I have mentioned, that, as a Christian and a scientist, I find myself often caught in the tension other people seem to recognize between faith and science. And yes, I do understand, where they are coming from. But from my perspective, the tension originates from misconceptions the one group has about the others point of view.
Take three westerners and let them talk about a given topic. They will have a maximum of three different opinions. Probably less. A joke, that I read, claims, that three Jews would have ten opinions. At least. And there is something to it. Our thinking is highly influenced by Greek philosophy. They were big in logical arguments. So, for them, something was true or false. It was either or. Jews, on the other hand, cultivated a style of argument best described as both and. (In some discussions, both participants held three to four contradicting options each.) Just because one is true, doesn’t mean, something else is not. But we love the either or. We know, where we stand. No fuzzy state, sharp edges. Black and white. Right and wrong. So, we struggle, when we try to harmonize to seemingly contradicting facts. (That is why a lot of people, even physicists, have a hard time with the dual nature of light, being a wave and a particle. We want it to be one or the other. But not both, because that can make our heads explode.) Now, when we look at science and religion they seem to be mutually exclusive. We won’t even try to reconcile the two, for it might damage our brains. Even though we should try. It’s worth it.
The major prejudice scientific oriented people have towards believers is, that they don’t believe in science. And I am sorry to admit, they are right. Religious folks are highly suspicious of everything science related. Manly, I am afraid, because they don’t understand, how science works. That is unfortunate, since the scientific method is actually quite simple. And the Church could profit a lot from it.
Thousands of years ago, some folks found out, that things behave always the same, when the conditions, they are in, remain the same. They discovered rules. The same ball has the same final speed when rolling down the same hill. On a different hill it has a different final speed. And it has to do, with how steep the hill is. Wonderful. Now we can form a theory, what a third hill would change. And we can test that. In a sense, that already is the scientific principle. Observe something, write down the underlying rule you suspect, and test that rule in other conditions. Did something change? Adjust the rule to agree with your observations. Otherwise, test it somewhere else. And the more you test a rule, the more accurate it will become. In other words, it will start to describe the world around you very well. It will come closer and closer to what we can call objective truth. And there are two underlying assumptions. First, the rules (the objective truth) exist. Second, they are universal (in time and space). So far, nothing made us doubt these assumptions. (Christians basically say the same, by assuming, God and His rules exist and they are universal. The difference, as they often think, is, God’s rules are laid out, with no need to discover them. Ironically, both sides claim, the other sides is wrong with their assumptions.) In all of that, the scientific mission is, to find out and understand, what is already there. It is the search for the laws that make the world go round.
An interesting philosophical question is, what is a god. Arthur C. Clarke coined the phrase, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In a sense, aliens with highly superior technology could be seen as gods. (You find that concept, when looking at god figures in books and movies.) But that would mean, that a god is the same as us, just further along in understanding the universe. An agnostic friend of mine doesn’t like that idea. In his definition, a god has to be independent of the scientific universe, not just better at using it to his advantage. And I agree with him. Yes, they can have interactions, but the two have to be separate non the less. So when scientists claim, they have proven the non-existence of god, they only say, they haven’t found anything god-like in the scientific universe so far. (They never may.)
Christians believe in an underlying objective truth. They call it God. They claim, that God remains the same “yesterday, today, and forever”. They might even agree, that God can be known via trail and error. (Not necessarily your first choice, when interacting with a person, but ok…) So yes, the basic assumptions of both sides are very similar. The only difference being, that Christians often believe to already know the underlying truth completely, while scientists assume, that they don’t know. And often, I think, scientists are closer to the truth here. We know way less about God and His creation, than we pretend. And especially when it comes to creation, scientists do an outstanding job figuring stuff out. And we should listen to them. God reveals Himself through His creation. So, science can teach us about the Creator. And we can even use the scientific method to read the Bible. We find an aspect of God. We think about, what that means. But then we find a verse, that somewhat contradicts our picture of God, so we have to adjust it. And so on. And all of the sudden, science and faith stop being mutually exclusive. And they both turn out to be the quest for the underlying truth. Faith already knows the final answer, but on the way there is still an incomprehensible amount of details to discover.
