Athiesm is not Science!

Over Christmas, I ended up going to a Barnes & Nobles in Briarcroft. You can tell a lot about an area's demographic based on the books in the local bookstores. Since Denton's B&N is packed with excellent books in the science section, that was the first place I visited at this B&N. I was, however, extremely disappointed: at least half of the books were misplaced! For example, biographies of Charles Darwin belong in the biographies section, not in the science section. But the majority of the misfiled books were on athiesm. As the title says, athiesm is not science.

Atheism is a philosophy, even practiced as a religion. Science deals with how things work, philosophy deals with why things are the way they are. I want to make it very, very clear that I am not arguing against atheism itself. Although I am a Christian, this post is not about why I am not an atheist. What needs to be addressed is the common assumption that athiesm is endorsed by science, or worse, that science requires atheism.

The primary criteria of scientific hypothesis is that it must be testable and repeatable. Hypotheses on the nature or existence of God are well outside these criteria. At the end of the day, each person picks his philosophy with respect to diety(ies) for himself. What I find really irritating is that atheists in particular latch on to science and claim its objective validity for their own philosophy. Two ideas seem to be very common.

First, I have heard athiests claim now that science has explained human origins, vis evolution, religion is no longer necessary. Ignoring for a moment the fact that atheism is a religion, evolutionary studies within science propose logical explanations for how species came to be. They are not repeatable and hence do not carry the same weight as theorems of science. That does not mean that evolutionary studies are invalid: they provide much good insight into how the world works. But to make the claim that one knows how everything came to be is well outside science. This is a philosophical distinction, but it is important.

Second, it is sometimes said that religion is uneccessary because science will one day explain everything. This is not an error in and of itself, but it needs to be pointed out that this cannot be strictly true and it is an article of faith. I can very confidently say that science will never know everything and remain trustworthy because Goedel's Theorem applies. It states that no sufficiently strong formal system can be complete and consistent. This is a well-proven theorem, not a supposition. Science is a massive formal system that attempts to assign a truth-value to propositions. Goedel's Theorem states that if it is complete, it will be inconsistent (for example, allowing both p and ~p to be true). If it is consistent, there will be undecidable propositions, i.e., the truth-value cannot be determined. It may very well be that the undecidable propositions are not very interesting, but the fact remains that science can never know everything there is to know. Even to say that science will know all relevant facts is clearly a matter of faith, not science. The applicability of science to matters outside testability and repeatability is metaphysics.

Please note that I am not arguing against atheism here, but I do feel very strongly about people abusing the good name of science to promote their own religion (and that includes any religion, even Christianity). This is probably a sore spot for me because science is objectively true. When it is conflated with personal philosophies, those philosophies can be accepted with the same ring of truth, regardless of their actual merit. The objective truth is morally neutral and very powerful: it cannot lend its strength to weak, biased, human belief systems without resulting in harm.