Science And Religion

               ... a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
                                                                                            Francis Bacon
           
          ... the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room ... and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. 'Rum thing,' he went on.  'All that stuff about the dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.'
                                                                                           C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy


     



     Francis Bacon, the father of scientific method, would surely be dismayed that we moderns have made a caricature of it, and then a religion of the caricature. Consider the perennial creation/evolution kerfuffle.
     In our everyday vernacular, the term evolution has acquired talismanic overtones, as if Charles Darwin's theory seamlessly explains all the long emergence of life as we know it. This is a claim that Darwin himself did not make.
     In the obverse are arguments that religious faith necessarily bars acceptance of the central soundness of Darwin's findings. This view is unsupported by sensible reading of Judeo-Christian scripture.
     (We'll stay with Judeo-Christian traditions. I can't presume to speak of other faiths, and don't reject the possibility of their simultaneous validity.)
     This outburst of peeves (mine) is prompted by a chance encounter with the writings of Jerry A. Coyne. He is a biologist, a prolific expounder on the theory of evolution, a professor emeritus at The University of Chicago and an example of a certain type.
     In a Google romp through his shorter works and reviews of his books, this picture emerges: Like a parent declaring Because I say so, he sides with science because it is science and rejects religion because it is not.
   Though Coyne appears to employ this approach with conspicuous  relish, it is not an unusual feature of a science/religion debate. In it, a secular thinker uses the methods of his own discipline to validate the methods of his own discipline; makes his conclusion implicit in his premise; and by circular route marches himself right back to his own starting point.
    If you frame the science/religion question as necessarily being an either-or choice, you haven't forthrightly faced the whole of it.  And you've evaded a truth widely neglected in the world of facts and evidence:  Pooh-poohing religion requires selective evasion of facts and evidence.
     The fact is: The historicity of Jesus' life is every bit as good as other ancient histories we take for granted.
     Evidence says:  The writers of the Christian New Testament knew what they were talking about and meant what they said.
     In its endless iterations, the science/religion debate doesn't reach resolution -- except perhaps to demonstrate that in some instances advanced education is not a barrier to pudding-brained logic.  Also, the cast of characters can remind us that the term science is applied in popular idiom to a variety of enterprise. Some of our scientists are explorers. Some are more nearly catalogers.
       The explorers have the better claim on the term, in my view, and on a spirit of inquiry that would never purport to have settled all answers to ultimate questions.
     The discipline of mathematics  offers the concept of asymptotes. Roughly speaking, this involves side-by-side lines drawing gradually closer together, in such a way that they would meet only at infinity. The image is apt for the work of writers who say that both the highest science and the highest theology rise from the human spirit yearning toward the infinite -- and that, side-by-side, both point there.
     There is a kind of meagerness in attitudes that value only what can be seen, touched, weighed, measured, listed.  A kind of disdain for the very idea that anything of worth might lie beyond the scope of one's own vision.
      We would be harsh to call this a worldview that reveres only itself. Harsh, perhaps, but not by much. It does of course automatically rule out any notions of faith. I think it betrays the spirit of true science as well.