Science and Religion - Mortal enemies, or a Lover’s tiff?

In school, I loved science. I wasn’t necessarily hugely good at it, but I still enjoyed it none-the-less. The most frustrating part for a Christian, of course, is having to sit through classes which deny the existence of God, and try to use science to back up their claims.

Evolution for example. Aaagh! Don’t get me started on evolution. “In the beginning was the nothing, and the nothing was with gas, and the nothing was gas. Through nothing, all things were made, and without it nothing was made that was made….”

It bugs me. Not because they teach things that a) they can’t prove and b) don’t really seem feasible, but that they teach them as facts, and never allow for the possibility of c) God (maybe I’ll do a bigger blog on it at some stage).

The biggest problem is that science and religion are seen as being at war with each other. Most secular scientists believe that, the public believes that, and even some Christians believe that. We need to understand as Christians that that is not true!

Indeed, the church and science were synonymous for a thousand years or so. Before Christians came along, the Greek philosophy was that everything had been around forever, and with no change, or that everything had come from a soupy-type mess, that had been around forever with no change.

Sounds familiar?

When Christians came along, and began looking into creation, that is when science challenged those ideas, and began to understand the scientific laws around us. Of course, as I mentioned in my last post, having Christianity as the prevailing culture did have its disadvantages, and over time some ‘Christians’ in authority began to become so stubborn in their beliefs that they refused to allow science to advance, and science broke away.

This is a real pity, because science and religion work well together, and without God, science reverted back to the whole ‘constant universe’ or ‘constant soup’ argument, up until it was shown that the universe must have had a finite beginning.

Now see, if religion and science were still hand in hand at the discovery of a finite beginning, everyone would be happy that they had proved that God must exist, and we could have carried on investigating how, and why, and looked at scientific laws to back it up.

Unfortunately, because science and religion have had their fall-out, science is left trying to explain how something can come out of nothing for no reason and create everything in an amazing way that works so well that it would appear to have been designed if not for the fact that design would mean a creator, and as that would be ‘religion’ we couldn’t allow that! As Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey explain in ‘How now shall we live?’:

Naturalistic scientists try to give the impression that they are fair-minded and objective, implying that religious people are subjective and biased in favor of their personal beliefs. But this is a ruse, for naturalism is as much a philosophy, a worldview, a personal belief system as any religion is (page 52).

Indeed, the main religious idea of Naturalistic scientists tend to be that their God is ‘No God’, and they worship that idea, and defend its existence against all odds.

The moment a Christian questions evolution, he or she is labeled a backwoods Bible-thumper, an ignorant reactionary who is trying to halt the progress of science… their imaginations are peopled with blustery, ignorant Christians going toe-to-toe with intelligent, educated, urbane defenders of Darwin… Our first task, then, before we can even expect to be heard, is to shatter that grid, to break that stereotype. We must convince people that the debate is not about the Bible versus science. The debate is about pursuing an unbiased examination of the scientific facts and following those facts wherever they may lead (page 54).

Christians and science should not be divided; they should be reunited. There are many areas of science that, when looked into unbiasedly show signs of a Creator behind them. Lets work at fixing the rift between them, and go back to having 'a nice happy family'.

We should not oppose science with religion; we should oppose bad science with better science (page 61).