2 Sources for Paper

For my big topic question, "Can Science and God Coexist?", I have wanted to show that science supersedes faith in terms of logic- that science that can be tested and proven over time while faith demands blind trust. For this main topic, I wanted to find two essays from scientists of how god and science cannot mesh together. As such, when reading, I did not want to include essays that have a borderline, that state that in some times science and God can coexist, and in other times it cannot. For this purpose, I chose the essays "Yes, if by..." by Steven Pinker and "Yes" by Victor J. Stenger.

In the essay "Yes, if by..." by Steven Pinker, he concludes that proof that science and God cannot exist together because over time, science has answered the questions that once deemed a response in a deity. In the essay, he says that "Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend: the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in God." He starts from the very beginning on time, the creation of the earth, and how it at first deemed that there had to be a larger than life creator. However, now, we have different ideas- that there was an explosion around 4.6 billion years ago that explained the creation of our universe, not the general creation story of that god created the world in six days. Then, he starts by saying how there had to be a deity that controls everything biological, of who lives and who dies. However, Charles Darwin in his origin of species explains how evolution and natural selection can decide which organisms live and die based on genetic traits. Later, Pinker begins to question morality, and how there has to be a deity that controls our own thoughts, actions, and ideals. Pinker counters by saying that advances in psychology and neurology have determined a network of trillions of cells that determine our thoughts, and that morality is just as easy to study and understand as our normal five senses. He closes the with the quote that "science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it," proving how over time, the waning belief in god has not only strengthened our belief in science, but also as a community, has made the human race better.

In the next essay, "Yes," by Victor J. Stenger, Stenger speculates that the larger questions have always been answered with science. Like Pinker, he states how the Big Bang not only explains how the universe was expanded, but how it was also created. He states how in "1905 Einstein showed that matter could be created from energy" and how that energy was always present in the singularity by the ever present union between the infinite amount of negative energy present by the gravity of matter, and the infinite amount of positive energy by the matter created leads to a net amount of energy being zero in the beginning. Therefore, it is plausible to conclude that from nothing, matter can be created. This observation, and the amount of knowledge attained from the realization of the plausibility of the Big Bang, allowed for an influx of new knowledge and experiments to be tested that caused a revolution in the early 1900's for the belief in no deity to ever have played a part in the creation of the universe. Stenger then states that "the universe we see with our most powerful telescopes is but a grain of sand in the Sahara" and that from the mass amount of matter created can prove that from all of the entropy in the beginning of time, it eventually became uniformity and order. With this observation, Stenger closes the essay by saying that "science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent." This simple statement proved that in Stenger's eyes, science and God can never coexist.