The Religion Called Science

Lay-led Sermon by Burns Fisher, December 2, 1990

Words For Reflection

Does anyone remember high school geometry? I know that I don't remember many of the details. It was one of the classes that I liked the least in high school. However, I have remembered the methods that we used in that class, because they are fundamental to all of science.

Remember postulates? These are the very basic set of assumptions which you accept without proof. In the geometry which we learned in HS, one postulate is that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. From there we went on to prove that parallel lines never meet; that perpendicular lines meet exactly once, etc etc.

Geometry is a microcosm of science in general. We start with some basic assumptions and on top of these assumptions, we build theorems to explain the universe.

What are the assumptions of science? I hope you're not expecting me to answer that question in full during the words for reflection. Not even in the sermon. What I would like to leave for your thought is this: One of the most basic assumptions of science is that it is important for scientific theories to be able to predict the behavior of future events. By making prediction the test of a new theory, science defines its most important postulate.

Does this make scientific theories true?

Many religions have different fundamental postulates. Prediction is not important to them. In some cases, religious postulates are validated by Divine Revelation. In other cases, by logical deduction from an observation.

Does this make religious tenets false?

Sermon

About 15 years ago, I was involved in a born-again Christian conversion experience. I want to tell you about this experience, because --- I won't keep you in suspense-- I was not converted myself, but the conversion nonetheless had a great influence on my religious thinking.

Ever since I can remember, I have been interested in science. I followed the launch of our first satellites and our first astronauts avidly. I experimented with chemistry and electricity while most kids were playing baseball. I grew up knowing that I was going to be an engineer, and sure enough, that is what happened. I have been a computer engineer (formerly a bit hardware, now software) for about 18 years. This conversion experience, however, began to define for me the other side of my existence ... my religious side, if you will.

At the time, I was a young engineer in Rochester NY working as a staff member on a research project. When I left my boyhood home 7 years earlier to go to college, I was freed from attending my boyhood Congregational church with my parents. As traditional religion stopped being renewed in me, and as I learned more and more about hard science, I started thinking of myself first as an agnostic and then as an atheist. I liked the shock value of calling myself an atheist. Maybe I did that instead of protesting or smoking pot or whatever during those college years in the late '60s.

Come 1975, I was working on a research project with an interesting group of people. One of my fellow engineers, a man named Gene, was of a similar religious persuasion to me. Our secretary was a woman who was, I think, a Seventh-Day Adventist.

One lunch time, Gene and I were discussing our secretary's religious beliefs and self-righteously comparing them to our own rational, science-based beliefs. At one point in the discussion, I said something like You know, you just can't reason with her. She is just starting from completely different postulates. (Remember postulates?) Gene agreed, we shook our heads sadly, and went on with other conversation.

Time passed and that discussion was mostly forgotten, by me at least. One day, though, Gene dropped a bombshell. He reminded me of my earlier comment on postulates. That got me thinking, he said. There is no way to prove one set of postulates over another, so I can just choose the set which is convenient for me. I have decided to choose the religious postulates which say that the Bible is the word of God and is infallible. Based on the postulates which he chose for himself, he built a consistent belief structure which matched up quite closely with fundamentalist Christianity.

I was of course, flabbergasted. I don't remember what I said. Maybe nothing but incoherent sounds! Gene and I continued to be good friends for the remaining years that I was in Rochester. I think that we respected and liked each other enough so that we could not reject each other's beliefs out of hand, but neither could we (or really did we try) to change the other's mind. Gene's rebirth did, in the long run, have a profound effect on me, though, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for that. His conversion started me on a 15-year on-and-off thought session about the foundation of beliefs, including the foundation of science.

What is science? Most of us, including those of us who are scientists and engineers ourselves, think of science as an answerer of questions, a way of finding the truth about the issues that it deals with.

In 7th grade, I had to memorize a definition of science which I think is more accurate. Science, the definition goes, is the orderly classification of data and the development of explanations for that data which can predict new data. Notice that this definition says nothing about truth. The sole criterion for the explanations of science given in this definition is that they can explain new data.

I want to try to clarify this definition by giving a short explanation of the scientific method. This explanation is brief and over-simplified, but the essence is there.

The scientific method is the means by which scientists try to convince others to accept their theories. Notice that I don't say for ascertaining the truth or for ascertaining the facts. The method is this:

  1. Gather data by experimentation
  2. Formulate a hypothesis which describes (or some might say explains) the data
  3. Use the hypothesis to predict the outcome of additional experiments
  4. Confirm the hypothesis by performing the additional experiments

All of the above must be subject to continual scrutiny and duplication by others in the field.

Notice that the final step, the confirmation or proof, is that the new hypothesis can predict the results of new experiments. This is what defines the most important characteristic of an accepted hypothesis (called a theory).

I want to focus on that word explains vs my preferred word describes. It is my contention that these are not the same. Consider, for example, the theory of gravity. It states that two masses attract each other in proportion to the size of the masses and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. With this elegantly simple theory, along with the similarly simple laws of motion, we can describe very accurately the orbits of the planets about the sun and even of our sun within the galaxy. With these theory, we can predict the orbits of spacecraft and launch them to follow these orbits. And we can determine how fast a cannonball falls from the top of the Tower of Pisa. But does this explain gravity? Not to me. There is no mention of why masses attract each other. Now it is certainly true that more detailed theories have been offered and are generally accepted. One theory describes gravitation as the exchange of particles called gravitons, for example. I am not a physicist, and I don't pretend to be able to discuss gravitons. However, I do know one thing: At some level, you have to stop asking why and say Because it works that way, or perhaps Because that is what the theory says, and the theory describes the results of all experiments that have been done so far

Another way to say what I have been talking about is that scientific theories are metaphors which describes the natural world. It does not matter if a scientific theory is true (if there is such a thing as truth in this context). It only matters that the theory correctly describes and predicts. In fact, even in science there are different metaphors which can be used to describe the same phenomena. Scientists choose the metaphor which suits the specific case better.

Here are three examples of science as metaphor:

Newton's laws of motion are very accurate, and are still used today for predicting relatively slow phenomena like the motions of planets and automobiles. However, they are known to be incomplete. For speeds approaching that of light and for objects close to a large mass like the sun, we need to switch to different metaphors, Einstein's Special and General Theories of Relativity. Under normal conditions, Einstein gives the same answer as Newton. The trick is to use the simpler Newton theories when they apply, and Einstein's when Newton does not apply.

Multiple metaphors in science are not always just different levels of completeness. For a second example, consider light. You may be familiar with the traditional model of light which is to say that it is a wave similar to what you see in water at the beach. There are many physical phenomena which seem to show that light is a wave. For one thing, the holograms which you probably have on your credit card would not work if light did not act like a wave. However, there is another metaphor to describe light. That is that light is formed from particles called photons. You have probably also seen an example of this behavior in a science museum gift shop. I am thinking of a little gadget called a radiometer. It consists of some fins balanced on a bearing inside a sealed glass. If you shine light on the radiometer, the fins spin around as if hit by particles. The photon metaphor describes this phenomenon perfectly. But here is an example where one metaphor is not just a more complex form of another. These are two completely different metaphors. You choose the right one depending on the experiment you happen to be performing. I am tempted to think that neither of these explanations is truth.

As a final example of science as metaphor, and one which gets a bit closer to traditional religion, let's try Evolution. The Theory of Evolution is a very satisfactory description of what we have discovered about early species, and has successfully predicted many additional discoveries. But I contend that it is a metaphor, whose purpose is to explain and predict. It may coincide closely with what really happened; it may not. Suppose that there is a personal God who created the world in 7 days a few thousand years ago, but suppose He designed it so that the theory of Evolution describes perfectly what we find now. Even if this is what really happened, the Evolution metaphor is much more useful to us than the Creation metaphor for description and prediction. If our purpose in forming these metaphors is description and prediction, it doesn't matter what really happened.

On the other hand, if we want to try to answer questions about the purpose for the Universe, or if we want to discuss our feelings about the Universe, perhaps metaphors from religious myths are more useful than those of science. For some of us, might not the vision of a Mother Earth giving birth to the bounteous life on our planet be more expressive than evolution about our feelings of thanks and joy, of the warmth and love we feel for our planetary home?

For some of us, might not a metaphor which rolls our combined feelings of wonder and terror of the unimaginable into the image of a loving yet stern and all-powerful god express some of our feelings?

What I think I have been talking about here is the reason why I like to think of science as being closer to a religion than to a purveyor of truth. Both are based on unprovable postulates; both attempt to answer questions of one type or another, but most importantly, both define their own methods of determining how their success is measured.

You may feel that what I have described is a prescription for religious or scientific chaos. Everything is a metaphor anyway; just believe what you want--it doesn't matter. On the contrary--I think that these metaphors are very important; it matters very much which metaphor we use. One of the most confusing problems facing us today is that we choose the wrong metaphors for a particular purpose or insist on using the same metaphor for all cases.

For an example, consider the abortion issue. Proponents of both sides (although primarily the anti-abortion groups) have tried to use scientific evidence to support their claims. Science says that life begins at conception. I don't buy this kind of argument. Remember science's purpose? To allow prediction of future data. Remember how science determines if it succeeds? By successful predictions. I argue that the abortion question is not amenable to scientific analysis. What is there to predict? Even if there is something to predict, how is the prediction to be tested? To me, the morality of abortion is a religious question, not a scientific one. It involves pondering the unknowable. It involves weighing portions of good against portions of bad. This is what traditional religion is all about.

A few minutes ago, I talked about my friend Gene who was converted to Christianity. Even after his conversion, we continued to like and respect each other, and to have conversations about our religious beliefs. I had less well defined beliefs then, but in looking back from my current perspective, I see a man who had his metaphors straight. He was an excellent engineer, using scientific metaphors when they made sense. However, he did not let his scientific metaphors blind him when religious metaphors made more sense. When he saw young boys at risk, his religious compassion inspired him to become a big brother to several, for example.

How does all this relate to us as Unitarian-Universalists? Our UU Purposes and Principles contain these words: 

The living tradition we share draws from many sources:
...
Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to
God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;

Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit....

To me, the freedom from one single orthodoxy, be it that of science, or of traditional religion is the very essence of being a Unitarian-Universalist. Both science and traditional religion provide metaphors to think about the world. As Unitarian-Universalists, we must recognize that many seemingly conflicting traditions and teachings are useful in different contexts. Further, we must recognize that if we stubbornly chain all our innermost thoughts and beliefs to one metaphor we are hobbling our ability to express ourselves, and even our ability to think and feel.

Again from the UU Principles and Purposes: Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision.

I am primarily an engineer; science is my stock in trade. Although I no longer feel the need to continually use the word, I am still an atheist by the definitions of most people here. My personal belief is that the evolution metaphor is probably closer to what really happened than any of the religious creation metaphors that I have heard. However, when I lie in the grass on my back and look out into the Universe, or when I walk through a forest teeming with life, I am filled with an overpowering sense of wonder, awe, and mystery which no scientific explanation can take away. This beautiful but awesome mystery is what I define as God.

Copyright © 1994 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.