SIM, Tristan James G.BS ChE 2-1ENG 201-1 (Rhetoric)Prof. C. Sabordo

On Science and Faith

The old story is told of Holmes and Watson going on a camping trip. After sharing a

good meal and an excessive amount of liquid refreshment, they retire to their tent for the night.

At about 3 a.m., Holmes nudges Watson and asks, “Watson, look up! What do you see?”

Watson replies, “Well, Holmes, I see stars, stars, and more stars.”

Holmes says, “What does that tell you, Watson?”

Watson says, “Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and

potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, it

tells me that it is about a quarter to three in the morning. Meteorologically, it tells me that

tomorrow will be probably a beautiful day. Theologically, it tells me that it is a vast universe and

we’re just a part of the great hole, tiny and insignificant. Why, Holmes, what does it tell you?”

Holmes replies, “Watson, what’s in you idiot? Somebody has stolen our tent!”

Modern scientists, more often than not, quickly dismiss the notion of faith in God even at

the slightest mention of the word “faith.” How ironic that these scientists whose jobs are mainly

to investigate the natural world yet so decline to even glance at the reasonableness of faith. They

can be profound responding to questions about science, knowledge, and everything in between

but still be hollow in answering questions not just of faith but of morality and ethics, questions of

right and wrong, good and bad; aesthetics, questions of beauty and appreciation; and the

supernatural, questions of the spirit and soul. What does it mean to be human? What is evil?

Why are there moral duties and obligations? Why do we feel the need to help those who are

suffering? These are the questions which cannot be qualified in a simple test tube experiment.

But first, let me be clear that I have nothing against science and its institutions. In fact, I owe the

development of the scientific enterprise to late 16th and 17th century scientists who were also

serving in the ministry and in the church. What I abhor is the current stance of today’s scientific

population. Scientism, the belief that science is the ultimate source of knowledge and truth,

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pervades the academies and universities of the last twenty decades. It is also high time for me to

junk the popular opinion that faith and religion are anti-intellectual entities of our society and

that faith is belief despite the lack of evidence. In reality, faith is belief in God because of the

good reasons to believe in Him and the evidence in modern science itself pointing toward Him.

However, to prove His existence is reserved for another time. What I seek to address today is the

miscibility of science and faith in God.

In this growing commotion between science and faith, I shall try to establish a middle

ground. In the first place, why should there be a gap between the two? Is there really a wide,

irreconcilable gap between science and faith, or is this just a propaganda in disguise from the

nonreligious scientific community? Today, I am here to contend that the clash between science

and faith is baseless and utterly destroying itself since science and faith can be of harmony. I will

appeal to history and logical argumentation to convince you that the two are not crossing swords

with each other but rather are exchanging handshakes. I begin by setting up a “Darwinian”

backdrop of time to further understand the relationship between the two and the plausibility of

the relationship by studying its development through history – before the “grand march of the

apes,” during the time of Darwin, and after the hype of Darwinism.

To begin with, let us examine the relationship between science and faith before the

“march of the apes” or simply put, before the dawn of evolutionary theory. Around 300 years

before Darwin, science progressed under the financial arm of the Catholic Church. James

Hannam, University of Cambridge philosopher of science, in his book The Genesis of Science,

says that the Catholic Church of Middle Ages paid for monks, priests, and friars to study in a

university. This act of pursuing greater knowledge unique to Christianity is never given credit in

the study of history today. The atrocities of the Church inflicted on innocent scientists during

those centuries are far more given emphasis when, in fact, such atrocities misrepresent the

Middle Age-church and are entirely fallacious and already brought down by modern scholarship.

During the Medieval times, Christian theologians like St. Augustine and Anselm knocked

on the doors of reason to understand the ways of God. Notice later that these men of faith

believed in God because their philosophical reflections logically tell them that there are good

reasons to believe in God. For example, Augustine is famed for the argument from First Cause.

Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza, in his book What’s So Great About Christianity, tells of

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Augustine’s argument that whenever you encounter an event A, A has to be caused by some

other B. But B has to be accounted for, and say, B is caused by C. This tracing of causes has to

find itself a beginning or a starting point, because the chain of causes cannot be infinite. To

illustrate, suppose you heard someone say “Five, four, three, two, and one. I just finished

counting down from infinity!” What would your initial response be? Of course, you would mock

the absurdity of counting down from infinity! Similarly, counting from zero to infinity cannot be

accomplished because there is always another number to count. In Augustine’s argument, the

First Cause is God. God needs to be the beginning or the starting point of the chain of causes and

therefore, God should be uncaused. This logical framework for belief in God is clearly based on

intellect, not on the rejection of evidence.

Many scientists of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were also men of the cloth, that is,

some of them are priests, monks, or devout religious individuals. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler,

Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Pascal, Dalton, Faraday, Joule, Lavoisier, Kelvin, Ohm,

Ampere, Pasteur, Maxwell, and Mendel are just some of the great scientists those centuries have

produced. And yes, they are all Christians, and their contributions to science are foundational to

the very laws and theories that keep science working. Their driving force for doing science was

to unravel the fingerprints of God in the orders and patterns of nature. Copernicus, a canon in the

Krakow Cathedral, remarks astronomy as a “science more divine than human” and regarded his

heliocentric theory as God revealing his marvelous plan for the cosmos. Francis Bacon, a devout

religious, established the problem-hypothesis-experiment-conclusion principle or colloquially

known in our textbooks as the scientific method. It is only rightful for Bacon to earn the title

“Inventor of Invention.” Lastly, Newton, who was virtually a Christian mystic, never said, “Aha!

I have discovered gravity. Therefore, God does not exist.” Rather, he said, “This most beautiful

system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an

intelligent and powerful being.” Those words were from a scientist who held a firm faith in God.

Let us now turn to where the rift between science and faith began to take shape – during

Darwin’s time. Charles Robert Darwin, an English naturalist and biologist, is known for his

theory of evolution, including the postulation that man descended from apes. Because the puzzle

pieces seemed to fit, the scientific population and the general public had accepted his

conclusions to be a fact. However, Darwin, unlike any of the religious scientists I have just

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mentioned recently, lost his faith in God. He was a brilliant scientist, but is his deconversion

from belief to nonbelief a result of his investigation that God has no room for the evolutionary

process? In other words, did he let go of his faith because of the empirical strength of science?

Maybe so, but not completely. Darwin may have doubted the claims of the Genesis story after a

scientific voyage around the jungles and islands of the world, but he was only critical of the

Bible. What made him loosen his grip from a higher power was the death of his daughter Annie.

Deconversion, during a tough situation, is sometimes a result of a moral and emotional

problem rather than a rational and intellectual one. Darwin’s questions rose from his soul, and

these are the questions which science seems to be silent about. Why does God allow pain and

suffering? Why does he condone evil? If He is at all omnipotent, why can’t He cure my

daughter? A hurting Darwin, in his prejudice to disprove the biblical account of creation,

published the On the Origin of Species in 1859. Much of the book contains assertions supported

by science, but a portion of it also contains reflections on God and faith. University of

Heidelberg philosopher and psychologist Momme von Sydow states in his article Darwin – A

Christian Undermining Christianity? that the existence of evil in the world greatly troubled the

faith of Darwin. Science did a minor bruise to Darwin’s belief, but it was his personal experience

of pain that finally dragged him out of the notion of God. Darwin’s works, which were partly

science and partly a disbelief in God, nevertheless rocked the science of the age. Subsequently,

the first-ever science-and-faith dialogue involving evolution was conceived between Thomas

Huxley, a biologist, and Samuel Wilberforce, a bishop, in 1860. One does not need to be

informed of who rooted for the Darwinian or the biblical point of view.

Around 160 years later, after the hype of Darwinism, we are still here holding the same

conferences, conventions, and dialogues dealing with the same matter. The gap continues to

widen as more scientists take opposite sides of the debate. Are science and faith really at odds?

John Warwick Montgomery, professor emeritus of law and humanities at the University of

Bedfordshire, denies in his article Science, Theology, and the Miraculous that there is a conflict

between the two. Montgomery says that although faith is associated with miracles, one cannot

just simply forego their possibility although miracles tend to deviate from the regularities we see

in the world around us. Water may not be turned into wine or Jesus may not have walked on

water, but are they impossible if God were to do it? On the other side of the arena, atheist

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physicist Victor Stenger, in his book The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason,

contended that all evidence points to a purely material universe, hence eliminating the possibility

of the soul, spirit, and even the supernatural. What evidence is he talking about? Surely it is

purely scientific in its entirety. What about the evidence in the non-sciences, say, in sociology or

theology? Hasn’t Stenger seen the overwhelming evidence in history and philosophy, or is he

keeping the evidences from pointing to God to satisfy his judgments against faith and religion?

Ladies and gentlemen, let us not succumb to scientists who label themselves as beacons

of knowledge while mislabeling faith as anti-intellectual. In his book God and Stephen Hawking,

Oxford mathematician John Lennox affirms that nonsense remains nonsense, even when spoken

by famous scientists. Let us take for example the statement of atheist neurologist Sam Harris. In

his book Letter to a Christian Nation, he asserts that the conflict between religion and science is

unavoidable. But is the statement “The conflict between religion and science is unavoidable” is,

in itself, a statement of science? I don’t think so. Science cannot prove if there really is a conflict

between religion and science. Can Harris prove to us, by laboratory experiment, that there exists

a gap between the two? I doubt.

Scientists with atheistic presuppositions shoot themselves at the foot at the moment they

step out of their science and try to engage in an arena they never even take seriously, the arena of

faith. The claim that science is the only source of knowledge and truth is intrinsically a statement

of faith! One cannot prove by science if science is the only source of knowledge and truth. It is

simply a leap in the dark. Logical positivism, the belief that all knowledge must be based on

perceptual experience, that is, what is tangible to our five senses, is suicidal. In his essay Logical

Positivism, professor of philosophy Oswald Hanfling contends that if knowledge must be based

on experience, how can the statement “all knowledge must be based on experience” be a result of

experience at all? Let us not be naïve of the absurdity of scientism. Scientism is not a statement

of science but a statement of faith, albeit, a laughable one.

The great gap between science and faith is a false gap. The real clash is more prominent

between two worldviews, namely, a religious worldview and an atheistic worldview. What is a

worldview? A worldview expresses the totality of one’s belief about reality. In a religious

worldview, science and faith can cohere, since there are truths which cannot be verified by

science. This is where faith, which is also based on reason and evidence, comes in the picture.

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We each have our own opinions and beliefs about our universe, and science is just a

speck in our affairs and explanations about reality. We might not know what worldviews we are

holding, but once we make certain judgments about the world, we are instigating a view of our

own. A judgment of our own. A worldview of our own. A faith of our own.

Thank you and good day.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

D'Souza, D. (2008). Christianity and Reason: The Theological Roots of Science. In What's So Great

About Christianity (pp. 87-88). Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Hanfling, O. (1996). Logical Positivism. In Philosophy of Science, Logic, and Mathematics in the

Twentieth Century (p. 207). Massachusetts: Routledge.

Hannam, J. (2011). The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the

Scientific Revolution. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Harris, S. (2006). Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 63). New York: Knopf.

Lennox, J. (2009). God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Updated ed.). Oxford: Lion.

Lennox, J. (2010). God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? Oxford: Lion.

McDowell, S., & Morrow, J. (2010). Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other

Questions Raised by the New Atheists. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications.

Montgomery, J. (1978). Science, Theology and the Miraculous. Journal of the American

Scientific Affiliation, 145-153. Retrieved March 11, 2015

from http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1978/JASA12-78Montgomery.html

Sloan, P. (2014, June 3). The Concept of Evolution to 1872. Retrieved March 11, 2015,

from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-to-1872/

von Sydow, M. (2005). Darwin — A Christian Undermining Christianity? On

Self-Undermining Dynamics of Ideas between Belief and Science. Science and Beliefs:

From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 141-156. Retrieved March 11, 2015,

from http://web.archive.org

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