Scientists aim to make God unnecessary

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 References 6 Further Reading 7 Related claims 8 See Also 9 Acknowledgments

Claim

The goal of many scientists, especially evolutionists and cosmologists, is to explain the universe without God. They want to make God unnecessary.

Source

• Morris, Henry M., 2003 (July). The bounds of the dominion mandate. Back To Genesis 175, p. b.

Responses

1. There are many different ways to explain the world. One way many cultures have attempted to understand the world is to use God-based explanations (God makes the flowers bloom, God makes the sun come up, etc.) Science is a parallel enterprise to understand the world, but only in terms of cause and effect by "natural" entities. Because of these imposed rules, Science cannot simply co-opt God-based explanations from other traditions, it must go out on its own to devise new explanations (The flowers bloom because temperature changes lead to hormone expression which causes differential gene expression leading to biochemical changes in development of the bud, the sun appears to comes up because the eastward rotation of the Earth on its axis causes the sun to come into view). To say that Science attempts to "explain the world without God" is completely true, but in a good way. Science merely explains the world to the best of its ability. If science manages to come up with an explanation, this does not mean that God has been "explained away", it merely means that there are now multiple explanations available - one (the scientific) involving the physical 'how', and the other (the religious) the metaphysical 'why'. The only potential conflict here about science "explaining away God" is no fault of science, scientists, or the methodological ground rules, but that people often find the scientific explanations more convincing than the competing "God-based" explanations.
2. It has been well documented that 90-95% of scientists from a multitude of the Earth Sciences do, in fact, believe in God ^{[citation required]}. Being an Evolutionist, or Old Earth proponent does not preclude one from being a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Hindu.
3. The goal of all science is to explain the universe without invoking the supernatural. Whether this makes God "unnecessary" is a personal opinion, not a necessary conclusion.
4. A God that can be made unnecessary by explaining things must necessarily have been a God of the Gaps.
5. add more responses

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Hasty Generalization
• Circumstantial Ad Hominem (even if some particular person might have a desire for something, this does not affect prima facie the truth of what they "want" to be known)
• add fallacies

References

1. Campagna, Tony, 2002. Bob Bakker on Creationism. [1]
2. Livingstone, D.N., 1984. (see below)

Further Reading

• Livingstone, David N., 1984. Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought. Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing.

Related claims

• Evolution's materialism or naturalism denies a role for God
• Evolution is atheistic
• Darwin made it easy to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist
• Naturalistic evolution rules out all but a Deist god

See Also

• Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?

Acknowledgments