eligious people often say there is order in the universe and
that order comes from God, whereas materialism can't explain
why there is order. For them, order is proof of a deity. They
have it backwards. A deity creates disorder, almost by definition.
What is order? We assume, as a first approximation, that the laws of nature—gravity, the chemical properties of the elements, and so on—are the same everywhere. If your thermometer works on Earth, it will work on Neptune. If it doesn't, you need an explanation. Only by taking order and consistency as a background is it possible to discover new stuff.
The Greek and Roman gods were certainly not creators of order. They were capricious and cruel and interfered with nature, as did the Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament. (Think floods, locusts, and people getting electrocuted by the Ark of the Covenant.)
Indeed, the unpredictability of nature was almost certainly why humans postulated a deity: nature ought to be ordered and consistent, but how to explain the disasters, plagues, diseases, and sudden inexplicable deaths other than by assuming retribution by a vengeful all-powerful being? Even today people look to “miracles,” which are violations of the order of the universe, for evidence of a deity.
Left to themselves, which is to say in the absence of energy, things automatically fall into an ordered state. To create order, it is only necessary for God to stop messing with the universe. If he interfered, whether by answering prayers or tweaking things to work out a certain way, the universe would rapidly become hopelessly chaotic and we would have no hope of understanding it.
We know better now, but the concept of a distant god was a brilliant invention that allowed science to treat the world as a place with ordered laws.
Trusting science is not the answer
But the last thing anyone would want to do is to “trust the science.” Professional scientists will tell you: they too must trust. They trust the reagents, antibodies, DNA primers, and ELISA kits that they buy from companies to work as advertised. They must trust that the phases of the moon don't change their results. They must trust the lab assistants who do much of the actual hands-on work. They do this by verifying whether these things happen and by running careful controls, which is one reason science is so expensive.
Last month, Science magazine called into question the science of resolvins, which are small lipid molecules claimed to be essential for ending inflammation. They cited a March 2022 paper in Frontiers in Pharmacology and discussed how some researchers think the concentrations of resolvins are too low to do what is claimed and the methods are too inaccurate to be sure whether they can measure them.
I worked with resolvins myself for a short time and gave up, unable to get any credible results. Another time I lost a week trying to get results with an antibody from a major antibody vendor, only to conclude that it simply doesn't bind to anything at all. And don't get me started about those ELISA kits. Trust scientific vendors? Pshaw!
If you say you trust science, what you're really saying is you trust the bureaucrats that tell us what we have to study if we want funding, the journals that allow politics to contaminate their pages, and the big corporations that make unreliable products.
As former president Reagan said, Doveryai, no proveryai, trust but verify. The Democrats hated him for it, but it's how scientists think: if you can't verify a result for yourself, you can't really trust it.
If not science, then what?
When people say they need something to trust, what they mean is they want a source of authority to back up what they want to do. Science cannot be that authority, and God faces the (possibly) insurmountable challenge of non-existence. We cannot dismiss the possibility that the laws of nature, by some mechanism we don't understand, may themselves be conscious. But even if they are, we must still ask ourselves: what does trusting mean? It means you stop verifying. So trusting science is as much an oxymoron as “asymptomatic patient,” “trusted journalism,” “communist philosopher,” “ground-breaking astronomer,” “advanced elementary particle physics,” or—my favorite—“reality TV.” The only things you can really trust are those you have personally investigated.
Even that assumes that the world really is as you see it. But maybe that's quite enough uncertainty for now.
may 15 2022, 7:51 am
