withallyourmind.net

The position which dominates secular western culture in our day is called scientific materialism. Scientific materialism asserts that science is the only way to gain reliable knowledge and that matter (and perhaps energy) is the only fundamentally existing reality. All nonmaterial things either do not exist or are reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. Carl Sagan claimed

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Jacques Monod has claimed that biology has proven that there is no purpose in nature:

Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.

Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine.”

Edward O Wilson believes that the mind will be explained as…

… an epiphenomenon of the neural machinery of the brain.

The reason science and religion appear to be at war is traceable to the substitution of scientific naturalism for science as it had been previously understood. The war is a war of worldviews, not of science and religion. Science has been hijacked by a philosophy at odds with the philosophy which produced modern science in the first place. Richard Dawkins claimed:

Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory…we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.

Why? Because it is naturalistic. A professor from Kansas State University stated:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.

Now, the definition of science has been debated by scientists and philosophers for a long time, but it seems to me that science should, if anything, be a search for truth and should be based on a willingness to go where the evidence leads. Modern science seems anything but this. Modern science is a product of a prior philosophical commitment. The commitment to naturalism is unquestioned dogma in education today. Harvard Biologist Richard Lewontin, in a review of Carl Sagan’s, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, admitted…

… we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… It’s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation… On the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes.

He goes on to state that this commitment must be absolute so as not to allow a “divine foot” in the door. To summarize, it is not religion and science which are at war, but naturalism and supernaturalism.

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