(client) “We need your help - a problem has surfaced in our infrastructure and we can’t figure out where the problem is. At around noon each Monday, servers begin to crash and we don’t know if it is the web servers, the firewalls, the load balancers, or the application.”

(me) “Has anything changed recently in your environment?”

(client) “We migrated the application from Unix to Windows.”

In October 2000, I did some consulting for a large investment firm. They were experiencing problems with their online trading system. My team was tasked with locating the source of the problem. The root cause analysis was performed relatively quickly, and the problem was identified: Windows NT Server was unable to handle the load. However, my team was informed that identifying the migration as the cause of the problem would not be well received. As a result, we had to chase ghosts and find problems which were not at all contributing to the outage. In the end, we were never able to resolve the problem because we were not permitted to state the true nature of the problem.

What does this have to do with science? Everything. Science has become just like my experience at the trading firm: only certain explanations are permitted. Consider this: in determining the origin of space and the origins of man, the explanation that we were created by intelligent design is rejected because it is “not scientific.” But what is science? Science is the study of causes. An online resource defines it as “a process by which we try to understand how the physical world works and how it came to be that way.”

Unfortunately, modern science is actually philosophic naturalism. If an explanation to something does not conform to natural laws, the explanation is rejected, even if it is the proper explanation. Intelligent design more adequately explains our existence, but just like the trading firm, modern science has set parameters which define which types of explanations are permitted. If the truth is found outside of those parameters, that explanation is rejected, and we are left with an incorrect explanation which conforms to parameters which we have defined as acceptable.

The reality is that science does not define these parameters, but rather people do. Even if we define science as philosophic naturalism, why does there need to be a scientific explanation for everything? Where is it written that science is even capable of explaining everything? Again, science is not a being which can speak but rather a philosophy which people have agreed upon and have taught us that it is the mechanism by which all things can be explained.

It helps to think of science as the judicial system. The justice system is not about truth, but about what can be proven. You can have someone who is guiltly of having comitted a crime, with plenty of evidence to prove it. It is entirely possible for the evidence to be inadmissible on several grounds (e.g. illegally obtained), and then the criminal cannot be convicted due to a lack of evidence. However, this doesn’t change the fact that he or she is guilty. Take that same criminal and put him or her in another country, where illegally-obtained evidence is admissible; now he or she is guilty. Similarly, what is science in one part of the world may not be science in another part. Why is that? Because science is not self-defined. We have defined it to be a limited scope of parameters (just like admissible evidence), and then attempt to make everything conform to our parameters. Let’s clarify this in the next paragraph.

Perhaps a more concrete example is mathematics. Imagine having to represent all values as integers (whole numbers). There would be no fractions. Now include all real numbers. You still would miss π and √2. Now include the irrational numbers; you still can’t calculate √-1; you need imaginary numbers for that. Similarly, science is not meant to explain all truths, but rather a subset thereof (just as integers are a subset of all values). Science is the study of natural things. The definition alone tells you that it is a subset: only the natural world, excluding the supernatural. The problem is that because science is only a subset of truth, it cannot be used to explain all things, just as whole integers cannot represent 1 ÷ 2. The bottom line is that science ≠ truth; science = philosophic naturalism.

Just as conservation of enery (truth) revealed the error of phlogiston theory, truth also reveals errors in other scientific principles. Intelligent Design is the only viable explanation for our existence. With the “Big Bang”, you are not starting at the very beginning; something already had to exist. According to science, matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Looking around you, common sense dictates that there is a huge amount of matter and energy. Where did it all come from? Some scientists state that the universe once existed as small as a handball (some say a marble), and that it expanded exponentially in a trillionth of a second. Sounds impressive, but where did the “marble” or “handball” come from? Secondly, this explosion (big bang) was as the result of something. Things are either a cause or an effect. The big bang is the effect of what? What caused it to explode? Obviously, things don’t explode for no reason at all, or else the myth of spontaneous human combustion would be true.

I have read explanations about what happened just before the big bang. They sound very impressive - general relativity, quantum mechanics, singularities, etc. In general, these theories state: “these are highly advanced topics; scientists are smart, you are not, ergo they must know what they are talking about.” If the space-time continuum began with the big bang, then there was no time before the big bang. Despite this, you will hear theories about random singularities a point in time before the big bang. If time did not exist before the big bang, how could singularities exist a point in time before the big bang? Additionally, what is the proof? Where is the empirical evidence that these singularities existed and they are responsible for our existence? Better yet, where did these singularities come from? This singularity theory merely defers the explanation of our origins. It is just like the chicken and the egg (further on) ...

The huge problem with the big bang theory is that it is as a result of a lack of a better natural explanation. Why must there be a natural explanation? That is a science-imposed restriction, not a true restriction. An example of a true restriction is that humans cannot breathe underwater (without the aide of a breathing apparatus). There is nothing which states that our origins must be explained by natural means; it is people (scientists) who have created this restriction.

I recall discussing constants in quantum physics with a crony. The simple formula of d = r x t (distance equals rate multiplied by time) was transformed so that

The chicken and the egg

I was researching explanations on the chicken and the egg; which came first? There is a wonderful scientific explanation: the egg came first. It came from an animal which evolved into the chicken. This is supposed to be proof of evolution, that chickens exist as a result of having evolved from the animal or species which existed just before chickens, and the last of the pre-chicken animals laid eggs which contain our present-day chickens. Do you see anything wrong with this “proof” of evolution? It states that because evolution is true, evolution is true. No, that’s not a typo; it is nothing more than circular reasoning. It assumes that animals evolved and then uses that assumption to prove the existence of chickens. Of course, the natural question is, “so where are the fossils of these pre-chicken creatures?” Where is the proof that they existed? This is the same tactic which is used to explain the origin of the universe. If you ask, “where did the initial mass (ball or marble) and energy come from?” You will get a variety of responses, but they merely defer the response; they don’t offer a true origin. So, if it came from random singularities, where did those singularities come from? If you can explain that, then what is the source of the source of singularities? It all had to begin somewhere, and the only plausible explanation is intelligent design.

(more to come)