Can One Believe in Miracles and Still Do Science?

It has been said that if miracles happen in the world, then science is impossible, for science proceeds on the assumptions of natural regularities. Plantinga devotes just a page (406) to this in Warranted Christian Belief, in a section addressing skeptical Biblical criticism. He waxes humorously acerbic here, as he often does. He's summarizing an argument by Alston that I don't have at hand, but it's still worth passing on:

"Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong in the world," says [John] Macquarrie; perhaps he means to suggest that the very practice of science requires that one reject the idea (e.g.) of God's raising someone from the dead. Of course the argument form

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore X is false

is at best moderately compelling. We aren't just given that the Lord has arranged the universe for the comfort and convenience of the National Academy of Science. To think otherwise is to be like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight, on the grounds that the light was better there. (In fact it would be to go the drunk one better: it would be to insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.)

But why think in the first place that we would have to embrace this semideism in order to do science? Many contemporary physicists, for example, believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; this belief seems to do little damage to their physics. To be sure, that's physics; perhaps the problem would be (as Bultmann suggests) with medicine. Is the idea that one couldn't do medical research or prescribe medications if one thought that God has done miracles in the past and might even occasionally do some nowadays? To put the suggestion explicitly is to refute it; there isn't the faintest reason why I couldn't sensibly believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and also engage in medical research into, say, Usher's syndrome or multiple sclerosis, or into ways of staving off the ravages of coronary disease. What would be the problem? that it is always possible that God should do something different, thus spoiling my experiment? But that is possible: God is omnipotent. (Or do we have here a new antitheistic argument? If God exists, he could spoil my experiment; nothing can spoil my experiment; therefore . . .) No doubt if I thought God often or usually did things in an idiosyncratic way, so that there really aren't much by way of discoverable regularities to be found, then perhaps I couldn't sensibly engage in scientific research; the latter presupposes a certain regularity, predictability, stability in the world. But that is an entirely different matter. What I must assume to do science, is only that ordinarily and for the most part these regularities hold.

The missing argument from Alston is that which explicates the final sentence. I think we can guess the gist of it (if anyone has access to his article in The God Who Acts, you can let us know what he actually said): science seeks to discover regularities in nature, and can proceed to do so even if on rare occasions there are exceptions to those regularities. Exceptions being exceptional, they do not much impact the truth or usefulness of the discoveries of science. Thus it does not follow that science is mangled by miracles being admitted.

Exceptions are difficult to handle in science, for science is the pursuit of understanding that which is regular and predictable. If Christ was raised from the dead, that would certainly be difficult to discuss in scientific terms--not because science says it's strictly impossible, but because science says that it would have to be considered a most unique exception. If a biologist and a pathologist were there to watch Jesus die and rise again, they would be forced to say, "We don't understand this, but we don't think it could have happened by natural means." Neither of them would be able to say that natural means are the only ones that work in the universe.

That of course assumes that Jesus rose from the dead and could have been "scientifically" witnessed to have done so. (The disciples who saw him were not pathologists, but they knew enough to know that he had been dead, he was unexpectedly fully alive again and healthy, and that this was highly exceptional. Is that not scientific enough for the current case?) But let's set that assumption aside and ask, if that putative pathologist today were to be asked, "Are natural means the only ones that work in the universe?" she should be savvy enough to say, "If I answer that question it is not from within my expertise as a pathologist. I only know, from that position, about what happens within the natural order. Whether there is more than that is not something to which I as a scientist can speak."

Those who, by way of a preference that might be called aesthetic, want to hold that science must be the story of unbroken natural regularities, have the right to hold that position. They ought to admit, though, that the force of their viewpoint is hardly more than aesthetic, no stronger than a preference of taste. It is not in the purview of science to show that every law discovered must always work without exception; it is not in the realm of science to pronounce that nature's system is closed and uninterruptible by its Creator.

That's my guess of the explication of Plantinga's final line quoted here. Science is fine with natural regularities, and can be just fine with rare exceptions breaking in among them.

Posted: Sun - April 30, 2006 at 06:34 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Can One Believe in Miracles and Still Do Science?

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson