Christianity and Science

 Fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost

Our blog on this theology day is a response to Joe's comment below and to Tobi Nyugen's superb sermon on the subject this past Sunday at University UMC.

First let me say that this subject is usually characterized as Science and Religion. I can speak about the relationship between Christianity and Science but not about Science and Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, or any other religion. I am always bothered by folks seeing all religions as being basically alike. They aren't.

 

Here is Joe's comment:

"Christian, I hope this is not too much of a deviation from your "Bold" topic. While listening to the sermons on Kindred and UUMC today it refreshed my memory. "Does Science Disprove God" was the sermon title. I have always wondered how science and human knowledge compliments or conflicts with more religious or spiritual disciplines. More clearly, for those whose profession is more concentrated in one or the other, science or religion, how do they reconcile the two? For example, Tobi mentioned her father in her sermon. As you may know he was a science professor at NCSU. He also had a vibrant spiritual life. He found no irreconcilable conflict in the two. They were compatible. In your considerable spiritual experience over the years through to the present, how do you perceive or how have you experienced religion such as the Holy Spirit? Has the Holy Spirit revealed itself to you in your research or academic efforts? It seems to me the Holy Spirit and religion generally is associated in large part with emotionalism. Is that emotionalism inconsistent with the clarity of thought associated with academic research? Or is it helpful, providing insight into such events like Pentecost? What was your experience?"

 

 

 

 

I love science. I was not any good at it in school but I loved it. I never particularly thought about it being in conflict with Christianity until I read about Galileo's excommunication (I was an amateur astronomer in my youth). I was never taught fundamentalism or literalism. My ninth grade biology teaher, unlike Tobi's, said a couple of sentences on the subject--basically that what we were learning didn't have anything to do with any religion. She then taught us evolution over the next many weeks, but never used the word. Her viewpoint is expressed more elegantly in a phrase from the famous Harvard evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould. Here's the phrase and an explanation:

Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is the view that was advocated by Stephen Jay Gould that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, fact vs. values, so there is a difference between the "nets"^[1] over which they have "a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority", and the two domains do not overlap.

This is pretty much my view on the subject. I do have slight reservations that come almost entirely from reading the French Catholic priest and paleontologist, Pierrre Teilhard de Chardin, primarily from two of his books, The Phenomenon of Man and Science and Christ. I read them in the summer of 1969, a heyday for science. I was reading them at the time the first men walked on the moon. That's 40 years ago, so my memory of them is considerably faded, plus the fact that they were complex, difficult reading in a field not mine. Teilhard saw evolution as the basis for Christianity. The most elemental understanding in evolution is that species evolve from other species. When we see two species that are obviously related, say a horse and a zebra, we can assume a common ancestor. If there is no common ancestor, they are not related--like an elephant and a termite are not related and do not have a common ancestor. In evolution one species evolves into another species. For Teilhard--and this is gross oversimplification--God and humanity were two different species. The species God had only one exemplar. Humanity is a species of many exemplars. When God and humanity combined--when the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:35) she became pregnant and gave birth to a new species, who was both God and human. Teilhard did not think here of species in a literal, biological sense when he talked about the coming of Christ, but of evolution as the way for us to understand the incarnation, which is the whole basis of Christianity.

Still I don't believe that Christianity and Science have anything to do with one another. But--In the 1920's another French priest who was a scientist, an astrophysicist named George Lemaitre, noticed what is called the "red shift" in the spectometry of galaxies. This observation showed that the galaxies were all moving away from each other at the same speed. The logical inference is that if you move this backward, they all had to be together at the primordial point. What had to cause them to move away from each other so fast with such power had to be a massive explosion, a big bang. Before the big bang was a concentration of matter so great that no light could escape from it, the primordial black hole. The energy that exploded from the big bang brought light, as any explosion does. This first light has been the ultimate source of all light ever since.

"And God said, 'Let there be light.'" (Genesis 1:3). Sound like the big bang to me. In the hymn to creation that is Genesis one, God creates in an order: plants, animals, humans. It's the same order as evolution. This is just an observation. The writers of Genesis 1 knew nothing about the big bang or evolution. The similarities may be entirely coincidental. Maybe. 

I'll deal with the last part of Joe's comment next week. 

Faithfully,

Christian