Must Science and Religion Conflict?
Please be patient as I clarify the question. (I have learned the hard way, mostly through blogging, that terms mean different things to different people and I cannot assume a universal, let alone uniform, meaning of any word.) Must modern science and Christian theism be viewed as enemies?
Now, why the question? It’s really a very old question and has been very much discussed at least since the days of Galileo. Perhaps one pinnacle of the debate about the question was Andrew D. White’s two volume work A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). White presented a narrative of never-ending conflict between especially the physical sciences and organized Christianity.
Many intelligent and educated modern Christians appeal to something like Galileo’s solution to ending the conflict by appealing to his main points in his famous “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615). There Galileo explained to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany that scientific observation and experimentation trumps doctrine and official church teaching in matters of cosmology—the study of the physical universe and its workings. Ultimately, Galileo’s point was that when conflict arises between them, and the results of scientific investigation are sound and settled, theologians and church officials must reinterpret the Bible and church teaching to fit with it. This was perhaps the first major assertion of the autonomy of modern science from “Christendom” (to use White’s word).
This has become relatively settled opinion among intelligent, educated modern Christians on both sides—the physical (and one might add the human) sciences (what the Germans call Wissenschaft) and theology. Jumping ahead many years from Galileo into the twentieth century, Swiss theologian Emil Brunner argued in Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology (1927) that there can be no real conflict between Christian theology and any proven scientific claim. Surely he had in mind the solution offered by Galileo.
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In 1954 evangelical theologian Bernard Ramm, who had a degree in science, published his anti-fundamentalist polemic The Christian View of Science and Scripture where he argued along the same lines as Galileo and Brunner—that Christian theology and Bible interpretation must be adjusted to fit the “material facts” of science—but only when they are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. For him, modern science had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the earth is millions of years old and was not created in six days of twenty-four hours each in 4004 B.C. as Irish bishop James Ussher asserted in the 17th century. Ramm argued against the typical fundamentalist model of conflict between modern science and Christianity while stopping short of embracing everything modern scientists claim to have proven.
Ramm’s book, now widely forgotten but still very influential, marked a turning point in the separation between American fundamentalism and American evangelicalism. So-called “mainline Protestants,” and to a lesser degree the Roman Catholic Church, had already taken Ramm’s route to ending the conflict. Ramm’s polemic was significant in going against what he saw, anyway, as fundamentalism’s obscurantism with regard to the settled “material facts” of science. Ramm was following Galileo’s strategy laid out in his Letter centuries earlier. Ramm’s view of the matter was largely embraced by the so-called “neo-evangelicals” who wanted to distinguish themselves from fundamentalism. (Around the same time Fuller Theological Seminary president E. J. Carnell called fundamentalism “orthodoxy gone cultic.”)
Ramm argued that modern science has proven Ussher wrong about the age of creation, but he prudently stopped short of endorsing even theistic evolution. That would have been going too far for many neo-evangelicals in the 1950s. He embraced and proposed what came to be called “Progressive Creationism” as a settlement between modern evolutionary theories and conservative Christian theology. This became the standard (not universal) view in many, perhaps most, neo-evangelical colleges and universities in America for decades.
So what was happening outside of fundamentalism, which was generally speaking hostile to modern science, even omitting any study of it from their Bible colleges, and outside of neo-evangelicalism—among so-called “mainline Protestants” in America? Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a tendency developed within mainline Protestantism in Europe and America to redefine Christianity, the “essence of Christianity,” to make it impossible for it to conflict with modern science. Is that what Galileo intended? It’s difficult to say. Perhaps.
How did this take place? Beginning especially with nineteenth century German liberal Protestant theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl influenced modern mainline Protestantism to reduce Christianity either to spirituality without cosmology or ethics without metaphysics. (In the end, those “withouts” end up being virtually the same.) To a very large extent, mainline American Protestantism still interprets Christianity and theology in such a way that there can in principle be no conflict between them and modern science. The two exist in water-tight compartments. Nothing the physical sciences can prove can conflict with theology because, as Galileo intimated theology is not at all about how the heavens go but only about how to go to heaven. Of course, many mainline Protestant theologians don’t take the part about “how to go to heaven” literally; what they mean by the maxim is that Christian theology is about how to live a good life here and now. For most of them, “going to heaven” is guaranteed for everyone (universalism).
Now to introduce a bit of autobiography into these musings. When I was in high school many years ago (1960s) I too two classes in biology. One was taught by an agnostic (who happened to be Baptist) and the other one was taught by an evangelical Christian (who happened to be Reformed). The agnostic instructor tended to interpret religion and science as entirely separate—they cannot conflict because they are about entirely different things. For him, the Bible has nothing at all, whatever, to do with cosmology or science; it is only about living a good life (ethics and perhaps spirituality). He became quite hostile towards me when I dared to ask him whether “natural selection” adequately and completely explained the emergence of consciousness and conscience. He refused to discuss the implications of natural selection, which he taught as proven fact and the scientifically settled explanation for human existence, for Christianity. Outside of class I asked him about the Christian doctrine of the imago dei and how he reconciled that with his belief in natural selection. He refused to discuss it. Basically, I detected, he took a “two truths” approach to these matters. In church he believed one thing while in class he taught something that contradicted that. I still am not sure he ever thought deeply about the conflict.
The other biology teacher taught us that nothing proven in modern biology contradicts basic Christian doctrines such as the imago dei in humans. He very carefully taught us a version of theistic evolution—that God guided and directed biological evolution so that human life emerged as a species especially and even supernaturally gifted with abilities other species do not have. When I pressed him a bit on the matter he admitted that, at some point in the evolutionary process, God intervened in a way beyond science’s ability to explain without appealing to a creator being. So I concluded that he was attempting to reconcile “progressive creationism” with “theistic evolution” and stood somewhere between them. But at least he was not separating Christianity into a water-tight compartment without any metaphysics, ontology or cosmology.
Today, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the conversation goes on—mostly among relatively conservative Christian theologians, scientists and philosophers. To my way of thinking, anyway, the most important, ground-breaking turn in the conversation comes from Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga who strenuously argued in Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011) that evolution itself, when fully understood, undermines (or even contradicts) naturalism. In other words, for Plantinga, generally considered an evangelical Christian, theistic evolution is true (a big adjustment to traditional Christian beliefs about the creation especially of human beings) but logically incompatible with naturalism which is often smuggled into the teaching of evolution by secular (and even some religious) scientists. (I won’t even attempt to summarize his argument here; it is somewhat subtle and complicated and I have explained it here before—as best I can.)
Today the conversation, even debate, about modern science and religion within relatively conservative Protestant circles, tends to focus on the distinction between science, as a method, and naturalism as a philosophy. Plantinga rightly argues, in my estimation, that the only real conflict between Christianity and modern science lies in modern scientists’ tendency to adopt naturalism as a metaphysical philosophy about reality (viz., nature is all there is). The problem is that naturalism is not provable by scientific methods. And yet, in many public schools and even many religiously founded colleges and universities, the two—“science” and “naturalism”—are taught as inseparable. In other words, an unproveable philosophy is subtly smuggled into the teaching of science such that students are brainwashed to believe that being modernly scientific requires embrace of naturalism. It does not. In fact, I agree with Plantinga that there is a fundamental conflict between them. Naturalism, correctly understood and applied, undermines science itself.
A major problem from the “other side”—conservative Protestantism—is the rise of fundamentalism, especially in America, which tends almost always to be hostile to modern science. There is no reason to be except when science is based on naturalism—which it does not have to be. Yes, to be sure, “methodological naturalism” is essential to modern science in the laboratory and in the fields of research. However, metaphysical naturalism is not necessary to methodological naturalism.
The answer to the question that forms the title of this essay is “no.” Science and religion must only conflict when they transgress their boundaries—which is not to say they must exist in water-tight, separate compartments with religion having nothing to say about cosmology and science having nothing to say about spirituality. Stripped of unnecessary, even alien, influences, science and religion, even conservative Christianity, can be harmonized and can even learn from each other. The term for this process might be “critical correlation.” It is a constructive and integrative conversation between non-naturalistic scientists (or at least scientists who do not confuse naturalism [except methodological naturalism] with their scientific endeavors and conclusions) and Christian theists who are open to adjusting traditional Christian beliefs in the light of “material facts” of science. A major problem is that this conversation is relatively rare today.
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