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What is religion? What is science?
Both of these seek to answer basic questions of life and existence. How did everything come to be? How did we come to be? Why are things the way they are? What will the future be?
Both religions and science use logic and reason to answer these questions though their starting places tend to be somewhat different.
Religion, of course, is really a set of diverse approaches to life, a variety of ways to approaching life and the questions it poses.
Religion may be a celebration of the material world or a denial of that same world; it may seek to avoid death, to ignore death, or even to celebrate death. Religion may honor human reason, or despise it even while using it. Religion may be acts of quiet meditation in still solitude or in community; or it may be corporate prayer; or it may be clapping, shouting and singing; or it may be thoughtful listening to a sermon. It may be a process of careful study and thinking about a sacred text, or it may be the rejection of books and the lived experience of here and now. All of these and more are encompassed in that one word “religion”.
Science, on the other hand, at least in its modern form, is a particular approach to studying the things around us. It is a means of learning about the material world. Even where it studies something as abstract as “mind” science uses particular approaches and techniques.
Science looks at the available data about something, develops an hypothesis to explain the data, and then tests that hypothesis to see if it can be proven false. If not, then that hypothesis might be further tested to see if it can predict future findings. If so, it can move from being an hypothesis to being a widely accepted theory.
Example: the Big Bang theory of the universe predicted that there would be leftover background radiation. When such radiation was discovered, that gave strength to the Big Bang theory.
Science being what it is, there can be competing hypotheses and theories in existence at the same time.
Now, here is an important point about science: scientific theory is falsifiable, but not verifiable. That sounds odd, but the point is that any theory can be proven to be wrong, but can never be proven to be absolutely right; there is always the possibility that further information might prove the theory to be incorrect. So, if asked whether the Big Bang actually happened, a cosmologist might respond to that personally by saying “absolutely”; but if responding as a cosmologist, the best that individual can say is something like, “The Big Bang theory is the best explanation of the data that we have at this moment”. For those who wish to live in a world of certainty, that is a very unsatisfactory response.
And yet, science, for all of its uncertainty, has gained us immense knowledge.
Once upon a time, thunder was believed to be the rage of a God or was Thor smashing his hammer on an anvil. Then, some brave and curious soul decided to investigate a bit more. Today our understanding of thunder is that it is the air rushing back in to fill the vacuum left by lightning, that discharge of electrons between cloud and earth or cloud and cloud. When questioning such things, and coming up with new answers to how they happen, people will accuse the investigator of denying God; but that is not the case.
As long as people attribute natural events to God or the Gods or supernatural forces, our understanding of nature is at a standstill.
That is, one can say that science begins when God is not the immediate answer. Science begins when God is not the immediate answer. Might God or the Gods or the Goddess be the ultimate cause of all that is? Certainly. Science does not speak to that.
I stated that science begins when God is not the immediate answer. I do not mean by my statements that science rejects the concept of God. Science makes no comment on the existence of God, though individual scientists may speak their individual minds on the subject—and those minds are quite varied. I don’t need to say this, of course, but I will anyone lest I be accused of thinking anything else: Some scientists are atheists and many are believers in one religion or another. Some see science as proving that God does not exist, and some see just the opposite.
Today there is some political and educational debate being raised about the issue of Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is an approach that states that life and the world and the universe are too complex for there not to have been an intelligent design—and therefore, presumably, an intelligent designer—behind them.
This is a modern, updated version of the watch and the watchmaker idea, which was propounded by William Paley in 1802. It states that if you found a watch lying on the ground, you would infer from that fact that a watchmaker had produced it; it would not have assembled itself through natural, random means. And so, goes on the argument, when we look at the earth, at the trees and plants, we can know that some intelligence designed and created these. Intelligent Design makes precisely that the same argument. But this approach fails as an argument if one does not accept the premise of a creator god. As others have pointed out, if you were the first human explorer on another earth-like planet, you would admire the plant life and the animal life, probably being quite struck by the similarities and differences with earth life. If you believed in God, you would see all of these things as God’s handiwork; if you did not, you would praise the great power of evolution for its ongoing fascination. However, and here is the point, regardless of whether you believed in God or not, if you then found a watch lying on the ground of this alien planet, you would know that this was different than the flora and fauna. Now you would know that some other natural form of intelligent life had been here before you.
Here are the problems with calling Intelligent Design “science”: First, it is not falsifiable; you can never prove that some intelligent did not create the universe. Second, it is not testable. It is a matter of faith, not of science.
I personally believe that every person is inherently good, that any bad that we do is the result of something causing us to stray from the path of goodness—illness, misunderstanding, pain, anger—something. I believe we are all redeemable in the sense that we can all return to the right path, to goodness and doing good.
And I believe that despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.
And that is part of the point. My faith in human goodness will find a way to fit all evidence into my belief. Logic has little to do with it. My belief is a faith belief, not a scientific belief. I will argue for it vociferously nonetheless; but I recognize that in my case it is a matter of faith, not a matter of science.
The point is that science as a discipline does not accept either the supernatural or faith statements as the answer to how something works; if it did, that would be the end of science.
And that is the ultimate point: Intelligent Design is a theological belief, not a scientific belief. It is religion, not science. Individual scientists are welcome to their personal religious beliefs. But religion—or religion masquerading as science—should not be taught in the science classrooms of the public schools of our nation.
In fact, Intelligent Design is merely the latest incarnation in the evolving attempt to have religion taught in the public schools. When Creationism failed it was repackaged as Creation Science; when that failed, it was repackaged as Intelligent Design; when Intelligent Design fails, it will be repackaged as something else. These have all been attempts to reimpose religion in violation of the separation of religion and state that in embodied in the second amendment to the constitution of the United States. I believe (as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did) that separation of religion and state is part of our defense against the loss of our civil and human rights.
Finally, I want to speak to the issue behind Intelligent Design, the issue of God.
Science does not deny God. Science does not challenge religion. It complements whatever our faith may be.
Science has taught us that the universe is much vaster than we knew. From our vision of the universe as a flat earth with the sun and moon in orbit around it, to the vision of the sun as the center of the universe, to our understanding that universe is the Milky Way with the sun as a minor planet, to our realization just eighty years ago that the Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies that stretch for unimaginable distances across the emptiness of space, science has expanded our knowledge of what is. For those who believe in a creator God, each of these steps ought to have increased the awe and wonder due to that Divine being. This is not a small God. Those who feel that science destroys their God or their vision of God have a vision of Divinity that is much too proscribed. The God who creates this universe is so much more than the one that created the universe of our forebears. Those who believe in God should not feel threatened by science; they should feel the greatness and majesty which science reveals.
So may it be.
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