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| St. Michael's Church - Lent 2007 Sermon Series | ||||||
 Hasn't
sciencedisproved Christianity?
In our sermons through Lent, we have been following the themes from our "Lost for Words" course. Each week we have been looking at a question that people around us in our daily lives might ask us as Christians and how we might answer. Today's question is "Hasn't science disproved Christianity?" and I have volunteered to explore this with you. I haven't had any formal training in philosophy or theology so the thoughts that I present to you this morning are my own and those that I've read while preparing this sermon. However, I do have a foot in both the "science" and "religion" camps since all my formal education, including two degrees, has been in science, engineering and systems analysis while I have also been a churchgoer for nearly all my life. When we talk to people about science and religion, there is a supposition that the two are in conflict and somehow irreconcilable. You can have either one or the other but not both. There have been some points in history where there has been conflict and this has manifested itself in great scientists being unwilling to publish their work for fear of the reaction from the religious authorities since their work would be seen as challenging Biblical authority. One of the most famous is Galileo who had formulated his ideas about the sun being at the centre of the solar system by about 1616 but was restrained from publishing by the Church until 1632. The Church authorities felt that the Bible indicated that the planets, stars and the sun revolved around the earth as the centre of God's creation. Even after 1632 Galileo found himself forced to recant by the Inquisition and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. A similar delay occurred with Isaac Newton whose work in mechanics, optics, astronomy and mathematics make him arguably the most influential scientist of all time. Newton had done most of his work by 1669 when he was in his late twenties but did not publish his seminal work De Principia until 1687 some 18 years later. Charles Darwin was the same. He had worked out his theory of evolution by 1842 but the Origin of Species was not published until 1859. Darwin was a bit of a perfectionist and wanted his theory to be absolutely watertight before facing the inevitable reaction to his challenge to the literal interpretation of creation in the Bible. Had it not been for another scientist developing a similar theory, Darwin would not have even published in 1859. The Origin of Species caused a storm and the Descent of Man, published in 1871, incensed many churchmen. Despite these examples from the past, it is important to ask if science and religion really are in conflict today. In trying to answer our question about science and religion, it is helpful to look at both, as they are today, and see how they help us to make sense of the world and people around us. It is my argument that neither science nor religion has a monopoly on the truth and are, in fact, complimentary. It is not the case that you have to have either one or the other; you can have both. Fundamental to this line of argument is consideration of the nature of truth. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? I chose three readings this morning that explore what the Bible has to say to us about the nature of knowledge, wisdom and truth. The teacher in Ecclesiastes is trying "to search out by wisdom all that us done under heaven". He has got to know wisdom, madness and folly. Yet he concludes that all this is ephemeral, like chasing the wind. So knowledge is, to some degree at least, illusory. In 1 Corinthians, Paul is also pondering the nature of wisdom. "For Jews demand signs and the Greeks desire wisdom" yet "God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom". This suggests that there are truths that mankind is not capable of understanding. Lastly, in John's Gospel, there is the exchange between Pilate and Jesus over the nature of Jesus's kingship. At the end of the passage, Jesus says, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice" and Pilate asks him "What is truth?". What, indeed, is truth? Looking back 50 years it might have been claimed that science could provide all the answers. However, as science has shown us more and more about the world and how it works, more and more uncertainties have crept in. The search for truth, at least in terms of scientific thinking, is often said to have started with the Greeks about 600BC. For the next 900 years, if not 2000, Greek thinking predominated. Although there were times when observational science and empiricism were in favour, most of the time Greek science was concerned with theories that were not tested by observations of the real world. Then from about 1500AD onwards, there was a revolution in scientific thinking. The works of Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Descartes and Newton changed the scientific method to one of experimentation. The aim of science became to try to produce a concise expression of the laws governing the universe by observation of deliberately designed experiments. This is a very reductionist approach. The real world is rich in variety and is messy, yet scientific experiments simplify this in order to get coherent observations. They reduce the complexity. Scientific method follows Descartes's philosophy that problems should be broken down and considered in a piecemeal way. Repeatability is important. As time goes by, a hypothesis will become accepted as more and more people undertake experiments. However, hypotheses are never proven as such, they just get to the stage where no one has found an experiment to disprove them. Then one day, something will be found that doesn't fit the hypothesis and uncertainty comes in like a bolt from the blue. The most famous case is probably that of Newton's laws of motion. For over 300 years these were the bedrock of science. Then Einstein came along and with his theories of relativity showed that Newton was not quite as correct as had been thought. Similarly in the sub-atomic world Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" came along to revise Bohr's view of the atom. Rather simply stated, the uncertainty principle says that by measuring something you change the object that has been measured so your measurement cannot be exact - there will always be uncertainty. At a micro-scale level when dealing with sub-atomic particles this uncertainty is very important, things become very fuzzy and the idea of absolute knowledge or truth dissolves. I have said that science is reductionist in its approach and tries to reduce the complexity that we find in the world. It cannot do this in all cases. At the other end of the scale from the sub-atomic particles, science has to start dealing with complexity and uncertainty comes in again. There is a view of the sciences that ranks them according to the amount of complexity that they have to deal with. This starts with physics as the most fundamental and leads up through chemistry, biology, psychology and social science. At each step along the way, things become more uncertain, statistics play a greater part and everything becomes fuzzier. By the time that you get to chaos theory then there is little certainty at all. So, as with the sub-atomic scale, at this end of the scientific scale there are no certainties or absolute truths either. An important factor that arises from dealing with complexity is "emergence". Emergence is allied to the view that the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. The properties of the whole cannot be predicted by simply studying the behaviour of the constituent parts in isolation. More is different. At one level this is trivial. You could break up a table into its constituent pieces of wood. All the atoms that made up the table would still be there so, in one way, it would still be a table. However, some of its properties, such as its usefulness for putting your coffee cup on, would have been lost. Organisation and complexity are important and help to determine what something is. When it becomes non-trivial, is when you start asking the same question about people. Is the fact that people are free agents and able to make choices in the world just an immensely complicated addition of all the atoms that make up their bodies or is there the emergence of another property that is not causally linked to those atoms? The answer to this question of whether we are more than just a collection of atoms is one of those cross-over points to belief that each of us has to make for ourselves. So, this is where we start to cross over into religious, rather than scientific thinking. The psalmist poses the question in Psalm 8 "What is man that thou art mindful of him or the son of man that thou visitest him". What is it that makes us human and somehow more than just a collection of atoms? If you would like to explore this further, you could do worse than read the short story That thou art mindful of him from the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's anthology The Bicentennial Man. In this story there is an android robot who has been given a wonderfully powerful positronic brain. He looks like a human, thinks like a human but is not human. The story is an exploration of what it is that makes us human and what the robot needs in order to be human. Where do our feelings, emotions and spirituality come in? Why do we have a notion of right and wrong; where do ethics come from? There are some scientific theories that try to give pointers such as the "selfish gene" argument that says that we do things to ensure the continuance of our own genes into future generations. But these come up short when we ask about philanthropy and charity. Religion gives us a way of understanding our feelings, emotions, spirituality and ethics and helps us to make sense of what we see around us and how people behave. It goes beyond that and gives us a framework for how we should behave ourselves. Religion does not deal with certainties and absolutes but gives us a way of dealing with complexity and uncertainty. This leads us back to the central question about the nature of truth. Science offers some explanations but with uncertainties at the "very small" level or wherever there is a degree of complexity involved. Hypotheses are never proven to be true; they just haven't been disproved yet. Religion gives us a way of understanding those results of complexity that science is not good at. Again no absolute proofs can be offered. Just as scientific theories cannot be proved, belief in God cannot be proved; it is just up to the individual to weigh the evidence from his or her life. Each of us has to decide whether to take that step in faith. Both science and religion help us to understand Pilate's question, "What is truth?" even if it is impossible to answer. It has been suggested that science helps us with the "how" questions about the world while religion helps us with the "why". This may be a bit of a simplification. I can't leave this subject without a quote from our Lent book How to explain your faith, by John Pritchard, concerning his wedding ring:
At one end we have the scientific explanations; at the other we have the religious. Are not all equally true yet any one cannot give the full picture? Science and religion are not incompatible. So, in answer to the question, "Hasn't science disproved Christianity?", I would say "No". Much though some might like science to offer certainty, it does not. Such things as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, complexity and emergence mean that nothing is absolute. The further you get away from classical physics, the more fuzzy science becomes and when we get into feelings, emotions, spirituality and ethics, religion has more to say than science. Both science and religion help us in our search for truth; they are complementary, not competitive. Bibliography Asimov, I. (1976) The Bicentennial Man London: Granada Checkland, P. (1981) Systems Thinking, Systems Practice Chichester: Wiley Desmond, A. & Moore, J. (1991) Darwin London: Penguin Hart, M. (1978) The 100 London: Simon & Schuster Polkinghorne, J. (2005) Exploring Reality London: SPCK Polkinghorne, J. (1994) Quarks, Chaos and Christianity London: Triangle Pritchard, J. (2006) How to Explain your Faith London: SPCK White, M. (1997) Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer London: Fourth Estate © AS Leach, 2007 |
