Can you Believe in Science and God?

Science and religion have long been considered to be polar opposites in conflict with one another. Where one employs logic, empirical fact, is objective and verifiable; the other is based on reasoning, faith and facts which are more often than not subjective and impossible to fully prove. However, is it possible to believe in God and still believe in scientific fact? Or do the two stand on opposite sides of a barbed wire fence? Well into the eighteenth century, scientists were philosophers and theologians. Until this point the term 'natural philosophy' was preferred in reference to the study of nature or biology and the term moral philosophy was give to the study of the mind. The point is that the two separate identities of science and religion stem from the same point and thus were once considered to be one and the same thing. So is it possible to reconcile them since they grew out of the same roots? Are they even separate at all?

For many theists science is a part of God's work because it was he who set down its laws and gave us the ability to comprehend them. For this reason we can consider the teleological argument when trying to understand whether God fits in with science. This argument is based on 'telos' or 'purpose' and the belief that everything is so structured, so ordered and designed that there must have been someone who designed it, structured it and made it work in the way it does. A theist may relate this to God and would argue that scientific discoveries can prove it; after all what is the ozone if not the forethought of a designer who knew that we would need it to protect ourselves from the sun? Or the intricacy of our bodies and our instincts? Similarly, people have eluded the universe to a garden which looks like it has been designed for all the beauty that has bloomed up about it, this goes along with the 'intelligent design theory', a pseudoscience that believes some parts of the world had to be designed by a supernatural creature or God.

However, this may be thought illogical by a scientist or atheist. For all the beauty there is in the 'garden' there are 'weeds': pain, suffering, survival of the fittest. There is an order to the world, yes, but that order is not perfect but brutal. And for all the 'intelligent design' arguments, there is the rebuttal of the big bang theory, ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Darwin's discovery of 'natural selection', the fact that the intelligent design theory is unaccepted by many because it cannot be experimented with. There is no empirical justification. Science is always changing to fit the evidence. Yet there is no, as of yet, evidence for the existence of God.

Many would also argue that even if they agreed that the complexity of some of life's systems do suggest an intelligent designer, there is no way to know that that designer is 'God', especially the Omni-benevolent god of the scriptures. Why couldn't this creator be creators? Why couldn't it be an 'infant god making his first draft'? Why not an evil god? On the other hand, science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of god, gods or any sort of creator. The furthest back they can go is to the beginning of time which, according to science started with big bang theory.

So surely the big bang could have been caused then by God, with him outside space and time? This relates to the cosmological argument: everything needs a cause, the universe was caused by the big bang and the big bang was caused by God. This seems reasonable as it would mean that he could have created the universe. But if he created such an expansive and unique universe why would he make one world and not many? Why would he be the god of humans, especially if there is other intelligent life? Moreover, if he is outside of space and time and thus able to have created the big bang, how did he then create the earth, make man in his image and influence this world? If he simply set off the big bang which then caused a chain of events of which he could not play a part because he was outside of space and time then the argument would be that we can believe in that God because there is no evidence against him as we cannot know him. To believe in the Judeo-Christian god, the god that interferes in the ways of man, is very different.

To use an example, Aristotle believed that God was necessary, not contingent and that he was the unmoved mover who set all things in motion only to do nothing afterwards. This belief can be applied to this question. After all, this God is transcendental and lives beyond our knowledge but is still the first cause of all that is empirical although he does not interfere with it. This leads me to the fact that Science is the study of phenomena and as such, if God were to interfere with phenomena then there should be some proof of him, particularly if we are to assume that the cosmological argument and Aristotle are correct in saying everything needs a cause and the first cause is a god. In terms of the Christian God, increasingly, people have considered that all things provable by science cannot be related to God because God is 'beyond nature' and therefore beyond the study of the empirical. In other words God is the 'God of the Gaps', the God who rules over everything that cannot be explained. So if Science rules over the explicable and God over the inexplicable; surely the two are both believable within their different spheres?

This God does not work. First, if we are considering God to be the cause in all things inexplicable then originally there would have been a much larger semantic field which could be assigned to the work of God. However, now, as science explains more and more about the previously unknowable, the 'gaps' become smaller and smaller. As the amount of what we can know through empirical knowledge grows this God dwindles, something that suggests that there maybe limits to our knowledge now but that there may not be in the future. Also if God is to be defined as omnipresent but has nothing to do with what we know through empiricism then he is not the God defined by scripture and thus cannot be believed in. For this reason it seems difficult to genuinely believe in both God and Science.

However, both are concerned with the search for a kind of 'truth' about his world and are both founded on aspects of reality. Science is primarily based on the impersonal and the physical whereas religion concentrates on the transcendental. If we are to argue that neither is able to interfere with the other, we are ruling out the constant similarities which reveal themselves in both. We are also arguing that what Science reveals and tells theology about the universe, it's history and it's order, cannot influence the way that religion evolves. The fact that the Old Testament starts with the 'Garden of Eden' and the 'Fall of Man' does not mean that a theist cannot believe in the Big Bang and evolution rather than the universe springing into existence 4004 years ago. The fact is that the domains of religion and science do not have to be in the phenomenal realm at all but are actually just different questions. Where science asks 'how?', religion asks 'why?' and thus neither can truly intrude upon the other as both are separate in their search.

The physicist, John Polkinghorne, argued to this point: that the two can be reconciled because, although conflict arises between science and religion where the other poses threat to a view held by the other, they can both communicate and express relevant views and ideas about phenomena which overlap in both areas on the questions of 'why?' and 'how?'. This suggests that there is room for a synthesis of the concepts expressed in both fields, a sentiment that has been felt since the medieval periods where Maimonides and Augustine of Hippo both tried, from their separate religious backgrounds, to blend them together.

However, it has also been the feeling that one will always seek to squash or hinder the other. For example when the study of the cosmos threatened Christian doctrine through discoveries made by Copernicus and Galileo the relationship between them deteriorated and the Church made any study of philosophy and the natural science something that was governed and censored by the Church. More recently, people like Richard Dawkins, the famously atheist biologist, have suggested that religion can play no part in science because that belief is wrong and meaningless.

Whilst disagreements such as these rage on, can we truly imagine it being possible to truly believe in both? We would say that some beliefs are reconcilable, others are not. It is easy to believe in a God if you believe him to be a transcendental, unmoved mover who exited outside of space and time, like Aristotle did. On the other hand, it is not so easy to create a reasonable synthesis of the God of Judeo-Christian-Islamic origin because not only do they give him an active role in the direct creation of the world such as in Genesis, but they also say that he interferes with this world and plays an immediate role within our lives and existence. This God is the God that is disputed over; the transcendental, the one which cannot be proven or disproved. If we use the ideas of Polkinghorne then we can see how the two can become one and the same, with science giving us greater empirical knowledge and religion creating in it a sense of meaning and purpose. This means that until such time that science can prove the existence or non-existence of God, it is perfectly possible to believe in both science and God.