I still hear it said that you can’t believe in God and accept the teachings of science. They are 2 incompatible “worlds” - you must live in one or the other. It will be no surprise that I don’t accept this for a moment (I do, after all, have a degree in Physics). Let me explain briefly why.
Usually, people begin by pointing out that we “know” now that life has evolved over millions of years. Science has proved it. The Bible says that the universe was made in 6 days. One of them must be wrong, and since there is all sorts of evidence for the evolutionary point of view, it must be the Bible. If the Bible is wrong about this, who is to say it isn’t wrong about everything else?
There are 2 misunderstandings here. The first is about the Bible. It is true that there is a story at the beginning of the Bible in which God creates the universe in 6 days. But there is another story about the Creation straight after it which does not mention a span of time and in which things are created in a completely different order! Check it yourself in chapters one and two of Genesis. It might seem as though I’ve just discredited the Bible even more, but I don’t think so. I take the Bible very seriously indeed, and the fact that it begins with 2 creation stories is an issue that I won’t dodge. Far from being a problem, these two different stories so close together in the Bible is the clearest indication there could be that they are not to be taken as bits of prehistoric journalism. These are “stories-with-a-purpose” (Myth is the technical term, but that’s a word we don’t use because it riles some so. Don’t tell anyone I mentioned it) They tell us about the sovereignty of God, the place of humankind in the Creation and the nature and meaning of human life. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is not contradicted by modern cosmology or evolutionary biology because the questions that they address are not the same.
The second misunderstanding concerns science itself. It is still somehow assumed that science reveals the “truth” about the world and that as the knowledge of science expands so our need for God will decrease. If you take this view, science is a threat to Christian life. But the truth is, science does not work this way. It is becoming more and more clear that what science does is construct a series of “models” of reality which are useful in predicting the outcome of experiments and in making technological progress. This does not make the models ‘true’ in any absolute sense. In fact, scientists are more than capable of having 2 mutually incompatible models on the go at the same time. They use them because they work. It’s hard to illustrate this without resorting to a technical discussion, but I suppose the classic case in point is the nature of light. Is it a wave? A particle? Both? Or neither? Perhaps a few words from someone else would be in order.
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“All models are deliberately simplified … and all models of the world beyond the
reach of our immediate senses are fictions, free inventions of the human mind.
You are free to choose whichever of the quantum interpretations most appeals
to you, or to reject all of them, or to purchase the entire package and use a
different interpretation according to convenience, or the day of the week, or
whim. Reality is in very large measure what you want it to be. … all we can ever
hope to find is a self-consistent myth for our times.”
[John Gribben, Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, London 1995, p221]
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I doubt that many physicists like the word “myth” any more than fundamentalist Christians do, but there it is. Far from being two different worlds, science and faith are in fact fellow travellers on the road of human discovery.
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk