Why being religious is perfectly consistent with a scientific worldview

Why being religious is perfectly consistent with a scientific worldview

By Sy Garte, Op-ed contributor

Science is a methodology designed specifically to gain knowledge of the natural world, and thus part of the scientific method is a widely accepted principle that science is limited to exploration of how the natural world works. Since (by definition) religion is generally concerned with matters outside of what we call the natural world, it is not open to investigation by science.

We often hear atheists proclaim that there is no scientific proof or evidence for God, the soul, Heaven, or any other religious claim. This objection makes very little sense, for a variety of reasons. First, science is not in the business of proof in general, which belongs solely to mathematics and logic. I once challenged an atheist to find a single scientific paper, outside of mathematics and logic, that contained the word proof or proven, and he could not.

As for evidence, there are two kinds — strong and weak. The popular saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, despite the favor it found with Carl Sagan, is meaningless — it's not clear what "extraordinary" would mean, and in science, even the most unlikely claims simply require strong evidence to be considered true. For example, the idea that DNA could be the genetic molecule was universally rejected up until the 1940s for what were considered good reasons at the time, and then universally accepted in response to the strong evidence supplied by Watson and Crick in 1953.

But scientific evidence, strong or weak, cannot be applied to phenomena outside the natural world. The problem we face in dealing with many atheistic arguments is that they assume the reality of philosophical naturalism, which posits not only that the natural world is all that science can address (methodological naturalism), but that the natural world is in fact all there is. Underlying the circular reasoning is scientism — the idea that the natural world consists of only those parameters that can be addressed scientifically, and anything that cannot be addressed scientifically isn't real.

When we say that phenomena such as human consciousness, love, art, and spiritual experiences are something other than components of the natural world, we are told that this is false, and scientistic reductionism is then used to insist that all of the above are actually "nothing more than" the results of natural processes such as neural impulses, genetic or hormonal effects on brain function, and other explanations that supposedly fit perfectly into a materialistic worldview.

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