By Marv Knox
Talk about a pointless war. The battle between faith and science just doesn’t make sense.
The whole world seems to be thinking about the relationship of science and religious faith this week, as we mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin‘s birth. (In fact, the Baptist Standard and our New Voice Media partners recently prepared an entire package of articles on Darwin, evolution and the varieties of creationism, which you can read on this website.) Nothing this side of Galileo has inflamed so many Christians as Darwin’s evolutionary tome, On the Origin of Species.
Still, I must confess: I just don’t “get” the fight between religion and science or faith and reason.
Missing the point
Oh, I understand the arguments. Some Christians feel threatened by the scientific assertion that the world came to be as it is through natural selection and an infinite number of mutations. On the other side, some scientists feel Christians who disagree with them willfully ignore plain evidence of observation. (I know those are gross oversimplifications, but I’m just pointing to the parameters. This is a column, not a book.)
It’s just that the folks who argue most stridently miss the point — not only of their adversaries’ purpose, but of their own.
The faith/reason or religion/science debate would go away if people simply acknowledged the role of each.
God & science in creation
Take creation — please.
The Bible’s account in the Book of Genesis seeks to explain the “Who?” and “why?” of creation. In the beginning, God launched the process that resulted in humanity because God desired a loving, reciprocal relationship with other sentient beings. Genesis offers two accounts of creation (in the first two chapters) that do not specifically harmonize with each other, much less current approaches to science and history. But they reinforce the Who and why of creation.
Science, on the other hand, seeks to explain the “what?” and the “how?” Darwin proposed a model for explaining how the species as we currently find them came to be. Both before and certainly ever since, scientists have been proposing and testing hypotheses to demonstrate the chemical and biological processes that bring them along.
Two purposes
So, religion and science have two different purposes. No amount of logic must deduce they oppose each other. They’re asking different questions, which lead to different answers, but not necessarily contradictory answers.
Religion errs when it seeks to dictate the range of answers science can discover. Science errs when it claims all its answers are final, and nothing — or, more specifically, no One — lies behind them.
I’ve been listening to this debate my whole life, and I’ve decided I’m a Christian who’s comfortable with theistic evolution. The Bible — my authoritative guide for faith and practice — tells me God is the Who behind creation and God’s love is the why. Science seeks to explain how life developed on Earth through the millennia.
Annoyed and/or embarrassed
Sometimes, atheistic evolutionists annoy me. They overstep their bounds, confident that because they feel they have good answers for the what and how of creation, they do not need a Who or why. But more than annoy me, they make me sad. For when they close their minds to the possibilities outside their sphere, they also close their hearts to a relationship with the God of love, Who has transformed my life and filled it with meaning and purpose. I feel sorry for them.
Almost always, however, hard-line creationists embarrass me. I guess it’s because we’re fellow believers, part of the same family. Your kinfolk can humiliate you far more intently than neighbors and people you don’t even know. Their arrogance is bad enough, but their lack of faith is worse. They think they’ve figured out how God did creation, and they deny the possibility of any other process. Don’t you see the irony? They become the ones who would limit God.
And worse still, their stridency, anger and mean-spiritedness gives God a bad name and drives unbelievers away. That never was God’s divine plan for creation.