Science and Religion - Changing the story from conflict to harmony

            I have recently been learning about the relationship between science and theology with Rev Prof David Wilkinson, and the thing that most struck me about what I have studied so far is the extent to which faith plays a fundamental part in the construct of science. I am not suggesting that you need to be a Christian to be a scientist or that all scientists are secretly religious, although many scientists do have a religious faith. No, the suggestion I am making is far more simple and far more specific than that. In order to study science you need to have an inherent belief that the world makes sense, that it is comprehensible, otherwise experiments wouldn't be repeatable and theories wouldn't be provable.

            It is the presumption of science that something which is true here is also true on a planet that spins around a distant star, even though none of us has ever been there to test out such a theory; and it is the presumption of science that something that is true today will also be true tomorrow. As none of us have yet been to tomorrow we cannot be certain that anything we know to be true today will still be true tomorrow. In many ways the assumption of science is not a wild one; yesterday we thought that the rules of physics would be the same today and so it is not unreasonable to assume that the same will still be true tomorrow, and if gravity and light can be observed doing the same things to a distant planet, as they do to our own then we can make a healthy guess that things work the same there as they do here.

            But there are two interesting points to be made here. The first is that this concept of the world being comprehensible comes historically from religious ideas that influenced the birth of science and so the idea that science and religion are at odds is really quite a modern story. The second is the interesting idea that although both Christian theology and Science have a concept of a comprehensible universe, both also have areas where mystery and incompatible realities take the fore. This can be seen in theological issues such as miracles and the nature of God's incarnation in Christ. Likewise with science there are strange incompatibilities between the way things function at the tiny quantum level and how they work at the cosmic level of astrophysics. There are mysteries in science like the question of whether light is a wave or a particle, and even whether uncertainty is an intrinsic part of the sub atomic world. But in both areas of study it is these mysteries that lead us to push forward in our exploration and seek to discover more.

            In the course of my studies I have found myself looking more deeply into the arguments of Richard Dawkins, and whilst he is a great biologist I realise that his arguments against religion come entirely from a prejudged view of religion as intrinsically bad, and he does this without ever requiring himself to produce the empirical data that he is expecting from others. At a basic level he never even reconciles that theology and religion are as different as scientists and people who use toasters. But I am realising more and more that the flawed nature of his arguments is not what worries me most; it is their divisiveness.

            I think the most useful thing that Dawkins offers this generation is that he highlights the way that many of those gullible enough to be convinced by poorly formulated forms of religion are just as easily convinced by his distracting mixture of science, pseudo science and scientism. The conclusion that the Church perhaps ought to take from this is that we should no longer sit back and politely accept ill-informed theologies and ecclesiologies, but rather seek to challenge them with a sense of maturity, diplomacy and grace. In short, we need to do religion better. We can only hope that inasmuch as he draws the gullible to accept his spurious arguments, he will also encourage the curious to ask deeper questions about his assertions. The worst thing that Dawkins has brought to this generation is yet another poorly formed religion and a descent into the kind of dogmatic conflict that he himself claims to abhor. 

            However, I have also found myself looking at the history of what we now call 'creationism'. And I have learned that the word was not used to describe people who believed in a seven day creation or those who oppose evolution until 1929 in a book called 'Back to Creationism' by Harold Clark, a little known biology teacher from California. What follows this book is a tale of divisive theological arguments, that were neither great theology, nor great science. They came from an ever expanding minority of fundamentalists that would eventually spread beyond America and even to some extent beyond Christianity, into Judaism and Islam.

            I find myself quite angered now by the way that fundamentalists on both sides of the science and religion argument have hijacked the concept and the language of creation and made it into a wedge to drive between groups of human beings who never should have been enemies. So perhaps we ought to spend more time together in harmony with scientists simply marvelling at the mysterious wonder of God's creation and sharing our stories with each other.