In December 2014, over 2,800 atheists responded to a challenge to rewrite the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with modern, humanist alternatives. After collating and condensing the submissions, thirteen judges voted on the top ten atheist Ten Commandments – or perhaps to avoid the hierarchical implications of the word, we ought to call them Suggestments. I would like to offer a few, brief observations to this list, which aren’t so much chiseled into immutable stone as they are finger-sketched into the sand at low tide. The original CNN article can be found here.
The scientific method is the most reliable way of understanding the natural world
If by “understanding the natural world” we mean gaining empirical knowledge through the senses, I heartily agree. In its pristine form, the scientific method has cured diseases, increased crop yields, and sent Man to the moon. She is very good at what she does. Insinuating, as it seems the statement does, that empiricism encompasses all truth, however, is wrong-headed.
Beyond the reach of the scientific method are all the questions that really matter. It can tell us that a body will fall towards the earth at 9.2 m per second squared, but it cannot tell us if throwing that body off a roof is morally onerous. It can demonstrate that the average male is stronger than the average female, but not if that strength ought to be used to protect or pillage the weaker sex. It can teach you how to enrich uranium, but not if it should be used in a bomb or a power plant. It can tell you the wavelengths of the rainbow colors on the electromagnetic spectrum, but cannot comment on its beauty.
It is also true that observations are only as useful as the humans who interpret them. Data is always interpreted through a worldview lens; ideological commitments alter the data we allow ourselves to see, dismissing certain hypotheses out of hand. If I do not believe extraterrestrial life is possible, then it will not be among the hypotheses I consider to explain the glowing blue orb hovering above my truck. A priori commitments to a godless universe blind one from considering an intelligent designer as a possible creator of the mind-boggling complexity and mathematical impossibility of, say, the human genome. Inference to the best possible explanation, when hamstrung by bias, excludes the best possible explanation.
So yes, the scientific method is the most reliable way of understanding the natural world and is a God-gifted means of improving life, augmenting the wonder of creation, and fulfilling the dominion mandate. And we must be prepared to have it lead us to the precipice where the physical world ends in the cliff of metaphysical implications.
Thought Butter 