withallyourmind.net

   In response to an earlier post, Two Contradictory Truths, a commenter said:

In fact, many very smart people argue that science and faith deal with fundamentally different kinds of things in very different ways. The contradiction is an illusion; one would not say the English language contradicts the German tongue.

   Rather than just replying in the comments, I thought I would dedicate a post to some of my thoughts on the matter. The person who made the comment was advocating what I would call the non-interacting complementarian model of the integration of science and theology. According to this view, which is the majority view expressed by those who would advocate Darwinian forms of evolution, science and theology are two distinct and non-interacting ways of looking at reality that can each give a full description of that reality without having to recourse to the other. People who take this view will say things like that science and religion are both authoritative in their own domains. What exactly are these domains? According to Stephen Jay Gould, “the empirical constitution of the universe” is the area of expertise of science and “the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives” is the area of expertise of religion.
   This particular model of integration is popular for good reason - this model accurately describes how science and faith interact most of the time. The precise nature of the atonement, for example, arguably has no bearing on how many protons a particular atom has, or vice versa. But the fact that scientific explanations of things like the water cycle work and do not contradict the Christian faith should come as no surprise since Christians have nearly always held that God chooses to work mainly through secondary causation, that is, by using the laws of nature (which, the Christian will say, are upheld by God and based on his own orderly nature).
   The problem arises, however, because Christians, for example, believe that occasionally God acts through direct or primary causation, in ways that cannot be described by the laws of nature. It is in these primary causal acts that science (as commonly defined) can contradict faith and vice versa. For example, Christians believe it is a historical fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Surely, this goes against everything we know of how nature usually works and if science is defined as only that which can be investigated by appeal to natural law, then science would rule that such a resurrection is an impossibility. Science therefore contradicts a key tenet of the Christian faith. Now, here many would say “Oh, well, the resurrection is something we must believe on faith.” But anyone who says this does not understand what the Christian is claiming. The Christian claim is that Jesus physically, empirically, and actually rose from the dead.
   As another example, there is currently a debate in the branch of physics known as cosmology as to whether the big bang was really the beginning of the whole universe or whether certain oscillating models are true. If these oscillating models are correct, then the universe has always existed and there was no beginning, which directly contradicts the Christian belief in creation ex nihilo (from nothing). It also seems true that scientific advances can actually reinforce religious beliefs. For example, the discoveries of the big bang and fine tuning have both been used in arguments for the existence of God.
   What we have seen then is that what I called the non-interacting complementarian model of the integration of faith and science works well in describing the way science and faith usually interact, but that if both science and religion are taken seriously as methods that lead to knowledge, then it is simply wrong to claim that they never can or will interact or contradict each other. Much more can be said on this issue and I plan in the future to use the concepts of God’s primary and secondary causation to show why intelligent design and descent with modification are both equivalent (and scientific) explanations for the development of life. It will mainly be a condensation of what can be found in Stephen Meyer’s The Methodological Equivalence of Design & Descent: Can There Be a Scientific “Theory of Creation”?, for those who don’t want to read the whole 37 or so page article.