The Science God:

   Theism by Reason Alone

 

 

      by Dwight Wendell

Preface

Faith and reason are not enemies. But nor can they really be called friends. They are different aspects of the same thing. Science is simply the form that religion has taken in the modern world, and science has both faith and reason embedded in it. That is the message of this book. But I know I will have to make my case well if I am to get readers to see that what I am asserting is so.

We live in an age that we like to think of as an age of reason par excellence. We assume science and the methods of science are increasing in influence in our world with every day that passes, and we celebrate that fact because we have seen over and over that the majority of the cruel and stupid abuses of the past can be traced directly to the unscientific superstitions of the societies in which they occurred.

But at the same time, the moral codes we need simply to move through our daily lives, from the personal level to the global, have suffered serious damage in the last four centuries, largely because these moral codes haven’t held up under the scrutiny of this same science. Most people know this on some level. We are bolstered and encouraged by the material progress science has brought us, but we are also frightened by the amorality of its world view.   

From the old codes of right and wrong, we keep getting directions that we can see are obsolete. Executing murderers, for example, is entirely counterproductive. In the meantime, however, the new gurus of Western society, namely the scientists, when they are asked to define right and wrong, say that science cannot comment on morality or, worse yet, they flatly assert that all moral values are no more than fantasy concoctions, about as empirically real as Santa Claus.¹

Science has given us the capacity to do harm on a planetary scale. Because of that, we need guidance; we need answers and not just piecemeal ones. We need a general moral system that can tell us which of our actions are at least tending toward right and which are not. We can’t go on doing things like building nuclear weapons and polluting our planet without, sooner or later, having to face consequences. Environmentalists from Rachel Carson to David Suzuki have said we must stop the madness.^2,3

 

             

The nuclear physicist’s nightmare is even more horrifying, so much so that Einstein himself said the unleashing of the power of the atom had set us drifting toward “unparalleled catastrophe.”⁴

                                         

        

We have a reasonable chance of surviving on into the future only if we can work out a new moral code that we can all agree to live by. Every other path into the future is shadowed by a high probability of disaster. That is the dark side of the power science has given us.