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Society, Religion and Technology Project Church of Scotland Looking at the ethics of technology for a New Millennium

SCIENCE AND FAITH

Years after Darwin or Einstein, why do so many scientists believe in God? Or is it that the supposed conflict between science and Christian faith nothing more than a myth, put about by a small number of vociferous individuals? Certainly reports of the the death of God have been greatly exaggerated! In fact, scientists often seem to have less a problem with belief than many other academic disciplines. Christians in Science represents a large number of scientists in different fields who relate their knowledge of science to their active Christian faith. Its Journal Science and Christian Belief is a much respected forum for debate on a wide range of subjects. The Science and Religion Forum is another body dedicated to exploring the interface.

But if Christianity and science are not really at loggerheads, science has been coming in for increasing criticism over the last 10 years, as many people have felt the great promises of the post-war boom in science and technology haven't been delivered, or have left us with a bitter legacy as well as undoubted benefits. So what is the place of science in society? In a paper to the Government Perceptions and Values the SRT Project argued for a new understanding of the place of science, where the ethical dimension plays an important role alongside the more familiar impulses of profit, progress or prestige, and where the general public have more say in what goes on. Copies are available, see our SRT Publications List.

This is the home page for what we hope will be a series of articles. Just for now we offer a few short pieces. First the recent claim for a God gene and the implications of the Hobbit-man discovery. Then some food for thought in Answers on a Postcard?. The last is Life on Mars, which looks at the implications of the announcement of what is claimed to be fossil evidence for bacterial life on Mars, and speculations about what might exist as we discover new planets on distant stars at a remarkable rate. Amid the media excitement, how valid is the claim for life elsewhere in the universe, and what would be its implications for Christian thinking and human self-understanding alike?

It's easy to set up an Aunt Sally about Christianity under the guise of 'science'. Desmond Morris's comment piece on the BBC On-line webpage (29 October 2004) Eton or the Zoo? is a classic of its kind, when he claims that evidence for a three foot hominid 12,000 years ago in Indonesia "is going to give them nightmares" referring to those who believe in the special creation of humans by God. He writes : "Our ancestors successfully killed off all our close relatives.This has created a chasm between us and the other animals, a chasm so big that religion went as far as to say that we are not even related to them. Humans have souls and they do not. Darwin put a stop to this nonsense with his theory of evolution, but amazingly the blindingly obvious truth he discovered is still resisted by large sections of the human population. They stubbornly continue to insist that we are some kind of special creation. The arrival of "Mini-Man" is going to give them nightmares."

This promotes a misguided and typically 'scientistic' view of religion in relation to evolution. Many of us who are scientists and Christians have pointed out for many decades that there is no essential contradiction between the notion that human beings are made uniquely in God's image and the theory of evolution. This is because these are two different types of knowledge concerning humans. The theory of evolution is a scientific theory and as such is silent on the spiritual nature of human beings as against other species. It doesn't tell you the type of information about whether a particular hominid could or could not relate to God in the way that humans are known to do today. The Bible claims that humans alone can do that, but it also notes that God created all creatures to glory God. In what sense some previous form of hominid, an animal or a tree or a mountain might do that is not something science is going to tell you, one way or the other. You need religious sources of knowledge for that sort of question, and even they may not tell you, because the key question for the Bible (and plenty of other religious texts also) is whether or not we know God, not whether or not some other species does. As such, a three foot hominid presents no more problems to Christian belief than an ape or an ant.

The real 'nightmare' occurs when some scientists, who happen to be atheists in their personal beliefs, try to pass it off as though it was science.

For several years the SRT Project has brought a series of distinguished speakers on science and faith issues to the world's largest science festival, including John Polkinghorne, Sam Berry, Fraser Watts, Russell Stannard and Mike Poole. Edinburgh Geologist Sue Rigby, and Liverpool University chaplain and former astrophysicist David Wilkinson discussed Life on Mars and its possible implications. Colin Russell, Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at the Open University, considered the question of how, in an age of X-files credulity and post-modern scepticism, we can know anything - scientific or otherwise. For more details see our Science Festival pages.

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This page has been produced by the Society Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland. For more about our work on other issues, see our Other SRT Project pages, our SRT Publications List, or our On-line SRT Newsletter.

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This page was last revised on 24 November 2004

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