Unscientific

I was reading through the back logs on one of my IRC channels this morning and found an interesting comment: "[I'm] just waiting to hear someone suggest that the Law of Conservation of Mass isn't true, and a theory of scientific wine into blood thing happen [sic]." This was stated in a discussion of Christian communion and specifically with respect to the Catholic belief that the wine of communion is transmuted to become the very blood of Jesus. I don't happen to agree with this mysticism, but I do believe in transmutation.

Jesus said to them, "Fill the waterpots with water." So they filled them up to the brim.

And He said, "Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter."

So they took it to him. When the headwaiter tasted the water which had become wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew) the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said, "Every man serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then he serves the poorer wine, but you have kept the good wine until now."

– John 2:7-10 (emphasis added)

The Bible says this happened. Therefore, I believe it. This is unscientific.

The problem with the statement above, "I'm just waiting to hear someone suggest that the Law of Conservation of Mass isn't true" is that he's stated it. It isn't true, it's a theory for explaning observations. From Wikipedia: "The law of conservation of mass/matter states that the mass of a system of substances is constant, regardless of the processes acting inside the system." To state that this Law is true is to assert faith in the fact that it will hold for all observations that could ever be made for now and for the rest of the observable future. This is a religious assertion. Stating that a physical law is true is an expression of belief that an explanation of observations always holds. This is definitely unscientific as well.

Science is the business of observing facts and then assembling the patterns into theories. The theories should be able to effectively describe the data and predict future observations. However, a theory ceases to be useful when a new observation invalidates it. The theory must be adapted or thrown away and replaced with a new one. Stating that a theory is true asserts that every possible application of the theory has been observed and that it held for every application for all time for all parts of the universe. Obviously, this is impossible unless one is omniscient. Any theory must be testable and an assertion of truth cannot be.

Therefore, it is not irrational to state that transmutation has occured, merely unscientific. In the specific case of wine turning to blood, that's quite testable. We could easily have a person take communion in a controlled setting and then test their stomach contents for blood containing foreign DNA. The obvious religious response would be that we aren't to put God to the test and that we'd probably just find wine because we'd be taking communion in an unacceptable way—whatever. Again, that isn't necessarily irrational, but it's certainly unscientific.

My main point is that too many people use science as a crutch for explaining truth when science isn't the search for truth, it's the search for explanations of the small database of known facts humans have collected. To state that a theory will always hold is just placing faith in science. Is that wrong? You can be the judge of that.

Cheers.