"Is
there a conflict between science and religion?"
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Historically, the reason that science advanced and had such an impact in the West was the Christian belief that the world was created and sustained by a perfect, orderly and unchanging God. This meant that we could expect to find orderly and unchanging rules to describe the mechanics of how things happen.
Hence, the earliest scientists were all Christians - Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday - they wanted to find out how God's universe worked.
In the history of the relationship between science and religion, two controversies stand out: the condemnation of Galileo's heliocentric theory of the universe in the seventeenth century and the condemnation of Darwin's theory of evolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
In 1979, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Einstein, Pope John Paul II acknowledged the wrong done to Galileo, and in the course of his discourse quoted approvingly the following statement from him, "the bible teaches us how to go to Heaven, and not how the heavens move". The controversies between religion and science over the past four centuries are a painful lesson in the need to be reminded of this truth.
At the root of a very large fraction of the arguments concerning science and religion is the persistent belief in the "God of the gaps". This is the belief that the working of God can be seen in those things which science cannot explain.
Belief in a God of the gaps comes from a literal interpretation of poetic expressions in the bible which talk about God controlling the world. However, when the bible says that God sends the rains, it doesn't mean that His hand carries the cloud along, it doesn't mean He blows the cloud along, it doesn't mean that we can't explain the mechanics of the weather systems - it simply means that God is the one who ultimately causes the rain.
The problem is that, as science explains more and more, the "God of the gaps" is squeezed out of existence.
As tempting as it may often be, it is a mistake to consider the failure of science to explain something as a proof of God's work. Such failures are nothing more or less than a demonstration of how far science has progressed, and a pointer to where some progress still needs to be made. Believing in a great creator means not doubting the quality of His creation. It is ironic that we often try to prove the existence of God by claims that essentially say He isn't such a great creator.
God is able to run the universe to accomplish His purposes without having to violate the rules of the universe, without having to show humans everything He is doing.
Evolution has, perhaps, been the thorniest issue in the history of the conflict between science and religion. Ever since Charles Darwin first used that phrase "the survival of the fittest", hackles have been raised.
The theory of evolution normally describes the gradual change in species of plants and animals, starting with a very primitive single-celled life form, and ending - at least currently - with human beings. Humans and higher apes are believed to have had a common ancestor. Supporters of creation science have often accused promoters of evolution as believing that humans are descended from apes; however this is not valid.
In those verses where Genesis conflicts with the theory of evolution, religious conservatives assume that the scientists must be wrong. Given sufficient time, they expect the scientists to see the light and discover the truth.
Perhaps in response to their failure to have "creation science" taught in the public schools, creation scientists adopted a new strategy in the mid-1990's. They attempted to persuade school boards to give equal time to "scientific evidence against evolution".
More recently, creation scientists have tried a new technique: to have schools describe what they see as inadequacies in the theory of evolution:
It is interesting that mass extinctions throughout the Earth's history have enabled creatures, who were formerly struggling to eke out an existence, to flourish, while their predators and/or larger competitors perished. These creatures included mankind's ancestors, so if the extinctions had not happened when they did, or had not happened at all, then the Earth would still be dominated by dinosaurs or by even simpler life-forms, and intelligent life would not have developed.
It is also interesting to note that evolution is, in itself, not anti-scriptural. Gen. ch. 1 itself shows that God takes what He has already created and "evolves" it from something that is "formless and void" (v.2) into something better ("God saw that it was good", v.10).
It is also very obvious, through comparing different parts of the bible, that the thought-forms, cultures and attitudes of those people mentioned in scripture, and even their ideas about God, "evolved" over the thousands of years covered by biblical history. For example:
So it is entirely possible that, if God's plan has been for man's thoughts to evolve over time, and has indeed used this evolution to bring those of us who know Him closer to Him, that He has also used biological evolution, over a much longer time period, to bring us to what we are today - "made in the image of God" (Gen. 1:26), but "being transformed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3:18).
Next page: Creationism >>
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"Is
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