Miracles and the Limitations of Science

Philip S. Norman, M.D.

In preceding discussions of science and religion, I have started by assuming that, among a church-going audience, most will have a pretty good notion of what religion is. On the other hand, for science I have described the wonders that modern science has uncovered without really explaining what science is. Before I point out the limitations of science, it may be worthwhile to pause to describe, or rather, define Science with the capital S.

Here are some definitions by scientists and non-scientists:

• Science is organized knowledge. Herbert Spencer
• Science is the desire to know causes. William Hazlitt
• Science is a series of judgments, revised without ceasing. Emile Duclaux
• Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Carl Sagan
• In essence, science is a perpetual search for an intelligent and integrated comprehension of the world we live in. Cornelius Van Neil

I find these statements and others like them catchy but only meaningful to people who are already "into" science. They are not real working definitions and perhaps not useful to someone not a scientist. Someone has said, "Science is what scientists do," which in itself is not very useful, but-what do scientists do? Answer: They collect data in an organized way.

Scientists get nowhere without data, without facts. The better organized, the more precise, the better. One can collect information using only the unaided senses, and a number of scientists still do just that, watching how a plant species grows, for instance, or observing ant or meerkat behavior in the wild. People may read about giant telescopes, rooms full of machines that sequence the genome, miles long super-colliders and think these are the essentials of modern science, without which there would be no new discoveries. Nothing could be further from the truth, even though such complex gadgets add importantly to our store of knowledge.

The important thing is organizing the observations, recording them, repeating them, and asking: Do you see the same thing every time? Scientists need the repeatable. They reason that if an event happens every time, then it follows a basic rule. With some thought the scientist hopes to devise a law that predicts future events. Scientists also love precision, because with precision, reproducibility improves. Hence the need for instruments that enhance the senses. Galileo would not have discovered the moons of Jupiter without a telescope; Leeuwenhoek wouldn't have found tiny "animalcules" in pond water without his microscope. Nowadays, telescopes detect light so distant that it originated billions of years ago. At the other end of the scale, we can visualize individual molecules, even atoms. We wouldn't have known whether the theory of relativity is correct if we couldn't have measured that the mass of the sun bends the light from a distant star ever such a little bit.

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