Science and Religion III

Don: For much of the history of man, things of the spirit and things of the flesh—things of nature and things of god—were combined and overlapped. Until the 19th century the term “science” did not even exist: The term used was “natural philosophy.” Its students were not scientists but “natural philosophers.” Their interest was to try to reduce, to the extent possible (as it were), the appeal to the supernatural to explain the world around them.

Without a doubt the leading philosopher of his time (the 17th century) and perhaps of all time was Sir Isaac Newton. He was also a very serious biblical scholar and wrote a commentary on the Book of Daniel. Sir Isaac said that the goal of natural philosophy was to understand god. But that goal began slowly and informally to change as the scientific revolution continued to explain more and more natural phenomena without recourse to supernatural sources, even if one believed that god was still responsible overall.

Most of the natural philosophers who espoused the changing role were by no means atheists. On the contrary: They tended to be god-fearing, bible-believing people, who happened to believe that the things of the spirit and the things of nature could not be commingled. It became dichotomous that while a recognition of the laws and orderliness of nature might lead one to deduce the hand of god, in the practice of science one could not invoke the deity, one could not apply the deduction.

In the 19th century, when scientists became known as such, the attribution of natural phenomena to either god or satan was expressly rejected. In the early 1980s, the evangelist Paul de Vries of Wheaton College coined the phrase “methodological naturalism” as a model allowing evangelical Christianity to explore scientific questions without attributing natural phenomena to supernatural causes.

A decade later, some were appealing to the concept of Intelligent Design to call for just the opposite: That god/the supernatural should be invoked to explain what science has not been able to explain. Science viewed this as an attack on science. But all these models or concepts arose arbitrarily, so all can be subject to debate.

Can we speak both of god and of science? Can a legitimate scientist be a legitimate believer, and vice versa? Or are the disciplines so extreme that no accommodation is possible? Science demands that all allusion to the supernatural must, by convention, be outlawed; religion demands a literal interpretation of and adherence to the word of god, and the bible as the literal word of god and the literal explanation of everything we see in the world around us.

Can Paul’s remarks in Galatians 5:22, that:

“… the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law”

… be paraphrased to say that “the fruits of science are gravity, Newtonian physics, genetic certainty, the biologic and cellular basis of the cycle of life and death, and cellular mechanics; and against this there is nothing supernatural”?

Are these views diametrically opposed? Was Gould’s theory of non-overlapping magisteria correct? If Nature is “god’s second book,” as some claim, how can it be compatible with god’s first book?

David: I wonder if there really was an arbitrary decision to separate science from religion. It’s true that Intelligent Design was around as a concept for centuries but the scientific method also developed over those same centuries. There was no sudden, arbitrary decision either to commingle or to separate science with or from religion; they drifted apart because science was advancing while religion stood still.

Can the two be commingled? I don’t think religion per se and science are compatible, but spirit, as defined by Paul in Galatians, is not incompatible with science—it is (as Gould implied) simply unrelated. So a scientist can do good science while loving or hating his neighbor.

Kiran: Talking about religion is frowned upon at scientific meetings. But there is a scientific notion of “wonder”—something bigger than we can currently explain but that might account for the phenomenon. Einstein was prepared to refer to this wonder as god, though he did not mean the Jewish god under whose religion he was raised, but many scientists won’t go even that far. Scientists and religionists cannot avoid experiencing each other’s outcomes (god/wonder or evidence.) This is more readily acknowledged in Africa and Asia than in the West.

Don: I have operated on intelligent, well-educated, scientifically inclined Indians, often with science backgrounds, who still want to choose a date for surgery based upon their horoscope!

David: Arabia used to be a great center of learning. What made it reject science?

Alice: The Ottoman Empire was largely responsible for suppressing Arab learning.

Jason: My answers to these questions seem to be so pre-programmed! I was raised in religion, I was in college when Intelligent Design resurfaced. It was a big deal. I was a science major at an Adventist university and took a class called philosophical biology, which was all about reconciling science with Biblical phenomena such as the Flood. So now my responses to the issue we are discussion feel like they were programmed into me!

Even so, I see common ground through faith. First, true science requires a deep faith that there are answers to our ultimate questions. So does religion. Second, to be truly in both camps requires the complete absence of bias—which is very difficult. The scientist must discard all scientific bias, and true spirituality must discard all bias against one’s neighbor—he must in fact love his neighbor.

Jeff: I think religion’s demand in belief of an absolute is incompatible with the most fundamental scientific concept: That one must question everything. The idea that god is not in science stems more from religious than from scientific dogma.

Kiran: My faith has been developing for 12 years and continues to develop through this class, yet religion insists I stay at the Religion 101 level.

Jay: Both science and religion draw lines in the sand. Both seek truth, enlightenment, understanding, yet both say you cannot cross into the other’s territory.

Jeff: I don’t think science draws such a line. It does not exclude anything. Religion just does not want science to define god.

David: Individuals—sometimes leaders—in both camps draw lines all the time. If you cross a line that a religious zealot lays down (which might include a line prohibiting atheism or apostasy) then you may seriously risk your life; but if you cross a line that a scientific star lays down (such as: “Don’t believe in the supernatural,” one or both of you risk, at worst, ridicule or egg on your face. This is a significant difference, it seems to me.

Kiran: Ken Hamm separated science into two parts. The first part does not seek to explain ultimate origin and therefore does not require a god. It produces all the science we have today and can expect tomorrow. The second part does seek to explain how everything began, and might therefore require a god.

Alice: We can learn about god through observing and interpreting nature through science.

Jay: The theory of evolution was Darwin’s interpretation of his careful observations of nature. It brought into sharp focus the origin question and was a fundamental cause of the divide between science and religion.

Alice: To attack the theory is an evil act because it seeks to prevent a valid way to know god.

David: Observation is not just the fiefdom of science. Certainly, observation of objective facts of nature is the bedrock of science, but subjective observation of love in people even in the most trying conditions is no less convincing and no less valid in the spiritual realm. Appeals to an inner light or gut feeling may be anathema to science, but they can be valid and reliable at the personal level.

Jay: Is the source of the inner light, or of love, compassion, etc., physical? Genetic? That is amenable to scientific research, but it must be unbiased. That therefore precludes bringing a religious perspective (which is biased by definition) to bear on the question.

Jeff: The ideal scientific perspective does not not necessarily exclude spirituality, but it must exclude religion.

Kiran: Michael wrote in a post on The Interface that for a stage 2 person, science has to reconcile with religion; stage 3 rejects religion; and stage 4 has no problem with both.

David: He also wrote that even a mother’s love was not necessarily true love, the sort of love that god and Jesus are talking about.

Don: Jay was wondering whether there is a genetic predisposition to some of the aspects of love, such as a forgiving nature, greater tolerance and love for others.

Kiran: Neuroscience is trying to find a physical or evolutionary cause for morality and such things.

David: It was resolved long ago by game theorists that altruism confers an evolutionary survival benefit. But even if science does end up finding a detailed molecular physiochemical basis for love it will still, as Kiran indicated earlier, be stumped and trumped by the question of ultimate beginnings. Logic dictates that it is impossible for science–it is illogical–to see the universe before it began, before the Big Bang. The only explanation is the existence of a spirit, something supernatural, something beyond our ability to understand, something utterly illogical–in short, god.

Chris: I think what it comes down to is that science and religion are afraid of one another. To coexist requires compromise. Facts are central to science but not to religion. Faith is central to religion but not to science. Religion fears that science’s efforts to regenerate organs and tissues and create life is a quest to become like god. Science may not view it like that, but religion does.

Don: Science evaluates and evolves its “truth” continuously because its data are ever-changing. There is a sense of honesty in this. Religion’s data set keeps evolving too–not just our understanding of the world but also our understanding of the scriptures and the history of how they were written and what each word meant, based on new archaeological evidence and so on–but religion has no functional capacity to change its explanations!

Jeff: It is explanation versus hubris!

Don: Many religious systems are tied up in immutable interpretation, yet it seems to me that a god who gave us the intelligence to re-evaluate data in light of new findings would expect us to use it for understanding the spiritual as well as the natural worlds. Some religions, including even our own denominational church, talk the talk of “evolving truth” but have no method for validating new ideas and data and for making adjustments accordingly. Anyone who tries risks being shot!

Jeff: Yet there are multiple instances in the bible where god contradicts what the writer had interpreted as his plan.

Kiran: Left to its own devices, I think science will reconcile with religion. Lord Kelvin once claimed that once science had explained a certain four things then we would understand god. Now we a whole laundry list of new things, like dark matter and dark energy. In biology, we once said that when we had sequenced the genome we would know everything. The more we learn, the more there is to learn! We discovered that over 90 percent of the genome appeared to be evolutionary junk! Then we discovered that the “junk” was in fact crucial to regulating everything else! Science must eventually come to the conclusion that it can never understand everything. .

David: If there is a deep faith it is that despite all the mayhem and cruelty in the world and despite the erosion of mysticism as science turns metaphysical into physical, if one still believes there is a god then all scientific explanation of physical phenomena is irrelevant. It may be true, but true of a different world to the world that lies beyond the reach of scientific thought. When Jesus said “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” he might well have meant that at the end of the day what we owe to god is that deep faith. Caesar has his magisterium, and god has his. We can and must live in both.

Jeff: But the magisterium of science is expanding exponentially while you are distilling that of god down to just one thing: Faith. I agree with Kiran that ultimately science cannot explain everything, but the part that it cannot explain gets smaller and smaller.

David: In quantity, but not in quality; or perhaps in form but not in substance!. That’s why the bible needs to be edited down to leave just the parts that science cannot explain: The Beatitudes, for example.

Jay: Yes, it needs to be “shrunk” to faith, love, forgiveness, and grace. That is its magisterium. It is not science’s. Religion has usurped much of the magisterium that properly belongs to science, and should be prepared to give it back.

Don: In the kingdom of heaven, laws of all sorts–social, economic, and so on–are turned on their head. The organization and management of the kingdom of god are antithetical to the world of Caesar and science. Maybe god is at the head of the Front Against Religion! In the end, when science has pushed religion to its limit, there still needs to be a place for god. Otherwise it would mean that the science magisterium will have pushed God’s magisterium completely off the edge of the universe!

David: The two magisteria are so different that one cannot push the other. They go right through one another. As Charles said last week, one is formed and one is formless. Perhaps they can be likened to matter and dark matter. Dark matter cannot be seen or detected. It can only be–and it must be–surmised because otherwise the universe does not make sense to science! The danger is that failure to understand that results in the individual’s pushing god out of mind.

Don: We’ll think more on this.

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