My friend Anthony posted this article on my friend Dan’s
facebook page and since it is a topic very close to my heart I thought I’d blog
about it. Also I needed a break from beating my head against a wall trying to prove stability for my MPC
method. If you don’t want to read the whole article you don’t
have to, just know it is a discussion about science and religion and whether
the two can be reconciled and whether or not both have a role in modern life.
I am a scientist and science is a world that is predominantly
a-religious, if not outright atheist (although I was surprised to read in the
article that polls showed that 25% of scientists believed in an interventionist
God who not only created the universe but is continually involving himself in
its affairs). I fall into that 25% of scientists, but there are many scientists
who don’t think that you can believe both in science and in God.
The author of the article discussed a underlying belief
(albeit one that is rarely discussed or referenced) in science called the
Central Doctrine which essentially states that all properties and events in the
physical universe are governed by laws and those laws are true at every time
and place in the universe. He said that it is impossible to both believe in
this Central Doctrine and also believe in an intervening God. The idea of a
non-intervening God (whether that manifests itself is a Deist or Immanentist
outlook) is compatible with the Central Doctrine, but an intervening God who
carries out miracles that violate those laws cannot be married with the idea of
the Central Doctrine.
While he acknowledged his own atheism, the author then went
on to state that people who completely write off religion are far too short-sighted
on the issue. His primary example was Richard Dawkins who once stated "faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. His contradictions to Dawkins is where I really started to agree with the
author. He continued, and I agree, that to write off the idea of faith entirely
is too narrow. To believe that everything can be explained by science is, in
both his and my view, a foolishly narrow-minded view. The author stated “faith
is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully
understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the
ability to honour stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion
and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the
full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” Put
differently, as is done in Hebrews 11:1, “Faith in the promise of things hoped
for, the evidence of things unseen.” Were it not for faith, the author
maintained, we would not be able to explain our response to a moving scenario we witness,
would not be able to create great works
of art or music, and would be unable to make the decision to sacrifice for others when
there is no benefit to ourselves.
Personally, I think the author takes faith outside the realm
of religion a bit too much. He is discussing faith in abstract ideas through
the concept that there are things that science cannot and will not ever be able
to explain. It is another thing altogether to attribute those feelings and
emotions and phenomena that are outside the realm of science to an all-knowing and
all-powerful Being. I, however, do attribute them to God, one that does involve
Himself in our lives and our world and is capable of doing anything, even when
they go against the physical laws of the universe that the Central Doctrine
depends on.
Much of the debate that has surrounded science and religion
focuses on creation versus evolution, how the universe was created and how we
came to be where we are today. This is an issue that I myself have often
struggled with and will continue to struggle with for my whole life. I am not
advocating ignoring the parts of the Bible that are difficult to understand or
are harder come to terms with (with the creation story being an obvious example for a scientist). But, I think that to focus just on this topic,
or other such general ones like it, causes us to miss out of the bigger issues
of science and religion. Science is about studying and asking questions and
seeking to understand how the world around us works. It is about the physical
world, it is about concrete answers to well posed questions that can be
discovered using experimentation and observation and can amass evidence and
points to a single correct answer. Religion, on the other hand, is about
answering a completely different set of questions. How should we treat others,
why are we here (not how we came to be here), how we should live our lives, and
what happens to us after we die. These questions are not those that can be
answered by science and they are the true purpose of religion.
The question of the conflict or convergence of religion and
science is one that wasn’t answered in the article, it wasn’t answered by me,
and it will not be answered for as long as people continue searching for
answers in both the scientific and spiritual realm. However, in a world that is
so often seen in black and white, whether that is seen in the world of
Democrats versus Republicans, Israelis versus Palestinians, Yankees versus Red
Sox (oh, sore subject right now?), why do we need to create even more
intractable conflicts? Science and religion are not incompatible and we should
embrace and celebrate that rather than try to perpetuate conflict between the
two.
