Originally published 9 November 1998
“Science Finds God,” screamed the cover of Newsweek not long ago.
“Science Sees the Light,” blurted the cover of a recent New Republic.
The New Republic does not use the G‑word, presumably out of deference to its more worldly audience, but its intent is the same: To tease the reader with the proposition that science has discovered a “higher meaning” among the galaxies and the DNA.
These banner headlines are only a notch above the supermarket tabloids that proclaim, “NASA Scientists See the Face of Jesus on Mars.”
Of course, science has not found God, nor has it seen the Light. Science has nothing to say about God or the Light one way or the other.
Science goes on doing what it has always done: Describing how the world works. If some folks see the hand of God in the way the world works, then well and good. Other folks may choose to see God’s absence.
What the Newsweek and New Republic cover stories are all about is not a scientific breakthrough — the discovery of God’s signature in creation — but rather a renewed interest in matters of knowledge and faith among the general public, including, of course, many scientists.
Unfortunately, the misleading headlines reinforce a mistaken notion of science.
Science is not Truth, nor should it be confused with any particular statement or group of statements about how the world works. Science is not the Big Bang, or evolution, or DNA, or chaos theory, or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — all of which have been used to evoke God’s presence or absence, and all of which are subject to revision if and when new data requires it.
Science is a socially organized instrument for generating reliable knowledge about the world. It relies upon theoretical speculation, experiment, mathematical description, specialized languages, refereed journals, exacting citation of previous work, scientific societies, and university departments. It eschews miracles and metaphysics.
What science seeks is the most concise, most elegant story of the world that explains and predicts what we see when we make exacting, reproducible, quantitative observations.
The proof, of course, is in the pudding. That science provides reliable knowledge of the world is evident all around us, in the astounding technological achievements of modern civilization. Even those religious fundamentalists who regularly excoriate science rely upon the fruits of science in their electronic ministries.
What science doesn’t provide is meaning. It reveals neither God nor his absence. And it is precisely this reluctance to engage in metaphysical or theological speculation that is the source of its success.
The autonomy of science from the churches was hard won by the sacrifices of the Brunos and Galileos and the tenacious scrappiness of the Tyndalls and Huxleys. It is a cornerstone of our confidence in the scientific enterprise.
Pick up any scientific journal and read any article. You will not be able to tell if the author is a theist or an atheist, an advocate of Intelligent Design or a believer in a universe of meaningless chance. There is no such thing as The Christian Journal of Physics or the Atheist Annals of Microbiology.
Last year, researchers Edward Larson and Larry Witham reported in Nature magazine a 1996 survey of the religious beliefs of scientists. They queried 1,000 biological and physical scientists and mathematicians randomly drawn from the 1995 American Men and Women of Science. About 40 percent of the scientists professed believe in God or an afterlife. Roughly 45 percent disbelieved, and 15 percent were doubters.
Interestingly, these numbers have not significantly changed since a similar survey was conducted by James Leuba in 1916.
Any proclamations on the part of the media that “Science Finds God” or “Science Sees the Light” do not reflect any measurable change of religious belief within the scientific community.
What has changed is the willingness of many theistic scientists to talk about their faith. This is partly due to the efforts of the John Templeton Foundation, which for some years has been doling out generous grants to support the study of science and religion.
Whatever might be the agenda of the Templeton Foundation, it is certainly no bad thing that this important topic should be discussed. According to polls, we are a people grievously torn between our way of knowing — science — and our ways of believing.
For example, nearly 80 percent of us believe in miracles, and nearly half of us are open to the influence of the stars in our personal lives, both of which suggest a certain detachment from the scientific way of knowing.
Scientists are represented in all parts of the religious spectrum, from firebrand atheism to belief in a personal God who acts miraculously in the world. Like everyone else, they seek an integration of knowing and believing in their personal lives.
However, the mixing up of science and religion is not a good thing for science. Science has succeeded as a provider of reliable knowledge precisely because it has kept itself separate from the eternally contentious questions of God and meaning.
