![muzammil-soorma-R11bppS4q8o-unsplash.jpg](https://bblais.github.io/images/muzammil-soorma-R11bppS4q8o-unsplash.jpg)
Gravitational Attraction
What would happen if two people out in space a few meters apart, abandoned by their spacecraft, decided to wait until gravity pulled them together? My initial thought was that …
In reading Francis Collins' book, "The Language of God", I was struck by the way in which the religious claims enter into the scientific discussion. There were three main arguments that he used:
Each of the arguments has the same form: "I don't know how to currently explain something, therefore it is unexplainable in principle, therefore there must be a God." Taken to its extreme, we can find Colbert's summary"There must be a God, because I don't know how things work." particularly appropriate.
It's really a bold religious statement, ironically full of the arrogance that religious people often attribute to scientists. By saying that our current knowledge cannot explain something, therefore it can never be explained, is stating that you know better than all other future generations of people.
The problem with the statements, however, is not the arrogance. It is that they are show-stoppers: once you make the claim that something is unexplainable, then you stop looking. So-called Intelligence Design suffers from the same problem: by saying that a designer is needed to create the stated irreducibly complex mechanisms, then there is no use in searching for an explanation. It stops science, stops curiosity, stops investigation.
These types of arguments, then, are not just wrong they are dangerous because they stop the types of inquiry that could possibly show that they are wrong. In this way, they have a tendency to protect themselves in the world of memes.
I am not saying that we have answers to points 1-3 above (although I think we have some very good ideas at least for 2 and 3), but to go from ignorance to "God must have done it" is extremely sloppy logic, if it can be called logic at all.