In the interest of reconciling science and faith, a helpful distinction would be to say that science deals with things and religion deals with words. When scientists perform their experiments, they are making measurements of the physical properties of things, and no words are allowed to change the results of their research. When religious people use words, on the other hand, they are attempting to create new realities by expressing their understandings, experiences and deepest convictions. There is nothing empty or cheap about religious words used well. In fact, they can influence numerous lives and change the course of history.
And the two men born on Feb. 12, 1809? Darwin looked at the things of this world and came up with the theory of evolution, which has helped countless scientists to understand the mechanics of how various species have come to exist. Abraham Lincoln drew on his deepest convictions to write the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, expressing his belief that our nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” These words had real power ”” first to free the slaves, and then to start us on a path to equality that has resulted in the presidency of Obama.
There can be peace between science and faith if their distinctive contributions are respected. Scientists will continue to study how things work, while religious leaders will speak of the meaning of life and use their words to create new understandings. This distinction might even be helpful to our new president, as he uses his considerable rhetorical skills to advance one of the goals of his inaugural speech: “to restore science to its rightful place.” It’s a worthy goal, one that can be embraced by both the scientific and religious communities.
One thing is consistent about the religion columns in USA Today, which is that they don’t understand religion and this column in particular neither understands religion nor science. First, science is not only about “how things work”. Good science tells us about the nature of things that are subject to change. Second, theology is not just about ethics or morality. Good theology tells us about the nature of the source of things. Both good science and good theology deal with whatness.
I would have been so much more hopeful if Obama has said “restore morality to its rightful place”.
Mr. Brinton makes the naive assumption that the left is more likely to allow science to seek and report the truth than is the right.
to create new realities by expressing their understandings, experiences and deepest convictions.
There being no objective realities to which we might be striving for more perfect understandings. No! Humanity – our understandings, experiences, and deepest convictions – create reality. There is nothing beyond Man, the True God.
I agree with Mr. Swain in #1 that USA Today is pretty insipid. I hate to pile on to the poor woman, but one mark of the shallowness of the author is his quoting of Mrs. Schori, who bears no particular resemblence to a theologian. The problem continues to be modernism’s denial both of metaphysics, which reduces philosophy to word games, and revelation, without which theology comes to look like, well, Mrs. Schori’s vague effusions. Why science should bother with either discipline in such denuded state is beyond me. However, properly restored, theology provides a place for philosophy’s examinations of both the physical (via its sub-discipline of science) and the metaphysical in aiding the understanding of both creation and Creator. Science is not properly an equal partner with theology since it has no access to revelation or ontology – it can describe the body and the workings of its appetites, but not come anywhere close to understanding persons. It knows that human bodies are alive, for instance, from the moment of conception, but has no way of assigning transcendent value to those bodies and so is as much help to the abortionist as to the defender of human dignity. While all of us live in the narrow little universe of science, we also transcend that little world. Philosophy has some inkling of how, but it is ultimately theology, based as it is on divine revelation that alone can understand this obvious transcendence as it alone knows that we are in the image of God and what to make of that fact.
Science and religion answer different questions. Science deals with “facts” and religion deals with “truth.” Science answers “what” and “how” fairly well because these are subject science’s epistomoligical tools (observation, inference, hypothesis, observation, repetion). Religion answers “who” and “why because these are subject to revelation and reason, not experimentation and repetition.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Mr. Snyder #5 – I don’t think I disagree. However, it seems to me that facts are a subset of truth, hence scientists ask a subset of the questions that theologians ask. Also, I’m not sure there really is such a distinguishable thing as “religion”. I have assumed that the author was referring to Christian theology and that, being intimately tied with creation and incarnation, cannot be neatly separated from scientific investigation. It may well be that, say, my little part of the scientific/technological world that involves turning big atoms into little atoms in a nuclear reactor, does not much impinge on any larger theological question. Then again, half-lives, temperature coefficients, buckling factors, fast fissions and the like are part of the created order into which God Himself entered in the incarnation. It might be better to say that science and Christian theology are like mathematics and arithmetic, distinguishable one from another, but not fully separable as the latter is a subset of the former.
I suspect that the supposed fight that the author sees himself as seeking an answer for is between a science that betrays itself by repeatedly trying to fill the void left by the denuding of theology by modernism’s rejection of divine revelation and a “religion” that nobody actually believes. The answer will begin, so it seems to me, with the restoration of theology to her rightful place as the “queen of sciences” with philosophy and modern science as footmen.