Science and Religion

There is a new spirit and attitude regarding the relationship between science and religion. Today, more and more scholars, including leading scientists, theologians, and philosophers are characterizing the relationship as complementary and interactive. This positive, complementary, and interactive view has not always been the dominant view. In fact, throughout most of history, two alternative views have prevailed. The first view, more ancient, conflated science and religion such that the two were indistinguishable. We see this in the medieval designation of theology as the “queen of the sciences.” We see this even more clearly in primal and ancient religions, which provided religious explanations for natural events—such as the ancient Greeks’explanation that the sun moves across the sky because it is pulled by Apollo and his team of horses.

The Enlightenment Era and the development of modern science during the 18th and 19th centuries brought a new dominant view of the relationship between science and religion, one that saw science as replacing religion and one that promoted a secular faith in reason and in a scientific approach to reality. This new dominant view was reinforced by the dazzling array of explanations that developed out of scientific inquiry, explanations of everything from how leaves make use of light to how spiders spin webs, to how babies learn a language, to how stars are born and die. The enormous power of modern science both to explain the universe and to support the development of new technology made religion seem obsolete—a holdover from primitive times, a crutch for those who need comfort, and a poor and childish substitute for scientific reasoning.

However, a number of 20th-century developments both within science and within the philosophy of science changed our view of science—by emphasizing that science and religion have much in common. The newer view shows just how much science, like religion, is influenced and defined by worldviews and frameworks for thinking, by faith in what cannot be observed, and by value judgments.

Nowhere is this newer view of science shown more clearly than in the current talk of paradigms, models, and metaphors. Philosophers of science have shown that modern science has developed not so much by adding new facts as by replacing old paradigms. For example, the universe viewed as a giant machine worked well as a paradigm, model, and root metaphor during Newton's time and long thereafter. However, when physicists turned their attention to explaining the structure of light and other incredibly fast-moving phenomena, a different paradigm, model, and root metaphor were needed.

In a similar vein, scientists and philosophers of science have come to stress how science, like religion, relies on faith in what cannot be directly observed. For example, without directly observing electrons, scientists have used the atomic model as an invaluable conceptual tool for explaining reality.

Finally, scientists and philosophers of science have shown how much values and value judgments influence what questions are asked as well as influence how scientists observe, categorize, measure, and explain. Perhaps the most infamous example is that of the scientific racism that developed during the 19th century and continued to develop well into the 20th century. Thinking they were merely describing the facts and measuring objectively, 19th- and 20th-century biologists and social scientists defined and measured human intelligence in ways that overvalued how they themselves thought and undervalued how groups different from themselves thought. Values, not facts and objectivity, guided their research on intelligence to produce a distorted and damaging view of human diversity.

...