Are Science and Christian Faith Fundamentally Incompatible?
This article is written by Dr Graham Leo. It may be reprinted or pasted only with the written permission of the author, and only with full acknowledgements of the author and the source.
Posted: 12 January, 2018
This article was first presented as a Lecture to the Dearlove Society at Monkton Combe School, Bath, UK, in 2014.
It is common to hear statements to the effect that “Faith and Science are fundamentally incompatible”.[1] Put into the language of ‘the man or woman in the street’: No sensible 21st century person, who has any knowledge of science, could possibly believe in God. Science has disproved God.
Any discussion about faith and science requires some careful definition before it can be useful. Both faith and science cover broad fields, and need to have their scope fairly and carefully defined.
Science is generally accepted as being a professional discipline where it is expected that a person will have some expertise in the subject if they are to have a worthwhile opinion.
Faith, on the other hand, is commonly regarded as a sort of free-for-all religious game where everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if some of those are mutually contradictory. It doesn't really matter anyway, because none of them are true.
Faith-holding is generally regarded as being the province of the less-than-thoughtful, even if not the less-well-educated.
The more that science has probed the question of origins of human life and of the universe, the more it has obtained luminary or priestly status in the popular mind. Carl Sagan fed this imagination, solemnly intoning those familiar words at the beginning of the hugely popular television series, Cosmos: “The cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be.”[2]
By borrowing biblical language and adopting worshipful music and voice tones, he proclaimed his own High Priesthood of the religion of Science-As-The-Only-Truth. Via images of stellar vastness, the masses have been brainwashed to think of the earth as an insignificant speck of matter in a vast and insensitive universe, and our own presence as human beings as a mere flicker in the progress from amoeba to TV Presenter to probable final disintegration.
As a result, the person in the street has come to think of science as that body of work carried out by experts who are not only capable of making analytical observations about the natural world, but also of answering ancient questions of origins and meaning.
Religious faith, on the other hand, according to this person in the street, is the province of the simple, the uneducated, the superstitious, or the fundamentalist dogmatic. From here it was but a short step to the common assertion, “But science has disproved God”.
When science and faith enter the same playing-field, one is reminded of the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland:
‘I don't think they play at all fairly,’ Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, ‘and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak — and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them’.
The first of my submissions in this lecture is that in the public mind, both science and faith are badly misunderstood and misinterpreted.
The second submission is that, when regarded respectfully, taking into account each one’s particular characteristics, and taking the best exemplars of each, not the fundamentalist nor doctrinaire bigots from either camp, Christian faith and Science share many similarities.
Any suggestion of incompatibility arises either from a poor understanding of one or the other (or both), or from mere prejudice.
Defining the Problem
For our purposes in this short address, I will only address the question of traditional Christian faith, not just any religious faith, nor any kind of faith in general.
Faith is often perceived in the popular media as believing in things without evidence. One YouTube video which has been viewed by over 3.5 million viewers shows British comedienne, Kate Smurthwaite telling a TV audience what she thinks about faith: “Faith, by definition, is believing in things without evidence, and personally, I don’t do that, because I'm not an idiot.”[3]
A slightly less aggressive, but no less strident view was presented on the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science by a respondent in a discussion forum:
What I find most objectionable in religion is the insistence that we believe it on faith, rather than having it proved to us with facts. That is where I truly part company with God-botherers. It's not what they believe, but rather why they believe it. I am against faith, against belief-without-evidence, and that is what all religions demand of us.[4]
Richard Dawkins is well known in the West for his strident and virulent attacks on religion in general and Christianity in particular. He comments that faith is not merely foolish or objectionable; he actually regards it as evil: “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument”.[5]
These views of faith all occupy similar ground. They argue that faith, by definition, is belief in something without any reasonable basis at all to support it. Faith is something that is allegedly held by someone as an a priori assumption merely on the grounds that they choose to believe it. Christian faith is regarded as being not materially different from a belief held in Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or fairies in the bottom of the garden.
Defining Faith
While it may be true that some Christian believers do not think deeply about evidence for their faith, this is not true of their leaders nor of those who have made an intellectual study of their faith.
The 4th century monk, St. Augustine, believed that “Reason is the vehicle, which, if driven correctly, takes us to the door of faith”.[6] Professor John Lennox is an Oxford don who has held senior posts in mathematics and physics as well as in theology, and who holds three doctorates. He writes:
… faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The Christian apostle John writes in his biography of Jesus: ‘These things are written that you might believe…’ That is, he understands that what he is writing is to be regarded as part of the evidence on which faith is based.[7]
In other words, for Lennox, Biblical faith is not a matter of believing when there is nothing to base a belief upon, but rather a rational and evidence-based assessment of facts and circumstances that cause a person to believe, to have faith. Lennox uses a Gospel author to show that this is not merely a 21st century attitude towards faith, but an original, first century attitude.
This view is repeated frequently throughout the New Testament. Paul consistently refers to ‘eyewitnesses’ of the resurrected Christ, and to the known facts of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his subsequent resurrection. Luke begins his Gospel with an introduction clearly intended to demonstrate his scholarly assessment of the facts at his disposal.
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. [8]
The view shared by those who have made lifelong studies of theology and biblical writings is clear: the demand for evidence to support faith claims is a reasonable demand. As it happens, especially in the last hundred or so years, availability of that evidence has increased exponentially, both in terms of quality and quantity.
New Testament textual and manuscript study in particular, is a highly reliable and evidence-based discipline. The work of thousands of experts in textual and language study, archaeological evidence, historical and social research and examination of literally thousands of items of contemporaneous notes, lists and letters, many of them found on rubbish heaps from the ancient world contribute daily to this body of knowledge.
But theology, i.e. faith-in-theory, like all other social sciences, e.g. History, does not look for scientific types of proof. It seeks best-fit theories and hypotheses. The causes of WWI are not going to be found in a test tube or escaping as measurable amounts of gas from a controlled experiment.
The authenticity of the core documents of Christianity is now supported by evidence from history, textual analysis, archaeology, linguistic analysis, and a vast body of written material gathered from places thousands of miles apart. That scholarly work has now provided us with a text of the New Testament that we are confident is so close to the original manuscripts that any differences would have no effect on the original meaning or any major or minor teaching.
The major elements of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are now well-established facts. There is not a single reputable scholar in the field who doubts the existence and the general facts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The central claim of Christian belief, namely, his resurrection, is less widely-accepted, but still well-supported by a body of evidence that is at least confronting, and at best, convincing.[9]
Despite all of this firm and critical evidentiary foundation for faith, it must be conceded that there is a not-inconsiderable body of writing and speaking amongst the general Christian public that is less well-founded.
Amongst some sensationalist circles, some literalist or fundamentalist circles, amongst less-educated people, and amongst the more superstitious, it is not hard to find expressions of faith which fail to distinguish between well-supported reasoning about faith and wild claims about God which are not able to be supported and which replace careful thought with dogmatic assertions. This is not Christian faith at its best.
Defining Science
The term ‘Science’ also suffers from some variability in its meaning – even at the highest echelons of the scientific cognoscenti. The British Science Council has recently delivered a new definition of science that presumably reflects the shared view of many, and probably most, scientists: "Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence." [10]
The most obvious criticism of this definition is that it may be too broad. Indeed, a good deal of theology or geography could fall into this definition of science. Nevertheless, it becomes a useful working definition especially when combined with the same Council’s description of scientific method.[11] The essential elements of science are generally agreed by professional scientists to include objectivity, observation, analysis, experimentation, evidence, verification.
The BioLogos Foundation describes science as requiring three things: … (1) An orderly, reliable and predictable creation with patterns to be discovered, (2) minds capable of a deep level of abstract thought, and (3) a burning curiosity to understand the world around us. If any of those three things are missing, then we cannot have science.[12]
If we ignore for the moment the word ‘creation’ above, this definition puts a human face on that quoted above from the Science Council.
If faith has its lunatic fringe which makes thoughtful Christians shudder, so the world of science has its outer orbit of fanatics who claim more than they should in the desire to protect science from religion, and/or to promote its high status in society. This position is often referred to as Scientism.
Scientism
Scientism is the belief (note this carefully-chosen word!) that science can do more than merely describe the natural world, or use the tools of science to create useful technology in such fields as engineering or medicine.
It is the belief that science can speak informatively and validly about the disciplines of history, business, economics or education, and even philosophy and theology, as well as biology or chemistry.
It is the view that science is capable, not only of exploring the natural world, but also of answering questions of human origin, meaning, purpose, worth and value. “Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge – that there is no rational, objective form of enquiry that is not a branch of science.”[13]
This position is not new. In his classic, Religion and Science, Bertrand Russell asserted: “Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know”. [emphasis mine][14]
Think about that! This is a truly outrageous claim. Can I not know if I am in love? Can I not know if I want to become a lawyer? Can I not know what I would like for dinner? Can we not know our history as a nation in the last World War?
For a more contemporary version of this nonsensical claim, Oxford scientist Peter Atkins writes:
There is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the religious – among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the uninformed – hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate. (emphasis mine)[15]
It is hard to believe that a highly intelligent scholar such as Peter Atkins surely is, could genuinely think, if he went back and calmly reconsidered this claim, that science could properly investigate many of our most treasured human experiences. Think about love, money, law, nationalism, beauty, art, entertainment, just for a start.
To believe, (again, note the careful use of that word, here) to believe that science is an appropriate tool for investigating every area of human existence does great injustice to the sober definitions of science given earlier.
Richard Dawkins supported Atkins’s optimistic view of science in a comment made in a Q&A program[16] in 2011: “I think that the existence of a supreme being, a supernatural supreme being, is a scientific issue – either there is a God or there isn’t.”[17]
Whatever else this sort of statement might be, it is certainly a category error in terms of philosophical thinking. Whether or not God exists is certainly a question of fact, but the category of fact is not the category of methods of knowing (epistemology).
God’s existence is primarily an ontological or philosophical question, not a scientific one. That is to say, if we were to formally investigate the question of the existence of God, we would not choose the scientific method to do so. We would choose methods relating to a range of disciplines, including especially, philosophy, but also ontology, history, literature…
Thankfully not all of our world’s best scientists are blinded by the false hope of scientism. Sir Peter Medawar was a Nobel Prize winner, and described by Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent agnostic and evolutionary biologist, as “the cleverest man I have ever known”. Medawar wrote:
The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: “How did everything begin?”; “What are we all here for?”; “What is the point of living?”[18]
The philosopher, B. K. Ridley was particularly scathing of the tendency of scientism to usurp ground which it could not properly claim, in particular the ground of religion. With a somewhat wry wit, he wrote:
The more fanatical extreme of a belief that this is, [i.e. the belief that scientific method can be used investigate all fields, including the arts and humanities] so is what I propose to call scientism, the religion that given time, science will explain all. Science may not take away the sins of the world, but it will certainly describe them truthfully. [19]
Perhaps this is just the segue we need to take us back to our topic.
Following so much media play of the voices of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris et al), the general public has often not been able to distinguish between scientism and science, just as they do not have a clear idea of what Biblical faith really is. Just as we saw with faith, there is a body of thought, not confined to the common person, that claims more for science than is reasonable. This is not science at its best.
Towards a Nexus between Christian Faith and Science
There is a long history among our best thinkers, of distinguishing between the reasoning required for the study of mathematics or natural science and the study of morality or God.
Aristotle made such a distinction, proposing that what he called speculative reasoning is useful for the study of maths and science, while prudential reasoning was best for more general, social enquiry. Furthermore, for Aristotle, all learning was a form of virtue, and a quest for virtue. This is the element that we have lost in our current tug-of-war between the scientific atheists and the mind of the masses.
Perhaps Aristotle’s idea of reasoning as a virtue is the point where faith and science might come together for mutual benefit. At their best, science and the scientific method aim to use human reasoning to achieve optimal outcomes for human life in the physical universe. And at its best, Christian faith aims to use evidence-based reason to achieve optimal outcomes to enable human beings to probe the relationship between the human and the transcendent - while not discounting the need for mystery.
John Polkinghorne, Cambridge-physicist-turned-Anglican-priest, draws faith and science together with this observation:
“Science is concerned with the question, How? – By what process do things happen? Theology is concerned with the question Why? – Is there a meaning and a purpose behind what is happening?”[20]
Both of these purposes are virtuous purposes, in the Aristotelian sense. They tend and guide towards greater service of humanity and more moral humans.
Furthermore, at their best, both Christian faith and science utilise some common tools: imagination, a quest for knowledge, a thirst for wisdom, an insistence on evidence where evidence is available, a respectful awe of mystery where evidence is unavailable, a desire both to understand the world better and to make it better for others.
As the lives of scientists who have been men and women of faith have demonstrated, when these two are allowed to work together, the results can be wonderful.[21] All of the scientists listed in Appendix A were sincere Christian believers, as well as most of them being Nobel Prize winners (if they were born in time to receive that award).
Conclusion
In summary, it must be said that if either faith or science are allowed to be defined in terms that fall short of, or go beyond what their best practice would permit, then there may well be incompatibility.
However, if faith and science are to be interpreted consistently with historic and international best practice, there is no fundamental incompatibility.
Faith deals with evidence, and then draws conclusions about metaphysical concepts on the basis of that evidence. There is an academic community which is generally in agreement on a core body of faith concepts and has done so since the very earliest times of Christianity. Science deals with evidence also, and draws conclusions which are tested and peer-reviewed across the scientific community at large.
As long as both faith and science are interpreted in accordance with best international and academic practice, and are recognised as being different and separate entities which serve different purposes and use different tools, there is no incompatibility between them in terms of each being able to contribute truthfully and accurately to descriptions and explanations of our world and of life.
It is in the interests of our civilisation that we maintain a dialogue between faith and science – each at their best. The world of science encroached on moral and behavioural grounds years ago, at least beginning with the Manhattan Project, and continuing now in such fields as bio-ethics, genetic engineering and reproductive technologies.
We may be safer as a civilisation if we can maintain a healthy dialogue between those who can best tell us how we should live a good life (faith), and those who can best tell us how we can make life better (science). Allowing either one the ascendancy while demonising the other may diminish us all.
Appendix A
Following is a short list (20) of some scientists who were/are also strong Christian believers (their major field of achievement or expertise in brackets). All of these were Nobel Prize winners (if they lived after the Nobel Prize was available), or received high honours in their own day. Many more, of course, could be added. The list is selected to demonstrate (a) the breadth of fields of science, and (b) the full range of time from the beginning of the Enlightenment to the present day. According to Wikipedia:
The three primary divisions of Christianity are Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. Between 1901 and 2000 it was revealed that among 654 Laureates 31.9% have identified as Protestant in its various forms (208 prizes), 20.3% were Christians (no information about their denominations; 133 prizes), 11.6% have identified as Catholic and 1.6% have identified as Eastern Orthodox. Although Christians make up over 33.2% of the world's population, they have won a total of 65.4% of all Nobel prizes between 1901 and 2000.[22]
To this list of Christian Nobel Prize Winners might be added those of Jewish descent. There is no clear data readily available on how many of these were active in their faith, but no doubt all were deeply influenced, at the least, by their faith in a Creator-God who is real and personal and who is interested in the cosmos, its elements, its creatures and its people. Again, using Wikipedia as our source: “Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 881 individuals, of whom 197 - 22.4% - were Jewish or people of Jewish descent, although Jews and people of Jewish descent comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population.”[23]
Robert Boyle (Boyle’s Law, Pressure and Volume, died 1691)
Francis Collins (Genetics, Director of the Human Genome Project, born 1950)
Arthur Crompton (Physics, particular nature of light, Manhattan Project, died 1962)
Rene Descartes (Cartesian geometry, philosophy, died 1650)
John Eccles (Neurophysiology, died 1997)
Michael Faraday (Electricity, died 1867)
William Harvey (Circulation of blood, died 1657)
Werner Heisenberg (Quantum Mechanics, died 1976)
William Kelvin (Temperature scale & work on Second Law of Thermodynamics, died 1907)
Johannes Kepler (Astronomy, elliptical orbits, died 1630)
James Maxwell (Electromagnetism, mathematician, died 1879)
Robert Millikan (Namer of cosmic rays, Physics, died 1953)
Isaac Newton (Maths, physics, optics, gravity, Laws of Motion, died 1727)
Blaise Pascal (Probability Theory, died 1662)
Louis Pasteur (Microbiology, died 1895)
Max Planck (Originator of Quantum Theory, died 1947)
Gottfried Leibniz (Calculus, binary notation, computing, died 1716)
Guglielmo Marconi (Telegraphy, died 1937)
Gregor Mendel (Genetics, died 1884)
Erwin Schrodinger (Quantum Theory, Theoretical Physics, died 1961)
Endnotes:
[1] “… science and religion cannot be reconciled.” John Cornwell, ed. Nature's Imagination - the Frontiers of Scientific Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 132.
[2] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4. The full quote reads (note the quasi-religious language): The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
[3] bdwilson, "Atheist Bitchslap," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsj1UWol7l8.
[4] Richard Dawkins, "Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science," http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/639021-apistevist-noun-one-who-lacks-faith, cited 1st October, 2014.
[5] The God Delusion (London: Transworld Publishers, 2007), 347.
[6] Carl Olson, "Augustine’s Confessions and the Harmony of Faith and Reason," http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/augustine’s-confessions-and-the-harmony-of-faith-and-reason.
[7] John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2007), 15.
[8] Luke 1:1-4
[9] See Appendix B for a short paper on this.
[10] "Our Definition of Science," The Science Council, http://sciencecouncil.org/about-us/our-definition-of-science/. (Cited 2 January, 2017.)
[11] The key elements of scientific method include:
· Objective observation: Measurement and data
· Evidence
· Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses
· Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples
· Repetition
· Critical analysis
· Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment (The Science Council, 2010)
[12] K. W. Giberson and F.S. Collins, The Language of Science and Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 29.
[13] E. Feser, "The Public Discourse," http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174
[14] B. Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 243.
[15] Cornwell, 125.
[16] Q&A is a thoughtful ABC television program in Australia. It has a panel of 4-6 guests, usually eminent people, or somehow representative of a sector, and it takes questions from an audience as well as from the host. It is generally entertaining and highly thought-provoking.
[17] ABC Australia, "Q&A," in God, Science and Sanity (2010). The full quote is: The implication of your question is that there's something about religion which is personal and which doesn't have any bearing - that evidence doesn't have any bearing upon it. Now, as I scientist I care passionately about the truth. I think that the existence of a supreme being - a supernatural supreme being - is a scientific issue. Either there is a God or there isn't.
[18] Lennox, 41.
[19] B. K. Ridley, ed. On Science (London: Routledge, 2001), 2.
[20] J. Polkinghorne and N. Beale, Questions of Truth (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 7.
[21] See Appendix A.
[22] List of Christian Noble Laureates, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_Nobel_laureates
[23] List of Jewish Noble Laureates, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
References
Australia, ABC. "Q&A." In God, Science and Sanity, 2010.
bdwilson. "Atheist Bitchslap." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsj1UWol7l8.
Cornwell, John, ed. Nature's Imagination - the Frontiers of Scientific Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Transworld Publishers, 2007.
———. "Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science." http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/639021-apistevist-noun-one-who-lacks-faith, cited 1st October, 2014.
Feser, E. "The Public Discourse." http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174
Giberson, K. W., and F.S. Collins. The Language of Science and Faith. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011.
Lennox, John. God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2007.
Olson, Carl. "Augustine’s Confessions and the Harmony of Faith and Reason." Faith_Science_Incompatible?.docx.
"Our Definition of Science." The Science Council, http://sciencecouncil.org/about-us/our-definition-of-science/.
Polkinghorne, J., and N. Beale. Questions of Truth. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.
Ridley, B. K., ed. On Science. London: Routledge, 2001.
Russell, B. Religion and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980.