The need of science and Christianity for each other

It will be helpful to look at this aspect of the subject under a number of headings.

Science is unable to meet basic human needs

In 1928, in an article on the notorious Scopes trial of 1925, The Nation stated:

A sentence which begins "Science says" will generally be found to settle any argument in a social gathering, or sell any article from toothpaste to a refrigerator.

"The Bible keeps a balance between the power of our own minds... and the need to humbly submit those minds to the truths that God has revealed"

However, today the climate has changed somewhat. In fact, there has been a growing "anti-science" movement over recent years. Many books have been written, particularly by ecologically-minded folk of a New Age bent, blaming science for many of our problems. As it was Christianity that spawned science, it often gets blamed in the process!

Much has been written over recent decades about what science can and cannot do. This has been a healthy corrective to much of the thinking of what is called "The Enlightenment" of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Central to Enlightenment thought was the celebration of the power of reason - the power by which we understand the universe and improve our condition. This brought enormous progress in science, technology and medicine, but inasmuch as it overemphasized the power of reason and ignored divine revelation, it carried the seeds of its own destruction. The Bible keeps a balance between the power of our own minds, and hence the capabilities of science, and the need to humbly submit those minds to truths that God has revealed about himself and our human condition. Firstly, science cannot meet the deepest needs of the human heart. The Chief Rabbi in Britain, Sir Immanuel Jakobovits, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, said:

Human life, generated from test tubes and petri dishes, sustained by artificial foods and drugs and terminated by unplugging some life-support machine, may be reduced to a form of mechanisation in which the incomparable grandeur of the human spirit, the genius of the human mind and the noblest virtues of the human heart are asphyxiated in the exhaust fumes of our technological wonders.

Science cannot speak to our deepest needs as beings created in the image of God.

If you leave God out of the picture, as did Jacques Monod who won the Nobel Prize for his work on genetic mechanisms, then, as he put it, we are left "alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe", however wonderful that universe might be. We live in "an alien world; a world that is deaf to [our] music, and as indifferent to [our] hopes as to [our] crimes."

Gamaliel Bradford, the famous biographer, a brilliant scholar who read staggering amounts daily in seven languages, exclaimed towards the end of his life, "Who will tell me something of God. I know nothing about him whatever. It is a mere name, a mere word to me, and yet it clings. Why?" Why indeed? Science cannot answer that question.

Secondly, science cannot deal with the question of purpose. It cannot answer such questions as: Why is the universe here? Is there any great destiny for human beings? Stephen Hawking, one of today's most brilliant physicists, stated in Black Holes and Baby Universes:

...science may solve the problem of how the universe began, but it cannot answer the question: why does the universe bother to exist?

Albert Einstein, perhaps the most revered scientist of the twentieth century, wrote in Ideas and Opinions:

The scientific method can teach us nothing beyond how facts are related to and conditioned by each other...knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduce from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.

As Dr Bernard Lown in Norman Cousin's The Healing Heart put it:

While science may help explain how a virus multiplies, it leaves unanswered why a tear is shed.

Richard Dawkins, in his popular science book, The Selfish Gene, written from the perspective of scientific materialism, can attempt to come up with a scientific explanation of such things as a mother's love. However, such answers don't satisfy our basic instincts, least of all those of the mother!

As Stephen Toulmin showed clearly in his standard work The Philosophy of Science, the major scientists today do not expect to produce final or invariable knowledge of the world. The physical and chemical properties they develop are simply practical aids to understanding, useful vehicles for getting about in reality. One cannot, by analogy, deduce from them anything about the ultimate nature of the universe, as so many people in the nineteenth century tried to do.

Mary Hesse, in her Criteria of Truth in Science and Theology, and Jurgen Habermas, in his Knowledge and Human Interests, also warn of this. Commenting on the role of science and the restrictions it must observe, Hesse reminds us that knowledge of science

...does not yield truth about the essential nature of things, the significance of its own place in the universe, or how it should conduct its life.

"Science only provides a car and chauffeur for us. It does not tell us where to drive" Dr George Lundberg

Some would say that the views of Hesse are too extreme. Science does tell us things that bear a real relationship to what is really there, even though it may be a varied mixture of fact and opinion. However, these are warnings against too much presumption, particularly in the area of answering all the "whys".

Thirdly, science cannot solve our problems in the moral sphere. Our most pressing problems in the world today are moral problems. Science itself is morally neutral. Dr. George Lundberg, professor of sociology at the University of Washington, in Can Science Save Us? says:

Science only provides a car and chauffeur for us. It does not tell us where to drive. The car and the chauffeur will take us into the highlands or into the ditch with equal efficiency.

It is people who use science and they can use it for good or evil. Charles Lindberg, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, went to Germany after the war to see what allied bombing had done to the Germans, who had been leaders in science. He said:

In Germany, I learnt that if his civilisation is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God.

General Omar Bradley, in a 1948 Armistice Day address, put it bluntly:

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount...Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

We can perform thousands of calculations in one second on a computer, but we have no formula that will increase people's compassion or take away racial prejudice from their hearts.

These are all areas where Christianity and science must work together, as some of today's thinkers are learning to do. We owe a great debt to people of science for much good that has been achieved by their discoveries, but without a Christian base, where it largely began, our problems will be multiplied.

Christianity needs science

Bruce Bradshaw, in his introduction to Bridging the Gap: Evangelism, Development and Shalom, says:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind"

Nothing has hindered the modern mission movement more than modern dualism that separates body from spirit, science from religion, and natural from supernatural.

Einstein observed, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." He also declared that anyone who is not in awe at the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. The discoveries of modern science can greatly enhance our wonder and awe at the amazing complexity and size of the universe and the manner in which it sustains our life on this planet, and hence the amazing greatness of the God behind it all. C. S. Lewis used to say that the Christian does not go to nature to learn theology - the message is too garbled - but rather to fill theological words with meaning.

Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.

Inasmuch as we long for the good and well-being of our fellow humans, science can enable us to multiply that good. Francis Bacon wrote over three hundred years ago in Novum Organum Scientiarum:

Man by the Fall, fell at the same time from his state of Innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can, even in this life, be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.

In this sense science becomes an imperative religious duty, part of our mandate to care intelligently for God's world and for other people in it, for whom we have a collective responsibility. Bacon also declared that natural philosophy (science) is "after the word of God, the surest remedy against superstition, and the most approved support of faith."

Handling conflict

If science and Christianity need each other, then how should we handle conflict? It will obviously help a lot if we recognise the truth of physicist Sir William Bragg's famous saying:

Religion and science are opposed...but only in the same sense as that in which my thumb and forefinger are opposed - and between the two, one can grasp anything.

Both Christianity and science are seeking to understand the truth - what is really there. Truth does not conflict with itself. It is only our perceptions of what is really there that differ - and that is because none of us has the whole truth.

Harvard scientist J. H. Van Vleck, summarising the profound philosophical significance of Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle", stated:

The least arguable conclusion is that man should remain humble in the face of nature, since there are inherent limitations to the precision with which he can observe.

We all need a good dose of humility, not least in our understanding of the Bible in those areas where Biblical scholars disagree. The philosopher Whitehead said, "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster - it is an opportunity." He continued: "A mere logical contradiction cannot in itself point to more than the necessity of some readjustment, possibly of a very minor character on both sides." And we need to respect the right of others to hold their opinions in those areas where we do disagree.

Summary

"When we consider what religion is... and what science is. it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depands upon the relations between them"

I will close this section with three quotes which aptly summarise the need of science and Christianity for each other. The first is by John Polkinghorne in an article in the Daily Telegraph. Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist and a member of the Royal Society. He was a professor of mathematical physics before his ordination to the Anglican ministry in 1983. Today he is president of Queens' College, Cambridge, and has been one of the leaders in what seems to be a growing contingent of British physicists who are engaging in meaningful theological discussion. He says:

Men of religion can learn from science what the physical world is really like in its structure and long-evolving history. This constrains what religion can say where it speaks of that world as God's creation. He is clearly a patient God who works through process and not by magic. Men of science can receive from religion a deeper understanding than could be obtained from science alone. The physical world's deep mathematical intelligibility (signs of the Mind behind it) and finely tuned fruitfulness (expressive of divine purpose) are reflections of the fact that it is a creation.

The second quote is from the eminent philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He observed:

When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.

The third quote, which I like most of all, comes from Gordon Cooper, American Astronaut, who named his spacecraft "Faith 7". He said:

At an altitude of more than 150 miles over the Indian Ocean, I had faith and thanked God for the privilege of being on the space flight. Our launch team had faith in God, in the hardware we had developed and in each other. As we learn more about the universe we gain greater faith in the work of the Supreme Architect. Upon contemplating the complex workings of millions of planetary bodies - and the unknown immensity of the universe - we realise what a fantastic miracle it all is, including our little earth.