In the 2006 comedy Nacho Libre, the protagonist Ignacio, a monk in a Mexican monastery, befriends a street thug named Steven, a skinny fellow who soon becomes Ignacio’s tag team partner in the local professional wrestling racket. Ignacio is a person of faith, though a brand of faith soaked in human frailty. But the crude and uneducated Steven will have none of that, proudly proclaiming “I believe in science” in multiple scenes. In this scene, Ignacio hilariously tries to baptize Steven via sneak attack:
I know many Stevens, although they are neither crude nor uneducated. They are everywhere — which I suppose is no surprise in a secular, technological civilization built on scientific innovation. We are educated to “believe in science” without understanding the contradiction that such belief represents. We’ve been trained to think of science as the Mother of Epistemology — the only legitimate way to know anything, and the inevitable author of all trustworthy explanations. We have taken a revolutionary, precision tool for identifying useful relationships in the physical world — a powerful method — and assigned it golden calf status. Science has become our God. We believe in it.
One might just as well “believe in” a hammer.
All human systems of knowledge ultimately rely on one or more gods. Folks who “believe in science” typically don’t want to hear that, but the phrasing is self-refuting. To “believe” in science is to assert the following:
Everything that is real can be measured.
Anything that cannot be measured (or at least detected) by a physical instrument is not real.
If something cannot currently be measured or detected, but is predicted or required by current science, we will assume that it will be detected someday.
If a model cannot explain what we see and measure, but is the only materialistic explanation available, we will assume that it’s only a matter of time. Until clarification arrives, we just ignore the dissonance, teach past it, and criticize people who mention it.
When science reaches this stage, belief in its capacity to explain becomes scientism. Like major religions, scientism is a faith, a worldview, an intellectual bedrock from which all subsequent reasoning flows.
But nothing in the scientific method demands such fealty. Stripped of the philosophical crust that has developed through the centuries, the essential scientific method makes no grand claims about any power to explain everything. It claims no god-like authority, demands no worship and makes no guarantees. It didn’t set out to be an idol, let alone a god. It simply provides a way to explain many processes in the physical world through disciplined observation and testing. But people looking for answers have no time for such waffling. We need a god and we need it now. And if we cannot discover such a god, we will invent one.
A scientific explanation assumes, as a starting point, that whatever we aim to explain can be explained by physics and chemistry. We always start there — we must. The natural world always gets first dibs on an explanation; otherwise, everything would become a miracle. And it is evident that this universe is more predictable than that, with many discernible, reliable relationships (what we often call “laws”, at some intellectual peril) that govern behavior. Enter science. But it does not follow that science can guarantee a naturalistic explanation for everything. Insistence on such explanations is scientistic, not scientific. This is where science enters the door labeled “isms”, and begins to look like a belief system. It becomes a kind of blind faith. And we should not be indoctrinating our kids with such faith.
Why is this important? Am I saying that all unresolved questions in science are best pursued outside of science? Of course not. But some questions seem outside of science’s grasp, and there are good reasons to suppose that science, properly understood, will never be able to supply answers. Sometimes science itself virtually precludes purely natural explanations. These are special cases and a distinct minority, but they cannot be swept under the rug, particularly when the scientific community insists (with some degree of arrogance) that it has answers. The humorous cartoon at the top of this article offers a hint at how to identify them — viz, if an explanation requires a miracle, then, yes, we have a problem.
Of course, I have kicked the can down the road, since we now must define “miracle”. And we must be very careful. At any given time, all areas of science have unanswered questions. Every new answer tends to raise new questions — science is a wonderfully fecund process that allows human knowledge to expand quickly, far faster than had ever occurred in prior millennia. Science munches questions and generates new ones for a living. In science, we expect unanswered questions, and we expect that the scientific method will let us explore them. And in most cases our expectations are reasonable. Science typically converges on an answer over time, the length of which depends on how many graduate students you can afford to hire. The pursuit is exciting, as potential answers enter the field of vision and come into focus over time.
But that is not always true (and, again, we have no reason to expect that it would be true, apart from blind faith). So let’s take a look at an example where the expectations are not reasonable, and answers remain stubbornly over the horizon.
How did life on earth start?
We can all agree that life must have started sometime in the past. Scientists and most traditional theists agree — life did not always exist. But it turns out that kick-starting life is not as simple as dumping some chemicals in a test tube and letting them perform magic. In fact, even the simplest life is staggeringly complicated, and our appreciation of that complexity grows by the minute. The problem isn’t getting any easier; if anything, each new discovery tends to demonstrate the naivete of our prior understanding. Much of what you learned in high school biology class is wrong. The more we learn, the farther we find ourselves from any answers. This is the opposite of what we expect from a fruitful scientific inquiry.
Leaving the theists on the sidelines for a moment, there are very good scientific reasons to expect such futility in this arena. The kinds of complex organic molecules that make living systems possible do not exist in nature on their own. They need to be manufactured on demand in precise form and quantity, precisely when needed, and carefully protected from their environment. They are easily destroyed by the same substances that living systems need to generate useful energy (roughly analogous to how the full gas tank in your car would destroy the car without careful engineering — just watch any action flick with a chase scene).
The infrastructure required to accomplish just these things, let alone the many other essential functions that even the most rudimentary cell must perform, is well beyond dumb luck, time and chance. It will never happen randomly — in four billion years (the current best scientific guess for the age of the earth), or four billion billion years, or four billion billion billion years. Everyone recognizes this (which is, in part, why the multiverse concept — i.e., infinitely diverse universes — has gained so much traction in recent years). But even the multiverse cannot save the situation on earth. Why? Because scientists want this particular universe to perform a miracle in some ancient context, but then stop performing such miracles shortly thereafter. Such a universe isn’t consistent, making it fundamentally opaque to scientific inquiry, rendering the entire discussion moot.
No one has ever seen life spontaneously generate, in the wild or in the lab. It has literally never happened, at least in the presence of humans. Even if we grant all the infrastructure (a huge and unwarranted concession), it simply doesn’t work — if you kill a cell, the cell will not come back to life, even if you undo the damage, even though all of the chemicals needed for life are still present. Could scientists make some progress with scenarios like this? Possibly — they are trying. It doesn’t seem out of the question. But their futility to date suggests something weird and special about living systems.
In other words, getting life from non-life seems to be impossible, or at least fantastically difficult, even if we concede an entire suite of required biochemistry, and even if the system was living only a few seconds prior. Of course, the difference between this and generating life from “early earth” conditions is massive. Allow me to analogize for a moment. Let’s say you want to build a large, complicated house yourself, despite having no design or trade skills. You plan to treat yourself well and rent a heated warehouse, fully stocked with tools and materials. You can practice sawing and nailing boards, preassemble things in relative tranquility, and take advantage of many otherwise unrealistic conditions. You will almost certainly still fail, since you know nothing about how to build a house. But this is a best case scenario for any remote hope of success. You have a friend who wants to do the same thing, but he can’t afford the warehouse or any manufactured materials — all he has is enormous piles of sand, metal ores and tree seeds. And of course he does not know where to start, since he needs to make interim products before he can begin to think about building a house. And the sand and ore will all wash away by the time the trees grow to supply the wood. Your friend’s situation is what origin of life in a “pre-biotic soup” faces, except in a context that is many orders of magnitude more complex.
Nature has no clue about what to do with a purported pre-biotic soup. Building life in a pre-biotic soup is like building your friend’s house from those unrefined materials, with untrained labor, with a flood, blizzard and earthquake happening at the same time. It will never happen. Well-grounded science and the mathematics of probability guarantee failure. Of course, even if the earth somehow succeeded in building a cell accidentally, what then? Would such a cell survive? Could it reproduce? Or would it disappear as quickly as it appeared, reabsorbed into its toxic environment, another lost and undocumented apparition of deep time? You need more than one miracle.
In recent years, origin of life researchers like Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow like to change the subject. Researchers like Cronin seem to be well-meaning, intelligent, highly educated people. But they are committed to solving a problem that seems inherently unsolvable based on everything we know about organic chemistry — a problem whose details become more complex and more unreachable by the day. Cronin likes to appeal to our imaginations. Maybe we just need to think about this differently. Maybe we are missing some sort of emergent property of the universe. Maybe things can just assemble themselves? We shouldn’t close our minds.
Maybe. Certainly, we should not close our minds, at least where there is any chance of discovering more. But should we close our minds to pink unicorns that poop marshmallows? Must we not be guided by the limits that experimental science itself imposes? Such “maybes” are not based on science. As far as anyone can tell, life inventing itself is more in the “unicorn” category than the “science” category. In fact, it sure sounds a lot like our cartoon… then a miracle occurs.
As post-Enlightenment science hit its groove and registered one impressive success after another, western civilization became drunk with the power of this new method to explain and predict. Everything seemed destined to submit to this juggernaut. Theists’ attempts to point out missing pieces of the the puzzle came to be known, somewhat derisively, as “God of the Gaps” arguments. That is, science is making the “God hypothesis” increasingly irrelevant, as God is needed only in rapidly shrinking areas of inquiry — the gaps. And, so the argument goes, someday God will disappear entirely, as science inevitably closes all those gaps.
As human understanding of the natural world expands, we are forced to ask: Which side truly has a “gap” problem? Concepts like origin of life by chance, dark matter and dark energy are all constructs invented to fill gaps — in these cases more like gaping holes. In each case, entire systems of scientific thought hang in the balance if these constructs prove to be imaginary. Decades of work and thousands of careers and legacies hang in the balance. Yet, all we really know about any of these things is that they remain imaginary; none have ever been detected by experiment or forensic study. In the case of origin of life, an entire body of scientific knowledge suggests that it is impossible. Scientists continue to pursue it because the alternative — that origin of life cannot be explained by purely natural causes — is philosophically unacceptable to people who, like Ignacio’s friend Steven, “believe in science”. It is as unacceptable to a scientist as Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation is to a theist.
It is time to abandon scientism, and let science be science. Science is exceedingly good at what it was invented to do. But it is a terrible philosopher. And it never asked to be put in the the impossible position of explaining everything. Let science be science. And God be God.