Metaphors are like... metaphors
I heard two good illustrations over the past few days regarding the ever-so-related topics of forgiveness and scientific reductionism (both in a church though, interestingly enough). Thought I'd share them:
- A young boy was visiting the Washington Monument and walked up to one of the park staff to disclose that he was interested in purchasing the monument to bring back to his home. The park ranger, wanting to humour the child, asked the boy how much money he had in his wallet. The boy took his wallet out, counted up his change, and announced he had $1.88 to offer in exchange for the monument. The park ranger replied: "Well, first, the monument isn't for sale. Second, even if it were for sale, it's worth much more money than you could afford to pay. Third, since you are a citizen of the United States, it already belongs to you." The analogy to forgiveness: we can't buy it (God offers it to us freely), we can't earn it (i.e. there's nothing we can give up that would be enough to buy our forgiveness unless God had made the perfect sacrifice for us), and, upon accepting Christ, we have become citizens of God's kingdom and have received forgiveness through Christ's sacrifice. I thought the analogy was both cute and beautifully accurate.
- A scientist found an old vacuum tube radio in his attic. He turned it on, but it didn't work. Being curious, he proceeded to take the radio apart and found that one of the vacuum tubes was broken. He went out and found a replacement vacuum tube at a garage sale, installed it, and flipped the switch to hear voices once again being projected from the old radio. Therefore, the only conclusion one could scientifically draw was that the voice must have been inside the vacuum tube; that is, the voice was missing before he put the tube in and present after the tube was installed. Sounds silly, but it's a great illustration of the idea of scientific reductionism, the idea of studying a larger functioning system by studying a component of the complex system in isolation. This is a classic problem in studying the human body - it's so amazingly complex that, in order for us to get any idea what's going on, we have to break our study down into very small and specific components (i.e. one type of cell or one type of protein) and attempt to figure out what it does, somewhat independent of everything else going on. This illustration actually came up in a round table I attended last night regarding whether the scientific and religious worldviews can ever coincide. The point behind this illustration is that science can't possibly understand all the interrelationships and complexity which exist in nature simply because we can't design a valid experiment to test them (i.e. the bottom line - faith is part of science too).
