Science and faith

The conflict story

We often hear that science and faith are enemies. The story took its shape in the nineteenth century. In 1874 the American scientist John William Draper wrote a history of the ‘conflict’ between religion and science, and in 1896 Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, a history of the ‘warfare’ of science with theology; both were widely read. The tale that medieval people thought the earth was flat spread along with books like these, though medieval scholars knew that the earth is a sphere. Many historians of science now hold that the story of science and religion is not one of constant war but a complex one, in which conflict, cooperation and indifference are mixed. The question itself is answered in Do science and faith conflict?; this lesson looks at the story and at the shape of the thinking.

The story's great scene is Galileo. With his telescope he saw the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, and he defended Copernicus's view that the earth moves round the sun. In 1616 the church in Rome ordered him not to hold or defend that view; after his Dialogue of 1632, the Roman Inquisition in 1633 required him to abjure it. He was not tortured and did not die in prison: he lived under house arrest near Florence, went on with his work and died in 1642. The causes were tangled. There was as yet no decisive proof that the earth moves; university Aristotelians opposed him too; and his sharp pen offended the Pope. But one plain cause was that theologians read verses such as "O sun, stand still over Gibeon" (Joshua 10:12) as teaching the structure of the heavens, and so confused the cosmology of their day with Scripture. In 1992 Pope John Paul II acknowledged the theologians' error. Galileo himself remained a Catholic believer, and in his letter of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina he wrote that Scripture and nature both proceed from the divine Word, so that two truths cannot contradict each other. He also passed on a churchman's saying that the Holy Spirit means to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.

Two books

Many of those who opened modern science believed in God: Johannes Kepler, who found the laws of planetary motion; Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry; Isaac Newton; and Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, who explored electromagnetism. Over the door of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, of which Maxwell was the first director, the words "Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them" (Psalm 111:2) were carved in Latin. Not all were orthodox: Newton did not hold the church's doctrine of the Trinity. Still, many historians think that certain convictions helped modern science to grow: that the world is the ordered work of one wise Creator; that because God made it freely, its order must be looked at and not merely deduced; and that human beings, made in his image, can understand it. These were not its only roots.

Behind these convictions lies an old thought: God speaks in two books. Psalm 19 sings first of the heavens, then of the law.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

Psalm 19:1-2

The Law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the LORD are right, bringing joy to the heart; the commandments of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes.

Psalm 19:7-8

John Wesley says of the heavens, "They are as a legible book, wherein he that runs may read it" Wesley, and at verse 7 that the psalmist turns to "another demonstration of God's glory, which he compares with and prefers before the former" Wesley. The Belgic Confession of 1561, the confession of the Reformed churches of the Low Countries, names the two means by which God is known:

We know him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God … Secondly, he makes himself more clearly and fully known to us by his holy and divine Word

Belgic Confession, art. 2

Theology calls the first general revelation and the second special revelation. The two books have one author; read rightly, they do not contradict each other. When they seem to, what is wrong may be not the books but our reading.

Creation and evolution

Christians read the age of creation and the history of life in different ways. Young-earth creation reads the days of Genesis 1 as ordinary days and the world as some thousands of years old, pointing to the plain sense of the text and to the commandment that grounds the Sabbath in six days of making (Exodus 20:11). Old-earth creation holds that the earth is very old: some read the days as long ages in which God worked in stages, others as a literary framework or as God's workdays told after the pattern of ours. Evolutionary creation holds that God brought forth life through evolution, and that his working through the natural order is itself creation. All three confess that God is the Creator of all, that human beings bear his image and that Genesis is God's word, and this course picks none of them. The reasons each gives are set out in Creation in the doctrine course, in Genesis: the beginning of all things in the Bible Overview and in Is Genesis history?

Science and scientism

Science can do great things, and what it does is a precious way of knowing God's world. But scientism, the view that science alone gives real knowledge, is not science; it is philosophy. The claim that we may believe only what science has proved cannot itself be proved by any experiment. Science in fact stands on things it does not prove: that nature is orderly, that our minds can grasp its order, that results must be reported honestly. The last is a moral truth.

Two kinds of naturalism must be told apart. Methodological naturalism is a working rule of science: explain natural events by natural causes. Many Christian scientists follow it, seeing natural causes as the ordinary way Christ upholds the world, for "in Him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17); some Christian scholars, though, argue that science need not be bound by the rule. Metaphysical naturalism is the worldview that nature is all there is. The first is a method and the second a belief, so the success of science is no proof that there is no God.

In Miracles (1947) C. S. Lewis argued that metaphysical naturalism undermines itself. If nature is all there is, our thoughts too are only the products of non-rational causes, and then we have no reason to trust the very reasoning that led to naturalism C. S. Lewis, Miracles. After criticism from the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, Lewis rewrote the chapter for the 1960 edition; naturalists reply that evolution, by favouring true beliefs that help survival, has given us reliable minds. The argument asks where the mind that does science comes from.

In conversation, if a friend says that science has done away with God, ask together which discovery showed it. Usually it is not a finding of science but a philosophy, scientism or naturalism. Christians too should learn humbly from what science shows, and should not make the age of the earth a test of faith. The next lesson, Is Jesus the only way?, turns to confessing Christ among the religions.

Practice