Science and Religion: Conflicting or Complimentary

As a philosophy student way back in the early 1990's, I wrote a paper regarding science and religion, precisely the title of this article. It was my first foray into the perpetual tangle between science and religion. This question has been asked for centuries now, and has always aroused emotions between the defenders of science and the apologists of religion.

The perpetual question that have always bedeviled me is whether science and religion can really be complimentary, or that they will always be conflicting. I will herein present the two sides of the spectrum - the cold facts of science and the revelation of religion.

The question that has always ignited the oftentimes cantankerous relationship between science and religion is the nature of the interpretation of religious texts. In this case, I will focus on the Christian Bible. The tussle between science and religion rests essentially on the insistence on the part of Christian fundamentalists that the Bible is the word of God and should be interpreted in its literal sense. They insist on its literal and unambiguous truth.

Philo of Alexandria once said that the Bible cannot be interpreted literally. It reveals a far deeper truth than the words it signifies. This video shows the historical basis of the conflict between science and religion from the perspective a Christian believer who also believes in science, particularly evolution. The video shows that historically, Christianity was always open to religion but was only hijacked by the extremist views of 19th Century Christian fundamentalists. According to Fr. Gregory Tatum of the Ecole Biblique, the church fathers did not ask if the Bible is literally true but rather what are the truths that the Bible reveals. St. Augustine even wrote an article titled "The Literal interpretation of Genesis" and warned Christians not to interpret the Bible literally as it would deprive the Christian of theological reflection.

The original poster boy for the scientific side has always been Charles Darwin, although he would never have been comfortable with such designation. Indeed, Darwin waited for at least 8 years before he published his his ideas in the new famous "The Origin of the Species." The Darwinian assertion that life evolved and developed over time and that life is a product of its adapting to the changes in the environment was anathema to Christian fundamentalists. The reformation led by Martin Luther opened the Bible to interpretation from various quarters of the Christian world. And this is what practically happened in 1650 in Ireland when Bishop James Usher computed, based on the Bible, astronomy, languages, ancient calendars and chronology that the world began on the night of 22 October 4004 B.C. This sealed the rift between Science and Religion, for now, Christian fundamentalists have a "proof" as to when the world actually began. This idea has been carried on until today, fed by Christian Evangelicals in the U.S., who vociferously assert that from Usher's computations, the world is only 6,000 years old. Such unfortunate event is what St. Augustine warned against, the literal interpretation of the Bible.

In 1859, England was at the height of the Victorian Age, when Darwin released his now famous book. This  created a firestorm. The arrival of the Industrial Revolution saw the proliferation of machines and in this zeitgeist, William Paley formulated his "Watch Theory" which asserts that since life is a complicated system, much like the machines that powered England in the Industrial Revolution, then life must have been designed by an Intelligent Creator. In the same way that a watch, with its complexity and working mechanisms cannot appear without a designer, so much so life, with its symmetry and equally complex systems.

It is interesting to note that when Darwin's book "The Origin of the Species" was released, English society was actually accepting of it. The problem rose really in the 1920's in America. In the 1920's, the Dayton, Tennessee trials of John Scopes essentially cemented the animosity between Christian fundamentalists and science which has prevailed up to now. In the end, Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in violation the Butler Act, a Tennessee law which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee.

The rise of commercialism in America in the 1960's scandalized conservative Christians, the proliferation of premarital sex, divorce, abortion among others galvanized the Christian right to move ever more deeper into conservatism, insisting that societal ills can only be cured by going back to the Bible and interpreting it in no other way but the literal one.

On the other side, science promoters like Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion" propounds on the uselessness of God in modern society. Dawkin has been at times labeled as the other extreme of the scientific side known as "ultra-Darwinism" which teaches that all life is governed by biological factors and rejects the intervention of any god in the development of life. Paley's "Watch Analogy" however was reincarnated as "Intelligent Design" by contemporary evangelical Christians. Intelligent Design is even promoted as a science. However, it is peculiar in that it defines God as an active participant in the progress of creation and life. Such insistence has however brought the idea into much trouble, for it would imply that the Christian God, if he intervenes actively in the natural order, could have prevented the evils in society such as, among others, the murder of 6 million Jews in World War II. Such failure to prevent a monstrosity has led many Christians to abandon Christianity and has been a steady ammunition for atheists that the question of god is a meaningless and utterly baseless endeavor.

Is Science and Religion therefore mutually exclusive? Does belief in evolution lead to atheism?

Science is based on the scientific method which involves the formulation of hypothesis, the conduct of experimentation, analysis of data taken and the arrival of a conclusion. It is based on experimentation and is essentially a cumulative endeavor, involving the work of scientists over time. It does not claim a permanent truth but relies on new ideas, new techniques, new processes. Science is open to any possibility, it does not judge with finality but is receptive to new knowledge.

On the other hand, religion is essentially static and revealed. It's truth is based on the assumptions of its 'sacred literature' and is not open for individual verification. In fact, most religions rely on a body of clergy that is responsible for interpreting its core beliefs and values. In essence, religion is closed to creativity and rigid with regards to its fundamental assertions.

Some would like to insist that religion and science can co-exist and that it is possible to believe in science and evolution and be a Christian. While it is tempting to say that indeed it is, at its core, belief in evolution in particular and science in general implies the acceptance of the scientific method as the basis for ascertaining truths of the world and the rejection of unverified beliefs which is essentially the nature of religion. It is no accident that we call the belief in the unverifiable as faith, for faith requires no proof.

In the same way, a true believer in religion, with its closed and rigid structure of beliefs, can never really accept science because science is based on testable, repeatable, mostly verifiable beliefs, and those that cannot be verified experimentally, are theoretically discovered through the language of mathematics and physics. Religious beliefs are mostly based on religious literature, traditions and the cultural experiences of its original adherents suffused with the cultural experiences of its various believers across the world.

In the end, one has to choose which will govern his perception of reality - the hard, cold facts of science or the mystical truths of religious experience. Science and religion therefore are like water and oil, they will never mix.