God Can’t Be Dead
In recent days, I’ve been pondering and discussing a variety of faith-oriented topics, often at one point or another finding an intersection between science and religion. Insofar as any of the discussions took a turn toward pitting one against the other, I eventually found a compromise, so as not to be intolerantly didactic. This fell somewhere along the lines of, “We agree to partially disagree.”
Each time, though, I was left with a residual unease. I felt the compromise was incomplete, and did neither of us any good; but I couldn’t articulate it, hamstrung as I was by the misperception that the feeling was a function of some untenable defensiveness on my part. While I’m fair more often than not, about some things I’m positively bullheaded. Some recent quasi-theological discussions in the media have raised my ire: questions about why God might have caused the earthquakes and tsunami; and the renewed battle in the South over whether public schools should include some alternative to evolution in biology curricula. Mindful of this, I didn’t want to kvetch during a civil dialog.
I eventually came to the conclusion that my unease was less a product of petulance than of a confusion of topics. God versus science is an archetypical debate, at least in Western cultures. I’m tempted to generalize this to a debate between any spiritual philosophy and any scientific philosophy; but I have neither the time nor, honestly, the toolset to do more than post 100 Kb of ignorance. Maybe one day when I’ve dissected Kant, Eco, the Bible, and the Principia Mathematica, I’ll carry out such a discussion. For now, though, it’s important to specify that I’m referring specifically to the apparent gulf between the world as seen between the lines of scripture, and the world as seen as a collection of universal constants and mathematical models.
Pitting God against science implies that the Bible and physics texts serve competing interests. On the one hand, the pious perceive the world as a divine creation, its creatures, principally humans, serving some purpose toward that divinity. On the other hand, scientists perceive the world nearly as a happenstance, a function of statistical mechanics, of probability, with no intelligence behind its function. Taken as such, the foundations of the debate appear sound.
Nope.
Religion and science no more compete as solutions to the meaning of life than 5W30 and 89 octane compete to keep my Plymouth Breeze roadworthy. Science and religion address different sets of issues, with some overlap. Within the tenets of each are statements about how the universe was created, for instance. Science and religion each serve as methods or practices for understanding the world. It’s in the nature and means of applying that understanding that we find the key to settling the debate.
Religion seeks primarily to inform its disciples of some moral or ethical consequences of the mechanics of the world. It wasn’t so long ago in the U.S. that we prayed for our harvests. We prayed for health. We issued prayers to keep unhealthy spirits away after sneezing (a practice which is largely cultural habit now, rather than an earnest attempt to ward off anything). Even now, we look for some reasoning, some justification, after natural and unnatural disasters. NPR carried a discussion among members of different religions about what the tsunami and its devastation implied about God and their faiths.
Science, for its part, almost completely avoids any moral or ethical standing. Cosmologists study the universe for signs of how the universe formed. Particle physicists examine properties of infinitesimal bits of matter to figure out what things are made of, and how. Biologists study the mechanics of life, cell replication and exhaustion, methods of transporting nutrients or vectors of disease infection. These people undertake study not because they expect to find moral guidance in their instruments, but rather because they want to understand where all this stuff came from, and how, and how it works. Understanding RNA transcription, in and of itself, doesn’t confer upon the scientist any moral superiority or perspective.
This is not to say that God and science are incompatible. Putting faith in one doesn’t exclude faith in the other. And there’s that, too: both science and religion are built upon faith in something. Religion is based on a faith that God exists; science is based on a faith that all its instruments and mathematical models work well, that the assumptions made during their construction and development are right, or at least close to right. It’s to this reality that my compromise appealed: “We agree to partially disagree” as much as states that we each have our faiths, and respect the other’s.
Yet, that’s a cop out. The faith of the pious isn’t the same as the faith of the scientific. Scientific faith is rigorously, competitively tested, with the findings distributed through the scientific community to be analyzed and scrutinized. Religious faith, as far as I can tell, is not, cannot be tested. It can’t be tested because that defies the point of the faith, to believe in God and allow his hand to shape the world. It also can’t be tested because it’s inherently untestable. The Bible, from what I’ve gathered, is not a document which develops some set of logical axioms into a coherent system of morality, but rather is the often cryptic transcribed word of God. With some few exceptions, you either believe it or you don’t.
The debate, then, isn’t so much about which is right within a common context, because they don’t share a common context. The debate isn’t about believing in science or God, but rather how we believe. Consider: in the scientific mind, if there is no evidence for the existence of God, you don’t assume He exists anyway; in the religious mind, looking for evidence of God completely misses the point of faith. This is at the heart of the division.
So, what’s my point? Good question. I guess it boils down to something like this: when discussions like these come up—and they do, and probably will for a long time to come—don’t quote Genesis 1:3 as a summary of the Photoelectric Effect; and don’t point to diagrams in a botany text as evidence that God did not speak to Moses.
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