Science and Faith in Opposition

Wow! It has been more than six months since I have posted on this blog. So sad. So sorry. The deadtime hasn't been because my interest in these issues has waned or that I have stopped pursuing them, just that blogging takes time and that is something I've been in short supply of lately! Lately, though I have stumbled upon what I think is a profound insight into this whole science vs. faith conversation and I wanted to share it.

Next month, I have been invited to give a lecture in this lecture series at the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, FL and have been thinking a lot about what I will say. My title is, 'What makes us human? Two perspectives from linguistics.' I am going to talk about how linguistics is uncovering what makes us human from a biological/cognitive perspective and also talk about how the current threat to linguistic diversity on our planet is not only a threat to languages, but a threat to what makes us human as well. I also plan to talk a little bit about the nature of science and faith a bit, and in thinking over these things, I realized something. Now it seems obvious to me, and perhaps it will be to you as well, but I think in all of my efforts to make science and faith compatible in so many ways, I missed it. The insight is this: science and faith really are in opposition. At the methodological level, they cannot be reconciled.

Here is why: science, at its core, is about taking power over something one did not previously have power over. When we study something new, scientists take that thing out of its natural environment and put it in an environment in which every factor that can be controlled is controlled. In fact, we even call them 'controls!' Science is about gaining understanding, a noble undertaking, but its method is essentially force and manipulation. Science is a form of violence.

But this is not how faith operates. Indeed, it cannot be how faith operates. Faith, at its core, is about giving up one's power over everything and giving one's self up to the mysterious flow of God's infinite being. When you have faith in something, you give yourself over to it. You let go. Faith also leads to gaining understanding, but through service, submission, and suffering.

The fundamental opposition here cannot be denied, nor can, I believe, the conclusion that science is fundamentally un-Christian. That statement sounds extreme, but all I mean by it is that the nature of the scientific method is inconsistent with the nature of being that Christianity teaches. This is not to say that doing science is evil (I'm a scientist myself, and one who doesn't plan to quit his job anytime soon) and I'll be the first to tell you about all the wonderful things science has given us. Science can be very good. But it can never be Christian.

All of this has been very helpful to me in understanding a lot of the conversation surrounding science and faith, realizing that much of the confusion in that conversation results from misunderstanding of the nature of science and faith. Atheist materialists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennet claim that modern science leaves no academic or cognitive space for faith, not realizing that in doing so they have themselves subscribed to a faith in science, submitting their wills and allowing themselves to be carried away by a method of gaining knowledge by force. Proponents of Intelligent Design and other versions of Creation Science claim that knowledge gained by science can provide evidence that an intelligent creator exists, but in doing so they too have put their faith in science and the God they discover is so small that one could not possibly have faith in him. They cannot seem to see that if science could discover God then science would have power over God since this is the only way science discovers anything. But God is all-powerful and all-victorious. He doesn't submit to anything, least of all the scientific method.