Science and Christianity

The relationship between science and religion takes many forms. Generally speaking, religion and science use different methods in their effort to ascertain truth. The scientific method relies on an objective approach to measure, calculate and describe the natural/physical/material universe. Religious methods are typically more subjective (or intersubjective in community), relying on varying notions of authority, through any combination of: revelation, intuition, belief in the supernatural, individual experience, or a combination of these to understand the universe. Science attempts to answer the "how" and "what" questions of observable and verifiable phenomena; religion attempts to answer the "why" questions of value and morals. However, some science also attempts to explain such "why" questions, and some religious authority also extends to "how" and "what" questions regarding the natural world, creating the potential for conflict.

Historically, science has had a close and complex relationship with religion; religious doctrines and motivations have often been central to scientific development, while scientific knowledge has had profound effects on religious beliefs. A common modern view, described by Stephen Jay Gould as "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA), is that science and religion deal with fundamentally separate aspects of human experience and so, when each stays within its own domain, they co-exist peacefully. Another view known as the conflict thesis&mdash;popularized in the 19th century by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, but now largely rejected by historians of science&mdash;holds that science and religion inevitably compete for authority over the nature of reality, so that religion has been gradually losing a war with science as scientific explanations become more powerful and widespread. However, neither of these views adequately accounts for the variety of interactions between science and religion (both historically and today), ranging from antagonism to separation to close collaboration.

The attitudes of religion towards science
Religion developed many centuries before the existence of the scientific method; classical religous works and scriptures show an appreciation of the natural world, but express little or no interest in any systematic investigation of it for its own sake. Nevertheless, historians of science owe a debt to practitioners of religion, who in many occasions collected and preserved early scientific texts.

In the Medieval era some leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, undertook a project of synthesis between religion, philosophy, and natural sciences. For example, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, like the Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo, held that if religious teachings were found to contradict certain direct observations about the natural world, then it would be obligatory to reinterpret religious texts to match the known facts. The best knowledge of the cosmos was seen as an important part of arriving at a better understanding of the Bible.

This approach has continued down to the present day; Henry Drummond, for example, was a 19th century Scot who wrote many articles, some of which drew on scientific knowledge to tease out and illustrate Christian ideas.

However, by the 1400s tension was keenly felt under the pressures of humanistic learning, as these methods were brought to bear on scripture and sacred tradition, more directly and critically. In Christianity, to bolster the authority of religion over philosophy and science, which had been eroded by the autonomy of the monasteries, and the rivalry of the universities, the Church reacted against the conflict between scholarship and religious certainty, by giving more explicit sanction to officially correct views of nature and scripture. This approach, while it tended to temporarily stablize doctrine, was also inclined toward making philosophical and scientific orthodoxy less open to correction, when accepted philosophy became the religiously sanctioned science. Observation and theory became subordinate to dogma. This was especially true for Islam, which canonized Medieval science and effectively brought an end to further scientific advance in the Muslim world. Somewhat differently in the West, early modern science was forged in this environment, in the 16th and 17th centuries: a tumultuous era, prone to favor certainty over probability, and disinclined toward compromise. In reaction to this religious rigidity, and rebelling against the interference of religious dogma, the skeptical left-wing of the Enlightenment increasingly gained the upper hand in the sciences, especially in Europe.

The phenomenon of Christian fundamentalism which has arisen predominantly in the United States, has been characterized by some historians as originating in the reaction of the conservative Enlightenment against the liberal Enlightenment. In these terms, the scientific community is entirely committed to the skeptical Enlightenment, and has incorporated, into its understanding of the scientific method, an antipathy toward all interference of religion at any point of the scientific enterprise, and especially in the development of theory. While many popularizers of science rely heavily on religious allusions and metaphors in their books and articles, there is absolutely no orthodoxy in such matters, other than the literary value of eclecticism, and the dictates of the marketplace. But fundamentalism, in part because it is an undertaking primarily directed by scientific amateurs, tends to be inclined toward maximal interference of dogma with theory. Typically, fundamentalists are considerably less open to compromise and harmonization schemes than their forebears. They are far more inclined to make strict identification between religiously sanctioned science, and religious orthodoxy; and yet, they share with their early Enlightenment forebears the same optimism that religion is ultimately in harmony with "true" science. They typically favor a cautious empiricism over imaginative and probabilistic theories. This is reflected also in their "grammatical-historical" approach to scripture and tradition, which is increasingly viewed as a source of scientific, as well as religious, certainty. Most significantly, they are openly hostile to the scientific community as a whole, and to scientific materialism.

The fundamentalist approach to modernity has also been adopted by some Islam, and by some Orthodox Jews. For example, an Enlightenment view of the cosmos is accepted as fact, and read back into ancient texts and traditions, as though they were originally intended to be read this way. Fundamentalists often make claims that issues of modern interest, such as psychology, nutrition, genetics, physics and space travel, are spoken to directly by their ancient traditions, "foretold", in a sense, by their religion's sacred texts.

In response to the freethought encouraged by Enlightenment thinkers over the last two centuries, many people have left organized religion altogether. Many people became atheists and agnostics, with no formal affiliation with any religious organization. Many others joined Secular Humanism or the Society for Ethical Culture: non-religious organizations that have a social role similar to that which religion often plays; others joined non-creedal religious organizations, such as Unitarian Universalism. People in these groups no longer accept any religious doctrine or perspective which rests solely on dogmatic authority.

In between these positions lies that of non-fundamentalist religious believers. A great many Christians and Jews still accept some or many traditional religious beliefs taught in their respective faith communities, but they no longer accept their tradition's teachings as unquestionable and infallible. Liberal religious believers do believe in gods, and believe that in some way their god(s) revealed their will to humanity. They differ with religious fundamentalists in that they accept that the Bible and other religious documents were written by people, and that these books reflect the cultural and historic limitations and biases of their authors. Thus, liberal religious believers are often comfortable with the findings of archaeological and linguistic research and critical textual study. Some liberal religious believers, such as Conservative Jews, make use of literary and historical analysis of religious texts to understand how they developed, and to see how they might be applied in our own day. Liberal religious Jewish communities include Reform Judaism and Conservative Judaism.

The attitudes of science towards religion
Scientists have many different views of religious belief.
 * Some scientists consider science and religion mutually exclusive;
 * some believe that scientific and religious belief are independent of one another;
 * some believe that science and religion can and should be united or "reunited;" and
 * some believe that science and religion can conflict because both attempt to accomplish the same thing: inform people's understanding of the natural world.

It has been argued that many scientists' conceptions of deities are generally more abstract and less personal than those of laypeople. Atheism, agnosticism, Humanism and logical positivism are especially popular among people who believe that the scientific method is the best way to approximate an objective description of observable reality, although the scientific method generally deals with different sets of questions than those addressed by theology. The general question of how we acquire knowledge is addressed by the philosophical field of epistemology.

According to a recent survey, belief in a god that is "in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and belief in "personal immortality" are most popular among mathematicians and least popular among biologists. In total, about 60% of scientists in the United States expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of deities in 1996. This percentage has been fairly stable over the last 100 years. Among "leading" scientists (surveyed members of the National Academy of Sciences), 93% expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of a personal god in 1998. (Larson and Witham, 1998)

The phrasing of the question can be criticized as presenting an overly narrow definition of god. The survey among NAS scientists was conducted via mail and had a low and perhaps statistically biased return rate of 50%.

Philosophy of science weighs in
Since the era of logical positivism, the philosophy of science has shifted away from scientific realism to instrumentalism and confirmation holism. While the views of professional philosophers of science have not permeated widely to scientists and the public, these views weigh in significantly on the relationship of science and religion and on worldviews in general. In particular, presuming the validity of confirmation holism, no scientific, religious or any other worldview can be conclusively proven by empirical data since data is sufficiently ambiguous to allow competing and sometimes contradictory interpretations.

Additional reading

 * Thomas Jay Oord - Science of Love: The Wisdom of Well-Being, Templeton, 2003, ISBN 1932031707
 * Mark Richardson - Wesley Wildman (ed.), Religion & Science: History, Method, Dialogue, Routledge, 1996, ISBN 0415916674
 * Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul : Integrating Science and Religion, Broadway; Reprint edition, 1999, ISBN 0767903439