Date: 1 December 2002
Subject: General

Does Christianity Conflict With Science?

Despite the historical role of the Christian faith in its development, modern science is essentially secular and based on the study of the kinds of things that people of all religious persuasions and none can agree upon. An apple falls to the ground. The Earth goes round the Sun. Parents pass on genes to their children. The status of science in our society relies on the existence of a wide-ranging consensus that science is firstly useful on account of the technologies it makes possible, and secondly enlightening in the truths it reveals about our world. Science makes no requirement of its practitioners as to their opinions on matters such as the existence of God or an afterlife. What the scientific community does expect is belief in an ordered and comprehensible universe, operating according to laws that we can hope to observe and rationalise.

The position of science in relation to religious belief is, I contend, well expressed in the words of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral." (1) This is not just science being polite to religion for the sake of public relations, it is the only position that could be adopted with integrity. In essence, science is prepared to co-exist creatively with religion, providing that religion is prepared to accept the basic integrity and utility of the scientific enterprise.

Such co-existence may rely on an implicit acceptance that science and religion are essentially about different aspects of reality and thus can be complementary without treading on each other's toes. This approximation to harmony is likely to suffer a serious threat either if religious groups try to contradict science on its own ground, or else if scientists claim to have disproved important religious doctrines.

Now I don't believe that Christianity makes the kind of predictions that allow it to be categorised as a scientific theory. It does, however, provide a metaphysical explanation for our existence, that God chose to create us and our world. This explanation is in competition with the atheistic idea that our being here is random, purposeless and meaningless. While science is consistent with either explanation, philosophers and theologians will continue to debate the existence of God till Kingdom come. Nonetheless, there is nothing about the Christian faith (or any of the other major world religions) that disqualifies a believer from being at the core of the scientific community. A Christian can be, despite the infamous rant of atheistic Oxford chemist Peter Atkins." (2), a "real scientist in the deepest sense of the word".

Does Science Conflict with Christianity?

So science can live with Christianity. Can Christianity live with science?

In fact the two have plenty in common. The scientist has to believe in an ordered and comprehensible world. That will do nicely for the Christian. The scientist must believe that the truth is out there, that there is an absolute reality to which all our theories must ultimately submit. Ditto the Christian. To be serious about either science or faith should demand a high degree of integrity. The more trendy it becomes outside these two spheres to assert that everything is relative, that one idea is just as good as another, the more notable this commonality of science and Christianity is.

Is science a threat to religion? Science is about those things that can be deduced from the combination of, firstly, careful observation of the world and, secondly, rigorous logical, often mathematical, thinking. If you want to know when and where there will be a total eclipse of the sun, there's a scientist who can tell you. If you want to know whether your sins can be forgiven, or to how to distinguish right from wrong, don't look to science. The idea that "science has disproved religion" is most often held by people who know or understand little of either subject, such as those ignorant enough to think that all scientists are atheists and all Christians young-earth creationists. In fact, many real deep-thinking scientists have Christian or other religious beliefs held alongside their scientific ones, which itself seems to debunk the idea of mutual exclusivity.

That said, there are legitimate areas of concern for the Christian church. One is that science may sometimes stray into ethically dubious areas. A minority of the things going on in science laboratories may raise the ethical hackles of Christians, just as other things done in the name of science may do with environmentalists, pacifists or animal rights activists. The openness of science to men and women of differing religious, political and other views limits the prospects of coherent self-regulation when it comes to questions like genetic engineering, nuclear technology, weapons research or the extent to which animals should be used in experiments. In any case, the scientific community is inevitably going to be perceived as having too many vested interests to be fully trusted with self-determination of its ethical boundaries. Informed and reasonable input from the churches as to where science should or should not tread ought to play its part in shaping society's attitudes to these questions.

A second area of concern is that science may stray too far into religion's own ground. Some psychologists say that religious experiences are merely a consequence of misfiring neurons. It has been suggested that their ability to produce apparently religious experiences by stimulation of the brain with electrodes proves that the spiritual world is unreal. This is actually a fallacy; finding a forged ?20 note does not imply that all money is fake. Similarly, there have been a number of attempts to conduct the equivalent of double blind clinical trials on the power of prayer. The results of such trials have in fact often been interpretable as suggesting that prayer does indeed work, but unsurprisingly this remains controversial. Dr John Astin, an "open-minded sceptic" from the University of Maryland, analysed results from 23 of these trials and found that 13 appeared to indicate that prayer did indeed work." (3) It seems unlikely, however, is that there is any scientific experiment possible in the foreseeable future that would be capable of proving or disproving either the existence of God or the truth of the Christian faith. The core of the Christian worldview simply does not make specifically testable predictions in the way a scientific theory does.

There have, of course, been optional add-ons to the Christian faith that have been rendered untenable. For instance, the known scale of the universe, together with the astronomical observation that speed of light is either constant or varies by less than 0.002% over much of observable space and time." (4), implies that creation is much older (by a factor of approximately a million) than the answer Archbishop Ussher obtained from biblical genealogies. Geology (which incidentally made no evolutionary assumptions) had shown by the mid-19th century that generations of animals had lived and died over many millennia before the first humans. We know from the fossil record that long before there was a man or woman to sin, animals fought, killed and ate one another. Nature was already red in tooth and claw long before we came on the scene. The fall of man was not responsible for animal predation, as some Christian fundamentalists would claim. Now I don't blame previous generations for their naivety; probably many of our notions will seem absurd in centuries to come. My point is simply that the Church has to accept that science gathers new knowledge relatively quickly and that the core of the Christian faith consists (and should continue to consist) of beliefs that could not easily be overturned by a future scientific discovery. Otherwise, we are in danger of placing our faith in a 'God of the Gaps', who gets smaller as science fills in the holes in our understanding of the world. It is very tempting today, for instance, to view the exquisite fine-tuning of the physical constants as direct proof of intelligent design. Nonetheless, if a future scientific theory were to explain this away, whither such a faith?

Who Says That Science And Christianity Are In Conflict?

There are two groups of people who loudly contend that science and Christianity are in conflict:

(a) "Fundamentalist" Christian young-earth creationists
(b) "Fundamentalist" atheists who claim to base their (un)belief on science.

The description of young-earth creationist views as "fundamentalist." (5) is familiar, and probably acceptable even to most of their advocates. Militant atheists are probably much less familiar with and less comfortable with being labelled fundamentalists, but that is what they are. Their atheism is asserted as if an unarguable truth and worn apparently without humility.

Of course, many atheists have respect (and even sneaking admiration) for believers and are nothing like fundamentalists. Similarly, the majority of Christians believe that it is quite legitimate to use our God-given intellect, creativity and curiosity to explore the history and nature of our world, without prejudging the answers. The fundamentalists, on either side, simply do not speak for us or represent our views.

Strange Bedfellows?

These two opposed fundamentalist groups are unlikely allies perhaps, but both would like to present the debate as a caricature. Either you can have a six thousand-odd year old universe created by God in six days, or you can have a ten to twenty billion year old universe expanding from the Big Bang where life has evolved on Earth by chance with no purpose or meaning at all. The atheists have not been slow to notice that their opponents are trying to achieve by assertion and bluster exactly what they themselves would love to, but cannot, achieve through science or logic. Namely to conjoin evolution and militant atheism into a single mythical beast (inaccurately) called "Darwinism", while giving the impression that belief in God requires young-earth creationism. This attempt to deny the Christian the freedom to believe in evolution, and the evolutionist the freedom to believe in Christ, is baseless in either science or theology. This, however, is conveniently ignored by both sides in order that Tweedle-creationist and Tweedle-atheist can have their battle.

Presumably, both sides think that they can gain from this polarization of the debate.

a) The young-earth creationists can establish a worldview based only on their (naﶥ and fanciful) interpretation of scripture. They convince themselves either that they are discrediting conventional scientific enquiry as a valid method of gaining understanding of the world or else that the scientific community is delusional and/or in league with the devil. They can present the debate in a conflict-centric way as Good v. Evil, God v. Satan or Gospel Truth v. Secular Falsehood.

b) So far as most non-Christian observers are concerned, the atheists can run intellectual rings around the young-earth creationists. This is both because the scientific data is seen (justifiably) to refute the young-earth position and also because the apologists of atheism are often, though not always, the more highly educated and more flexible thinkers. The (overwhelmingly strong) arguments for the truth of evolution, which carry out a facile demolition job on the young-earth creationists' house of sand, can also appear (at least to the hard of thinking) to discredit 'Christianity'. This is unfortunate, because much of the rationale of the supposedly scientifically based atheistic worldview would appear highly dubious if challenged by better informed opponents.

The Real Relationship

Anyone who has read this far will have realised that I don't have much time for the 'conflict thesis', the idea that science and religion are fundamentally in both competition and opposition. There is an attractive alternative view that science and religion are complementary, describing different aspects of reality. From this perspective, science is about 'how' questions, and religion about 'who' questions. Another way of saying this is that the two disciplines are 'perpendicular', perhaps that one is about ghosts and the other about machines. It would be convenient to swallow this view in its entirety, but realistically we must accept that it is something of a simplification. There are some areas where science and religion may well end up treading on one another's toes. Examples range from the exploitation of ethically dubious technologies to resolving the mind-brain problem.

Neither science nor religion is ever likely on its own to provide a complete understanding of the world. Many different generations have been tempted to think that science was almost completed; all, so far, would have been very wrong. This is unlikely to change. Christianity has always required of itself a high standard of integrity. This means admitting the Darwin and his legacy have been handled as poorly by parts of the Church as Galileo was, which hardly constitutes progress. The Church has to learn the lesson this time, and be less fearful of paradigm shifts in science. Christians need to trust scientists to do science. Scientists in turn need to accept that there are some very significant things that science can never explain or understand.

Notes

(1) National Academy of Sciences Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (Natl Acad. Press, Washington DC, 1998).

(2) Atkins, P. "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge." quoted in Highfield, R. The Daily Telegraph (London), 3 April 1997.

(3) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/778564.stm This is a BBC news report dated 5th June 2000.

(4) Webb JK, Flambaum VV, Churchill CW, Drinkwater MJ, Barrow JD; A search for time variation of the fine structure constant; Physical Review Letters 82: (5) 884-887 (1999). This paper puts an upper limit of about one part in 2?10-5 on the variation of the fine structure constant, and is valid up to redshifts of 1.6, which corresponds to several billion years of cosmological history. The fine structure constant is the reciprocal of the speed of light in atomic units.

(5) I am using "fundamentalist" in a modern sense to mean someone who is committed to one way of understanding the world and prejudiced against any source of knowledge or evidence that might support an alternative worldview. There is actually something of an irony here, in that the term "fundamentalist" is often traced back to a series of early 20th century booklets known as "The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth". As can be seen from the contribution of Rev. Prof. James Orr, entitled "Science and Christian Faith" at http://www.xmission.com/~fidelis/volume1/chapter18/orr_3.html the original "Fundamentalists" actually had a much more mature, thoughtful and constructive attitude to the science-religion relationship than do many of their modern counterparts.