SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY, OR WHAT IS EVOLUTION?
Photo from Unsplash
What comes to mind for you when you hear the phrase “science and religion,” or the interaction between faith and the natural sciences including biology, chemistry, physics, and the like? For many, or maybe for most, people, it brings to mind one of two things. The first, especially for Americans, is the past and present debate over the origins of the universe and the origins of humanity, focusing on evolutionary biology and cosmology. This is the question of where we came from, both in terms of the universe and of human beings in particular. The second is the question of knowledge, and of how scientific knowledge and Christian knowledge interact with each other. Philosophers call this a question of epistemology, which just means how we know things—and Christianity and the natural sciences can understand knowing in very different ways.
One of the most common frameworks for thinking about the relationship between science and religion is a set of categories proposed by Ian Barbour. Barbour outlines four ways science and religion can interact with each other: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration.
The conflict model claims that both science and religion make truth claims that are irreconcilable, to the extent that one or the other must be rejected. One example of this approach can be found in what is often referred to as “young earth creationism,” in which scientifically derived information about the age of the earth is scuttled in favor of a particular interpretation of Genesis. From the other side, the reduction of all life to biological processes that can be found in the work of many New Atheists can lead to a rejection of religion.
The independence model suggests that science and religion are concerned with truth claims that do not overlap each other. Science tells us about the physical world, while religion is concerned with morality. To use an example from the movie Jurassic Park, science can tell us how to clone a killer dinosaur, but religion can help us discern whether or not it’s a good idea.
Dialogue involves looking for parallels, if not common ground, on the basis of comparing scientific and theological methodologies, or by looking for similar concepts in scientific and theological thought. One example of this model is the complexity in physical or mathematical systems that gives rise to fractals. Both scientific reasoning and theology can lead us to wonder at the intricacy of these complex systems, albeit from different directions. But the contemplation of complexity can be a common ground from which to begin a mutually appreciative conversation.
Integration suggests a seamless melding of natural and religious knowledge, where knowledge of the natural world obtained though scientific inquiry can tell us about God. A classic example of natural theology would be to look at natural selection and conclude that it reveals something of God’s intention for creation. (1)
Yet there is something about this arrangement into categories that leaves much to be desired. Have we truly delved into what it means to be a Christian in a scientific age? I would suggest that a more fruitful response begins with questioning the terms of how the “science and religion” conversation generally takes place. What is religion? What is science? Let’s proceed on that basis and see where it takes us.
Science, as a way of knowing the world, is not disconnected from history and it didn’t show up out of the blue. The scientific method, and scientific reasoning, emerged out of a particular context centered on objectivity, or the notion that the person making observations can be detached completely from their observations. The objective stance of the person making scientific measurements emerged as an authoritative voice. Although this trajectory started earlier, scientific objectivity took on vast explanatory power in the 1800s, particularly as the theory of evolution emerged and made claims on what it means to be human. It saw itself as responsible for explaining why the world came to be as it is, not coincidentally including the political systems in place at the time, which were deemed to be the natural products of social evolution. In the words of historian Jenny Reardon, the role of science in the modern world caused “the entanglement of rules that govern what can count as knowledge with rules that determine which human lives can be lived.” (2) In a world where the survival of the fittest is deemed the deepest truth of human nature, it is all too tempting to mark some people as the winners and others as the losers of evolutionary struggle.
Because biological Darwinism can very quickly leak over into social Darwinism (that is, an explanation of human society in terms of survival of the fittest), we need to ask deep questions about the politics and philosophies that are enmeshed with scientific claims. The researcher and the writer of science cannot be separated from the products of their research. Or, as MC Hammer put it in a recent tweet about the philosophy of science, “when you measure, include the measurer.” Knowledge cannot be separated from the knower. I do not mean to suggest that scientific inquiry and the scientific method cannot be a vital part of the intellectual life. But it is important for scientists to be aware of the philosophies that undergird their work, and of the fact that they are particular and not universal.
When we think theologically about science and the question of the humanity’s origins, for example, we should not be solely fixated upon the truth or falsehood of evolutionary biology in itself. Rather, the seam between evolutionary science and Christian theology lies in the assertion of scientific objectivity in an attempt to explain truths that biology cannot, in fact, explain. The cure for this problem has nothing to do with re-asserting the reading of the creation narratives that is often dubbed “creationism” in contemporary American debates—or with re-asserting the kind of materialism often associated with New Atheists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. The earth is not flat. But shouting its roundness in the street as though it were a matter of some controversy when this is a rather universal and uncontested claim makes the shouter a comic figure, not an authoritative explainer of the meaning of human existence.
In teaching seminary students how to think about evolutionary theory, I often use the example of Ohm’s Law from introductory physics. It is uncontroversially true that voltage in an electric circuit is proportional to current and resistance: V=IR. Likewise, it is uncontroversially true that evolutionary theory has something to say about how species develop and differentiate themselves from each other, even if the exact mechanism of that differentiation is still contested. But that biological truth—the earth’s roundness, as it were—should have as little hold on the moral imagination as Ohm’s Law does. Electricity is everywhere, but no one believes that Ohm’s law explains the poverty of Haiti or the pitfalls of marriage. Popular accounts of evolutionary biology, however, have been far less circumspect in the limits of its explanatory power. When biology flows back into philosophy by way of politics and policy, that is when our moral-theological alarm bells should start ringing.
“Religion” is the other half of this question that bears unpacking. The category of religion encompasses talk and practices related to God regardless of their theological content. And, as a result, when it is brought into conversation with scientific thought, it often finds that it has very little to say beyond a vague and nebulous idea of God as creator or a theoretical discussion of the possibility of miracles. The category of religion itself presses the conversation between Christian faith and science back into the question of origins, because there are few other places for it to go. As a result, those conversations often remain captive to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s and the echoes of the Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution. We cannot, it seems, move beyond the question of our beginnings.
This is an old problem. St. Augustine’s reflection on time in the Confessions grew out of an exegesis of “In the beginning, God created…”, and certainly that has been a consistent pattern in the tradition. But what if we thought not from Genesis 1 but from Hebrews 13:8—Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever? What if we take seriously the fact that our beginning and our ending is given to us by and in the crucified and risen body of Jesus Christ? What if we address questions of science and theology from the standpoint of the particular claims made by Christianity?
By claiming the life of Jesus as “at once the centre and the beginning and the end of all the lifetimes of all,” the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth shifts the conversation with scientific authority to a much more fertile and congenial ground, away from either the collision or convergence of worldviews and towards witness to the risen Lord. As a consequence, he also steers the doctrine of creation decisively away from theologies that conflate the activity of God with evolutionary struggle and the death of the “unfit.” He asks, “Is it our job as Christians to accept or reject world-views? Have not Christians always been eclectic in their world-views—and this for very good reasons?” We are not forced to choose between “electric light and the radio” and the existence of miracles. The one does not exclude the other. As Barth explains, the crux—quite literally—of the matter lies elsewhere:
What if our radio-listeners recognized a duty of honesty which, for all this respect for the discoveries of modern science, is even more compelling than that of accepting without question the promptings of common sense? What if they felt themselves in a position to give a free and glad and quite factual assent to faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead? What if they have no alternative but to do this? (3)
What if we were so deeply converted to Christ that we had no alternative than to believe in and witness to the Good News—even when it seems like so much foolishness or irrationality?
Reframing this question in terms of witness also works against the dangers of social Darwinism and the erasure of the individual that accompanies thinking on a cosmic evolutionary time scale. Because the love commanded in Christian discipleship is the concrete love of one neighbor for another, it can never take the form of what Barth calls the “inhumanity" of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the evasion of the you and me in human relationships in favor of a “general consideration and a general programme,” where human beings are “grouped” together, become “invisible to one another,” and can then be dealt with or disposed of as a whole. (4) Our witness to the risen Christ is the loving witness of one neighbor to another—not as observer and observed, nor as combatants in evolutionary struggle. The conversation between science and Christian faith cannot be conducted on the level of categories, concepts, or groups, but between neighbors as they look for the truth together as a work of love.
Suggestions for further reading:
Brian Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age
Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood
Gerald McKenny, To Relieve the Human Condition
Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1997), p. 117.
Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 5.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, trans. G.W. Bromiley, G.T. Thompson, and Harold Knight (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), p. 447.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2, trans. G.W. Bromiley, G.T. Thompson, and Harold Knight (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), p. 252.
