The other night I went to go and see the new Sherlock Holmes movie with some of my friends. I'd seen it before, but my friends' college was showing it for free, so I decided I may as well see it again.
I wasn't real impressed with it the first time that I saw it, and I was even less so the second time, perhaps partly because I was tired and not very comfortable while watching the movie. I could go into detail on why I wasn't a huge fan, but that would make this post quite long, and I'd like to focus on something else.
That something else is the topic of science vs. non-science. It's not even science vs. religion, as the villain in the movie *spoiler warning!* pretends to have occult powers and such, and I wouldn't really consider the occult a religion in the classical sense.
At the "big reveal" at the end of the movie, Holmes explains how the so-called occult powers of the antagonist were actually just a series of cleverly concocted ruses designed to sway the weak and stupid. Nothing supernatural ever went on, and everything has a rational, scientific explanation.
I'm no fan of the occult, so I wasn't sad to see occult practices turned into shams, but the idea behind the whole thing bothers me because I see how pervasive it is in society. Science dominates in today's world, leaving little room for anything else.
Want examples? How about God? Anywhere science enters, God tends to get dismissed. In matters regarding the universe around us, you'll get laughed at for mentioning God. In matters of counseling, a field dealing with the mind and soul, God has been displaced by the science of mental illnesses and neurology. In matters of ethics and morality, God has been set aside in favor of statistics and genetic predispositions. Numerous times, I've heard people say people say "science proves that God doesn't exist", or something similar sentiment.
Here's the thing: science is basically mankind's combined efforts, and God is so much vastly greater than any combination of mankind. God made (and could unmake) the laws of science that we little humans tout so mightily.
I would like to see a little less reliance on science and a little more room for the supernatural. This runs counter to the prevailing idea that science is king and anything else is for the weak-minded and stupid, but in the end, it is the more accurate worldview. Because not everything fits into science's clean little boxes, and that's not going to change.
The Creature Behind the Blog
- Warrior-Poet
- Michael is a fairly average working man (when did that happen?) with an undying imagination and a sarcastic (and slightly black) sense of humor. In his spare time, he battles dragons and rescues damsels in a world that exists only in his own mind. Sometimes he forays into the real world, promptly realizes it was a bad idea, and returns home to his brain castle. He has been known to, on occasion, refer to himself in the third person.
1 comments:
Welcome to my life as a science major at a Christian school. What kills me is this notion that science and faith are mutually exclusive or in conflict in some way. THEY ARE NOT. Science and faith/theology seek different kinds of truth, answering different types of questions via different modes of inquiry.
Empirical science seeks to explain physical phenomena by asking and testing hypotheses. By nature, it must ask questions that are tangible and disprovable. The misconception in our society is that science can and must answer every question. According to our way of thinking, therefore, that which is not scientifically explicable cannot exist. This is when people dismiss the "supernatural" as "unscientific," therefore not real. We call this a logical fallacy.
Not so with questions of faith. Faith is concerned with ethics, purpose, and values. It asks the deep questions of life that cannot, by nature, be answered scientifically.
The problem with our culture is not the relative reliance on science and faith. It is a problem with understanding what science is, and what science does.
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