SIM, Tristan James G.

BS ChE 2-1
ENG 201-1 (Rhetoric)
Prof. C. Sabordo
On Science and Faith
The old story is told of Holmes and Watson going on a camping trip. After sharing a good
meal and an excessive amount of liquid refreshment, they retire to their tent for the night. At about
3 a.m., Holmes nudges Watson and asks, Watson, look up! What do you see?
Watson replies, Well, Holmes, I see stars, stars, and more stars.
Holmes says, What does that tell you, Watson?
Watson says, Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and
potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, it
tells me that it is about a quarter to three in the morning. Meteorologically, it tells me that tomorrow
will be probably a beautiful day. Theologically, it tells me that it is a vast universe and were just
a part of the great hole, tiny and insignificant. Why, Holmes, what does it tell you?
Holmes replies, Watson, whats in you idiot? Somebody has stolen our tent!
Modern scientists, more often than not, quickly dismiss the notion of faith in God even at
the slightest mention of the word faith. How ironic that these scientists whose jobs are mainly
to investigate the natural world yet so decline to even glance at the reasonableness of faith. They
can be profound responding to questions about science, knowledge, and everything in between but
still be hollow in answering questions not just of faith but of morality and ethics, questions of right
and wrong, good and bad; aesthetics, questions of beauty and appreciation; and the supernatural,
questions of the spirit and soul. What does it mean to be human? What is evil? Why are there moral
duties and obligations? Why do we feel the need to help those who are suffering? These are the
questions which cannot be qualified in a simple test tube experiment. But first, let me be clear that
I have nothing against science and its institutions. In fact, I owe the development of the scientific
enterprise to late 16th and 17th century scientists who were also serving in the ministry and in the
church. What I abhor is the current stance of todays scientific population. Scientism, the belief
that science is the ultimate source of knowledge and truth, pervades the academies and universities
1

of the last twenty decades. It is also high time for me to junk the popular opinion that faith and
religion are anti-intellectual entities of our society and that faith is belief despite the lack of
evidence. In reality, faith is belief in God because of the good reasons to believe in Him and the
evidence in modern science itself pointing toward Him. However, to prove His existence is
reserved for another time. What I seek to address today is the miscibility of science and faith in
God.
In this growing commotion between science and faith, I shall try to establish a middle
ground. In the first place, why should there be a gap between the two? Is there really a wide,
irreconcilable gap between science and faith, or is this just a propaganda in disguise from the
nonreligious scientific community? Today, I am here to contend that the clash between science
and faith is baseless and utterly destroying itself since science and faith can be of harmony. I will
appeal to history and logical argumentation to convince you that the two are not crossing swords
with each other but rather are exchanging handshakes. I begin by setting up a Darwinian
backdrop of time to further understand the relationship between the two and the plausibility of the
relationship by studying its development through history before the grand march of the apes,
during the time of Darwin, and after the hype of Darwinism.
To begin with, let us examine the relationship between science and faith before the march
of the apes or simply put, before the dawn of evolutionary theory. Around 300 years before
Darwin, science progressed under the financial arm of the Catholic Church. James Hannam,
University of Cambridge philosopher of science, in his book The Genesis of Science, says that the
Catholic Church of Middle Ages paid for monks, priests, and friars to study in a university. This
act of pursuing greater knowledge unique to Christianity is never given credit in the study of
history today. The atrocities of the Church inflicted on innocent scientists during those centuries
are far more given emphasis when, in fact, such atrocities misrepresent the Middle Age-church
and are entirely fallacious and already brought down by modern scholarship.
During the Medieval times, Christian theologians like St. Augustine and Anselm knocked
on the doors of reason to understand the ways of God. Notice later that these men of faith believed
in God because their philosophical reflections logically tell them that there are good reasons to
believe in God. For example, Augustine is famed for the argument from First Cause. Christian
apologist Dinesh DSouza, in his book Whats So Great About Christianity, tells of Augustines
2

argument that whenever you encounter an event A, A has to be caused by some other B. But B has
to be accounted for, and say, B is caused by C. This tracing of causes has to find itself a beginning
or a starting point, because the chain of causes cannot be infinite. To illustrate, suppose you heard
someone say Five, four, three, two, and one. I just finished counting down from infinity! What
would your initial response be? Of course, you would mock the absurdity of counting down from
infinity! Similarly, counting from zero to infinity cannot be accomplished because there is always
another number to count. In Augustines argument, the First Cause is God. God needs to be the
beginning or the starting point of the chain of causes and therefore, God should be uncaused. This
logical framework for belief in God is clearly based on intellect, not on the rejection of evidence.
Many scientists of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were also men of the cloth, that is, some
of them are priests, monks, or devout religious individuals. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo,
Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Pascal, Dalton, Faraday, Joule, Lavoisier, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere,
Pasteur, Maxwell, and Mendel are just some of the great scientists those centuries have produced.
And yes, they are all Christians, and their contributions to science are foundational to the very laws
and theories that keep science working. Their driving force for doing science was to unravel the
fingerprints of God in the orders and patterns of nature. Copernicus, a canon in the Krakow
Cathedral, remarks astronomy as a science more divine than human and regarded his heliocentric
theory as God revealing his marvelous plan for the cosmos. Francis Bacon, a devout religious,
established the problem-hypothesis-experiment-conclusion principle or colloquially known in our
textbooks as the scientific method. It is only rightful for Bacon to earn the title Inventor of
Invention. Lastly, Newton, who was virtually a Christian mystic, never said, Aha! I have
discovered gravity. Therefore, God does not exist. Rather, he said, This most beautiful system
of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent
and powerful being. Those words were from a scientist who held a firm faith in God.
Let us now turn to where the rift between science and faith began to take shape during
Darwins time. Charles Robert Darwin, an English naturalist and biologist, is known for his theory
of evolution, including the postulation that man descended from apes. Because the puzzle pieces
seemed to fit, the scientific population and the general public had accepted his conclusions to be a
fact. However, Darwin, unlike any of the religious scientists I have just mentioned recently, lost
his faith in God. He was a brilliant scientist, but is his deconversion from belief to nonbelief a
3

result of his investigation that God has no room for the evolutionary process? In other words, did
he let go of his faith because of the empirical strength of science? Maybe so, but not completely.
Darwin may have doubted the claims of the Genesis story after a scientific voyage around the
jungles and islands of the world, but he was only critical of the Bible. What made him loosen his
grip from a higher power was the death of his daughter Annie.
Deconversion, during a tough situation, is sometimes a result of a moral and emotional
problem rather than a rational and intellectual one. Darwins questions rose from his soul, and
these are the questions which science seems to be silent about. Why does God allow pain and
suffering? Why does he condone evil? If He is at all omnipotent, why cant He cure my daughter?
A hurting Darwin, in his prejudice to disprove the biblical account of creation, published the On
the Origin of Species in 1859. Much of the book contains assertions supported by science, but a
portion of it also contains reflections on God and faith. University of Heidelberg philosopher and
psychologist Momme von Sydow states in his article Darwin A Christian Undermining
Christianity? that the existence of evil in the world greatly troubled the faith of Darwin. Science
did a minor bruise to Darwins belief, but it was his personal experience of pain that finally dragged
him out of the notion of God. Darwins works, which were partly science and partly a disbelief in
God, nevertheless rocked the science of the age. Subsequently, the first-ever science-and-faith
dialogue involving evolution was conceived between Thomas Huxley, a biologist, and Samuel
Wilberforce, a bishop, in 1860. One does not need to be informed of who rooted for the Darwinian
or the biblical point of view.
Around 160 years later, after the hype of Darwinism, we are still here holding the same
conferences, conventions, and dialogues dealing with the same matter. The gap continues to widen
as more scientists take opposite sides of the debate. Are science and faith really at odds? John
Warwick Montgomery, professor emeritus of law and humanities at the University of
Bedfordshire, denies in his article Science, Theology, and the Miraculous that there is a conflict
between the two. Montgomery says that although faith is associated with miracles, one cannot just
simply forego their possibility although miracles tend to deviate from the regularities we see in the
world around us. Water may not be turned into wine or Jesus may not have walked on water, but
are they impossible if God were to do it? On the other side of the arena, atheist physicist Victor
Stenger, in his book The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason, contended that all
4

evidence points to a purely material universe, hence eliminating the possibility of the soul, spirit,
and even the supernatural. What evidence is he talking about? Surely it is purely scientific in its
entirety. What about the evidence in the non-sciences, say, in sociology or theology? Hasnt
Stenger seen the overwhelming evidence in history and philosophy, or is he keeping the evidences
from pointing to God to satisfy his judgments against faith and religion?
Ladies and gentlemen, let us not succumb to scientists who label themselves as beacons of
knowledge while mislabeling faith as anti-intellectual. In his book God and Stephen Hawking,
Oxford mathematician John Lennox affirms that nonsense remains nonsense, even when spoken
by famous scientists. Let us take for example the statement of atheist neurologist Sam Harris. In
his book Letter to a Christian Nation, he asserts that the conflict between religion and science is
unavoidable. But is the statement The conflict between religion and science is unavoidable is,
in itself, a statement of science? I dont think so. Science cannot prove if there really is a conflict
between religion and science. Can Harris prove to us, by laboratory experiment, that there exists a
gap between the two? I doubt.
Scientists with atheistic presuppositions shoot themselves at the foot at the moment they
step out of their science and try to engage in an arena they never even take seriously, the arena of
faith. The claim that science is the only source of knowledge and truth is intrinsically a statement
of faith! One cannot prove by science if science is the only source of knowledge and truth. It is
simply a leap in the dark. Logical positivism, the belief that all knowledge must be based on
perceptual experience, that is, what is tangible to our five senses, is suicidal. In his essay Logical
Positivism, professor of philosophy Oswald Hanfling contends that if knowledge must be based
on experience, how can the statement all knowledge must be based on experience be a result of
experience at all? Let us not be nave of the absurdity of scientism. Scientism is not a statement of
science but a statement of faith, albeit, a laughable one.
The great gap between science and faith is a false gap. The real clash is more prominent
between two worldviews, namely, a religious worldview and an atheistic worldview. What is a
worldview? A worldview expresses the totality of ones belief about reality. In a religious
worldview, science and faith can cohere, since there are truths which cannot be verified by science.
This is where faith, which is also based on reason and evidence, comes in the picture.

We each have our own opinions and beliefs about our universe, and science is just a speck
in our affairs and explanations about reality. We might not know what worldviews we are holding,
but once we make certain judgments about the world, we are instigating a view of our own. A
judgment of our own. A worldview of our own. A faith of our own.
Thank you and good day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

D'Souza, D. (2008). Christianity and Reason: The Theological Roots of Science. In What's So Great
About Christianity (pp. 87-88). Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Hanfling, O. (1996). Logical Positivism. In Philosophy of Science, Logic, and Mathematics in the
Twentieth Century (p. 207). Massachusetts: Routledge.
Hannam, J. (2011). The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the
Scientific Revolution. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Harris, S. (2006). Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 63). New York: Knopf.
Lennox, J. (2009). God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Updated ed.). Oxford: Lion.
Lennox, J. (2010). God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? Oxford: Lion.
McDowell, S., & Morrow, J. (2010). Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other
Questions Raised by the New Atheists. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications.
Montgomery, J. (1978). Science, Theology and the Miraculous. Journal of the American
Scientific Affiliation, 145-153. Retrieved March 11, 2015
from http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1978/JASA12-78Montgomery.html
Sloan, P. (2014, June 3). The Concept of Evolution to 1872. Retrieved March 11, 2015,
from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-to-1872/
von Sydow, M. (2005). Darwin A Christian Undermining Christianity? On
Self-Undermining Dynamics of Ideas between Belief and Science. Science and Beliefs:
From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 141-156. Retrieved March 11, 2015,
from http://web.archive.org