The Devil's in the Details

This blog was a long time coming because I just didn't know where to start.

So I typed in various versions of "science and faith" or "Evolution vs Creation" into Google and quickly found my inspiration.

- In the 1600s, Galileo's claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun resulted in the Catholic Church charging him with heresy and banning several scientific texts.

- In the 1800s, Charles Darwin's book proposing the theory of evolution by Natural Selection was hotly debated (though, it was more warmly received by the Church in Darwin's time than it is today).

- In the 1920s, a lawsuit over the teaching of evolution in a public school made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

- Now it is 2010 and after 500 years of irreconcilable differences, it seems that science and faith have finally given up and filed for a nasty divorce. You all have seen it. Every time science and faith get in the same room there is bitterness, distrust, fighting, and name-calling. Sure, we kids have to deal with spending weekdays with science and weekends at God's house, but everybody is happier now, right?

image courtesy of sciencecartoonsplus.org

Ok, so maybe that was a bit dramatic, but you get my point. Can't we all just get along?

I have a theory (yes, another one) that all of this fighting is not really due to irreconcilable differences after all. I think that science and faith "appear" to be in conflict partly because of ambiguous definitions, misunderstanding, misinformation, and various other forms of confusion. Let's face it, nobody can be an expert in religious studies, anthropology, philosophy AND science. Young-Earth Creationism, Old-Earth Creationism, Neo-Creationism, Intelligent Design, Theistic Evolution, Naturalistic Evolution, Uniformitarianism, Catastrophism, Deism, Agnosticism, Atheism..... AHHH!

No wonder we have no idea what anybody else is talking about. Honestly, when are two normal people ever going to agree on the proper definitions of all of those terms? It is this confusion that is the source of the perceived conflict between science and faith. The Devil is in the details, and he is laughing like crazy when we all go into a room on the same team and then fight like enemies.

So, in an effort to spoil the Devil's fun and begin the clarification process, here are some definitions from Dictionary.com:

Science (n): systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

(Note the conspicuous absence of anything spiritual in the definition.)

Faith (n): Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.

(Did you catch that? Belief, truth, value, and trustworthiness are all non-physical and immaterial things. We cannot examine or measure matters of faith by means of observation and experimentation.)

So let's play God for a minute (I promise it won't be blasphemous). If you were going to create physical beings and place them in a physical world, doesn't it make sense to give them a way to learn and understand who you are through that physical environment?

And if you were going to give those physical beings a sense of spiritual awareness, doesn't it make sense that you would also give them a way to understand who you are in that spiritual sense?

Well that's exactly what God did. God gave us observation and experimentation (i.e. scientific inquiry) as a way to interact with our environment, and through it, to learn how incredibly amazing our Creator is. He also gave us the ability to understand spiritual ideas and then presented us with a field guide (i.e. the Bible) that tells us how to deal with spiritual and non-material concepts as we live out our lives within the aforementioned physical environment.

These are the two "books" that God gave us. When we interpreted each of them correctly, these books give us a complete understanding of our Creator.


Next Time:
Next post, I will dive into what I have learned in the last couple of years about the Bible, science, and anthropology as it relates to the Book of Genesis. If you want to read ahead, you can find more detailed writings about these topics on the links to the right (specifically, Essay 2 from the science and faith link).