Thomas P. Sheahen is an MIT-educated physicist who has spent more than a decade fighting the failure to use the scientific method in important public policy research, whether in climate science, toxicology, cancer research, public health, or medical issues. Sheahen is wise enough to recognize that science cannot prove or disprove God’s existence.

However, Sheahen is also smart enough to use scientific knowledge and the scientific method to create a larger platform from which one can theorize that there is a creator. What makes Sheahen’s approach so is that he never confuses science and theory, unlike Lysenko-ists in today’s “scientific” community.

In every area of intellectual inquiry, the scientific method—using controlled, carefully observed experiments to test a theory’s validity—is an important tool. However, politically motivated junk science is everywhere, particularly in the politically charged areas of public health, medical science, criminology, sociology, climate science, and toxicology. What we have instead of the scientific method is “scientism.”

Scientism is the inordinate and unjustified assertion that science has all the answers—something that is never true as a general principle and that is definitely not true if scientists fail to use the scientific method to test their proposed theories, if their theories are unscientific because they can’t pass the Popper test of falsifiability, or if they’re engaging in deceptive practices such as data dredging and multiple sampling. All of this is what Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman called “cargo cult science,” which looks like science but fails to use the scientific method.

Image from NASA. Public domain.

Sheahen is notable because he examines issues where religion and science intersect, unlike scientism, which charges in to announce solutions to matters that cannot be solved scientifically. He addresses this in Everywhen: God, Symmetry, and Time, where he provides a physicist’s unique perspective on what most people would describe as the philosophies of being, ontology. knowledge, and epistemology.

For those wondering, ontology and epistemology address the big questions—what made the world, and how do we get to know that world? How do things work in such an orderly manner? How did the biosphere develop from simple organisms to eventually produce sentient human beings? What do we know, and what evades our ability to know? Sheahen sees science as an aid to appreciating the issues without providing the answers:

As a physicist, the appreciation I have for the symmetry and beauty of the laws of physics points toward the magnificent power of God... The grandeur of God’s creation greatly exceeds our language and thought processes... I borrow from geometry the concept of higher dimensions, a device to aid perception.

He explains that we have problems with the big questions because our circumstances limit us; that is, we are held hostage by our perspectives of time and space and by the limitations of our senses. What if we broke those bonds and considered that the reality of God the Creator is not limited by space and time? What if we consider that Einstein’s E=mc² formula for the relationship of space and time also hints at the possibilities of other dimensions beyond space-time? That’s not scientism; it simply brings science to bear on the infinite possibilities of faith.

Sheahen provides a round-trip tour of the issues that are related to the intersection of science and faith:

• The importance of the scientific method as well as its limitations.
• Time and space as a limit to human knowledge.
• Evolution as a product of creation rather than purposeful actions by inanimate chemicals.
• The questions of eternity and an afterlife.

Sheahen’s solid arguments remind us of Richard Feynman’s warning regarding scientific research: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Bad science arises from a lack of humility and the failure to be skeptical about our theories. The latter is a form of tunnel vision driven by true believer egotism and the Pygmalion (My Fair Lady) effect.

Sheahen’s book aligns with Thomas Aquinas’s proposed five proofs or arguments for a supreme being. Despite being 800 years old, these proofs still make sense and compare favorably to Sheahen’s arguments as a modern physicist. Both ultimately say that physical phenomena—motion, causation, physical existence, evolution of complexity (gradation), and finally, design—are so complex that they could not have arisen from chaos and randomness.

Sheahen has the humility to admit that there are limits to our knowledge. He uses actual science to take us as far as he can but stops short of scientism—that is, making up science to suit his theory. Instead, when science ends, he offers some rational deductions to support the theory that there exists an entity that created our incredibly complex world.

John Dale Dunn is a physician and attorney in Brownwood, Texas.