In Education, Science and Religion Should Be In Dialogue
Attempting to understand the nature of God has been a millennia-long endeavor.
Christianity is a religion that requires thinking and learning. It also demands we seek wisdom and justice. Yet faith is not simply a private matter, separated away from intellectual pursuits. Indeed, one of the most beautiful things about the Christian faith is how it permeates all we do and learn.
Contrary to the oft-repeated narrative, faith in God isn't divorced from thinking and learning or anti-intellectual. Sadly, we live in a time where many universities have all but abandoned following their old, beautiful mottos that affirmed this truth. Northwestern University's motto comes from Paul's letter to the Philippians: "Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."
Genuine liberal education is concerned with seeking truth. Of course, in our own limited capacity, there are many things we need to know to put ourselves in a position where we can begin to grasp reality. To put it another way, we need several disciplinary lenses to help us see. And as we learn, our learning invites us to look up and to realize that something exists that's higher than ourselves. For Christians, that something higher is the one true God as revealed to us in the Bible — it's the highest thing we can know.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle expressed God as an eternal "unmoved mover" — the final cause of all motion and change; the pinnacle of the great chain of being, contemplating only Himself. One thousand years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury defined God as "a being than which no greater can be conceived." The Westminster shorter catechism of 1647 describes the Christian God this way: "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." Today, most Christians learn what God is like primarily by studying the Word.
Because God is a person, our lives are changed by knowledge of Him. Rather than some cold detachment, studying God is different. We're not just trying to know about Him, we're seeking to know Him. And if we want to find truth, we must know about the God who created and sustains this world that we live in. Yet in our quest for getting a grasp on reality, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that knowing about God is crucially important for living out our lives.
As a chemistry professor, my own modest contribution to this overall project is in the physical sciences. Some people have seen science and religion as being in fundamental disagreement. For the last 25 years, this "conflict thesis" has been championed most famously by the so-called "New Atheist" movement. This thesis believes science and religion are fundamentally, irreconcilably at odds — a view tending to come from people who believe that science is the only way to arrive at trustworthy reality. Science is seen as the sole method for uncovering objective truth, thereby relegating religion (and the humanities, for that matter) to the realm of the personal and subjective — interesting and important in their own way, but not really having anything to do with what is actually true. This view doesn't see other ways of knowing that aren't physical sciences as valid ways of finding answers to very important questions yet places science on such a high pedestal that science itself quite obviously cannot be tested using the scientific method.
One way to understand the relationship between science and religion is to see them as completely separate from one another, while legitimate within their own spheres but not interacting. This could be called the "independence thesis" or what Steven J. Gould called "NOMA," which stands for "non-overlapping magisteria." He uses this as a principle to solve what he saw as the false or unnecessary conflict between science and religion. The idea here is that the object of study of science is the natural world whereas the object of study of religion is God and values.
There's an appeal to this view. After all, science and religion are not the same things. They do have different objects of study, and this view respects both disciplinary lenses — science and theology.
But while science and religion are ways to get at different aspects of reality, surely they have something to say to each other. There have been scientific discoveries that have provided a challenge to religious beliefs that have led to a reinterpretation of scripture. And surely our discoveries about what the world is like tell us something about the character of the God who created it. Frequently, when you talk to scientists who are Christians, this is one of their favorite things about science — whether studying the inner workings of nature or the immensity of our universe, their scientific work connects to their faith in God.
When we discover order and complexity — both on a grand scale and also in microscopic detail — these things bring the scientists to a posture of worship. And so, scientific understanding enhances the kind of natural amazement that we all feel about God's creation. Belief in God as a personal creator who guaranteed the order and rationality of nature is one of many ways in which Christianity influenced the development of modern science. Ultimately, it's neither possible nor desirable to keep the various disciplines — science, theology, art, literature — completely sealed off from one another within their own independent and non-interacting magisteria. As such, it's misguided to treat science and religion as occupying completely separate spheres to try to avoid conflict.
A better way to relate science and religious faith is what we might call the "dialogue thesis." One helpful analogy is to think about different disciplines as attempting to make maps of reality. So just as different maps of a region might represent different information about the region – one might show topographical information, one might show political boundaries, and one might show population density — each represents true aspects of the same region and no contradiction exists between the various maps. In the same way, though science and religion may give us different maps of reality, we need them both to see the full picture.
The nature of our physical universe has turned out to be surprising and non-intuitive. In the final analysis, both science and Christianity help us understand the rich, multifaceted, surprising way that things truly are. Often, what we discover is quite shocking and unexpected. Figuring that out is the exciting project of the liberal arts.
This task must be undertaken with intellectual humility. When we think about complex questions, we often need the perspectives of many disciplinary lenses to help us develop answers. But we must recognize that we might not have all of the answers exactly right, things are complicated, and we all have our own biases.
The work of cultivating a love of learning, a love of God, and a love of your fellow man must be done authentically and deliberately. The motto of Hillsdale College is "Strength Rejoices in the Challenge." The spirit of this statement implores us to pursue our studies with a particular combination of boldness, energy, and enthusiasm.
To be sure, whenever we face significant challenges, there can be times when it feels discouraging and our quest for the truth can feel exhausting or even hopeless. Yet as Christians, we can always look to God for refuge and for strength and we can say with the Psalmist, "I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth."
This text is based on an edited excerpt of the lecture entitled "Faith" given to Hillsdale College students – part of a four-part "Freshman Foundations" series on the purposes of a liberal arts education that all Hillsdale students must attend during their freshman year.
Matthew Young is dean of natural sciences and professor of chemistry at Hillsdale College.
