Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents
Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon
“So vast, without any question, is the divine handiwork of the Almighty Creator!” —Nicolaus Copernicus
LISTS OF THE GREAT IDEAS of modern science typically contain a major omission. On such lists we are sure to find Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, Kepler’s laws, Newton’s laws, and Einstein’s theory of relativity yet the greatest idea of modern science is almost never included. It is such a big idea that it makes possible all the other ideas. And it is invisible to us because it is an assumption taken for granted rather than a theory that has been formulated. Oddly enough, the greatest idea of modern science is based not on reason but on faith.
Faith is not a highly acclaimed word in the scientific community “I do not believe that the scientist can have that same certainty of faith that very deeply religious people have,” writes physicist Richard Feynman in The Meaning of It All. Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson complains that “the claims of religions rely on faith” and boasts that “the claims of science rely on experimental verification.”3 Feynman and Tyson seem quite unaware that at the heart of their cherished scientific enterprise is a faith-based proposition no less mysterious than any religious dogma. This is the presumption, quite impossible to prove, that the universe is rational.
Scientists today take for granted the idea that the universe operates according to laws, and that these laws are comprehensible to the human mind. Science is based on what author James Trefil calls the principle of universality: “It says that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time.” Physicist Steven Weinberg writes, “All my experience as a physicist leads me to believe that there is order in the universe…. As we have been going to higher and higher energies and as we have studied structures that are smaller and smaller, we have found that the laws, the physical principles, that describe what we learn become simpler and simpler…. The rules we have discovered become increasingly coherent and universal…. There is a simplicity, a beauty, that we are finding in the rules that govern matter that mirrors something that is built into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.”
