Worship and research fulfill different roles. While science studies and deciphers the world, faith looks inward to answer questions like ‘what should I be feeling right now?’ When rationality and spirituality deal with separate parts of existence, there’s no conflict, but sometimes they go head-to-head.
EVOLUTION
Theory. n.
1: (Popular) Conjecture or speculation
2: (Scientific) A testable model supported by observable evidence and capable of predicting and explaining phenomena
The basic dispute between religious and scientific thought stems from religious explanation of human origin. Some have responded to biological discovery by trying to reconcile scripture with scientific concepts. An oft quoted passage in the Qur’an states that God created every living thing from water—not a far cry from the theory that life on earth originated undersea. Other suras contain descriptions that resemble human conception and embryological development. Hindsight, and revisions, are both 20/20. Another, much more outspoken school of fundamentalist thought finds evolution incompatible with scripture, and therefore wrong. Intelligent Design is at the forefront of making up an explanation based on a literal reading of religious texts. Though posited as an intellectual alternative to evolution, it cannot be tested. “Blatant scientific fraud,” the Council of Europe called it this June. Fraudulent or not, President Bush talks openly about how his conviction in God supersedes the evidence of his senses.
MEDICINE
Ethical debates are shaped by the technology of their time. The Bible, for example, isn’t clear on gene therapy or stem cells. Christian churches have historically resisted treatments, such as organ transplants, that are now widely accepted. Certain North American protestant denominations did not endorse human organ transplants until the early 1980s, and Japan’s Shinto adherents consider it disrespectful today. Xenotransplants, implanting another species’ organs into a human being, is on the verge of widespread testing. It’s been used to fight AIDS: in 1995, sufferer Jeff Getty had an experimental transplant of baboon bone marrow, in the hopes that the monkey’s HIV-resistant cells would help his own body fight the infection. Getty lived for 11 more years. We’re familiar with the Vatican’s condemnation of condoms and the subsequent spike in HIV infections. Stem cells raise the same question, but more poignantly: every line of embryonic stem cells necessitated the destruction of a miniscule (roughly four-day-old) human embryo. Recently, scientists have created “the ethical stem cell,” culturing cells from adult skin tissue, but the technique is in its infancy and cannot be used on humans.
PHYSICS
Around 150 AD, the Greek-Egyptian Ptolemy devised the most accurate model of the geocentric universe. Intricate but imprecise, it did conform to the literal word of the Bible, so the Catholic Church preferred it until the 16th century, when Nicolaus Copernicus described the basis of planetary motion still widely used today. The Catholic church banned the book until 1835 and sentenced Italian physicist Galileo Galilei—often called “the father of modern science,” to house arrest for endorsing the book. The church apologized for their treatment of Galileo—in 1992. However unscientific, the Vatican has persisted in their role as overseers of physics. After congratulating them for their recent discoveries, in 1981 then—Pope John Paul II warned a group of theoretical physicists not to look any further back in time than the Big Bang, because creation was “God’s work.”
WARFARE
“Thou shalt not kill”
—God
Religion, unlike science, is able to change its story when it hits a fundamental contradiction. When Rome was sacked by barbarians, St. Augustine developed a “just war” theory to reconcile warfare with turning the other cheek. When general relativity and quantum mechanics disagree, only painstaking theorizing, experimentation, and gradual advancement of knowledge can solve the problem. Scripture is subject to interpretation, and can be used to promote or condemn the same action. The Crusades, in which Christians massacred whole cities of innocent people, were waged in the name of a religion that considers “thou shalt not kill” a supreme commandment. On the other hand, science has no inherent morality whatsoever. J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb, turned to the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita when directing the weapon’s development at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer, deeply troubled by his work, took solace in the epic of a soldier questioning the morality of fighting and killing an opposing army. The soldier’s doubts are quelled by the god Krishna, who tells him not to debate his actions: he is a soldier, his kingdom is at war, therefore he must fight. Upon the success of the first thermonuclear test, codenamed “Trinity,” Oppenheimer, steadied by his faith though deeply ambivalent about what he had helped bring into existence, quoted the book as he stared into the first atomic fireball: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
