Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! Tonight, we’re going to be continuing our look at the relationship between religion and science. I wish to start however by getting clear what science is first and that is in relationship to theology. Tonight, I’d like to take a deep look at truth claims.
A month or so ago, I had some Mormons come by and visit. In the discussion, they said that I was asking a historical question and that I just needed to ask God for the answer. Now personally, I see this as lazy thinking anyway. God never set Himself up to be our personal answer-man. However, I reminded them of what I’d said earlier. When we make philosophical claims, we use philosophical evidence. When we make historical claims, we use historical evidence. If we make a spiritual claim, we can use spiritual evidence.
A lot of people like to test truth claims via the scientific method. Now I think the scientific method is a great way to test truth claims. That is, it’s a great way to test truth claims if they are truth claims of a scientific nature. If they are not, then the scientific method is not the method to use.
Suppose I am in a debate with a Jehovah’s Witness. If we want to determine if God is triune or not, we are not going to use the scientific method. We are going to use the data we have that we both believe comes from God and reach a conclusion that way. This would be looking at what God has said about Himself and going from there.
We obviously could not perform an experiment and see if God was triune. For one thing, we don’t have the subject matter to act on in a way that is done in science. We cannot take God to a lab and especially since he has no body, take some DNA of God and see if we find a gene for Triunity or anything of that sort.
Even with real flesh and blood people, we can’t do that. If I want to see if my wife loves me, I don’t have a doctor draw blood and take it to a lab and look at it and see if he sees traces of my wife’s love in there. Instead, I look at the evidence that I see in our relationship together.
If I want to see if Jesus was risen from the dead, I do not use science for that. Instead, I look at history. I take the information we have from the manuscripts that exist and look and see what I believe can and cannot be verified historically and act from there.
The point is that the scientific method is great for doing science, but the first question that needs to be asked is if the question is even scientific at all. Not all questions are and to use the scientific method to answer such questions is to commit a category fallacy.
We shall continue tomorrow.
Support Deeper Waters on Patreon!
