The Leek and Meerbrook Team Ministry

Reflections

If you look at history you might well give an account of the relationship that shows religion and science in conflict with one another. We think of the Church’s initial response to Galileo’s discovery that the earth travels around the sun and not vice versa and Charles Darwin’s development of a theory of evolution. But even those two defining chapters in the relationship between science and religion can be read in other ways and we may have time to look at that later. But before we concentrate on particular episodes from history it might help to stand back and ask a deeper question: What kind of view of the world do you need to even begin to do scientific enquiry? To do science you need to believe that the world is an ordered place. You need to believe that when something happens in the world - an apple falls from a tree to the ground, for example – that were such an event to repeat itself it would do so in the same way and according to the same rules. I think actually the religion gives you a view of the world that makes science possible in the first place. The religious view suggests that world is in some way the product of the mind of a wise God and therefore we can expect it to behave in a rational way. Because the world is sustained by the mind of God things are not random and completely unpredictable. The religious world view expects the world to be reasonable and orderly because behind it lies purpose and meaning because it is made by God.

This is all by way of claiming that far from inhibiting scientific research, religion actually created the framework in which such enquiry was possible. Because there was a rational mind behind the universe, human beings could investigate it rationally. Isaac Newton always claimed that he was "thinking God’s thoughts after him."

Now I don’t have the time or the skill to take head on all the arguments in the science versus religion debate and I must declare myself as ignorant of science as Richard Dawkins is of theology so I want to look at what seems to me an issue that takes us to the heart of how we humans beings see and understand the world. How do we know when something is true?

And I think we need to be careful when talk about what is rational and reasonable. If by rational we mean only something that can be proved by the methods of scientific enquiry – experimentation, clearly repeatable results, control samples and so on – then religious faith will not be rational but then neither will be a lot of other things we hold dear – history, poetry, philosophy, the law, not to say the whole gamut of feelings and emotions that make us human. If for something to be reasonable (and therefore true) it must be provable by scientific method we will exclude a vast range of human experiences and knowledge which we all generally accept to belong to the realm of that which is real and true but which are not the kind of thing you can prove scientifically. Does this mean they are therefore not true at all? We need to be wary of privileging one way of understanding the world (scientific) over all others.

Let’s take an obvious example. It is a reasonable assumption to make that my wife loves me. However if I demanded that she prove this fact to me by allowing me to conduct a series of experiments possibly involving another woman who was not my wife as a control sample, I would receive the dustiest of answers. Now in this case there will be some evidence that my wife loves me that I can take into account – without getting too nauseatingly intimate – her behaviour towards me, the things she might tell me, the time she spends with me. These are all good indicators of the reality that is love and whilst they cannot be subjected to the rigours of the laboratory I hold them to be true! Am I deluded in this? We apprehend the truth "I am loved by this person" not as a provable scientific fact but as an insight and conviction born of experience and feeling. This is a kind of knowledge and truthfulness that we arrive at by another but equally valid route than that of scientific method.

It can therefore be reasonable to believe that there is a God even though it is not something that in the strictest sense we can "prove". Like love, God cannot be brought into the lab to be tested. But this does not mean that belief in God is unreasonable. I think there are things in the world that point to the existence of a creator, just as there are clear indicators that my wife loves me, none of them prove definitively that God exists in the sense that we can prove that gravity exists but they suggest that it is not unreasonable to believe in God. If we accept there are other ways of knowing the truth, experience and evidence and faith can all be taken into account when religious people claim they believe in God.

We all celebrate the ways in which science has opened up for us the wonder and complexity of the world. We are grateful for the ways in which science has informed the technology that has made our lives so much more comfortable and rich. But to claim that science is the only way we can understand the truth of the world or that things (like love, faith, poetry) are somehow second order truth because they can’t be proved scientifically is deeply impoverishing for the human spirit.

It does neither science nor religion any favours to set one against the other. Each can be shown to be a reasonable and rational response to the world as it is and each has its own distinctive way of regarding the world and, most importantly, seeking the truth. To claim there is some irreconcilable conflict serves only the purpose of those who wish both science and religion ill. Better by far to rejoice in the richness and multitude of ways, including both scientific method and religious faith, by which we understand the world and our place in it.

Matthew Parker