Shhhh … if you’re very quiet, you can probably hear it — the sound of my husband’s arm being twisted as I sought permission to share some of his ideas in this space.
Unlike me, Joe is not quick to communicate. He ponders quietly, while I ponder, um, more loudly, shall we say.
As an engineer, computer software developer, and someone who reads physics books for FUN, Joe is tired of seeing evangelical Christians characterized as unenlightened idiots who categorically reject science and cling to myths and fairy tales.
He’s so tired of it that he recently addressed that topic on his blog website —www.joecrum.blogspot.com. The entire blog post won’t fit here, but what follows are some excerpts I wanted to share:
“Over the past decades, I’ve noticed a growing number of people who say something like ‘I believe in science, not religion.’ I guess you could call it ‘science-induced atheism’ because they believe the argument that science and God can’t coexist. Their trust in science has caused them to abandon faith in God. …
“I believe that the concept of ‘faith vs. science’ is simply invalid. Even atheists have ‘faith,’ though some might not recognize it. Some people believe that faith in God is for weak or ignorant people who are unable or unwilling to understand scientific facts. But aren’t all of us, in many ways, both weak and ignorant?
“When I encounter some ‘fact’ that I can’t personally verify, and I don’t want to devote years to studying the subject in order to prove or disprove it, I have little choice but to believe in something I can’t really understand. In other words, I have faith in the source of the information.
“I trust someone else’s understanding, and I choose to believe something I cannot possibly know first-hand. So my decision about whether to believe or not to believe is based on faith or lack of faith. No human truly understands everything he claims to believe. And we all believe many things.
“Science is all about answering questions with more questions. And as questions are answered, the follow-up questions get harder and harder to answer. …
“Describing something is not the same as understanding it. Science can tell us what something looks like, but it can’t really tell us what anything actually is, except in answers that lead to more questions. …
“We all believe in things we don’t understand. We have faith, or trust, or whatever you want to call it, because we don’t know everything. …
“There are countless examples of things we believe without actually knowing they are true. We are always accepting someone else’s statement as truth. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to make progress.
“If we could never take advantage of what others have learned because we have to ‘see it for ourselves’ before we believe, where would we be? Textbooks would be worthless, because we wouldn’t believe them. Similarly, school would be mostly a waste of time, because we wouldn’t be able to accept what we are taught; we would need to re-learn everything. …
“What we believe or do not believe comes down to a choice. Believing in God takes no more faith than believing in relativity or quantum physics. Less, I think. And I do not think it’s an irrational decision, but rather one that is completely rational and logical. …
“When you look at a building, you intuitively know that it required a builder. When you look at a painting, you recognize that it was created by a painter. How is it possible that the tremendous complexity we see in this universe just came about by accident?
“If God exists, it’s obvious that denying His existence and ignoring Him is the worst decision we could possibly make.”