Are Religious Faith and Science Compatible?

Are religious faith and science compatible?

The question gets asked a lot and often in just that phrasing. That’s unfortunate since it is almost never clear from the question what exactly ‘compatible’ should mean in this context. If it means, can a single person take the claims of science and claims of faith seriously and hold to both, then clearly the answer is ‘yes’ since there are hundreds of professional scientists and thousands of non-professionals who do just that. Furthermore, it isn’t clear just from the wording what is meant by ‘religious faith.’ Any religious faith? All religious faith? Christian faith?

In conversations with everyone from atheists to creationists, I find that what is typically meant by the question is really something like “Can we accept science as a valid framework for understanding the world while at the same time allowing for some presence of the supernatural in the same world?” There are basically three answers to this question on the market. Two of them are “no.” Fundamentalists, for instance, stake their theology on a highly literal interpretation of the Bible. For them, science and the Bible compete for explaining historical events. Where the two conflict, one must be wrong and for them it must be science. Since the conclusions of science in most of these conflicts are unarguably on scientific grounds, the fundamentalist conclusion is that there must be something essentially wrong with science itself (though seldom is an attempt made to explain exactly what this might be).

The other ‘no’ answer comes from scientist atheists, led around these days by Richard Dawkins. The claim here is that science, by definition, deals with the natural. The natural can be examined, augmented, described, explained. In contrast, the supernatural cannot enter into scientific thinking science the supernatural, by definition, cannot be investigated, described, or explained. Therefore, the two are incompatible. If one accepts a scientific worldview, then one must have a natural worldview. There can be no supernatural.

The third answer is a “yes” and, in its popular form, comes from the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould and has a name: Nonoverlapping Magesteria (NOMA). This answer says that religion and science deal with fundamentally difference domains of knowledge. Therefore, they really have little to say to one another when practiced properly. Science may tell us how the earth came into being, but it can never tell us why it came into being. Religion may tell us about humanity’s purpose in life, but can reveal nothing about our cosmic history.

While there certainly is something truthful about the position of NOMA (science really cannot give us purpose; religion really cannot give us geology), a moment of deeper thoughts tells us that this is an idealization that needs to be refined considerably. Consider Christianity. This faith makes explicit claims about miracles such as spontaneous healing and physical raising from the dead. These claims cannot be dismissed (unlike claims about the age of the earth) because their literal truth is central to Christian doctrine. Without Jesus’ actual physical resurrection, we have no Christianity. Without the miracles of Jesus’ time and those of the Old Testament, we are left with a watch-maker God who does not interact with humans or intervene in their history. While this might be someone’s God, it is clearly not the God of the Bible.

And so, if religion and science really are compatible in some real sense and the Dawkins’ and Creationists of the world are wrong, there must be a fourth answer to the question I started with. I believe that there is and that it is somewhat particular to the Judeo-Christian view of God set out in the Bible. In the Bible, God is depicted as being constantly active in the goings on of his creation, but in two distinct ways. In one way, God is the source of creation – of its substance and of its laws. He is the great Sustainer, holding the sun in the sky. All things flow from him and the laws he set the universe to obey do not discriminate. As Jesus put it, “he causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and his rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). However, in another way, God clearly shows favorites. From amongst all the humans on earth, he chooses particular individuals to carry out particular commands with particular purposes. He has a “chosen” people that both experience his blessings and wrath in exceptional ways. For these people, God is not just the Sustainer, but also the Provider. When they need him, he intervenes (not always in pleasant ways). For them, he is willing to break the rules that he put in place to govern the universe. He can do this because, well, he’s God. And so Pharoah’s army is drowned, the Israelites get manna in the desert, Elijah rides a chariot of fire to heaven, Jesus rises from the dead, and Paul is blinded on the road to Damascus.

The crucial difference between these two ways that God interacts with human history is not really that one is natural and one is supernatural. These terms are, after all, only definable in a circular way (that which is natural is anything that isn’t supernatural; that which is supernatural is that which isn’t natural). The crucial property (what makes something “natural”) is systematicity. Science can only investigate systems: machinery (no matter how complex) that consists of effects and their causes. If something is not systematic, if an action has no cause, if it is a singularity – in that case, science has very little to say about it. What I believe the Bible teaches is that God interacts with the world in some ways that are systematic and sustaining. This is what we typically call “natural” – the principled laws of the universe that can and should be actively investigated, defined, explained. (In fact, I believe the Bible mandates that we do investigate nature, a topic for another essay). However, God also interacts in non-systematic ways, what we typically call the “supernatural” or “miraculous.” Crucially, such events are singularities. They are not consequences of God’s sustaining laws of nature, but the results of God’s direct actions. Since God acts only according to his own will, they have no cause. Being completely unsystematic, they are therefore outside the realm of scientific investigation. This is why scientific studies about the effects of prayer on hospital patients and the like really tell us nothing. God’s direct interventions are not caused by prayer (to think so is a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian teaching about prayer), or by anything else. If they were, they would be systematic and could be predicted.

Notice, however, that I did say science has very little to say about the miraculous. The supernatural, as a collection of singularities, cannot be investigated. However, they can be detected and defined as singularities. Science can examine an event and throw up its hands. In fact, the Catholic church has been actively engaged in this sort of practice for a few hundred years in its process of sanctifying particular individuals. In order to become an official Saint, a person has to have a certain number of miracles attributed to them. These miracles are fully investigated and often include the testimony of scientific authorities. One of the primary things church authorities look for is a complete lack of scientific explanation for the event; if there is even a slightly plausible natural explanation, the church is very hesitant to grant miracle status. (I use this example because the Catholic Church is particularly rigorous about investigating miracles. However, history books, churches, and grocery store tabloids are full of unexplained events. That is not to say that they are all miracles, or even all singularities. However, it is hubris to proclaim that one day science will explain them all in a systematic fashion. Or at least it is a matter of faith.)

So the position of NOMA has been tweaked here a bit and given a religious bias. It is not the case that science and religion address distinct domains in a general sense. Since religion is about God and God is the source of everything, everything is in religion’s domain. However, it is the case that science can only address a specific (and incredibly important) realm of everything, namely systems. It is in the goals of the addressing of this domain that the ‘nonoverlap’ of NOMA comes in: science’s goal is to discover, describe and explain the properties of these systems. Religion’s goal is to ask what these systems might tell us about the nature of creation, God, and human purpose. This is why I believe religion must take scientific findings seriously – we cannot properly consider God’s purposes without knowing the nature of his creation in concrete ways.

When it comes to non-systematic events, however, the goals of science cannot be accomplished. Science must therefore be satisfied with merely identifying the unexplainable. The general goals of religion, however, can still be accomplished for a singularity may still point to truth and purpose.

Are faith and science compatible? Clearly the answer is ‘yes.’ It is no surprise, then, to find that those who answer ‘no’ often have non-scientific reasons for their conviction. Creationists cannot condemn evolution without speaking of the evil moral implications of a Darwinist worldview; Dawkinsians cannot condemn religion without talking about the moral evils that religious zealots have wreaked on society over the millennia. While social questions are perfectly valid for choosing one conviction over another, they have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not science and faith are compatible in an intellectual sense. I suspect that neither party really cares about whether science and faith can really get along, rather that they just don’t want them to.