Is God explained away by science?

G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: Is God explained away by science?

This is very relevant question for us living here in the 21^st century which is so dominated by science and technology.

In essence, it’s a question is about the nature of explanation or how we know things. So to get to the heart of it we need to unpack the kind of knowledge science gives us, to then understand whether or not God is explained away by science.

And there are three brief things to say here.

First: let’s define science.

Historically speaking, the English word ‘science’ comes from the Latin word scientia which means knowledge of what something is because of how and why something is what it is.

For example, if I have scientia knowledge of myself sitting in this chair, then I have knowledge of how this chair is holding me up, through the mechanical structure and process of stresses and strains in the chair legs which support my weight and my back, and also why it is holding me up: because I desire to be comfortable as I speak into this microphone!

Now here’s the thing: this classical view of scientia is not what we mean by the word ‘science’ today in modern English. If we look at the Oxford English Dictionary for a definition of science, there are actually 10 different definitions, but it says “the most usual sense [of ‘science’] since the mid-19^th century” is as follows: “[Science is] The intellectual and practical activity encompassing those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the physical universe and their laws…”

So, you see, when we say ‘science’ today, we have a limited meaning to only what things are because of how they are, because of how “the phenomena of physical universe and their laws” work. It’s like saying I know the reason I’m sitting in this chair: it’s because of how it holds me up with the legs and the back and so on. Basically, it’s dropped the why explanation off.

That’s the first point: modern science tends to only refer to how physical things work and interact. And that leads to a second point about the nature of modern science.

Knowing HOW something works doesn’t mean that the reason WHY it works isn’t important or doesn’t exist! That’s like saying: ‘wood doesn’t exist, because my metal detector can’t detect it!’ A metal doctor doesn’t pick up wood because it’s a metal detector! That’s what it’s programmed to do.

Or think of this analogy. Elon Musk and Tesla cars. If you got your hands on a Tesla 3, reverse engineered it and understood everything there was to understand about the electric motor, the battery, power storage and distribution, computer functions and so on – if you knew everything there was to know about how a Tesla 3 works – that how knowledge doesn’t do anything to preclude the existence of Elon Musk and his engineering team. Why? Because the description of how a Tesla 3 works is not the same as the explanation for why there is a Tesla 3 that works, namely Elon Musk and his crew. The descriptors and the explanans are not on the same explanatory level with one another. One is a how description of process, the other a why explanation of purpose.

But that’s not to say that they aren’t related; I mean, if anything, reverse engineering a Tesla 3 just begs the question of who the engineer is. The ingenuity and intelligence of that engineering feat is like a signpost to the intelligent engineer. That kind of intelligence is a mark of personal agency because the intelligibility of the how description is in a sense contingent on the why explanation. If there was no Elon Musk and crew of engineers, there would be no Tesla 3 to talk about… You see, that’s why the engineering of a Tesla 3 points to the Engineer of the Tesla 3. The engineering carries the indelible mark of the engineer.

So to bring it back to the original question: Is God explained away by science?

No. Describing how the natural world works does not preclude the explanation for why the natural world works the way it does, or more fundamentally that it even is to begin with. The how and ahy of science and God are not competing, they are complimentary. The issue is not degrees of understanding but kinds of understanding. Only if we suppose that the how description and why explanation are of the same category or kind will we be faced with a contradiction and therefore pressed to choose between alternatives.

Science explains how the universe works. God explains why science explains how the universe works.