Science Without Faith is Dead

The dinosaur mania of the 80s/early 90s may have gone the way of, well, the dinosaurs. But no male of my generation can forget those barbarous days when the T-rex was bigger than the Beatles. We practically begged our parents to take us to the natural history museum to watch the animatronic thunder lizards swing their scaly tails and roar for our blood, while the older folks learned to "Walk the Dinosaur" at the hippest, most exclusive dance clubs. If we went to a Christian school, we might also have been exposed to Ken Ham's creation science lectures, in which he contradicted everything that everyone else was telling us about the dinosaur bones in the rock layers.

At home, we were saturated with a plethora of dinosaur-themed programming, from cartoons (Dinosaucers, Dino-Riders, Denver the Last Dinosaur, The Land Before Time), to mb7uyjhjovies (Jurassic Park, Adventures in Dinosaur City, Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, Dennis the Menace: Dinosaur Hunter), to the just plain weird (the Dinosaurs sit-com; a Christmas special hosted by a triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex; the Gary Owens paleontology documentaries on the Disney Channel).

On second thought, maybe I was the only kid who watched the Gary Owens specials. I was certainly the only one who owned his own microscope and telescope and spent his summer vacation tinkering with Weekly Reader science kits. Had you asked the fifth-grade version of me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said a scientist, astronaut, or science fiction author, and preferably all three at once. It never occurred to me that it was "nerdy" to have a favorite planet (mine was Saturn), or that normal, healthy children did not scoop mud out of their yard for scientific experimentation, or that my theory about the inter-connectedness of multiple universes was not what a boy was supposed to think about while playing with his action figures.

My idea of a wild weekend was to visit a planetarium and be transported via state-of-the-art light projection technology into the starry depths of space. From the comfort of a recliner, I could soar at warp speed beyond suns, asteroids, quasars, and black holes, and escaping gravity's fingertips, penetrate the vast, shimmering mists of an impressionist painting composed by God's own hand on the canvas of infinity. More than hunks of rock and gas, the celestial bodies seemed aware, as if their craters were the sockets of a million ancient eyes scanning the cosmic night for life. In those thrilling moments, it became clear why John the Revelator could call the seven angels the seven stars.

It was never the nuts and bolts of nature that attracted me to science, and it certainly wasn't the math. I had neither the memory for the machinery of things nor the patience for calculations. Instead, my thoughts were filled with dreams of a glorified Santa's Workshop filled with shiny pulsating toys and the fresh-out-of-the-plastic sterilized-for-consumption smell. Ok, maybe not the smell. But I loved the adventure, the creativity, the infinite possibilities; the glimpses into fragments of past and future things like whispers of the First Story. I loved science for the magic.

If the last sentence made you twitch, you are a child of modernity. Magic, we say, is just a term for a thing that science has not yet explained (but, if given enough time, will surely explain in full). But to a 9-year-old boy, a dinosaur is as magical as a dragon; a rocket ship as awe-inspiring as a flying carpet; and Saturn's rings as otherworldly as Never Never Land. The magic may fade, but it's not because the average adult knows more about cosmology or the pre-historic world than he knew about those things when he was a fifth-grade student watching Disney documentaries. A better explanation is that he's grown too familiar, like a man who stops noticing his wife because he takes it for granted that she will always be there, until he no longer knows her at all.

The magic we grown-ups lose is primarily a sentimental feeling, but it's also an unspoken creed - a creed of respect for a kind of world where the "laws" of science, though perhaps real, are only incidental; where if the pixie dust had fallen in a slightly different pattern, we'd have dragon instead of triceratops bones, and weightlessness instead of gravity. Science, from this angle, is just a series of miracles we've seen too many times.

As I grew older, my interest faded because the science in books and movies was presented in a way that can only be called inhuman - even dogmatically inhuman. The moral of the dinosaurs was always that man is an animal and a savage. The moral of the planetarium show was always that, contrary to what we learned in church that Sunday, we are insignificant accidents too small to be noticed by the cold, unconscious universe; or, if I may quote the theme song of the popular 90s cartoon, Animaniacs, "We're just tiny little specks about the size of Mickey Rooney." Science taught us that man's fate is oblivion; that his end will be as random and meaningless as his birth; that when our sun purges the world of all biological life and consumes our bleached bones, there will be none to mourn our passing.

The science fiction writers plodded the same grim course - from H.G. Wells' atheism to Isaac Asimov's determinism to Frank Herbert's false messiah. When Star Trek: The Next Generation arrived on our television sets, the new Enterprise was supposed to represent a perfected human race, having overcome our past sins of bigotry and ignorance and evolved beyond the rough-edged heroism of Kirk and McCoy. But in place of the womanizing captain and expendable red-shirted ensigns, they gave us a crew with less personality than the resident android, Data. TNG's successors, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, were equally laden with boring humans, more-evolved-than-thou platitudes, and far more interesting androids and quasi-humans.

No modernist utopia has ever had room for real human beings. The reason the ontological line between robots and humans is so often brought into question in the sci-fi world, as in the film A.I., is that the humans of sci-fi so often have the hearts of machines. In the Matrix trilogy, whose theme was presumably man's escape from the machines and the restoration of his humanity, the human heroes somehow managed to be more wooden and two-dimensional than their nemesis, the computer program Agent Smith. The irony was not intentional.

The fatal flaw of science fiction is not an artistic problem but a philosophical one. In the world of the secular naturalist, platitudes cease to have meaning, and meaning itself becomes nothing more than a bit of wishful thinking. Is it a wonder that our children behave like sociopaths when they are taught to believe that our experience of life tells us nothing about life itself, and that the role of science, history, and even art is to interpret the natural world as if, in the words of Carl Sagan, "The cosmos is all there is, was, or ever will be." The Magician has died, and there is nothing up his sleeve. There is no sleeve at all.

Recently, I was introduced to an Intelligent Design documentary called The Privileged Planet: How our place in the cosmos is designed for discovery (2004, Illustra Media). The film began like the typical Discovery Channel or planetarium show, with blabbering experts, gorgeous star-scapes, and a deep-voiced narrator. But then it took a turn that would have been a total surprise, had it not been spelled out in the title. The team of scientists argued convincingly, not only that the cosmos bears God's signature, but that the conditions necessary for human life to exist are the same conditions that give us an optimal view of the universe. God designed the cosmos to be discovered. Science begins with divine revelation.

The old feelings of wonder and mystery surged back into me as I was swept out across a fresh universe that, far from negating our existence, affirmed our special place in creation while also pointing to something greater than all things. Here was a beautiful, magical world where a human could be a human, fully convinced that his consciousness is more than cruel illusion, and his conscience more than a fraud.

No doubt Richard Dawkins' atheistic disciples will accuse me of interpreting the data on the basis of personal preference rather than facts. But what are the facts? Can a man claim to be living by "facts" when, on the one hand, he calls himself an ethical, rational, conscious being, and on the other hand, limits his intellect to an amoral cosmos that has no place for man or God - a cosmos where rationality itself is an accident of evolution and therefore unreliable, and where absolute truth, and therefore all truth, is absolutely unknowable.

Science's dirty little secret is that the naturalist arrives at the conclusions that he does because he allows no other option. He does not have to prove Darwinism; Darwinism is simply assumed. He does not have to prove that every phenomenon has a natural explanation; he has already discounted supernatural explanations. Those of us who believe in the deep magic of things are those who were curious what would happen if we tried the forbidden option. What we have found is that we no longer need the gloom of Carl Sagan, because the cosmos fits quite comfortably into the hope of Aquinas and Augustine, whose belief-seeking-understanding overcomes the impossible modernist vision of blank-slates-seeking-facts.

I am not now arguing whether a Christian can believe in the common ancestry of men and animals - a secondary, though important, debate - but that he cannot view the cosmos as a closed system, or God as unknowable. The battle between theism and naturalism begins, not with the evidence, but with philosophy: the first a philosophy of darkness and isolation, the second a philosophy of light and eternity.

Either way, boys will always like dinosaurs. And movies with special effects will always draw a crowd. This year's latest installations of the Ice Age, Star Trek, and Terminator franchises are more about entertainment than philosophy; yet at some deep, perhaps subconscious level, every pimple-faced kid in the audience will be forced to consider what we really are: electro-chemical reactions in a world of matter, or men in a world of magic.