Brainiac? Science abuse…
A while ago I posted a bit of a blog about a tv show called “Brainiac: Science abuse” where acumenally-challenged “scientists” would test out science with wierd and wacky experiments… This post is about another kind of science abuse that I experienced this week…
Now I don’t want to start an argument about anything (no really!). I’ve been here before and it was fun for a while and I learned a lot, but then it got frutrating and unproductive. So let’s not get stuck into a creationist/evolutionist argument, or worse a religion/science argument. Of course with my comment popularity recently it probably won’t be a problem! 
This week we had a seminar on Creation, it was the second of two seminars, the first was interestingly looking at ancient-near-eastern myths of creation and how the biblical account measured up alongside them. It was interesting for many reasons, if people ask nicely I might post about some of them. This week we had Creation and Modern Science. Now I feel this was looked at due to it being a (seemingly eternally) hot-potato as Jim would put it. It will tell you something of this class if I explained that among the top “scientists” there were two Ashby trained engineers, one from the Keir and a language teacher with a degree in psychology. So as you can appreciate we weren’t the best qualified group of people to discuss and critique the apparently consensical view of science.
Yet I found that I was having to stick up for science. On one occasion I had to correct a mistaken scientific viewpoint pronounced with such force that if I hadn’t studied this as a part of my degree I would have assumed was a valid scientific viewpoint, not only that, but I didn’t even point out the major flaw in his argument, I just swung and swatted at the minor one nearest me at the time and only had a brief second to explain that before the ever scientifically-humble professor reminded us all we weren’t scientists! (For all those interested it was an argument based on informational entropy which we touched on while learning information theory in informatics.)
But my beef here isn’t with creation or with evolution. My beef (had steak for dinner, beef on the brain) is with people who misuse a discipline, specifically in this case science, to prove their “Christian” point. I get extremely annoyed when I hear people spouting pseudo-scientific garbage in order to refute the evils of science and defend God (as though he can’t defend himself! more on that story later…).
Firstly I get annoyed at the loss of face this brings the Christian community worldwide. We are relatively lucky here in that it hasn’t struck us as savagely as it has across the pond in the USA. We don’t have the same debacle over here really (perhaps though, it is more down to the scientific community’s tolerance than it is to our zealous creationist’s diplomacy)
But I am often outraged at the viewpoint people have of Christians as a result of this. We don’t have a leg to stand on anymore when it comes to these discussions because so often scientific laws and theorums have been tied to a chair and beaten until no longer recognisable and a confession can be forced. Trotting these out shows our scientific inadequacy and turns our valid witness of Christ into ignorable, laughable trash.
Secondly I get annoyed that people feel that they need to step in and sort these bullies out, like they are God’s big brother and he’s getting picked on in the playground by the smart kids calling him names and confusing him.
God doesn’t call us to prove he exists. He doesn’t need us to scientifically prove he created the world. He doesn’t need us to disprove scientific theory so there is room for him. He doesn’t need us to and nor does he ask us to.
God asks us to be witnesses to him.
We are called to be apologists for our faith, don’t get me wrong, we should have answers, but the answer we are told to have is “an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (1 Peter 3:15, NIV) If our best answer is informatics or thermodynamics, then we have real faith issues we need to deal with…
