Skepticism

It is very common to talk to somebody who is skeptical about matters of spirituality. After all, if you can’t see it, it can’t be real……..Right? This same person, however, will believe just about anything you tell them as long as it is “scientific”. There is very little skepticism in our world about matters of “science”. I think we need to take science with a grain of salt. To put it another way, we need to asses matters of science with the same cautious, critical eye as we do matters of spirituality. As a disclaimer, I worked 40 years in a job that was applied science. I am by nature and training a scientist.

So……why should we look at science with the eye of a skeptic?

1. The scientists haven’t figured it all out yet. Every year we learn more. In 10 years we will know twice what we know now. In 10 years, some of what we “know” today will be wrong. We will look back and laugh at how naive we used to be. In 1492 the greatest scientific minds of the age told Columbus that the world was flat. In the middle ages they were in laboratories trying to turn lead into gold. In the late 1700’s, they bled George Washington to treat his pneumonia. In 1980, they believed that ulcers were caused by stress and treated them by cutting out your stomach. The scientists are smart, most of them are honest, and they are trying hard. But, THEY DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING.

As Will Rogers said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble…….it’s what you KNOW that ain’t so.”

2. Astrophysicists are the people who tell us how the universe formed and how it behaves…….how we got here.  They describe with complete confidence the “big bang”, the expanding universe, black holes and so on. But, if you question them closely, they will say that their theories don’t fully explain the universe. In a word, the theories are wrong …….or at least incomplete. For the universe to behave as they say it does, there must be much more mass and energy out there than they have found. They call this “missing” stuff “dark matter” and “dark energy”.  Here’s the rub. The “missing stuff” amounts to about 80% of the observable universe. In other words, the scientists who are telling us how we got here are basing their theories on observations of a system that they have only seen 20% of. This is not a great confidence builder. One of the “missing” things is the “Higgs boson”……and no I can’t explain it. They even call it “the God particle”. This may be an astrophysics joke.

If somebody proposed to explain to you how your car works after inspecting in detail the radio, A/C, and heater, but without ever having seen what goes on under the hood, they would likely get it wrong……and, you would be correctly skeptical.

Scientists cannot prove that God doesn’t exist. They don’t even try. They don’t have the tools to assess the supernatural. And yet, the conclusion that we must draw from listening to them,  is that they have everything figured out…….. and that God isn’t involved. If you think about it, they begin with the tacit assumption that God does not exist, because any explanation that involves the supernatural is discarded.

All that I am asking you to do is to maintain a healthy doubt…..a healthy skepticism about science and it’s limitations.

Because, in that 80% of the universe that we haven’t seen…….yet……. there is plenty of room for God.