tried to explain its existence, they would conduct several experiments and determine that the bread was a composition of flour, salt, water, oil and carbon dioxide. Reason and experience would dictate that someone mixed the ingredients together, baked the bread and then left it where it was found. Measurements of the moisture content and temperature of the bread could even allow them to estimate how old the loaf of bread was. And even though this would seem to be a reasonable assessment of the origin of this loaf of bread it would be incorrect because of the philosophical limitations that Naturalism placed on the observer and the fact that he didn’t actually observe its origin.

So in a universe that has both natural and supernatural phenomena, science finds itself inadequate to explain everything. To be sure, it is very useful in explaining the natural phenomena, but it comes up very short in explaining supernatural phenomena.

That means that in the Origins debate we need to first determine if this universe is limited to natural phenomena or if it has supernatural phenomena too. If it does indeed have supernatural phenomena then we’ll need a lot more than just science to explain the universe.