by Chris Macnab
A few weeks ago, a teenager on the soccer team I coach asked me if I was religious. This was because he knew I am scientist and that my wife is a minister, and he wondered if I could be a scientist and religious at the same time. Now this fellow only knows about science and religion from what he has seen on TV. I think a lot of people are led to believe that science and religion are at odds. Scientists are portrayed as coldly calculating atheists, and religious people are portrayed as blindly obedient fanatics. So today I am going to explain how I, personally, can be scientific and religious at the same time.
What does it mean to be scientific? `` The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.'' Huang Po. The scientific revolution was based on simple observation of experiments, what we refer to as the scientific method. The most famous scientific experiment of all time was done by Galileo. Everyone laughed at him when he said that all things fall at the same speed, since everyone knows that heavier objects fall faster that light objects. So Galileo went to the leaning tower of Pisa and brought two rocks with him; a big heavy rock and small light stone. He told the learned people he was going to drop the rocks off the top, and they gathered around the base of the tower to watch and laugh at him. He climbed all the way to the top, and stuck out his arms over the edge; the big rock in his right hand and the small stone in his left. He released them both at the same time, and to the astonishment of the crowd below, the rocks hit the ground at exactly the same time. Now even though this experiment was done some 500 hundred years ago most people today, when asked, will tell you that heavier objects fall faster without bothering to do an experiment. So the scientific method may be old, but it is rarely used outside of academia.
So if the scientific method is only used by academics, what the heck do most people mean when they describe themselves as being scientific? Usually they mean they believe in everything that science has so far discovered or theorized. And it often goes farther than that. I am amazed at the fans of the show Star Trek. In Star Trek, the ship routinely flits around the galaxy faster than the speed of light. They take 10 minutes to get up to full speed and then reverse direction in an instant. Captain Picard orders the ship to a "full stop'' in the middle of space. When I challenge Star Trek fans and tell them all the laws of physics are routinely broken on this show, they express the faith that eventually scientists will figure out how to do all these things. So, faith in science often has little to do with current theories, but rather it's a fervent faith that scientists will eventually figure out how to do everything and anything. This kind of thinking makes science into a kind of religion and has no resemblance to the scientific method of believing what you see.
The Christian church has been strongly influenced by science. I mentioned Galileo earlier. He was harassed by the church because he defended the theory that the Earth went around the sun. He was forced to recant and apologize to the church, and then the church turned around and used his theories to predict when Easter would fall.
This has always been the difficulty with rejecting scientific theories. These theories usually are extremely useful in allowing us to predict things and build ourselves wonderful machines. With such concrete results it is hard to argue with science. In fact, religious thought in general became influenced by science very quickly.
Early science presented a world that was predictable and orderly, whose rules were simple and could quickly be determined by experiments. Categories could be made, and everything could be put in a category. Science was a search for the Truth. Religion also became a search for the Truth. It began to describe God as being just as simple and predictable. God was a puppet master, who had predetermined all of history. All the rules in Heaven and Earth were assumed to be known. The Bible is the literal Truth and tells us all we need to know. We know exactly who is saved and who is not. {Realize that this is heavily influenced by the scientific world of 1500's and on.} This type of thought we now call Modernism.
{The important thing to realize is that this is different than the way the people in Biblical time thought.} Ancient Jews did not think this way. They didn't see God as a puppet master. They didn't see the Bible as the literal truth. The Bible presents God as a loving, but stern, Father figure. The Israelites are God's children who often misbehave. God, like us when we are parents, is sometimes forced to punish His children when they step out of line. Often God rewards his children when they are good.
Jesus updates this image by emphasizing the loving and forgiving nature of a parent. God's children include everyone, not just Jewish males. When it came to suffering people asked, "What did we do to deserve this suffering?'' Nobody ever asks, "If God really loves us, why does He let people suffer?'' But that is exactly what people ask today. That is because our traditional image of God as an all-powerful orchestrater of events. This understanding is not Biblical, but comes from the Modernist era, which was influenced by science.
The Modernist era is coming to an end. The first assault on this type of thinking was over a 100 years ago by another scientist: Darwin. Darwin was on a tropical cruise to the Galapagos Islands in the South Pacific. He noticed with his keen scientific eyesight that the Finches on each island were slightly different. He proposed that all the Finches were the exact same species when they first got to the islands. But each island's Finches were subject to random genetic mutations. The best, or fittest, mutations would provide the most offspring and these mutations would thus survive. Each island's Finches would then end up being slightly different birds with physical advantages for their own island.
He went on to theorize that all animals and humans achieved their present form by this method. We tend to think of this theory of evolution as being opposed by only some religious people today. But in Darwin's day, everyone, including the scientists, vehemently opposed him. This is because it was directly against Modernist thought. The idea that randomness could be a significant factor in anything, and that we were designed by a process and not a blueprint was completely unthinkable. Similar discoveries of randomness and process have been made in all other areas of science in the last century. {The scientific world has been turned upside down. No longer was the world explained in terms of simple, easy to understand principles. No longer could everything be predicted and understood exactly. The Truth of why things worked was no longer a question that science could claim to answer.}
Again, these new scientific theories have proven to be extremely useful and practical in predicting things and building machines and computers. With such results, this new science is convincing and has influenced our society's thinking. Science has become a process of how to predict results, without actually knowing how things work. Religion has been changing as a result. Religion is now more prone to think of God as mysterious, experienced by everyone differently. We are now more prone to think of disasters and accidents as purely random events. When a child gets killed by a tornado we don't necessary think it's because God is angry or God had some specific purpose. In fact we say that God suffers along with us when tragedy strikes. Many people feel they have a relationship with God. It is no longer important to believe the right things, it is more important that we learn and grow in our relationship with God. Rather than thinking of God loving us because God created us, we think that God loves us because God understands us. Sometimes this kind of thought is called Post-Modernism, but really no one name has been agreed upon as of yet.
Let us return to the original question: how can I be a scientist and a Christian at the same time? My answer is that I am a Christian; since my faith is not in science but is in God. In the Modernist era it could be difficult to claim this, because one could be asked to choose between the Truth of science and the Truth of the Bible. In the post-modern era, there is no such difficulty. I am scientific, in the original sense of the word, since I believe the evidence of what I see. However, I also have seen the power of prayer, I have felt the presence and love of God, I must also believe that God exists. So my answer to being a scientist and religious at the same time? Well, I cannot believe in science as the holder of all knowledge and discoverer of all truths and also be a Christian. But I can use the scientific method of believing what I see and not what I think. Because what I see not only includes two rocks falling at the same speed, but also the love of God influencing peoples lives.
