You’ve all seen this skit on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, right? Well, here’s to science and religion meeting on the web.
The Slope is Really Slippery, from Christianity Today:
For many years, IVF proponents dismissed fears about IVF abuses as irrational slippery-slope arguments. But now the Abraham Center for Life, through embryo selection, is moving society farther down the slope. This abuse of biotechnology opens the floodgates for commercializing human life. When will the embryo drive-through service start?
The slippery slope is real, and it involves a broad cross-section of the bioethics industry. W. Jay Wood, associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, notes that the Christian view of sinful human nature makes slippery-slope arguments credible. “Humans naturally test limits. Any cop will tell you that if you post a 35-mph speed limit, drivers will go 38, 40, 42, until the law cracks down.”
People tend to say that the problem with “slippery slope arguments is that they assumer we’re at the top of the hill right now. But in reality, does that matter? If we’re halfway down the slope, shouldn’t we be trying to stop and turn back?
Science, Superior to God? (JackeHammer):
Some men look to sex to fill an uneasiness they sense in their soul, some look to wealth, some to knowledge, some look, yes, to science as they seek and when they do they find answers to questions about all sorts of things, just as do those who look to God and God’s Word—the Bible. Sometimes scientists can’t find an answer but they have faith that they will one day, when they do enough experiments, when they ask the right question, just as those who believe in God have faith that they will one day understand things which they can’t understand today.
Secular people tend to ignore the faith needed to pursue science as the basis for your understanding of life. They act as though science is totally based on fact. What they ignore is that much of the science that forms the foundation of their “belief” in the ordered, autonomous world, is only theory. Of course, you can test your theory through the scientific method, but that process isn’t as simple in it’s implications as some people believe:
Science is the OPPOSITE to faith. The scientific process is all about finding evidence to prove or disprove a theory. Science is always moving forwards, trying to disprove earlier theories, searching for new theories, trying to gather better data[...]
So [the Big Bang is] about as proven as scientific theories get (which doesn’t necessarily mean it cannot get replaced by a new theory in the future if competing evidence becomes available, although that seems highly unlikely).
Well, if people are always trying to disprove you, and if you look at history, likely will, how do we know that this is right? Once we’ve “proven” a hypothesis aren’t we believing on the faith that we’ve taken into account all the details and tested them purely? And how quickly we forget…as recently as 1949 “big bang” was a term of ridicule for the theory that many now revere so well. So why is anyone confident at all that a new theory isn’t going to pop up and knock the big bang right out of the picture?
In the line of thinking of the above quoted blogger’s six-year-old (”Who invented God?”), here are some questions that might make your head hurt:
The big bang theory says that the earth expanded “a tremendously dense and hot state” in which all the matter in the universe was packed together. But where did that matter come from? And what did it expand into? If space is generally a vacuum, containing no matter, what is space expanding into now? Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, how did we come to have so much of it? Wouldn’t it have to have had a beginning?
And what if one day all of our scientific experimentation leads to proof that God exists?
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