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| His Voice - Reflections |
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| Written by Scott McKinley / Reflections | |
| Friday, 25 April 2008 | |
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Let science peer into the gaps There is a theory that explains everything but reveals nothing. It’s called “God did it.”  Scott McKinley / Reflections At best, writing off mysteries as acts of God turns people away from studying a problem. At worst, it creates active ignorance where scientific progress is forbidden. This has happened many times in history. A particularly striking example is found in the 16th century, when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the theory that the Earth moved around the sun, instead of the accepted theory that the sun moved around the Earth. In old times, people wondered why the planets and the sun moved in the sky. Without a good answer, they decided that “God did it” in the form of angels or other deities pushing and pulling objects in the great dome over our head. Such explanations found their way into books of the time, and people accepted them. Copernicus, Galileo and other scientists, though, pushed the idea that the Earth orbited the sun, a theory that ran into a lot of religious opposition because it was challenging established belief about God and how he set up the world. Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10 and 1 Chronicles 16:30 were quoted to state that “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.” Psalm 104:5 made the similar claim that “(the Lord) set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” Ecclesiastes 1:5 adds that “the sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” Even Martin Luther criticized Copernicus by referring to Joshua 10:12-13: “The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the Earth.” While the moving-Earth theory has been well-established, history repeats itself with other God-of-the-gaps arguments, like God’s providence over disease versus inoculation and, more recently, creationism versus the Big Bang, the theory of evolution and abiogenesis. Abiogenesis, the study of how life came from nonlife, is a good example of gaps in scientific knowledge. Scientists have not found the route by which life developed on Earth. But the fact that scientists cannot yet give a definite answer to all mysteries does not mean we should immediately make the assumption that God’s direct intervention is the solution to the unknown. There are many good hypotheses on how life could have developed. Most scientists do not think life started as modern bacteria of a few hundred proteins. Instead, the search is on for self-replicating molecules that could build and evolve complex structures through chemical means. This field is rife with interesting results, such as a 32-amino-acid-long peptide chain that self-replicates, or a strand of six DNA nucleotides that copies itself. However, we don’t know the simplest route from nonlife to life, though the odds are not as desperate as creationist literature would make them out to be. Science cannot say what set off the Big Bang, if anything did. It cannot reveal every fossil that shows a species transition. It cannot show the simplest route from nonlife to life. But those gaps in our knowledge need not be filled with the simple but unprovable assertion that “God did it.” What science can say is that we have some interesting ideas and some great possibilities. Scott McKinley is a scientist and a local Patterson resident. He may be reached by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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