Modern Science and Belief in God
Science fails as an attempt to demonstrate God's non-existence
It is well known that the scientific developments of the twentieth century have greatly altered the Newtonian world-view... The Newtonian laws of motion had given rise to a philosophy of mechanism... Nothin inconsistent with mathematical equations could take place. These laws were fixed, absolute, accurate descriptions of how nature works. Therefore, there could be no miracles, no soul, no personal immortality, no God.
...Newtonian science, quite apart from any twentieth century reversal, cannot validly support these conclusions. The picture of science itself is mistaken, and its extension to religious affairs is unwarranted.
...The processes of science as actually carried on in the laboratories do not justify the conclusion that the laws of mechanics describe how nature works... At best, scientific law is a construction, not a discovery, and the construction depends on factors never seen... Mechanism is no the scientific discovery of a fixed and final truth, nor is any law of physics a description of how nature works. This much can be asserted strictly within the limits of the Newtonian era.
When now we come to the scientific revolution of the twentieth century, not only are these conclusions confirmed, but we are introduced to a radically new view, not merely of the accuracy of particular laws, but of the nature, the limitations, the purpose and significance of science as a whole... [The] notion... that the laws of science are permanently beyond question has to a large measure been replaced by the... more skeptical view that all science is tentative... [Percy] Bridgman waxes emphatic: "It is difficult to conceive anything more scientifically bigoted than to postulate that all possible experience conforms to the same type as that with which we are familiar"... The significance of this theory of the operational character of concepts should not be missed... They are not descriptions of natural objects or physical realities. The laws of physics... do not describe how nature goes on. They describe how the physicist goes on...
In contrast the the former, the more recent scientists have recognized certain limitations of science and have entertained a greater or lesser degree of skepticism... Science then must not be regarded as cognitive, but rather as an attempt to utilize nature for our needs and wants... Instead of being a gateway to all knowledge, science is not a way to any knowledge... Scientific naturalism, that is, naturalism offered as an inescapable conclusion of science, must be repudiated... In his presidential address before the American Philosophical Association in 1954, Ernest Nagel said, "There is no place for the operation of disembodied forces, no place for an immaterial spirit directing the course of events, no place for the survival of personality after the corruption of the body which exhibits it."
Much less can physics demonstrate the non-existence of a Supreme Intelligence... who directs the universe for his own purposes. And how laboratory procedure, confined in the nineteenth century to impossibly ideal conditions in the here and now, and in the twentieth century barred from all descriptive application to reality, can show that personality does not survive death in a future life is utterly unintelligible. - From The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God, by Gordon H. Clark (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1964). Used by permission.
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