| Feature Article – January 2006 |
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Unbelief may seem a big hurdle to overcome when spreading the gospel, but to many Christians the real enemy is science.
Science and religion have been well compared to a shark and a tiger. Each in its own domain is supreme, but when either strays into the other’s territory, it’s toast. One can extend that analogy, albeit clumsily: 2,000 years ago, when the sharks were only tiddlers, the tigers took it upon themselves to do a bit of paddling. They declared they knew not only why we are here on earth, but how the earth came to be the way it is. Now that the sharks have matured, they are saying “gerroff, that’s our territory,” and though there is a small area of sea artificially roped off, where literalists still maintain that Adam & Eve were the first human beings and the world was made just as it says in Genesis (I told you this was a clumsy analogy), by and large the sharks have won and their victory has cast doubt about whether the tigers now have any relevance at all.
Being somewhat of an amphibian in all this (having got “a modest 2nd”, first in Natural Sciences and then in Theology) I would like to sit at the water’s edge for a month or two and chew this over. What I most want to do is to lift the debate above the saloon bar level of either “the world was made in a week, for the Bible tells me so,” or, on the other hand, “Darwin has disproved Genesis and science has made God irrelevant.” There are no knock-down arguments on the science side, and no simplistic proof texts on the religious side. It’s a complex subject, for which we need a cool head, cleared of bigotry and prejudice.
The first thing that has to go, I’m afraid, is Creationism, or its more recent manifestation: Intelligent Design. If you have followed anything of the recent debate on the teaching of ‘ID’ alongside evolution in Texas classrooms, you will have seen mainstream Christianity and the scientific world unite in saying most vehemently that ID is bad theology and it most certainly ain’t science.
But I will stand up for them to this extent: without knowing why they hold these beliefs, theirs seems to be a sincere attempt to do something to stop the apparently invincible juggernaut of science, with its no-nonsense logic and irrefutable ‘proofs’. That would account for the veritable torrent of words that characterises Creationist and ID writings (theology by the kilo). When examined carefully, their logic is thin in the extreme, and their assumptions huge, but it’s probably an attempt to dazzle their more susceptible followers with an equally impressive ‘system’. In that, they misunderstand their enemy, for science is a far more tentative process than they imagine. Some will always cling to Creationism and ID, but that battle is lost; the real battlefield is elsewhere, where we need all Christians to be in the front line.
Fundamentalism is somewhat different. Odd though it may seem, belief that the Bible is without error has little to do with the Bible. Challenge a fundamentalist about any of the more glaring inconsistencies in the Bible and he will say “if that’s so, what can you trust?” In other words, biblical fundamentalism is all about a neurotic longing for certainty, which they think they find in the Bible, but which is not ours to have this side of the grave. It is also incapable of distinguishing between a truth and its formulation. If something is true, it has to be expressed in only one way. It is incapable of seeing, for instance. that West Side Story is essentially the same as Romeo & Juliet. There are fundamentalist Anglicans, but their views have never been a requirement in Anglicanism, much less its purest form, as they would have us believe. It’s a heresy and – because it only gets the “answers” it wants – profoundly unscientific.
The chief misunderstanding about science is that it, too, rests on certainties and proofs. Again, odd though it may sound, no reputable scientist ever talks about proofs for, amazingly, science advances by disproofs. The so-called ‘laws of gravity’ only hold true because they have not yet been disproved. If you were able to show, under laboratory conditions, that a pebble dropped on a seashore on Wednesday afternoons descends to earth with an acceleration of 31.9ft/sec2, rather than the usual 32, all the textbooks the world over would immediately be rewritten and the cause diligently sought.
This is in direct contrast to the world of religion, where long since discredited views are still clung to, usually because people believe what they want to believe, not what the evidence says.
It also shows up the absurdity of the Creationists’ argument against evolution – that it’s “only a theory.” All scientific propositions are “only theories.” Gravity is “only a theory.” It just happens to be a theory that has not yet been disproved. Some phenomena, like the origins of the universe, can’t be wheeled into a lab and tested, but there is still a rigorous honesty over how theories about it are formed. During my time at Cambridge, Fred Hoyle was developing the alternative theory to the Big Bang – the ‘Steady State’ theory – which held that there was no beginning to time and the universe has come about by one molecule of hydrogen per year being produced out of nothingness in one cubic light year. The theory was abandoned by Hoyle himself, when he discovered a flaw in his own reasoning. There’s integrity for you.
Are scientists modern-day saints, then? No way! They just want to get their stuff published before the other guy does! If it’s flawed, though, their career is over. And the chief crime in science is not so much faulty reasoning as trying to bend the facts to fit a pet theory. As CSI-watchers will know, the name of the game is “let the evidence do the talking.” Another way of saying that is that those who think “how can I present this passage of scripture in a conservative (or liberal) way?” may well impress their congregation, but they’d make rotten scientists.
In spite of that humble talk about “only theories”, though, there are some branches of science that are so deeply entrenched in the scientific way of thinking that in spite of their flaws, to abandon them is not seriously contemplated. One of those is evolution, about which more next month, including its own inconsistencies.