Essay about The Role of Science, Ethics, and Faith in...
The Role of Science, Ethics, and Faith in Modern Philosophy
ABSTRACT: Curiously, in the late twentieth century, even agnostic cosmologists like Stephen
Hawking who is often compared with Einstein pose metascientific questions concerning a Creator and
the cosmos, which science per se is unable to answer. Modern science of the brain, e.g. Roger Penrose
s Shadows of the Mind (1994), is only beginning to explore the relationship between the brain and the
mind the physiological and the epistemic. Galileo thought that God s two books Nature and the Word
cannot be in conflict, since both have a common author: God. This entails, inter alia, that science and
faith are to two roads to the Creator God. David Granby recalls that once upon a time, ... Show more
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Paradoxically, the third model, which argues for a fusion or unity of science and theology has
naturalistic as well as theistic proponents. For naturalists like Willem B. Drees, personal experiences,
including religious experiences and consciousness, are all part and parcel of nature (1996: 245).
Hence, Drees concludes that the distinction between personal and impersonal relations provides no
basis for distinguishing supernatural and natural phenomena (1996: 245). Naturalists like Drees, then,
consider religious beliefs and moral codes as products of evolution or natural processes alone, which
leave no room for a Creator, let alone a transcendent God.
In contrast, theists like Phillip E. Johnson and Alvin Plantinga criticize the prevailing scientific
paradigm in the natural sciences for excluding questions concerning design, purpose, value, First
Principles, and ultimately the Creator God. According to Johnson, the scientific method or
methodological naturalism leads imperceptibly to, and buttresses, metaphysical naturalism that
excludes the transcendent and God. For Johnson, this reductionist methodology has impoverished
science and led to a corrosive moral/ethical relativism affecting social theory, law, and practice, since
naturalistic metaphysics leads inexorably to relativism in ethics and politics, even though many
naturalists dislike relativism and try hard
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