The Way Forward

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.”

— Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom

Recent trial balloons from the right suggest that the next approach for creationists attempting to make inroads into public school is the notion of science as a "materialist religion."

The argument for creationism is a theological one - "This is how I read the Bible." Responding with evidence for evolution misses the point - which is that some people choose to accept a somewhat literal reading of the Bible over the clear evidence.

While science is not a religion, and methodological materialism is not a faith, biblical literalism most certainly is. The relentless press to establish a narrow, sectarian view of Christianity as the official religion of the US is something we all should resist. First, because theocratic states are by their very nature repressive. Second, because this country explicitly rejects the idea of an official religion (that is why there is no religious test for office allowed in the constitution). Third, because the only people with the energy to push for a theocracy believe all sorts of things that are just plain wrong (like a young age for the earth, a global flood and special creation) that will cause all sorts of pain and damage when they end up with the sanction of government.

So the discussion might go like this:

Q: I've heard that evolution is a failed theory, and is only kept alive by lies and distortions. Why should I believe it?

A: If that were true, you should not believe it. As it happens, there is strong evidence for evolution, and I'd be happy to talk about it, but let me ask you a question first, "are you open to considering the evidence?"

Q: What makes you think I'm not?

Well, for most of us, we have a hard time believing in things we disagree with. For example, we want to believe certain things about our country, our children, our friends - and we have a hard time accepting it when someone presents us with facts that run counter to our beliefs.

It is the same with science. Most people who object to evolution have a particular view of God that they see as incompatible with the gradual development of life over billions of years.

If you accept evolution, you have to give up a literal reading of Genesis. Are you willing to consider doing that, if the evidence is strong enough?

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Science is on the defensive on two fronts. First, that the evidence for evlution is flawed, and second, science is a religion, and so Christianity should be given equal time. The proper response is to point out that a particular sect is trying to promote their narrow sectarian faith at the expense of the truth, and in the face of the Constitution.

Why Is the Church Silent?

In the early 20th century, the fundamentalist movement purposefully turned away from social justice issues and the results of modern scholarship in order to affirm “fundamental” biblical principles. These were unrelentingly issues of personal morality and personal relationship with God, based on a particular way of reading the Bible. This is a theology that embraces the idea that Jesus did not preach revolution against the established order, but asks us to be good citizens so that we can be about a life of devotion to God, unencumbered by larger political or social concerns (which are best left up to God).

The concept of America as a Christian nation, the idea that God wishes to bless His people, and the notion that we are to be good citizens (plus the lingering idea of communism versus capitalism as a religious / economic / political struggle) all combine to send the powerful message that there is no real conflict between conservative Christianity and American capitalism. For example, most of the social action and compassionate ministries sponsored by the conservative church involve caring for the victims of the system, not transforming the system to remove the harm. Even when the conservative church critiques the system, it complains of moral failure, not a system of capitalism that prospers when people make impulsive, selfish and shortsighted choices.

It is a "blame the individual" orientation that keeps many Christians blind to a system that is designed to elicit behavior of economic benefit precisely by tearing down moral and rational safeguards (for example, by advocating a sense of entitlement over responsibility, spending over saving, style over substance, instant gratification over delayed gratification and so on). People who live responsible, moral lives are poor consumers - so the natural conclusion should be that free-market capitalism is fundamentally at odds with Christianity.

That many Christians are now becoming concerned about social justice and ecological issues is not because of a renewed interest in theology or Bible study (either of which would offer a strong corrective and a call to action), or from a call by national religious leaders to move in a new direction. Rather, the excesses of the free market, the rising tide of suffering and disease, the rejection of Western capitalism by whole cultures and the dangerous state of our eco-system has come to the attention of more and more “ordinary” people, and those people are bringing these issues into churches.

This is an area where few theologians, pastors, national religious leaders or even prophetic voices within the church are raising an alarm. There has been no renewal, no call to repentance, no “move of the Spirit” convicting Christians in these areas. That these concerns are raised at all is in fact due to the encroachment of secular concerns into the church - which explains why there is precious little theology, ecclesiastical structure or leadership to nurture it. It also explains the hostility or indifference to issues like global warming - it is simply irrelevant to the agenda of personal salvation.

Many conservative Christians are genuinely puzzled as to why accurate science, opposition to global warming or renewed political action to establish a more just system (not to simply provide relief to those already suffering) should matter to Christians. “Why are these things important?” they ask – “How does involvement in these areas make me a better Christian?” Conservative Christianity does not have an answer to these questions, because they have a theology that is almost totally focused on the individual’s personal connection to God, to the exclusion of all else.

First Science, Then...?

One of my concerns with both the exodus of religious conservatives from schools and the fight for vouchers is the impact this trend will have on public schools.

First, public school will become a place for those with no options. The better off, more motivated and anti-secular parents will resist funding schools they do not support or intend to use.

What is worse, we will end up with many students graduating from alternative schools that leave out important information - civil rights, important lessons of history, facts about the natural world - resulting in the formation of minds hostile to a secular democracy, cultural pluralism and scientific literacy.

Rather than teaching common values and a shared view of how the world works, we may end up with balkanized groups of students, each with their own distorted view of the world, and each with a parochial view of the world that makes it difficult or impossible to understand people different from themselves, let alone get along with them.

Does Science Matter?

Science Gives Us An Accurate Picture Of Our World
The world is not always what it seems. This is especially obvious when you compare how we thought about the world only a few hundred years ago, and how we understand it to work today. It is easy to lose perspective on what it was to live in a world before modern science. People often died young, mostly of diseases easily prevented by good public heath practices. What we would consider modest distances between people presented difficult, often insurmountable barriers. Mountains, oceans, weather, language, economics all conspired to keep us separated and ignorant of one another.

The mechanics of everyday life (why leaves were green, why the sky was blue, where the wind came from, what the stars were made of) were all unknowable, and the subject of wild (inaccurate) speculation.

Science Improves our Everyday Existence
Every time we use a telephone or the internet, take an airplane ride, listen to digital music or enjoy clean drinking water, we owe a debt to science – because science drives the technologies that transform our world.

Without science, there would be no plastics, no antibiotics, no airplanes, automobiles, lasers (so no DVD's or supermarket scanners) – we couldn't even feed the burgeoning population of our planet without the basic research into how the world works that science provides.

Science is a tool, and a powerful one. The proper use of science requires a strong, broad community to guide the policies and priorities of the scientific community, and to help channel the fruits of science into the technologies that build better, more meaningful lives. In order to play that role, we all need a good grounding in science and technology, to help us grasp the benefits and pitfalls of science.

Science Invites Us To Awe And Wonder
Science unveils a world beyond our imaginings– drawing us beyond the day-to-day world we live in, towards amazing variety and potential. Understanding how the world works has not robbed us of mystery, or awe or the capacity to wonder. Rather, as we struggle to uncover how the world works, we are confronted with endless variation and beauty, both subtle and grand.

It turns out that the universe is much more complex and diverse than anyone ever imagined. From the behavior of quarks, to the light-years-spanning nebula seen by our space-based telescopes, from 350,000 species of beetles to the intricate beauty of DNA's double helix, our world has amazed us with its variety, complexity, invention and resiliency.

Science challenges our pre-conceptions about how the world works, and invites us to explore new possibilities, new options, new answers. In the process, we learn about how we impact the world and our community. The world is connected in amazing ways – ways that we would never discover, if not for science.

Science Does Not Take the Place of Ethics or Values
While science concerns itself with “how,” ethics, faith, philosophy struggle with questions of ultimate meaning, and the wisdom or folly of our actions. Science can inform those discussions, but science does not take their place.

At best, science is a tool that we humans use to better understand our world. Like any tool, the kind of value we get from it depends on how we use it. If we use science with skill and wisdom, it enhances our life and understanding. Science is an important window into the world in which we live. To understand science is to better understand our world, our selves and our future.

OK, So What’s The Issue?
Some people have reached conclusions about what the world is like, and they object when their preconceptions are not supported by science. Sometimes we accept this this corrective and revise our perspectives of the world to align with new information. Sometimes, we attempt to discredit, marginalize, or even manipulate science to support our preconceptions. This is a mis-use of science, and results in spreading mis-information about the world. Bad information can lead to improper conclusions. What is worse, these kinds of artificial controversies damages science’s reputation, and results in fewer people studying science, weakening our ability to compete globally and address pressing problems.

Science should be left alone to answer questions about how the world works, free from dogmatic prescriptions about what science can and cannot discover. Questions of ultimate meaning (Why) should be left to philosophy and religion.

(revised 3/30/07)

Is Science Atheism?

Physical processes can be identified at work in the natural world. For example, heating, expansion, cooling, forming and breaking of chemical bonds. The mechanism of evolution is based on these physical processes, which have been observed and are well-defined.

That God is not observed in these processes does not mean that God does not exist, but it does require the belief (which cannot be proved) that God designed the universe in which these processes are active (that is, science uncovers the "how" of God's creative activity). As recent scientific discoveries have indicated, the universe “works” all the way down to the quantum foam, and all the way back to the Big Bang. This severely constrains our understanding of the ways in which God has chosen to interact with the universe. This understanding should inform our theology.

Of course, this belief in God is not required to explain the way that the world works, so some people see this as tacit support for atheism.

So what role does faith play in the world? Well, so far, I do not need it to make sense of how the world works, from the perspective of science. And I do not, in fact, seek scientific understanding from faith. I do look to faith to help me understand my place in the universe, a search that includes the dimensions of spirituality, community and personal morality and ethics.

A Dialogue Between Faith & Science

Both sides of the faith / science dialogue (and those who say you don't have to take sides) are talking. I am not sure folks are always getting what is being said. We all re-interpret what we hear in our own terms - in order to make it intelligible. This does not make understanding impossible, but it makes it more difficult - because we often miss what is being said because we change it into something somewhat different in the process of trying to understand it.

Many conservative Christian creationists are trying to defend two things - the authority of the Bible, and a particular worldview that comes out of their interpretation of the Bible.

Because this worldview is understood to be "ultimate reality" (and the physical world we live in a distorted version of that reality), there is a deep distrust of the natural world and the products of our reasoning, emotions and sensory experiences.

Science cuts through the Gordian knot of the "what is reality?" question by taking it as a given that the world we experience is real, and seeks to understand how the natural world works (bypassing the "Why" question). Science has been successful beyond all imaginings at this enterprise. Lasers, digital music, semiconductors, & nano-machines would have been beyond anyone’s wildest speculation even a few hundred years ago.

Precisely because it ignores the supernatural (and because science has not been hampered by this lack), science is suspect - it is part of the "world" that is set against the "Kingdom of Heaven." The world we live in is part of the “present evil age" – and to be resisted - while Christians are called to be part of the age to come (marked by the direct rule of God, and no part of the current political, economic or technological order – referred to as Babylon, and depicted as a whore).

Because science seems to have no need of God, it represents an affront to the worldview that nothing makes sense except in the light of God's creating, sustaining and guiding activity. So on one level, ID is simply an attempt to “place” science in the context of a larger Christian worldview – it becomes an area of theology (learning about God through his creation).

Lessons Creationists Have Taught Me

Lessons learned from dialouges with creationists:

1. There is no evidence for creationism (young-earth, old-earth or ID). For folks predisposed to see design, they see design. For folks who look into the science of nature, they see that explanations for how the world works requires no supernatural intervention (open invitation for any creationist to provide a counter-example – show your work).
2. Creationist sources invariably lie about, distort or omit important facts about how science works, and what scientists themselves say about their work in order to bolster their claims. Naïve creationist supporters roar in to the frey, armed with arguments form creationist web sites, only to be shown over and over again that they have their facts wrong. Invariably, the argument is pared down to how to read the Bible – almost always, they end up saying something like “I have the right interpretation, and those who don’t share it are going to hell.”
3. Truth takes a back seat to strategy. This is obviously a religious issue – creationists want their children to be able to hold on to their creationist beliefs while getting a public education. There are two main approaches here – withdraw from public school, like the Southern Baptists, or get schools to stop teaching science, as laid out in the DI’s Wedge Strategy.
4. The discussion cannot take place on the basis of facts. Creationists have no facts to back up their position (they are not even interpreting Genesis 1 literally, or they would be flat-earthers and geocentrists). They simply “know in their knower” that they are right, and that means that anyone who opposes them are tools of Satan.
5. This is not about materialism, or liberalism, or naturalism. Science makes no claims about the supernatural, and so far, no appeal to the supernatural is required to explain the world we live in. This may mean that the natural principles we’ve discovered are the methods by which God created the universe. It does not mean that science is opposed to religion – just that science does not deal with religion.
6. We do have real problems to deal with – but they are not the fault of evolution, and are not solved by believing that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together, or that God spends His time poofing tails onto flagella.