What is "Meaningful Science?"
For science to be meaningful it has to be built upon the right foundation.
You need motivation to do science, and moral direction for applying technology to the real world. You also need to assume several basic things about reality and about yourself before you even use the scientific method. Christianity provides all of these things better than any other religious worldview, especially Atheism. In fact, science without God is meaningless.Assumptions
Science comes from the Latin scientia, meaning “to know.” Why believe that we can perceive and understand the order in nature, that we can “know” anything about nature at all? Why do we believe we can transcend nature enough to manipulate it in experiments? For the Atheistic Humanist, man is nothing more than a mere mechanical part of the great cosmic machine. Every thought and every act is every much as determined by the laws of physics and the great chain of cause and effect as the digestive system. But you must ask, if the human brain is nothing but three pounds of chemicals that arranged themselves by chance over billions of years, if absolutely everything in the universe can be ultimately explained in terms of inanimate matter in mindless motion, then how can we trust the very thoughts we are thinking and any conclusions we come to? Why believe that what we observe and what we believe have anything to do with the Truth? Not only this, but the concept of true freedom of the will, of true free thinking has no foundation in Atheism, and therefore must be accepted on blind faith. As the famous biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, put it,
“If my mental processes are determined
wholly by the motions of atoms in my
brain, I have no reason to suppose
that my beliefs are true …and hence
I have no reason for supposing my
brain to be composed of atoms.”
(Possible Worlds, p.209)
On the other hand, in the Christian worldview, Man was created in the image of God and, therefore, we can trust our ability to reason and expect to discover Truth about nature. And similar arguments could be made for several other assumptions necessary for doing meaningful science, such as:
- We can rely upon our senses to observe nature.
- We have free will to choose which sensations and thoughts to pay attention to and which to ignore in an experiment.
- Nature is real; it's not just an illusion.
- Nature is orderly, so orderly that we can describe it using simple, elegant, mathematical formulas.
- The order we observe here and now can be applied to other times and places.
- We can't simply predict how nature is ordered, we must go out and see for ourselves.
Motivations
And how about the motivations for doing science? Every scientist knows well that without strong motivations for studying nature, the hard work of research would never get done. Throughout history there have been three major motivations for doing science:
- 1. Satisfying Curiosity
- 2. Developing Technology to Benefit Mankind
- 3. Bringing Glory to the Creator
In summary, if you don't have a foundation that supports these basic assumptions and motivations for the scientific method, then your definition of science will be doomed to collapse in on itself. Let's face it, science without God is meaningless!