Why the Christian worldview is the foundation of the method and spirit of science.
In my university teaching experience, my Chinese students often tell me, “From the very start of our elementary school, we have been taught to ‘believe in science.’” This is accepted even in the West. Many people adopt a view shared by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, among others, that natural science can bring about “definite knowledge.”
Natural science involves the human activities of interpreting empirical observations by reasoning through induction. However, in the realm of theology and metaphysics, there is a set of beliefs that the natural sciences cannot prove or disprove by simply applying scientific methodology. Therefore, science in itself is not neutral. Science has a set of beliefs on which its epistemic feasibility hinges that do not arise from within its own methodological system, and science as such cannot be an object of its own belief system. Even more, it has no right to call on people to believe in it.
Causality and “idols”
When natural science uses theoretical models to interpret and describe natural reality, it presupposes that every phenomenon or thing that comes into being has a cause of its existence and that nothing can arise out of nothing. The inability of physicists to explain the phenomena observed in the double-slit experiment led some scientists to wonder whether various natural phenomena happen outside the laws of natural causation. This, however, did not cause the scientific community in general to give up using scientific theories to explain the causal laws behind all phenomena.
Stephen Hawking’s interpretation of the Big Bang theory insisted that, strictly speaking, the universe did not arise from absolute nothing, but rather a certain …
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