The Mad Scientist

I've been having fun reading some more books in geology that I haven't for a while.  Often, the good thing about being involved in something, then taking a long break, and then looking back on it, is that it gives you a better perspective of things.

The book I'm reading right now is Simon Winchester's The Crack at the Edge of the World.  It's a book about earthquakes and especially the 1906 San Francisco one.  It's fun to read again about geology and be familiar with his terms, but his attitude toward the science frustrates me.  It's kind of the same old thing; he seems so sure of himself on issues that are utterly unexperimental--such as prehistoric geology, the evolution of the earth's crust, and so on.  He has an extremely arrogant attitude towards anyone who would disagree with him, and calls the 18th century "less sophisticated" because they believed God had something to do with earthquakes.

In talking with my husband about it I realized that there are two types of scientists; essentially I would call them good scientists and bad scientists, but there's probably a better term than that.  Good scientists stay within the limits of science.  They make only simple inferences from their experiments and don't even attempt any universal theories of everything that's totally unknowable.  The bad scientists are those who take the most theoretical parts of science as obvious fact and begin to philosophize upon the nature of the universe and our very own souls as a result of it.  The good scientists may not believe in a Creator God, but at least they have the humility to understand the place of science.  The bad scientists have already gone on to replace the Creator God with themselves!

I thought of an analogy to describe this.  Looking at nature is like an audience watching a magician do a magic trick.  Flowers and food appear!  Rain appears!  The sun keeps us warm!  God, of course, is the magician.  Good scientists are those whose first thought is, "Wow!  I wonder how he does that!"  and immediately begin to investigate into the trick with their own experiments.  The bad scientists are those who sit back in their chair and arrogantly pronounce, "Oh, that's easy.  I'm sure it's done with some trap doors, or special smoke, or something like that.  It's not that amazing."

Eventually, this "bad" way of thinking about science leads us straight back to paganism.  The Greeks were very good at philosophizing about science.  They discovered many things, but ultimately lost out on the most practical areas of medicine and technology--just to name a few.  Their reason was based on what they knew, and they failed to explore any area that didn't conform to what they thought was reasonable.

And, as Chesterton noted, you'll never get anywhere in paganism, except back to Christianity!