Science, Faith and Reason

I’m currently reading “The Challenge of Jesus” by N T Wright, and he makes an interesting statement on p21. He says, “The Enlightenment notoriously insisted on splitting apart history and faith, facts and values, religion and politics, nature and supernature, in a way whose consequences are written into the history of the last two hundred years – one of the consequences being, indeed, that each of those categories now carries with it in the minds of millions of people around the world an implicit opposition to its twin, so that we are left with the great difficulty of even conceiving of a world in which they belong to one another as part of a single indivisible whole.” This got me thinking about the relationship between science and faith, or faith and reason (as it is often characterised), and I think he is certainly on to something. For some time now people, especially theists, have been trying to integrate faith and science or faith and history and books have been written attempting to do just that. Yet there is still, as Wright says, an opposition in the minds of many to the uniting of these ideas. Why is that?

This is not restricted to the secular world, either. Many Christian have this strange idea that if you know something then you cannot have faith, like if you prove the Bible correct historically or archaeologically then you no longer have faith in it because you have certainty. It’s like faith is at one end of the scale and certainty is at the other and we must avoid certainty in order to have faith! I think this is without doubt a mistaken view of what the Bible teaches about faith, and it leads many Christians to stick their heads in the sand and not engage with the culture because “you just have to have faith”.

In 1999 Stephen Jay Gould published “Rock of Ages” in which he formalised this notion when he advanced his idea of Non-Overlapping MAgisteria (NOMA), the idea that “the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap...” (Wikipedia). In this same year we see the National Academy of Sciences making a similar claim, “science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each” (Wikipedia). This idea seems to have taken root in the minds of many Christians and non-Christians alike, reinforcing the Christian’s previously stated aversion to fact and the non-Christian’s belief that the sciences have nothing of religious value to say.

Is this the true?

I don’t think so, although I think that there is perhaps some merit to this idea. As J P Moreland said at the Saddleback Apologetics Conference 95% of science has nothing to do with religion, and 95% of religion has nothing to do with science. For example, religion has nothing to say about the mechanics of an aircraft engine, and science has nothing to say about the atoning blood of Jesus. But what about that 5%? What about things like the origins of life on earth, or of the universe itself? These are areas where science and religion overlap, and you might find conflict here or you might not. Should we continue to attempt to separate the two? Is it even possible? I don’t think we can, nor should we try. For example. belief in a purely naturalistic explanation of origins (the Darwinian Hypothesis) is in conflict with the Genesis account that says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Now, how God did it and how long He took are legitimate debates, but that God did it is an integral part of the Christian’s convictions, and a purely naturalistic view excludes God resulting in a conflict that needs to be resolved. This is a case where science and religion make claims about the same thing that are in conflict, and I don’t think it is enough to say, as some Christians have, that you just need to believe, whatever the evidence. I think we need to try and reconcile the two, we need to do our spade work, as Koukl says.

I think we have been seeing a shift in that direction for the last 20 years or so, a shift that is slowly gaining momentum, both in academia and in the public square. The ID movement would have to be a case-in-point, as they attempt to show that science points to a Designer, that science and faith can work together. Ministries like Greg Koukl’s “Stand to Reason” (www.str.org) and William Lane Craig’s “Reasonable Faith” (www.reasonablefaith.org) are efforts to show that faith and reason go hand in hand, indeed that reason can be a support for faith, and have been very successful in doing so, at least in my opinion. Craig often points to the radical shift since the ‘70s in philosophy which is seeing many more believers take posts in university philosophy departments and has led to a resurgence of philosophy as a tool that can lead us to God I think this is what’s needed from the Christians – engage with the culture, don’t hide from it. What’s needed from the scientific community is an abandonment of their policy of scientific naturalism that, to use Richard Lewontin’s words, doesn’t “allow a divine foot in the door” (NY Times, 1997). The documentary “Expelled” is a great example of what happens to scientists in secular universities who question this approach. I think scientists should be free to follow the evidence wherever it leads. All options should be considered, and the one that has the best explanatory scope should be the one presented, regardless of naturalistic preconceptions.

Can we see this conflict ending anytime soon? I’m not sure. Dr Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute disagrees. He thinks the tide is turning. In an interview with Greg Koukl (available from the website) he predicts that we will see this paradigm shift in his lifetime! That’s a pretty big claim, and I sure hope he’s right!