Introduction to Science, Chapter 7
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The Relationship of Faith and Science
Introduction to Science, Chapter 7
Todd Charles Wood
Think about all the different relationships in your
life. You are directly related to members of your
family, and you have friends that you like to spend
time with. You also have more distant and formal
relationships. Your teachers at school or church have
a kind of relationship with you that is different from
your friendships and relatives. You even have
relationships with people you don’t know. You have
a distant relationship with waiters, checkout clerks,
police officers, and the people who supply your home
with electricity, internet access, and clean water.
When things go wrong in a relationship, you
handle the problems differently depending on the kind
of relationship. A disagreement with your parents
might end in an argument and some kind of
punishment, but you wouldn’t want to get into an
argument with a police officer. Resolving problems
with your banker or the person who bags your
groceries is much simpler than patching things up with
your best friend after a fight. Different kinds of
relationships approach problems differently.
What kind of a relationship can we have between
faith and science? In the previous chapter, we learned
that some people think that Christianity and science
are constantly at war, and we saw that the real
relationship was not that simple. There can be a happy
relationship between science and faith. It doesn’t have
to be competitive. In this chapter, we want to explore
the relationship of science and faith more carefully.
How do science and faith get along?
More
importantly, how do we resolve problems that come
up?
Lots of people in our modern world think about
resolving the differences between faith and science,
and every one of them has a different way of
answering these questions. Some of them emphasize
philosophy, and others focus on the science. Still
others want to make religion the most important
ingredient in thinking about this subject. Here, we will
try to distill these ideas into four simple types of
relationships that should be easy to understand, but we
have to remember that reality is much more
complicated than our description. It’s not as simple as
being able to pick one of these relationships and say,
“This is correct.” Depending on the circumstances,
faith and science can and should relate in different
ways. You’ll understand this better as we look at these
different relationships.
As we go through the types of relationship, we’ll
illustrate each one by examining the events of
Galileo’s life from that perspective. You’ll recall that
we talked about Galileo in the previous chapter.
Galileo advocated Copernicus’s idea that the earth was
a planet that goes around the sun, but he came into
conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. Church
officials at the time believed that the Bible taught that
the earth could not move and was the center of the
universe. There is no question that this was a conflict
between a scientist and the church, and by examining
this conflict from the perspective of each type of
relationship, we will see how the conflict might have
been resolved. The key to understanding these
relationships is that they tell us how science and faith
ought to behave, especially when there is a
disagreement.
The first type of relationship goes by many
names, and it’s a very popular way to understand how
faith and science work together. We’ll call it the Mind
Your Own Business relationship or MYOB for short.
According to this idea, faith and science occupy
completely different areas of thought. Faith is about
morals, ethics, and values, and science is about how
things work. Some scholars compare these areas to
actual kingdoms. In the realm of morals and ethics,
faith is king. In the realm of how things work, science
is king. Because they are two separate realms, they
should not invade each other’s territory. Scientists
should not try to tell religious people how to do their
religion, and people of faith shouldn’t try to dictate
how science is done or what science can say. We can
picture this first relationship as two spheres that do not
overlap.
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Introduction to Science, Chapter 7
More specifically, this way of relating science and
faith implies that science and faith can only answer
certain kinds of questions. In the case of Galileo, we
can see that each side tried to invade the other. When
Galileo tried to explain how to re-interpret the Bible to
make room for his ideas about the universe, he as a
scientist was invading the domain of faith. If he had
stayed completely in the realm of science, he might not
have gotten in so much trouble. On the other side of
things, the church officials that confronted Galileo
invaded the realm of science. The realm of faith does
not tell us how the universe is structured. The proper
role of faith is to give us a sense of the value of the
universe as God’s creation. It is the job of science to
describe that creation. By insisting that the structure
of the universe was a matter of faith, the church
officials invaded the territory of science. If only
Galileo and the church officials had minded their own
business, they probably wouldn’t have had such a bad
conflict.
As we think about this MYOB relationship, there
are certainly times when this approach makes sense. If
a scientist declares that there is no God, that scientist
has definitely stopped doing science and started doing
religion. Even though that scientist might have great
credibility in the area of science, we have no more
reason to believe his ideas about God than the ideas of
our friends or neighbors. On the other hand, if
someone tells you that the Bible teaches us that there
are no other planets besides the earth, you probably
should be skeptical of that too. The question of what
exists (planets, fossils, etc.) really is where we should
just see things for ourselves (science).
On the other hand, some scholars have been very
critical of the MYOB relationship. Some atheists
claim that religion really has no domain at all. Imagine
living in India where cows are considered sacred
because some Indians believe in reincarnation as part
of their religion. Do people who don’t share that
religion really have to give cows special treatment? In
other words, if belief in reincarnation is false, then we
have no actual reason to give cows special treatment.
These critics claim that there must be another source
of ethics besides faith and religion, and therefore
religion doesn’t actually have any domain at all.
A Christian can also object to the MYOB
relationship because our faith does make claims about
things in the domain of science. After all, when you
pray for someone who is sick, do you expect them to
get well? If so, aren’t you invading the area of
science? How things work and how to fix them is the
proper domain of science. Actually believing that our
prayers will be answered and people will be healed is
an invasion of the scientific domain. According to the
MYOB relationship, sick people should go to the
hospital not to church.
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Another type of relationship between faith and
science has science completely ruling over faith. In
other words, faith doesn’t get a proper domain of its
own. We’ll call this relationship Science Rules.
According to this position, you should only believe
that which is scientific. When conflicts occur between
faith and science, science always wins. If you have
some nice meditation or prayer habit that makes you
feel good, that’s fine for you, but there is nothing about
faith that can be imposed on other people. In fact,
some would even say that your faith is entirely private
and should not be shared with other people, since you
might offend someone else’s faith or lack of faith.
This type of relationship is most often advocated by
nonreligious people, but some religious people have
recently started talking about this type of relationship
also. Many conservative Christians think that liberal
Protestants practice this kind of relationship, where
Christian beliefs are constantly changed to keep up
with the latest discoveries of science.
In the case of Galileo, this type of relationship
would say that the church officials that confronted
Galileo were completely wrong. Not only that, but
Galileo should not have even needed to justify his
interpretation of the Bible. Science always rules.
Galileo should have been allowed to promote his
scientific interpretations of the universe without the
Catholic Church trying to interfere and persecute him.
The church was completely wrong, and Galileo was
right.
As Christians, we can see that this type of
relationship is not good, for several reasons. First,
science is not always right and is always changing.
Why should Christians hurry to change their beliefs to
match the latest scientific theories when science itself
will change over time?
Why does science
automatically get to dictate belief to religion? More
importantly, Christianity has essential doctrines that
are tied directly to the reality that science claims to
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Introduction to Science, Chapter 7
rule. The apostle Paul told the Corinthians, “if Christ
has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and
your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). If a scientist tried
to tell Christians that dead people don’t just come back
to life, that should be completely unacceptable. Our
faith is built on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Science cannot dictate terms to our faith.
A third type of relationship is the opposite of
Science Rules. We can call this relationship Faith
Rules. In this relationship, science is ignored or
maybe even scorned, because nothing a scientist says
will change what we believe. Whenever there is a
conflict between science and faith, we always defer to
our beliefs. Faith always rules. When people talk
about the conflict or warfare of science and religion,
they usually think that people of faith are practicing
this relationship between science and faith. Scientists
never get to do anything even remotely controversial
or religious, because scientists might conflict with the
unquestionable power of faith. Science can only
operate in a very limited way, in whatever way won’t
offend religious authorities.
Looking at Galileo’s situation through the Faith
Rules relationship, we would say that Galileo was
wrong to challenge the church’s authority with his
scientific claims. Because the Catholic officials
believed that the Bible taught the truth about the
structure of the universe, Galileo should not have
confronted them. If the church officials were wrong
about the universe, figuring out their error would take
prayer and Bible study, not arguments with
disrespectful scientists.
It’s easy in our culture to look down on people
who practice this Faith Rules relationship for being
ignorant, close-minded, and uneducated. We certainly
would question a person who rejects medical treatment
for serious illness in favor of prayer only. Many
Christians believe that modern technology and
medicine are God’s gifts to us. Many Christian
doctors believe they are helping to minister God’s
healing to sick people. Likewise, we might wonder
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about a Christian who casually dismisses new
scientific discoveries because they’re “made up” or
just “speculation.” Science is an amazing tool and has
done amazing things. We shouldn’t just scoff at new
discoveries.
On the other hand, as we already discovered when
discussing Science Rules, there are times when
Christian doctrine should not be changed or modified
because of science. On the question of resurrection of
the dead, faith absolutely rules, and it should. Many
Christians would add more beliefs to the list of
unquestionable doctrines. For many Christians, the
power of prayer, the miracles described in the Bible,
the Exodus from Egypt, and the accounts of creation
and the Flood are things that must be believed by faith,
even if science says otherwise. Sometimes faith really
does rule.
If we are to be faithful Christians and good
stewards of science, none of these relationships seem
to be good enough. MYOB fails because our faith
isn’t just about morals and values. Science Rules fails
because science shouldn’t just dictate beliefs to
Christians, and Faith Rules fails because sometimes
scientists really do find things we ought to pay
attention to. What other relationship is there?
Because we’ve been thinking about the
faith/science relationship in terms of human
relationships, maybe we can gain some insight from
the Bible’s teaching about relationship. The Bible tells
us to love our neighbors, to bear one another’s
burdens, and to be humble and consider others better
than ourselves. Perhaps the best way to think about
relating science and faith is a Mutual Partnership,
where each partner has certain talents and abilities but
they work together rather than in competition. In this
type of relationship, there are places where science can
answer questions better than faith, and faith ought to
encourage us to seek scientific answers. Likewise,
other issues might be best addressed by prayer and
fasting, and science will need to let faith take center
stage. On still other issues, science and faith can
genuinely work together, like praying for a medical
cure for cancer or churches sponsoring medical
missionaries. Conflicts (which happen in every
relationship) would be resolvable by humbly
examining each partner rather than automatically
forcing one partner to yield to the other (Science Rules
and Faith Rules) or pretending like the conflict is just
imaginary because there really isn’t a partnership at all
(the MYOB relationship).
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Introduction to Science, Chapter 7
How might Galileo’s history have been different
if both he and the Catholic officials decided to work
towards a Mutual Partnership relationship? Instead of
confronting and condemning Galileo, the church
officials would have gone back to the Bible to make
sure they were right. Maybe they would have
discovered that the language of Psalm 96:10 (“the
world is established; it shall never be moved”) doesn’t
mean the same in Hebrew as it does in English. They
could have discovered that the Hebrew word translated
“moved” does not necessarily refer to all motion. The
very same Hebrew word is used in Psalm 17:5, “My
steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not
slipped.” The Hebrew word for slipped is the same
word that describes the world not moving in Psalm
96:10, but certainly Psalm 17:5 isn’t saying that feet
never move. That’s why it’s translated “slipped”
instead of “moved.” Why then would we think that
the same word describing the earth can only mean that
the earth will never move? Couldn’t it also mean that
the earth will never fall out of its God-appointed orbit?
Maybe the Bible really doesn’t have as much to say
about the structure of the world as those church
officials thought it did.
What if Galileo had gone back to re-consider his
own science before running into confrontation with the
church? Maybe he would have noticed that he hadn’t
actually discovered the movement of the earth. He
certainly found evidence that challenged some beliefs
about the universe, but he never actually showed that
the earth was moving. As we saw in chapter 3, the
switch from the old geocentric model of the universe
to the heliocentric model took many years and
important contributions from Kepler and Newton.
Perhaps Galileo could have taken a more humble
approach to his opinions about the universe.
If Galileo and the church had decided to try a
Mutual Partnership, they might have concluded that
neither of them were absolutely sure that they were
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right. They might have just decided to keep studying
the Bible and the universe to see what discoveries they
might make. Instead, the church adopted the Faith
Rules relationship and demanded that Galileo accept
their belief that the earth doesn’t move around the sun.
Galileo adopted the MYOB relationship and insisted
that we misinterpreted the Bible if we think it teaches
anything about the movement of the earth around the
sun. When two people approach the same relationship
with very different understandings of what that
relationship actually is, unpleasant conflict is almost
unavoidable. So it was with Galileo.
What can we learn from this survey? First of all,
believe firmly. Remember from earlier chapters that
science can make mistakes. It’s not infallible. Don’t
let science rattle your faith. The Christian faith has
survived for two thousand years, and it survived much
worse than science. Science is always changing and
adapting to new discoveries.
Second, think carefully. Don’t just reject science
because some scientific discovery challenges
something you believe. Try to think about why you
believe what you believe. Study the Bible. Talk to
your pastor or other Christians that you trust. If you’re
able, look carefully at the science to see exactly what
the new discovery is and what it might mean (we’ll
learn more about this later in the book).
Third, don’t panic. If you can’t figure out how to
resolve a conflict between science and faith, don’t fall
into the trap of thinking that you must figure it out.
There are a lot of very smart and very faithful
Christians who disagree about a lot of faith and science
questions. If they haven’t settled every question of the
universe, why do you think you can? Too many
Christians run into some problem of faith and science
and end up abandoning the faith altogether. Don’t let
your faith be so fragile. Be patient. Read books from
other Christians about the question that bothers you.
Talk to people who know about these things.
Remember your faith in Christ and the things that you
are confident about.
Finally, try to enjoy yourself. Remember that
science is pretty amazing, because scientists study an
amazing creation. It’s true that it isn’t always easy to
resolve science and faith conflicts, but don’t let that
ruin your enjoyment of God’s creation. Sometimes we
should just push aside all our fussing and debates and
just enjoy what God has made, because He made it for
us. When we marvel at God’s creation, we bring glory
to Him.
©2016 Core Academy of Science. Sample chapter is provided for preview only. Copying and redistribution is prohibited.