God Bless You Charles Darwin: Reconciling Creation with Evolution
I shall describe four main positions. One says the Bible provides the facts and science is mere human theory. Another says science provides the facts and the Bible is mere belief. The third is the dualist compromise: science is right about the scientific facts and religion is right about the religious facts, so we need to keep the two separate in their own independent spheres.
These three positions share a view about facts which philosophers call positivism. The idea is that a fact is a truth which has been completely proved so we’ll never need to question it any more. It’s secure, in the bank. As such, facts are completely different from opinions, beliefs and theories.
The fourth position is that neither science nor religion can provide complete or certain facts. This is the position I shall defend. For 200 years scientists thought Newtonian physics was absolutely true fact. Then Einstein came along. What had seemed certain was only partially true. So according to this fourth position, when scientific leaders disagree with religious leaders about something, we don’t settle it by general theories about science and religion; instead we allow that either may be mistaken and we judge each issue on its merits. Full text...
Good religion, good science
The recent Hay Festival included a debate between three scientists about religion. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, argued that science is under attack and needs as many allies as it can get. 'If we give the impression that science is hostile to even mainstream religion, it will be more difficult to combat the kinds of anti-science sentiments that are really important'.
This is hardly a recommendation of religious belief; but it was too much for the other panellists. Richard Dawkins thought it risked 'buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of fate rather than because of evidence'. The evolutionist Professor Steve Jones, describing some of his students from Islamic backgrounds, complained that 'There are parts of science they will not accept. That means that, in their early lives, they have been told deliberate lies by people who, I'm sure, know they are deliberate lies. I don't care how charming they are, I don't care how pleasant they are, these people are evil'.
Now we're getting into the spirit of it. Why evil? Because they do not accept the facts of science. This view is the mirror image of the argument that evolutionists tell deliberate lies because they can read the Bible and see for themselves that evolution is untrue. Full text...
Science
The relationship between science and religion continues to be hotly debated. These
pieces argue for a reconciliation between the two.
<< Talk at St Bride’s Church Liverpool on Darwin Day, 12th February 2009
<< Response to a debate at the 2007 Hay Festival. Published in Signs of the Times
July 2007.
Genesis 1 and the presuppositions of science
This article argues against six-day creationists and anti-evolutionists. It focuses
on two principles which are essential presuppositions of all science, namely the
order and comprehensibility of the universe. Both became accepted parts of Europeans’
mental furniture only after millennia of theological debate. Central to that debate
is the first chapter of Genesis. Today it is often treated as the jewel in the crown
of anti-evolutionist and six-day creationist theory. Historically, on the other hand,
it played a major role in establishing these two principles on which science still
depends. Read the full text.
<< Chapter of the book Intelligent Faith, edited by John MacDonald Smith and John
Quenby, O Books, 2009.
