Also in The Guardian, Charlie Brooker who is usually so spot on, gets caught up in the angry, self regarding world of Richard Dawkins who is on TV this week extolling the virtues of his own ideas Charles Darwin.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.
And that’s the problem right there. I don’t know why anyone would be looking to the Bible for any view on an issue of science, and by the same token why we should consider a scientist to have any authority on any subject outside his chosen field of study.
The Bible is primarily concerned with the relationship between God and man rather than the proposition of a scientific theory for the inner workings of creation. The writers of the Bible are attempting to articulate with ‘the why’ rather than ‘the how’ and it’s this ‘why’ that is central to the life of faith. For them the ‘the how’ is a far less important, as the intended audience are more concerned with being the ‘People of God’ rather than the students of creation. Whilst certainly a big issue in certain quarters, mainly an insecure Christian minority, who build museums to creationism and argue against the existence of dinosaurs, and to fame hungry scientists who make great show of burning spiritual strawmen on an alter to their own desperate thirst for glory, ‘the how’ is by no means the subject of the book and of the christian life in general. But as the ‘journalists’ at the Daily Mail are well aware, controversy is far more effective at selling newspapers than boring things like ‘news’ and for scientific authors few things are better for raising your profile than invoking false conflicts between reason and faith.
It’s a shame that otherwise smart people are drawn into such senseless arguments, repeating Dawkin’s polemic battlecries word-for-word, rather than actually thinking about the complex and for the most part complimentary relationship between science and faith. Both sides of the debate would be far better served realizing the limitations of their respective views. It’s not in anyone’s interest for the church to go wading into scientific debates, where most of the time it has a) no business b) very little reason to feel under threat. Equally when it comes to the realm of personal relations, science has actually very to say about how we should live and the big relational questions, like grace and love and the search for meaning.
Perhaps it’s best left to Albert Einstien to illuminate the way;
For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.
Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith.
The situation may be expressed by an image: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
