mormonsandscience

Imagine, for a moment, living in 1687 when Isaac Newton published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (or Pincipia, for short).  After the publication of the book, you would have risen in the morning and gone to work never knowing that the most influential scientific book ever written had just been published.  Those living during that time could not have imagined that Principia would revolutionize the world in which we live.

Are there developments in science today that will greatly impact the world hundreds of years from now?  Will people living 300 years into the future (2308) look back on our time and identify developments in science that brought about major change?  Quite possibly.  I can think of at least one positive example and one negative example.

On the positive side there’s the Human Genome Project, a multi-billion dollar effort to map the human genome that was completed in April, 2003.  Because of this Project, science is pursuing genetics research that has the potential to bring about significant change to the well-being of humanity.  People living 300 years from now may look back on our time and wonder if we realized the significance of the Project.  On the morning the project was completed in 2003, we probably woke up and went about our work as if nothing had changed.

Now for the negative.  There is currently a subtle movement in science that is not recognizable to many, yet it has long-term ramifications.  It is changing the goal of science from discovering absolute truth to discovering relative truth. 

Absolute truth refers to universal, necessary, and certain knowledge about the world.  It is the standard to which scientists aspired for generations.  Relative truth, on the other hand, is the idea that truth is context and culturally dependent.  That is, there are different truths for different folks living in different situations.  Now, to a certain extent I accept relative truth.  Even my doctoral dissertation was in the area of phenomenology, a philosophy which basically asserts that truth exists in people’s subjective interpretations of lived experiences.  But relative truth should not be allowed to replace objective truth as the goal of science.  Efforts to promote this change is putting science on the slippery slope of moral relativism

Moral relativism is the belief that what is right or wrong in a moral sense is dependent on contextual circumstances (i.e., social, historical, cultural, and personal circumstances).  Clearly it is important to make moral judgments based on context; for instance, if someone kills another person, it is important to know if that killing took place on the battlefield or in a bank.  But I would argue that each legitimate moral judgment ultimately ends up in an absolute truth (i.e., the soldier is not guilty of murder whereas the back robber is guilty of murder).  Yet when we take away absolute truth and leave only relative truth, everything goes haywire.  Science is not exempt from the resulting confusion.

Science’s rejection of absolute truth has already had unfortunate consequences, especially in psychology.  The oligarchy of psychology, otherwise known as the American Psychological Society (APA), recently sanctioned (in 2001) immoral practices such as gay marriage and other gender bending practices.  What is particularly irksome is that all this happened in the name of scientific progress!  “Progress by what standards?” you may ask.  Progress by the standard of “If it feels good and doesn’t harm anyone else, then do it.” (a.k.a. moral relativism).  In other words, according to the APA, there are no longer any absolute truths about what comprises healthy sexual relationships.  “Anything goes as long as it makes you feel good and it does not hurt others.”

Relativism was once popular among the Sophists in ancient Greece.  We are thus experiencing a return to the old ways, and it feels like a bad dream.  So how did we get to this point?  The answer is simple.  The scientific community has been infiltrated by secular humanists that reject God.  If there is no God, there can be no absolute truth because absolute truth requires a final arbiter of truth.  In other words, without a final arbiter who conveys truth and knowledge of things as they really are, there can be no absolute truth.  The more secular humanists push their atheistic agenda, the more they are driving the final arbiter of truth out of science.  Moral relativism is gaining popularity today because it is filling the void left by the forced exit of the final arbiter of truth from the sciences.

The only antidote I can think of is bringing God back into science, much like existed during the 17th century Scientific Revolution.  (Note that I am not calling for a return of religious influence into science that existed during the Medieval Dark Ages.)  If secular humanism is allowed to proceed unchecked, relativism will grow and the goal of science will look very different 300 years from now.  

If that happens, people living 300 years from now will say, “Gee, I wonder what it was like to live during 2008 when relativism began to replace absolute truth?”  If we could speak, we might say, “I just woke up in the morning and went to work as if nothing had changed.”  If we fail to challenge the rising tide of secular humanism and pretend as though nothing is happening, history could very well turn out this way.

Do you believe that natural remedies have the potential to heal wounds and cure diseases?  I do because in Alma 46:40 it says that the Lord provided humanity with “many plants and roots [of excellent quality]...to remove the cause of diseases.”  Yet if you are like me, you rarely turn to natural remedies.  Like so many of you, I have taken a few herbs (the legal kind) and tried a couple of holistic remedies, but never knowing if they really worked, I quit.  

What is wrong with this picture?  Everything.  The Book of Mormon tells us that there are plenty of high-potency natural remedies out there, but we have insufficient knowledge about what they are, where to find them, and how they work.  Granted, there is literature on the efficacy and uses of herbs, but it is limited, especially in comparison to the literature on pharmaceutical drugs.

Drug development is a multi-billion dollar per year industry.  Drug companies pour millions of dollars into testing drugs to uncover their potential benefits and drawbacks.  The FDA drug testing process is standardized to optimize benefits and minimize harm to humans and animals.  Before releasing a drug to the public we want to know everything there is to know about it.  We want to know where it works, why it works, who benefits, and who does not benefit.  

Why hasn’t our pharmaceutical industry given equal attention to natural remedies?  If plants and herbs can heal and cure disease, then why are we not investigating natural resources with equal rigor?  By expending all of our resources on synthetic drugs we are ignoring half of the possibilities.  We’ve put all our eggs into one basket (the drug basket), and left the natural remedies basket largely empty.  I hope that I am not the only person who has a problem with this.  I believe that many people have died and countless others are leading less than healthy lives because we have largely ignored natural remedies.

We have not pursued natural remedies with the same rigor because natural remedies cannot be patented.  You see, when a drug company develops a new drug, the company is allowed to put a patent on it so that no one else can develop and sell the same drug.  Pharmaceutical patents are generally a good thing because they enable companies to recover and the millions they spent on testing and development, and make a profit. Without this protection there would be no incentive to develop drugs.  After a company has recouped its costs and made some money, a patent usually expires and other companies are allowed to make generic versions of the drug and sell it at a lower price. 

If a pharmaceutical company is unable to patent a natural remedy, then there is no financial incentive to develop and test herbs, plants, and roots – so they don’t.

This situation needs to change.  We could start by allowing drug companies to patent natural remedies.  By allowing patents, we will facilitate the rigorous testing of herbs, plants, and roots.  Until then, we will largely be in the dark about the best plants, doses, and combinations of natural remedies to use to treat injuries and cure diseases. (Mormons and Science 09.08)

I was at a ward sod party last week.  (For the uninformed, a sod party is where members of the ward help lay sod at a member’s home.)  While moving wheel barrows of sod to the back yard, dropping them on the ground, and setting them in place, the home owner asked for my opinion on a radio talk show that focuses on paranormal events (the Coast to Coast show by George Noory).  I replied that largely it is a good show, but that some of it was hoakey (I use “hoakey” when referring to empirical truth claims that lack scientific rigor); like a recent show that had a UFO expert answering calls from guests who claimed to have been abducted by ET.

There is a saying which goes: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  In other words, just because we don’t have good empirical evidence for something, it does not follow that that thing does not exist.  Even honest atheistic scholars concede this point when it comes to deity.

I reject ET, but not because we lack evidence like flying saucers and short, skinny men with big eyes and large craniums.  I reject ET because the accounts are not consistent with what the gospel teaches. 

Is there extra terrestrial life out there?  Yes.  God created and populated other worlds.  Could people from those other worlds develop technology that would allow them to travel to our earth?  Yes.  They would have to be more technologically advanced than us, but intergalactic travel technology in other worlds is a real possibility.  In 40,000 years Voyager 1 (launched in 1977) will come within 1.6 light years of a sun in the Ophiuchus constellation, but without life on board, of course.  If people on an earth near that star are paying attention they might see Voyager and call it a UFO.   

If there are extra terrestrials out there that could have intergalactic travel technology, then why not accept ET?  The answer is that intelligent life forms are created in the image of God.  ET may have two arms and two legs, but his eyes and head are way too big.  Even modern apes look more human than ET.  Reports of ET’s physical characteristics are too far off the beaten path of what an entity created in the image of God would look like

So have extraterrestrials resembling ET visited earth? No.  But if we start hearing reports of human-looking extraterrestrials in space ships, then the reports might gain credibility.  But as long as the ET folks keep with the hallucinogens, alcohol, and self-imposed delusions caused by wishful thinking, ET will have a disproportionately large cranium and large eyes, and their accounts will lack credibility with me.

I am currently reading a book that reconciles Christian and scientific teachings on the creation.  The author does a fairly good job of illustrating the similarities between the gospel and science.  He shows how scientific theories on the history of the earth, pre-Adamic hominids, dinosaurs, and the Big Bang are supported by teachings in the gospel.  (That’s right, supposedly there's a scripture or teaching that supports the idea of a big bang.)  So basically, the author starts with the assumption that the teachings of science are truth, and then shows how the scriptures can be interpreted to support those teachings. 

I think that this sort of scholarship is a worthwhile endeavor, but it is very risky because it relies on a tenuous working assumption, that science has got it right. 

It is fine to argue that there are teachings in the LDS faith that agree with scientific theories, that is until the scientific theories that our faith supposedly support turn out to be false.

Case #1 - Phlogiston.  If you lived during the 1600s and first half of the 1700s you would have believed that combustible objects give off a substance known as phlogiston.  Phlogiston was supposedly evident in the smoke and flames given off when an object burned, and in the reduced weight of the object (ashes) after burning.  The theory of phlogiston remained a tried and tested theory throughout the early 1700s.  It was even dubbed the discovery that “changed the face of chemistry.”  Then in 1770s Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier discovered that oxygen was the substance involved in combustion, not phlogiston.  The once prized theory of phlogiston is no longer accepted as a legitimate theory of science.

Case #2 – Luminiferous Ether.  For thousands of years scholars have been philosophically opposed to the idea that there is space in the universe which is void of matter.  For instance, Aristotle believed that the space between matter was not empty; he called it "quintessence”.  And the Stoics believed that the space between the matter of the earth was not empty; they called it "pneuma”. 

The same goes for science during the the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s.  Leading scientists believed that light and sound waves traveled through something, and they knew that the stiffer the medium, the faster the waves traveled through the medium.  (Remember in The Hunt for Red October the scene where the American submarine crew had to keep quiet?  The sound waves from something as small as a pen hitting the floor could quickly move through the water and steel hulls of two submarines, thus alerting the enemy of their location.)  

Because light waves travel very fast, scholars surmised that it must be moving through a medium in space that has the stiffness of steel.  And so, with very little scientific evidence to go on, they called the substance through which waves and planets pass, ‘ether’.  It was widely believed that ether filled the empty spaces of the universe until 1887 when an experiment by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley failed to find empirical evidence for ether.  The null result was a major disappointment to the scientific community.  Although the theory of ether took a long time to fall out of favor, it is no longer accepted today.  (A prominent LDS scholar once claimed that ether was a manifestation of the Light of Christ.  Click here and read the Joseph Smith as a Scientist book review to find out who it was.)

Today’s most beloved theories may one day be proven false.  It has happened in the past and it will surely happen again in the future.  This simple fact should be on the mind of every LDS scientific apologist. 

We need to be cautious of claiming that gospel teachings support theories like the Big Bang, pre-Adamic hominids, and ancient fossilization.  The beloved and widely accepted theories that we claim the gospel corroborates may one day end up in the trash heap of scientific rejects like phlogiston and ether.  Then what?  That's right - Ooops!
(MormonsandScience 09.08)