Jason Galloway commits many obvious and common errors in his latest column, “Turning science on its head.” He is wrong when he says atheists are claiming they can disprove a god. No one can disprove a god any more than they can disprove the Easter Bunny or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Atheists simply state that there is no evidence to support the existence of a god, which is a fact that even religious people rarely argue against. Faith, they say, is good enough for them.
Yet science is very much valued by everyone because it makes much more sense than any other method of understanding our world. Even Christians, who say their abundance of faith is “good enough,” leap at every opportunity to prove their god in some way. Can you imagine Christians thumbing their nose at a scientific discovery proving Jesus’ resurrection? “Oh, that’s nice, but we don’t value science. We have faith!” Not likely. Science is only bad when it contradicts their holy text.
Galloway himself, while criticizing the scientific method, attempts to prove God’s existence using the scientific method. Hypothesis: if the physical laws of the universe are found to be violated, then some non-physical force must be at work. (I totally agree!) He says the “fulfilled prophecies” of the New Testament are such miracles. What he conveniently disregards is the fact that there is no evidence of “fulfilled prophecies” outside of the book itself, and, of course, the people who wrote the New Testament had read the Old beforehand.
Miracles are always things that seem statistically unlikely but could easily happen on their own. “God” will heal your pneumonia if you’re lucky, but he won’t ever grow your leg back. In the words of author Bob Collins, “Penicillin without prayer works much better than prayer without penicillin.” Science is responsible for every single advancement in every facet of our civilization. Can you think of a time in history when we valued faith over science? Maybe something starting with “D” and ending in “ark Ages?”
Galloway’s last point about science textbooks is utterly ridiculous. Science changes because science is constantly growing and improving. The downfall of religion is that it is based on ancient dogma that is irrelevant to our way of life today. The Bible, for example, is written under the assumption that the sun revolves around the earth, that we own slaves, beat our children and discriminate against our women. We have surpassed that ancient knowledge and morality because we learned more about the world, which is a good thing. Christians today are very unlike the Christians of the 1600s, and it isn’t because the Bible changes (we agree that it doesn’t), but because society changes. It gets better. It learns.
How can you say “today’s science is tomorrow’s joke” with a straight face? How many ancient gods that people once lived and died for do we laugh at and make Disney movies about today? Today’s Yahweh is yesterday’s Zeus.
Sam Arnold is a junior majoring in computer engineering. He is the president of Alabama Atheists and Agnostics.
