You: If science cannot say that there are things it cannot yet explain, then it is useless. If you assume that God did those things that cannot currently be explained, then there is no reason to go on looking for an explanation since you already have one.

Let us say that there are two construction workers seated beside a half-completed stone wall some two or three thousand years ago. They are eating their lunch and laughing together over certain off-color jokes involving the number of slaves it takes to light a lantern. After a particularly clever punch line, both men break into uncontrolled laughter. One of the men, with a sweep of his arm, knock a grape from his lunch off of the wall and the other, at the same time, leans on a loose brick and sends it falling to the ground. The laughter is suddenly silenced when the two men see that the grape and the brick have struck the ground at the same time. Both of the men know that heavy objects fall to the earth faster than light ones and are unable to explain what they have just seen.

Over the next hour, the two men perform a number of experiments, dropping rocks, bricks and a variety of fruits to the ground simultaneously, and discover that pairs of objects always fall at the same speed. The only exception to this rule being a feather that one of the men came upon that fell quite slowly no matter what it was dropped with.

After a moment's contemplation, the men decide that, because small things should not fall as fast as light things, the gods must push down on light things to make up the difference. As for feathers, they are light and the gods do not push down on them because, if they did, then birds would not be able to fly.

You can see that science would make no progress at all if scientists thought in this way. When ever they came upon a theory that was contradicted by the facts, they could invoke God to make up the difference. Science would become a bizarre and tragic parody of itself.

Aaron: I do not believe that one should invoke God every time they are unable to explain something. On the contrary, there are a small number of things that God does and that cannot be explained except by his action. It is the job of science to find out what those things are so that they can be rightly attributed to God, not to attribute everything to God that possibly can be attributed to him.

How do you respond?

  1. What are these inexplicable things? Go
  2. We shouldn't stop searching for natural explanations. Go
  3. There are no inexplicable things. Go