5. Are Scientists Evolving?

Science is evolving. Every living thing grows and changes with time and perhaps it is fair to view science, mankind’s collective awareness of how nature works, in the same way: as a dynamic, living system of knowledge, much more than a collection of brute facts.

The science of today is far advanced from what it was even just a few years ago, yet somehow, archaic notions still plague the minds of many supposed scientific experts. One of those lingering bugaboos rattling around in the skulls of academia’s ivory tower is that the notion of a Creator is irrelevant to science.

One need look no further than the daily news for the daily row over evolution and creationism, where the purported defenders of science come with the clarion call “Intelligent Design is not Science, it’s religion. As such, it’s irrelevant to science.”

This is not a new concept. It is rooted in the Age of Reason and the “Enlightenment” when European society rebelled against the church specifically and religion generally. However, it’s no longer the 18th Century or the 19th Century or even the 20th Century.

For the rationalist, a godless science worked just fine because classical physics had built such a neat edifice on the foundation of purely materialistic assumptions. (Those assumptions are material realism, logical positivism, causal determinism, locality, and epiphenomenalism.) However, during the past century, modern science has turned full circle and disqualified each and every one of those materialistic assumptions.

And the result?

The new physics views consciousness as the underlying reality of nature. It sees time-space separations as illusory. It recognizes that paradoxes are integral to reality and will never “go away” when we learn more. It recognizes that classical rules of cause-and-effect break down entirely in every atom in the universe. It allows for a level of human significance in the cosmos never before imagined, except by the Jews. And it even envisions a continuous creation involving both a higher consciousness and human awareness which act together to bring all reality, including the past, from a potential to an actual state.

In short, modern science sees an enchanted universe, a holistic reality, subject to some ephemeral higher unity.

So how ironic it is, that the very same scientific community that cries, “No Way!” to Intelligent Design, simultaneously envisions a conscious universe, intimately personal, ultimately transcendent and beyond any rational comprehension. Does this sound like a science indifferent to G-d? I guess that depends on how you define “G-d.”