Discovering The Unexpected - Science vs Religion
By - Dean Van Drasek
A recent experiment with a box of flour yielded surprising, nay shocking,
scientific results: cracks in the vibrated material resulted in a high energy
electrical discharge. The experimenter doesn’t understand why this is so, as
it’s never been observed in the laboratory before, and there is no immediate
explanation for it in the current understanding of applicable scientific
theories. Pretty cool stuff, right? But before you run off to your kitchen to
empty a bag of flour into a pan to try this for yourself, let me explain a bit
more.
If this had happened in a religious context, it could have been seen as a
miraculous event, like the Hindu images of Ganesha supposedly drinking
milk – viewed as miraculous until someone remembered surface tension and
capillary attraction; or in the secular case, when the well-known reporter –
but obvious city boy – Charles Kuralt broke a story on US national news (this
is pre-internet and pre-cable TV) about an amazing swimming pig, only to
be told by every farmer in the country that all pigs could swim (but they still
can’t fly).
So, how would science and religion treat this electricity-from-flour event?
1. Repetition
Science requires that all experimental evidence be capable of replication. If
you can’t make it happen again, then it probably didn’t happen the way you
thought it did in the first place. Single occurrences are chalked up to
experimental error, such as equipment failure, measurement error,
undergraduate lab assistants, interference by unintended sources, mistakes
in calculation or tabulation, gremlins, etc.
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