Posted by Thank goodness for science. Imagine what it would’ve been like trying to tackle something like coronavirus without science and without scientists who uncovered its genetic code, worked out how it spreads, and produced a vaccine in record time. Science makes a stunning contribution to our lives – it solves so many of our problems – all of us benefit from it every day.
So it’s right that science has an important place in our culture. But with that said – I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to hear the phrase “follow the science” (as seemed to be said every day on the news during the pandemic) without at least raising an eyebrow in the future. The overuse of that phrase showed us that it’s not science itself which leads us anywhere.
I compare all that science talk with what how little it seems the Church had to say about beating the virus. Compared with science, we wonder whether the Church – or God if he exists – has got anything helpful to say about what we’ve been through. For some people, the fact that science has come to the forefront in such a major way shows that science is more relevant than faith.
Maybe some still want to believe in God, and a sort of old mysterious world of miracles that was popular before science – a world of weird things the Bible says. But others say that kind of world is irrelevant, perhaps even harmful to believe in – and because of science, belief in God is not credible for a thinking person in the 21st century.
Somebody like Stephen Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics would agree that the Church should keep it quiet: “The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
In the age-old debates about faith and science, most of us non-experts aren’t totally sure what to think. Extreme opinions in either direction fail to convince, but we do just share the underlying sense that science is more rational and familiar. We have a few GCSEs, we know roughly what science is about and what it means to trust it.
Christianity, on the other hand might be attractive in parts but we fear that believing in God, being a Christian, means you have to switch your brain off – is faith anti-scientific? What about evolution? What about the Creation narrative and other weird things in the Bible? Do you have to ignore science in order to be a Christian?
Well, to make any progress on this subject it’s important to identify what the most basic questions are. And to remind ourselves what science is and what the scientific method can tell us. So what are the key questions in the science / faith debate?
Well firstly, there’s what we might call the question of knowledge: can science tell us everything, or can we know things without science? If there is reason to think that science can be a source of any type of answer and every category of knowledge, then clearly faith is not needed. But are there things science cannot answer?
Then there is the question of worldview. This is about your presuppositions about the world, the interpreative lens through which you try to make sense of reality. This is important because the idea that science disproves God comes not so much from anything within science itself but from among the things which some people who do science say. What’s going on there?
Thirdly, there is the question of evidence – if we do want to decide as fairly and as rationally as we can about all this, what evidence is there to support our conclusions and where can we find it?
Stay with me over the next few posts as I dig into each of these questions in turn – the question of knowledge, the question of worldview and the question of evidence. Then make up your own mind.
Living Telos 