"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess." *

While I had no problem with the sermon I heard yesterday as a whole, there was one side point or illustration that just struck me wrong.

The preacher started talking about the wonders of modern technology and asked why we have things now that we didn't have in the past, in effect he was asking "why didn't Shakespeare have an iPhone?"

I didn't even know that this was a question that needed to be asked, and I definitely didn't know that there was a theological answer to it.

The preacher's answer was part intelligent design and part special revelation.  You see, he said, the knowledge to build these modern marvels was always out there, but we couldn't have it until God decided to reveal that knowledge to us.

In other words, the only reason Shakespeare didn't have an iPhone was that God didn't think it was time for us to have iPhones yet.

The first problem I have with that is the image of God as Carol Merrill.  "Let's see what we have behind door number two . . . it's Special Relativity!"  It also makes God seem more than a little capricious, arbitrarily deciding what we can know when.
 

My other problem is that I think it reflects a flawed understanding of how scientific progress happens, and I think that many people share that understanding.  I think that because of the way were taught history, people think of scientific progress as being something like "nothing, nothing, nothing, Boom! something huge, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing Pow! something really big"

We go from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton to Einstein with nothing happening in between.   And if you think that is how science works, then it isn't hard to think of God intervening at each of those sudden advances, but that's just not how it happens.

Science progresses slowly but steadily, with incremental increases in our knowledge and understanding.  Einstein didn't just pull relativity out of thin air, he had the insight to put together the thoughts  and discoveries of other scientists into a new form.  It was a brilliant insight, but it didn't happen in a vacuum.

Even Isaac Newton a devoutly religious man credited the men who came before him more than god when he said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

My analogy for how that progress works is a little odd, but imagine that you have a friend on the other side of the country who every week sends you one piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  Each week you put the new piece in place.  One day you get a piece in the mail, put it in place and all of a sudden you know what's the picture on the jigsaw puzzle, and you have a good idea about what the rest of the pieces will look like.

The one piece that gave you the answer wasn't significantly different from any of the other pieces, it's just at that point you had enough information to see what the bigger picture was.  Some people might have been able to make that leap with fewer pieces, other's might have needed more. 

In science, the results of experiments, the observations of researchers and the ideas of theoreticians all contribute pieces to the puzzle, and at some point, to someone, those pieces are going to come together to form a coherent whole.

What made Newton and Einstein special was that they seemed to need very few pieces to see that whole, not that they had some divine revelation.

*Sir Isaac Newton

Comments

[nancy]

Yeesh! What a sermon! And why did God "decide" we needed to know about germ theory and penicillin....after so many people had already died? was there a tipping point? N