Given it is Good Friday tomorrow, I thought I would do my first thought video on God and Science. In this video I explain why the principle of Occam’s razor is so important to the scientific method and yet the nature of this principle means that God can never enter into the scientific paradigm because the explanatory power of science resides in reducing complex entities into more fundamental ones. Given that God, by definition, is the most complex entity of all, a “God explanation” can never be invoked to justify any operation of the universe in the scientific sense.
However, despite the fact that God is directly and formally excluded from the scientific paradigm, it does not mean that science itself is unaffected by the philosophical question of whether God exists because the question of God’s existence has a direct bearing on how we calibrate science in relation to its utility of explaining aspects of the strange reality in which we all find ourselves. If God doesn’t exist, then in principle there is no limit to the efficacy of science to resolve reality in its entirety. However, if God does exist then this sets an upper limit to the questions that science is able to address. For example, if God exists then it forever means that the ultimate origins of the universe cannot be explained just in terms of the universe itself because clearly the origin of the universe is based on the actions of a non-observable entity that preceded it and which is outside the scope of scientific enquiry.
I conclude this video by surmising that the entanglement of atheism with science as it is currently practiced is harming the progress of the science because it is limiting the possible ideas that can be explored in relation to say unifying quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity because it is demanding that such a theory must also contain an explanation of how our universe could spontaneously arise on its own terms rather than allowing for the idea that this single question might be outside of science’s explanatory scope because the origin of the universe is bound up inside the creative act of a deity. I suggest that just as science had to be disentangled from theism in the middle ages, perhaps now it is time to disentangle science from atheism because neither belief system is appropriate within the scientific paradigm.
The two videos I cite in this video are Brian Cox’s Human Universe and Emergence Theory presented by Marion Kerr.