IS SCIENCE IMPARTIAL ABOUT GOD?

Atheist and scientist Sean Carroll makes the claim that we can trust scientists (and presumably other scholars) because they are willing to admit when they don’t know something. This might often be true. However, many have also admitted that they are quite biased in what they want to find and see.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel admits:

·       “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”

Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin also admits:

·       “a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods… of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the… world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our… adherence to material causes to create… a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying…materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”

The late Australian philosopher John Smart revealed his bias against the miraculous:

·       “someone who has naturalistic preconceptions will always in fact find some naturalistic explanation more plausible than a supernatural one… Suppose that I woke up in the night and saw the stars arranged in shapes that spelt out the Apostle’s Creed. I would know that astronomically it is impossible that stars should have changed their positions. I don’t know what I would think. Perhaps I would think that I was dreaming or that I had gone mad. What if everyone else seemed to me to be telling me that the same thing had happened? Then I might not only think that I had gone mad – I would probably go mad.” https://jamesbishopblog.com/2015/09/07/26-brutally-honest-atheist-quotes-worth-a-read/

Scholarship and the highest credentials are no safeguard against bias, even bias within the laboratory.