Dr. Jeffrey Koperski of Saginaw Valley State University in northeastern Michigan visited Andrews’ Haughey Hall in the Science Complex on Friday, October 6. Invited by the Department of Physics, Dr. Koperski spoke to a filled-up Thompson Amphitheater in the early afternoon to speak on the topic of “The Story Behind the Separation of Religion and Science: How the Laws of Nature Were Naturalized.” Physics students and guests from other departments were greeted with homemade soup, beverages, and bread as announcements about future events, class information, and an offering of co-curricular credit were made. After the proper introductions were made by the event’s host, Andrews physics professor Dr. Gary Burdick, Koperski began his lecture, accompanied by slides.
As not only a professor of philosophy but also an active practitioner, Koperski began his talk by stating how, throughout his career, he has always been interested in the concept of law. This includes the history of legal, philosophical, and spiritual law. He went on to state that many of the biggest questions in philosophy regarding the natural world involve distinguishing the strict formulas of laws and who or what the lawgiver is. Throughout the course of history, the laws of nature have often been used to contradict religion and the supposed lawgiver that theism promotes.
From these lines of thought have come the theories and scientific philosophies of naturalism, which, per Koperski’s definition, is “the belief that only natural things exist.” A prominent example of the leaders who led a philosophical and scientific shift in thought from believing dominantly in creationism and theism to naturalism, was a group of British thinkers known as the “X Club”. Out of a group of nine individuals, Koperski mainly focused on the efforts of three, including Thomas Henry Huxley (the initiator of the club), Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. These men rebelled against the doctrine of creationism to popularize theories that the world and the rest of the universe were created without divine help and were instead products of natural randomness.
An interesting point that Koperski brought up was how many of the men, through their studies and theory-constructing, often twisted the words of revered scientists and philosophers, like Sir Isaac Newton, to fit their own agendas. After jokingly claiming Newton as a part of his field as a natural philosopher, since the term “scientist” was not created until later in history, Koperski pointed out Newton’s religious background and practices that he applied to his works. Contrary to the points that those of the X Club and others made, Newton subscribed to the belief that God did not need essences to govern the universe, and he just physically did everything himself. Without God, there would be no laws of nature, according to what early philosophers and scientists asserted regarding creation, which again contradicted the early opponents of creationism.
Other theories of naturalism and other philosophies ran rampant throughout the Western world from the 18th century to the early 20th century. French mathematician Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace claimed that in his model of the solar system, there was no need for God, although his methods of making this discovery involved him using a model of the universe that was made through intentional design. Others claimed that maybe God created science but did not provide any further intentional care. Unfortunately, many researchers and theorists concluded that there were no set laws of nature and no God creating such laws, which Koperski, in his speech, expressed his disappointment in.
In the modern world of science and philosophy, a debate between “progressive” thought versus old traditional constructs of faith and religion has broken these fields into two large pieces, each continuing to splinter into hundreds of smaller pieces of theory and belief. In concluding his monologue, Koperski asserted that the laws of nature came from “theistic theory and not naturalism,” contrary to what many modern philosophers in history had proclaimed. It is very hard to work within physics or many other fields without the laws of nature, leading Koperski to believe that creationism ought to be accepted and integrated with naturalism and other philosophic beliefs instead of the continual pulling apart of the two that have been occurring for centuries.
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