Are Christians Just out of It, Scientifically Speaking?
Have you seen this page scanned from an older edition (copyright 1990) of our Science 4 textbook floating around the blogosphere lately? Just do a Google search for “electricity is a mystery” (include the quotation marks) and you’ll see that it has been making the rounds.
The word “mystery” might seem unusual in a science context, but to
physicists the world is still full of mystery. When electricity and
magnetism were unified through Maxwell’s equations and light was
explained as electromagnetic radiation, people thought that we fully
understood this area of science. The famous physicist Albert Michelson
said in 1894 that “The more important fundamental laws and facts of
physical science have all been discovered.” On careful reading in
context, Michelson’s quotation was not as naive as it sounds, but it
does reflect a widespread view that physics was largely complete.
Within a few decades the discoveries of relativity and of quantum
mechanics turned the world of physics upside down. Today, the sense of
wonder and mystery in physics is as large as ever. The popular science
writer Amir Aczel is unafraid to use the word mystery in the title of
his recent book, Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics (Wiley,
2002).
Of course all of this is too much to explain in a 4th grade science
textbook. A helpful first step, however, is to acknowledge that even the
familiar set of phenomena we call electricity is still not fully
understood and to point out the difference between the effects of
electricity and the fundamental nature of electricity itself.
A number of people have taken the opportunity to ridicule the science that is presented here as well as the Bible. The basic point being made is that Christians are just out of it; we don’t have a clue; we are “two hundred years” out of touch with reality.
Are Christians just out of it, scientifically speaking?
The answer comes down to viewpoint. If you believe that man can know everything and that science is the path to that knowledge, then you would say yes; Christians are befuddled. If, however, you believe that man’s study of the universe is limited by his senses even when those senses are extended through technology, then your answer is no; Christians are clearly not “out of it.”
Christians acknowledge that there is much humans do not know about our world. While they fully accept that which we can learn and verify about, say electricity, they also accept that much remains beyond our current ability to know. While we all know what electricity does, no one really knows what it is. Not surprisingly, many reputable scientists admit such limitations.
Consider this statement:
“With the study of electricity, we begin a qualitatively different phase of our study of physics. Up to now, we have for the most part dealt with topics which are macroscopic, and of which we have some intuitive appreciation. For the next few chapters, we will be concerned with the microscopic world, which is largely hidden from our senses and our common sense.”
or this:
“You can’t see electricity but you can see the work it does. You can see a lamp light, you can see electric trains run, you can feel electricity if you touch a bare wire and get a shock. One can feel the effect of electricity if burned by an electric hot iron.”
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1989/7/89.07.03.x.html
or this:
“It is a form of energy. It is difficult to explain what electricity really is because:
- Electricity has no weight—we cannot weigh it. And yet electricity can be used to lift or haul thousands of tonnes of material.
- Electricity has no shape—we cannot see electricity. And yet it produces light at the flick of a switch.”
The following quotation is about light, which in physics is viewed as electromagnetic radiation and therefore related to electricity:
“Because it is so many things, defining light is a bit of a philosophical quandary. It doesn’t help that light continues to surprise us, with novel materials that alter light’s speed and trajectory in unexpected ways. . . . Instead of worrying about what light is, it might be better to concentrate on what light does.”
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/070226_about_light.html
The point is this: The examples could come from any branch of science, and depending on one’s view of man’s limits (or lack thereof), the examples can be said to either describe or explain. BJU Press science writers take the position that science describes what can be observed, and their writing reflects that.
In our new edition, we have not used the word "mystery," but the concept of some things being beyond our knowledge is still there. We believe it is better to teach students that the study of science is limited by our human senses than to teach them in such a way that they leave the class thinking they know things none of us really does.
Interested in seeing the latest edition of Science 4? Science 4 Student Text, (3rd ed.)
To see how this thinking is developed in the upper grade levels, see the textbooks for 9th grade Physical Science and the 12th grade Physics.