What exactly is this problem? Astronomer and physicist Lee Smolin writes that if the universe started at a point in time, this “leaves the door open for a return of religion:’ This prospect has Smolin aghast. “Must all of our scientific understanding of the world really come down to a mythological story in which nothing exists … save some disembodied intelligence, who, desiring to start a world, chooses the initial conditions and then wills matter into being?” Smolin adds, “It seems to me that the only possible name for such an observer is God, and that the theory is to be criticized as being unlikely on these grounds.”
Here we have scientists who do not seem to be acting like scientists. Why is it necessary to object to findings in modern physics in order to give evolution time to get going? Why is it important to avoid the “problem of Genesis” or to shrink away from any theory that suggests a divine hand in the universe? If the evidence points in the direction of a creator, why not go with it?
Douglas Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution, gives part of the answer. “One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed,” he told the New York Times. “That’s a fundamental presumption of what we do.” Biologist Barry Palevitz makes the same point. “The supernatural,” he writes, “is automatically off-limits as an explanation of the natural world.”
Erwin and Palevitz are absolutely correct that there is a ban on miracles and the supernatural in modern scientific exploration of the universe. Yet their statements raise the deeper question: why are miracles and the supernatural ruled out of bounds at the outset? If a space shuttle were to produce photographs of never-before-seen solar bodies that bore the sign YAHWEH MADE THIS, would the scientific community still refuse to acknowledge the existence of a supernatural creator?Yes, it would. And the reason is both simple and surprising: modern science was designed to exclude a designer. So dogmatic is modern science in its operating procedures that today all evidence of God is a priori rejected by science. Even empirical evidence of the kind normally admissible in science is refused a hearing. It doesn’t matter how strong or reliable the evidence is; scientists, acting in their professional capacity, are obliged to ignore it. The position of modern science is not that no miracles are possible but rather that no miracles are allowed.
All of this may seem surprising, in view of how science developed out of the theological premises and institutions of Christianity. Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and others all saw a deep compatibility between science and religion. In the past century and a half, however, science seems to have cast aside its earlier presupposition that the universe reflects the rationality of God. Now scientists typically admit the orderliness of nature but refuse to consider the source of that orderliness. One reason for the shift is the increasing secularization of the intelligentsia since the mid-nineteenth century, a process described by Christian Smith in his book The Secular Revolution.
Another is the discovery that unexplained mysteries of the universe, once attributed to God, can now be given scientific explanations. “The Darwinian revolution,” Ernst Mayr writes, “was not merely the replacement of one scientific theory by another, but rather the replacement of a worldview in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant explanatory principle by a new worldview in which there was no room for supernatural forces.” Consequently, science has become an entirely secular enterprise, and this—oddly enough—creates problems for science. By narrowly focusing on a certain type of explanation, modern science is cutting itself off from truths not amenable to that type of explanation.
