Science vs. the Bible: The Limitations of the Natural Sciences

There is a continual debate between those to accept the Bible as the Word of God and those you believe truth is found only through science. The truth is that observable science and the Bible agree 100% of the time. However, scientists and the Bible do not always agree. Scientists often take the observed facts and use them to support their conjectures about how the world was created. This is were the disagreements originate.

They use these observed facts to form beliefs about the age of the Earth and about the creation of the Earth and mankind, and about the destiny of mankind. Once a scientists start forming beliefs about these questions of life they are no longer practicing good science they are forming religious opinions. Then agnostics, atheists and others use them to support their beliefs. They have now gone beyond observable scientific facts into the field of speculation. Let me illustrate the error being made.

Have you ever made a paper airplane? If you have, you probably copied what someone else had previously shown you. You also probably, after a few test flights, changed the design a little, especially if the other guys would fly better. Then you gave it a few more tosses, to find out if the modification made a better model. An analysis of this process of arriving at the best plane points out the limitation of the natural sciences. If you keep this process up, will you ever produce the best paper aircraft design? If you did how would you prove it was the best design? Could you afford the time and money it would cost to test your model against every model ever created? If you could, how about models yet to be created? How would you know that yours would be better than those not yet created? You could not. And that is the limitation of the natural sciences. It can not prove something is absolutely true because it uses the scientific method.

The natural sciences makes its discoveries using the scientific method. It is the heart of the natural sciences. All of its discoveries about our universe have been produced and/or tested using the scientific method. An understanding of this method of investigation will reveal its limitations.

The steps in the scientific method may be phrased slightly differently, but in general they begin with ask a question then proceed to do background research, construct a hypothesis, test you hypothesis by doing an experiment, analyze your data and draw a conclusion, then communicate your results. This is one thing that limits the natural sciences. At its simplest, the process is to ask a question, to purpose an answer, to test by experimenting or observing, then to tell others what you found out. As more and new experiments are conducted using better techniques or instruments, you may get different results. Since accepted truths can change as we learn more by conducting more experiment are making more observations, then no result is conclusively proven to be true. Just as with the paper airplane, one will never know for sure that the next experiment or observation will not disprove our current thinking. A second limitation of natural science is its instrumentation. The accuracy of observations and experiments depends upon the quality of the scientific instruments being used. So, as the instruments get better current beliefs are discarded because they do not explain current observations or new experiments that can now be conducted.

So, the natural sciences by their own acceptance and use of the scientific method, cannot prove anything is absolutely true, because "the next airplane model" might be better than theirs at explaining the observable facts.

To illustrate this limitation, consider the development of the Law of Conservation of Matter/Mass. Antoine Lavoisier's, the father of modern chemistry, research which included what many consider to be the first truly quantitative chemical experiments. He carefully weighed the reactants and products in a chemical reaction. By doing so, he showed that, although matter can change its state in a chemical reaction, the total mass of matter is the same at the end as at the beginning of every chemical change. Thus, for instance, if a piece of wood is burned to ashes, the total mass remains unchanged. His experiments supported the law of conservation of mass, which Lavoisier was the first to state and to prove them in experiments."¹ The Law of Conservation of Mass/Matter took its first form stating that mass(matter) can neither be created nor destroyed. It was true by the scientific method. It explained what people observed. It was supported by thousands of experiments. Then on July 16^th,1945 the United States detonated the first atomic bomb which destroyed matter/mass and turned it into energy. So, the law had to be changed to take into account what this new experiment produced.

As a further illustration, matter was first believed to be made of atoms which were considered to be the smallest possible particle of matter. As advances where made in scientific instruments, they discovered the atom was composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Further discoveries in particle physics and nuclear physics have led to the postulating of quarks, leptons and force carriers existing in atoms also. Firmly held, universally accepted truths, are consistently being discard as advances in instrumentation allow us to observe what was previously unobservable.

So, natural sciences goal is to produce the best possible explanation as to how our universe works. It builds intellectual models that explain how the universe works based on the best available evidence. And, it adapts as new discoveries are made. As new evidence is discovered. This is why the discoveries of natural science are correctly called theories.

A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it's an accepted hypothesis.

A hypothesis is an educated guess, based on observation. Usually, a hypothesis can be supported or refuted through experimentation or more observation. A hypothesis can be disproven, but not proven to be true. ²

That is, they have not been proven. They will never be proved. Because they cannot be proved.
Any natural scientist who says that one of their theories has been proven to be true has abandoned his own methodology and moved into the domain of religion. The Macmillan Dictionary Thesaurus list the following as synonyms of theory: thought, idea, belief, commitment, faith, principle, philosophy, ideal, interpretation, ideology, doctrine, dogma.³ It has become his doctrine because he believes it to be true because of the preponderance of the evidence collected thus far. Not all the evidence, only that collected thus far. He has been brainwashed, maybe by his own desire to believe. He now believes that he has created the best paper airplane ever.
Have we also been brainwashed? For the answer see Part Two.
¹ Read the full history on http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/lavoisier2/home.html.

² Taken from the website http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm on May 15, 2012.

³ Taken from the website http://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus/british/theory#theory_4 on May 15,2012