Using Design Hierarchy in Digital Logic to Illustrate the Scientific Method as a Human Invention

About Using Design Hierarchy in Digital Logic to Illustrate the Scientific Method as a Human Invention

Abstract

What level of authority should be given to “science?” For example, in a 2008 presidential debate, candidate John McCain said that, “[public] policy ought to be based upon sound science.” Others might say they “believe in global warming” or “evolution,” or some other topic of current interest. However Christians believe that science is a human invention, thus subject to our sinful nature and thus not necessarily “sound,” yet expressive of our God-given call to creatively care for the creation. The universe is holistic. It does not obey or respond to science (or mathematics, or philosophy, or theology for some other examples), no matter that we humans cannot seem to perceive the complexity of the universe apart from some employment of scientific theories. The relationship is the other way around. Science (and mathematics, philosophy, etc.) is a human response to the universe. Christians go further and say science (etc.) is a response to God and His creation, the universe. The universe always offers unpredictable aspects not explained by human understanding. Digital circuits are also holistic. When constructed and actually used they might exhibit unpredicted behaviors. The unpredicted behaviors make it evident that for some reason the theories, including scientific theories, applied during the design phase apparently did not fully explain or predict everything necessary. There are many reasons rooted in our humanity why this might happen even if known theories might have been able to explain the unpredicted behaviors. Understanding of the scientific method as a human invention in response to God’s creation gives insight to why unpredicted behaviors occur, and more importantly, is essential to relating one’s science to one’s faith. Digital design is an engineering subject in which it is remarkably easy to illustrate the human basis of the scientific method because applied science is one aspect of engineering. The hierarchical structure of the subject (digital logic) naturally lends itself to an illustration of how the science of digital logic is humanly constructed and therefore finite and tainted by sin at best. Some specific aspects of the scientific method that can be elaborated in the context of digital design are the hierarchical nature of the scientific method, the axiomatic foundation of these hierarchies, the limited scope of scientific theories and an important utilitarian goal of the scientific method, essentially to predict the future if given enough of the right information about the past and present. There are other goals that may be sought via application of the scientific method. The scientific method might inspire one to worship (or not). The scope of this paper, to illustrate that the scientific method is a human invention, does not allow a complete discussion of all the interesting goals of the scientific method, but this paper does undermine the popularly cited goal of using science to free ourselves of personal or cultural bias while the paper also affirms a positive role for science.