The scientific community faces a huge dilemma. It’s important to understand why the scientific community must only choose naturalistic causes. It may not be right, but we need to at least appreciate this position.
The United States Declaration of Independence is a marvelous document. The second sentence acknowledges the existence of God while preserving the individual’s right to believe (or not) as they see fit as they pursue happiness.
In this article, I present three principles of science. I don’t think you’ll find them published this way anywhere else because I propose them here as principles (norms) that are well understood adhered to by the community, but not specifically written. In fact, principles of science are intentionally not written down.
Science has a problem yet to be solved as eloquently as the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Science is tasked with finding and promoting truth in nature without bias. As such, science has a first principle corollary to the first amendment – not to favor any religion (no bias). The second principle is by definition – search for and share findings of truth. Unlike the constitution, order is important. Principle 1 takes priority over principle 2. There lies the dilemma. To prevent favoring a religion, science is limited to accept only explanations that do not favor a religion, group of religions, or the existence of anything beyond the natural, observable universe. If the hard truth is that there is a Creator, the unwritten edict of science’s first principle dictates that there can be no acknowledgement of that fact, or even present it as a hypothesis to be tested. As a result, all ties between the general scientific community to anyone or anything that breaks the first principle must be severed – no funding, publication, accreditation, favorable acknowledgment, etc. These social and professional controls reinforce the code of ethics, particularly relating to the first principle and shuts down the openness that science is supposed to value.
Unfortunately, there is no clear answer how to fix this problem. If we allow the scientific community to accept the truth with respect to origins, we open another can of worms – government endorsed religion. That may sound harmless, but when the government starts interfering, it doesn’t seem to know when to stop. Even if government promotes the “correct” religion, it won’t end well. We’ve gone down that road before.
Fortunately, we have the third principle of science – report all the facts with openness, even when they don’t support the hypothesis. Today we have more proof than ever about Creation thanks to the tireless efforts of countless scientists who mostly believe in the general theory of evolution as fact. Even though their repetitious dogma is nauseating, and bias is rampant, there is ample application of the third principle of science for everyone to benefit from the data regardless of belief. Today we enjoy a wealth of information showing how infinite our God and Creator is. For example, I enjoy the Planet Earth video series even though it’s chock-full of the unsupported evolutionary dogma. Because of their non-religious charter, they have open access almost everywhere in the world. Between silly references to evolution as if it is proven fact, we learn how every species has some unique and remarkable trait, not connected to anything else. More repetitious than their references to evolution are the so-called “developments of nature” that creationists understand as designs of our Creator. The former claim comes without any support. The latter comes with Power beyond measure.
See another article that covers the same subject with a different angle here.