Are Christianity and Science at War?
Photo by Martin Sattler on Unsplash
No, they are not. That’s the short answer. Hopefully most people realize that Christianity and science are not opposing forces or belief systems. I want to provide a general outline of why that’s so. When you read other writings about these topics, perhaps you’ll see these themes again.
Why do people think there’s a battle?
There are a couple reasons some people think there is a battle between Christianity and science. It’s partly the fault of the Church, for not always teaching what the Bible says about the goodness of creation. And it is partly the fault of people who dislike Christianity, who have sometimes spoken without being well informed, and sometimes just made things up out of hatred for Christianity. And it is partly no one’s fault, except that there are some big, messy issues in the intersection of faith and science that are difficult to resolve in a nice simple way.
People tend to remember stories, and the first story about Christianity and science that usually pops into people’s minds is the tale of Galileo, who said that the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice-versa. (It turns out he was right.). Many people think that he was persecuted by the Catholic Church and put into prison for daring to challenge the Church’s belief that the Earth is the center of the universe.
The real story is much more complicated. Galileo mostly got in trouble for insulting the Pope (who had been a friend of his), and breaking a promise not to publish his research until it had been confirmed. After his trial, he lived in the comfortable house of a church official for a while, then was placed under house arrest, where he was allowed to visit with family and friends and continue to study. He died of natural causes, cared for by his daughter, a nun. He never renounced his Catholic faith.
Or take Giordano Bruno, who, in the 2014 version of the Cosmos series (hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson), is presented as a science martyr – a man who died for the idea that the stars are other suns with other planets that might host other creatures. Mr. Bruno was burned at the stake as part of the Inquisition, which is tragic. But most of the charges against him were for heresy, because he violated his religious vows and directly contradicted Church teaching about who God is. He had a lot of nutty ideas, and no evidence whatsoever for his belief in other planets around other stars; it was just a lucky guess. So, while his story is sad and unjust, he isn’t a great example of a scientist or a martyr for the cause of rigorous investigation.
The Start of the Debate
Historically, theology and science have been seen as two different and compatible ways of knowing kinds of truth. The natural sciences were categorized as a kind of philosophy, and science was understood as a tool for understanding the ways of the universe.
According to Robert C. Fay, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Cornell University, the idea that science and faith are in a permanent state of conflict was first advanced by two books: History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, published by John William Draper in 1875, and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, written by Andrew Dickson White (the first president of Cornell University) in 1896.
These two men and others like them promoted a hysterical and confused understanding of history. They gave a skewed take on simple misunderstandings, came up with historical “facts” that happened not to be factual, and added a few real conflicts and misunderstandings between Christians and scientists. They changed the way people in the Western world thought of faith and science. These men's work, long ago discredited, still forms the backbone of the "faith vs. science" story today.
Evolution and Creation
"Although Atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Atheist."
Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker, 1986)
Christians believe God created the universe and everything in it. We have to; it’s right there in the Bible and the creeds and everything. But there has been a long debate about how to read the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which were revealed to Moses by God Himself. Was the world created in six twenty-four-hour days? Did a snake literally talk to Adam and Eve? Did the flood in Noah’s time really cover every inch of the globe?
These questions have been debated since at least the third century (Saint Augustine), but they became a cultural flashpoint when Charles Darwin went public with the Theory of Evolution in the 1850s. Darwin’s theory proposed an alternative story for the origin of humanity: through the processes of random mutation and genetic selection, living things have changed over millions of years to become what they are today, and we are presumably changing still. You and I are descendants of slugs, and monkeys are our cousins. For the first time, anyone who doubted the creation story in the Bible (Christian or Atheist) had a viable alternative.
Atheists and Agnostics jumped on the Evolution story like white on rice. This made Christians react by forcefully rejecting it. Sometimes they had carefully considered scientific or theological arguments. Sometimes they simply figured that what is good for Atheism is bad for Christianity. The argument over what to make of evolution is still raging in our culture. We have observed evolution taking place on a small scale, so most scientists also believe it happens on a large scale, and that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
In the Christian camp, there are several schools of thought when it comes to evolution. Some Christians are fine with it and see evolution as a way that God works; they believe the first chapters of Genesis don’t describe literal twenty-four-hour days of creation. Others believe that the scientists are wrong and that the Earth is only thousands of years old, based on Genesis and its genealogies - they’re commonly referred to as Young-Earth Creationists. And still others believe that however old the Earth is, God is constantly doing acts of creation, and we can see the evidence of His activity in the physical universe. This school of thought is called Intelligent Design.
I don’t have time to go into the specifics of each here, but suffice to say that the debate about what to do with Genesis 1-11 is ongoing, and it gives some the impression the Christians don’t take science seriously. But Christians in each camp dive deeply into science to justify their positions. Just check out the websites of Answers in Genesis, Reasons to Believe, and BioLogos.
Environmentalism
Michael Crichton, the brilliant writer famous for great novels like Jurassic Park, said that Environmentalism is a modern-day religion; there was an initial paradise (pre-human Earth), a fall from grace (environmental sins), and now a chance at redemption (a green lifestyle), with sacraments (organic, non-genetically modified food). Crichton made a good point; people can make an idol out of pretty much anything. If people can worship a golden cow, why not Mother Earth?
On the other side, Christians have (sometimes rightly) been accused of poor stewardship of creation. We’ve made two mistakes: the first is that we spend so much time putting our hope in eternal life that we forget that God has given us plenty of work to do here in the meantime. He created the world and said that it is good, but some Christians think that when Jesus comes back He’s going to fix everything anyway, so it’s not a big deal if we cause some damage.
The other mistake we make is that we American Christians bow too often to the promises of capitalism, that big companies can make our lives so much better, it’s worth great costs in environmental damage. Christians believe that people are more important than wildlife and nature (and that’s true). But we often get things out of balance and take a poor accounting of costs and benefits when it comes to things that harm the Earth.
Christians have sometimes forgotten that environmental issues are a matter of justice. If you’ve read the Bible, you may have noticed that God cares an awful lot about justice. Justice requires that we consider the needs of the generations that come after us and the kind of world that they will inherit from us. We are promised that Jesus will return, but we are not told when. It might be tomorrow, or it might be another thousand years. We have an obligation for justice’s sake to plan like it will be another millennium. It’s also a matter of justice because many of the environmental costs caused by big, rich countries (such as the United States) are borne by small, poor countries. That’s not fair, and Christians should care about that.
And we Christians must also consider our call to stewardship. The word stewardship means taking care of something that isn’tyours. God made the whole universe and put us in a place of privilege and responsibility, so we’d better take good care of His stuff, or we will have to answer for it.
Christians are right that we shouldn’t make a religion out of Environmentalism or put the creation above the creator. But that doesn’t excuse us from thinking about the bigger picture and making plans for the future. Christians have great reasons to care about nature without worshipping her. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, Nature is not our mother, but our sister, created like us by the God we love.
Bioethics
Another reason Christians are accused of being anti-science is because we take stands on ethical issues that can appear at odds with progress. Many of us believers are wary of some kinds of stem-cell research because they use embryos, and Christians have been strongly pro-life since the very early days of the Church. Many Christians are against cloning and manipulating genes, because we believe that we shouldn’t be messing in that way with things God has made. All we have to do is look back on the sad history of Eugenics to see how quickly “healing” turns into “fixing” people we see as broken instead of loving them as they are.
Bioethics, as with any ethics, must rest on a philosophical foundation. Atheists and agnostics often appeal to some type of utilitarianism (do what benefits the most people) or to the idea that we have to do what will best preserve our species. But there is no scientific basis for either morality; they’ve been imported from philosophy along with a host of other assumptions. Christians, on the other hand, can justify their ethics by pointing to the character of God revealed in the Bible.
When Christians talk about abortion, stem-cell research, cloning, and genetic engineering, it is okay to disagree, but it makes no sense to say that Christian positions are based on superstitions or groundless faith. Believers have used reason to arrive at ethical stances for twenty centuries, and anyone who cares to look into the matter can find some of the most intelligent and thoughtful writing in history has been produced by Christians exploring ethical questions. If Christians are wrong, we are eloquently and elegantly wrong. And we are consistent.
Conclusion
Christianity and science are not at war. Christians have contributed to the scientific enterprise in many ways, from Newton’s theory of gravity, to Galileo’s understanding of planetary motion, to Mendel’s genetic research, to Lemaitre’s Theory of the Primeval Atom (the Big Bang Theory), to Francis Collins’s work with the human genome. Christians have been at the forefront of science since the beginning. Science, if it existed at all, would be much poorer without the input of Christians and the philosophical underpinnings of our theology. And Christianity would be poorer without a robust understanding of the world that God has made and charged us to be stewards of.
There are some points of tension between supernatural and natural explanations of the world. But these tensions are the anomalies; Christianity and science mostly either support each other, or at least stay out of each other’s way. That’s why the tensions are so interesting; because they are the exception. Christians believe that God made a big, incredible universe, and it is our job and our good pleasure to explore it and understand it as best as we can. Good science glorifies God, the great Scientist.