Science Seeks to Understand Nature

Many theologians believe that God wrote two “books”: The book commonly called Creation, and the book commonly called sacred Scripture. Science seeks to understand the Book of Creation. Understanding this book is essential to understanding Scripture since Creation provides the basis for language and the place where theology is experienced and practiced.

Science and Theology differ in the methods used to answer questions and the kinds of questions addressed. Using the wrong method to solve a problem leads to bad science or bad theology and frequently both.

For example: at a science fair a teenager had a polished presentation purporting to show that an iron ax head can float in water. She used a story from the Bible as her only method of data collection. Doing so she mocked the scientific method; she had not attempted to replicate the story nor gather her own data. She also obscured the theological application of the Bible story to her life. The result was bad science and bad theology.

Good science tests hypotheses to understand how the universe functions by collecting carefully measured data and examining that data against a proposed model. A great hypothesis allows others to collect similar data using different techniques that affirms or refutes the proposed model. An excellent hypothesis only becomes a scientific theory or law when enough data has been collected such that the model is affirmed to within a degree of error that is small relative to measurement errors. Once validated other scientists and engineers use that model or theorem to predict future outcomes within that accepted degree of error.

For example in 1572 Tycho Brahe desired to prove that the planets and stars orbit the earth. He hypothesized that with sufficient data one might determine the orbit of the Sun and planets. Forty years later Johannes Kepler examined Tycho’s data using spherical geometry and accurately determined that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn did not orbit around the earth but orbited around the Sun along ellipses, and that the earth also orbited the Sun. Tycho’s data invalidated his hypothesis. Kepler’s constants continue to be used 400 years later. Tycho’s process demonstrated a key point of the scientific method: an hypothesis must be falsifiable.

About 70 years after Kepler’s analysis of planetary motion, Isaac Newton used those equations to discern the inverse square law of gravity.

Each of these great discoveries have been tested and retested, and refined with new data using more accurately measured angles to the planets. Throughout history scientists have attempted to disprove Kepler and Newton. This is the nature of science. Continual testing of hypotheses and refining theories. The science is never complete. There always remains a measurable margin of uncertainty.

More recently scientists have examined minute perturbations from Newton and Kepler’s models of the solar system and hypothesized the existence of other planets. When astronomers subsequently examined those locations they spotted Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto and their moons. As astronomy has refined measurements of planetary motion, they have validated that gravity obeys General Relativity, acting at the speed of light instead of instantaneously as Newton had presumed.

The results of the scientific process have yielded many wonders of our daily life from predicting the location of planets, to the behavior of semiconductors essential for Cell Phones, to mRNA vaccines. Each of these wonders can be traced to original research with careful data collection that validated or falsified hypothetical models of physical properties. Each of these models are continually reviewed, questioned, validated, and occasionally invalidated or refined.

The scientific process of hypothesizing, data collection, reporting, review, questioning, validating, and extensive arguments, while of interest to the scientist, also sends a message of uncertainty to the rest of humanity. Current scientific methods manage this uncertainty through the use of probabilities.

People use probabilities in daily life, typically without quantification. For example driving across town to shop is generally considered safe, although there remains a small probability that another vehicle, perhaps a much larger vehicle could run head on in one’s own vehicle due to a mechanical failure of either vehicle, due to driver distraction, or due to a sudden physical ailment to either driver. Fortunately the probability of those scenarios is minuscule thus we readily expect to safely drive across town.

The end result of science is a deep understanding of how Creation operates. Science can tell us how we will proceed. Theology seeks to answer teleological question of why, or for what purpose, we are to proceed. These two disciplines must be co-equal authorities. One based on empirical knowledge and the other on cultural stories that have guided generations to live together. With each guiding the other.

Summary

My new theological framework seeks to better incorporate the results of careful scientific study of Creation.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ―Marie Curie