A Complementary Conflict

Almost a century ago, science and religion came to a showdown in the yard of the Rhea County, TENNESSEE, courthouse. Two of the country’s most accomplished lawyers represented the sides, Clarence Darrow, for science, and former Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, for faith. The occasion was the famous, or infamous, Scopes Monkey Trial, a spectacle that drew about as many SIGHTSEERS and vendors as a state fair.

July weather was so hot that the judge moved the trial outside. Entrepreneurs hawked Coca-Colas, popcorn, and all kinds of monkey paraphernalia. Newspapers from around the country sent reporters, and the trial was one of the first events to be broadcast live on the newfangled device of home radio.

Substitute biology teacher John Scopes had been recruited by the American Civil Liberties Union to test a new Tennessee statute that made it unlawful “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” In a dramatic confrontation, Darrow called Bryan as a witness in an attempt to prove that evolution did not “deny the story of divine creation.” Bryan answered under oath that he believed that both the story of Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and the one about Noah and the ark were literally true.

Despite Darrow’s theatrics, Bryan won the case. Scopes was fined $100 but attracted far more than that in scholarships, job offers, and even a movie contract. The Scopes case never made it to the Supreme Court as opponents of the law hoped, and the law stayed on the books in Tennessee until 1967.

The following year, the Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools; and in 1987, the US Supreme Court voided a Louisiana law that required public schools to teach creationism along with evolution.

But even that wasn’t the end of it all. Attempts to dilute references to evolution arose as late as 2017 in South Dakota and 2018 in Arizona. In 2002, school officials in Cobb County, Georgia, began putting stickers in textbooks declaring that “evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.” Four years and many skirmishes later, they agreed to abide by a federal court order to cease and desist and remove the stickers already in place.

Today many people readily accept Darrow’s point that evolution and divine creation are compatible. They feel as the Rev. Ben Wells does. “I honestly never felt that the two were opposed,” said Rev. Wells, a toxicologist-cum-Episcopal priest who serves as rector of St. Francis in Macon. “As far as I’m concerned, science is just the revelation of God.”

A report from the Pew Research Center shows that mainline Protestants, the group in which Pew classifies Episcopalians, are significantly more likely than any other religious group to accept human evolution. Evangelical Protestants are least likely.

As an associate professor of biology at LaGrange College, St. Mark’s vestry member Dr. Melinda Pomeroy-Black still feels some push-back from students over the e-word, evolution.

Dr. Melinda Pomeroy-Black says she never saw a conflict between religion and science.

Growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, she attended the local Episcopal cathedral with her family and participated in acolytes, choir, and youth activities. As a young adult at Rhodes College and a graduate student at Virginia Tech, she questioned the role of religion and the understanding of God, she said, but with a lifelong love of things scientific, she never saw a conflict between Christianity and science.

Not so for many of her students, who’ve been raised in conservative and fundamentalist congregations. “For the majority of students who come to me, if you say ‘evolution,’ they’re turned off,” she said. “I have to be careful how I present it.”

She wants to make it clear to them that humans didn’t come from apes, she said. But she wants them to understand that animals, humans, and diseases evolve to suit their environments. Now she can use COVID-19 as an example. Its new variants are signs that it is evolving.

As associate professor of biology at LaGrange College, Pomeroy-Black said she’s careful how she presents evolution to students.

Occasionally a student challenges her directly. “I tell them I go to church,” she said. She tells them that she believes science and Scripture can go together, that Scripture was a way for people who didn’t have today’s scientific knowledge to explain phenomena. And, she says, she lets them know there are things she doesn’t understand.

“That’s OK,” she said. “I don’t have to explain everything.”

Other Battles || Of course, evolution is only one battle-flag issue in what occasionally breaks into a war between science and faith. Look at climate change. Scientists from many different disciplines seem to have reached a widespread consensus that humans are warming the planet. NASA, for instance, attributes the global warming trend to “the human expansion of the greenhouse effect,” saying that our cars, agricultural fertilizers, and industries are producing gases that form a shield around the earth and prevent heat from escaping.

But as of a 2015 Pew report, only half of American adults surveyed thought human activity was behind the trend. Protestants in historically Black denominations, Hispanic Catholics, and the unaffiliated were most likely to accept the idea that people are at fault. At the time—and granted things have probably changed in the last six years—only 41 percent of mainline Protestants blamed humans. About a quarter of mainline Protestants said natural patterns were at fault, and a third said they saw no solid evidence that Earth was heating up. Data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in 2020 showed that four in ten Americans believe climate change is a “critical issue,” but the report did not break down the issue by religious affiliation.

From Boredom to Faith || John Haught, a senior fellow in science and religion at Woodstock Theological Center of Georgetown University, outlines three basic approaches to the relationship between science and religion: conflict (they are opposed and irreconcilable); contrast (they are distinct but not in competition or conflict); and convergence (they ask different kinds of questions but can “interact fruitfully”). Haught is the author of Science and Faith: A New Introduction.

Scientific findings, Haught says, “can make a significant difference in how we think about God and the meaning of our lives.”

Dr. Steve Hill might say that religion, or specifically Christianity, made a difference in how he thinks about science.

Hill, British born and Oxford educated in medicine, moved to the United States in 1999 and has headed several pharmaceutical companies. He was an atheist, he says, for the first forty years of his life. “I thought science would explain things and religion was meaningless,” said Hill, sixty-three. “I was a pretty aggressive atheist. To some extent, I was not even entertaining the idea that the Christian faith had anything useful to say. Science had the answers. Any answers it didn’t have, it would get.”

Dr. Steve Hill, an Oxford-educated physician who headed several pharmaceutical companies, spent much of his life as an atheist.

Boredom with his usual music sent him to a different car radio station, where he heard a show called The Bible Answer Man, featuring Hank Hanegraaff, an evangelical Christian who in 2017 joined the Greek Orthodox Church. Hill was intrigued despite himself, and he started studying Christianity on his own.

“After several years of exploration of the Christian faith,” he said, “I came to believe it was true.” To go even deeper, he earned a master’s degree in theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, where he was living at the time.

“I started digging very deeply into where the conflicts were between scientific claims and Christian claims,” he said. “I couldn’t find any conflict between what science claims based on evidence and what the Christian faith claims based on Scripture.”

Like many Christians, he feels no need to accept or defend a literal seven-day—or six with rest—creation but sees the story as a reference to seven eras. “Seven ages fit very well with the history of the earth and the solar system,” he said. But creation, arks, and a Jonah-swallowing fish aren’t particularly important to his faith.

“The be-all, end-all of Christian faith is whether you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” he said. “If it happened, you’d be wise to take notice of the person. If it didn’t happen, then Christianity is irrelevant.”

As an atheist, he said, he feared giving up control to God. “Thy will be done—putting God in charge of destiny, that’s a huge barrier to some people.” But, he said, the “peace and comfort that comes with the Christian faith” far surpasses anything anyone must forfeit.

Hill attributes much of the perceived conflict between science and faith to ignorance. Many scientists know little about Christianity, and many Christians aren’t well versed in science, he said. Consequently, scientists’ knowledge may be overrated. “Just because someone is a world-famous expert on a tiny slice of scientific knowledge doesn’t mean he knows other things,” Hill said. And whereas intricate scientific expertise may be hard to come by, “Scripture is accessible to everybody. You just have to sit down and read it.”

Hill, who attends St. Aidan’s in Milton with his family, said the possibility of an eternal life promised by the Bible should be worth some attention by skeptics. “If that’s true, wouldn’t you rather spend more time exploring that claim? Yet most people spend less time on that than they do on buying their next refrigerator.”

How and Why || Science can often tell how something was done or came about but not why, wrote Dr. John C. Lennox, who is, like Hill, a Brit, and a professor emeritus at Oxford. He uses the example of a kettle and the question “Why is the water boiling?”

It is boiling because heat from a flame is being conducted through the metal base of the kettle and agitating the molecules. And it is boiling because someone wants to make a cup of tea. Both are true. “Scaling up this illustration,” he writes, “we may say that God no more competes with science as an explanation of the universe than Henry Ford competes with science as an explanation of the motor car.”

Elaine Howard Ecklund, professor of sociology at Rice University, has studied the faith of scientists. Her conclusion: that scientists in the United States are more religious than the stereotype.

People among both Christians and nonbelievers have ethical concerns about how far humans should go with such things as genetic modification. The tales, fiction though they be, of Frankenstein’s monster and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are cautionary. But Christians and non-Christians differ little in their appreciation for the ability of science in general and medicine, in particular, to alleviate suffering, according to Ecklund.

Without science, the COVID-19 pandemic would have been much worse, and the Diocese of Atlanta, its parishes, and other institutions would have been at a loss as to how to respond. Vaccines still would be unavailable, and even more people would die.

“God has many facets,” said the Rev. Ben Wells of St. Francis in Macon. “Science is one of them.”

Wells, who is gay, was raised in a conservative denomination and stayed away from church for many years because he didn’t feel he could truly belong. That changed when a friend invited him to St. Bartholomew’s in DeKalb County.

He was working in a laboratory but over time felt the tug of God toward the priesthood. When his company wanted to transfer him away from Atlanta, he refused to move and entered seminary instead.

Despite his early adult years out of the pews, he retained his faith in God and his confidence in science, although the latter shifted somewhat. He remembers in college at the University of Kentucky thinking that, given enough time, science would answer all the questions. “What I didn’t know,” he said, “was that we didn’t know all the questions.”

As for the creation versus evolution tug-of-war that brought about the Scopes trial, he said he gave it lots of thought. Evolution “is how God makes sure organisms can survive,” he said.

And the creation account? “Once I started reading about dinosaurs and fossils, the six-day creation didn’t make sense,” he said. “But that didn’t cause me to throw out the story. It made me look deeper at what our ancestors were trying to get across with that story.”

And what was their point? “God loves us. God blesses us. God blessed us with creation.” Science, he said, is a gift from that God.

“I couldn’t find any conflict between what science claims based on evidence and what the Christian faith claims based on Scripture.”

— Dr. Steve Hill

Those who see science as a complement to faith, not a substitute, are in illustrious company, that of Galileo Galilei. In 1633 he was labeled a heretic by the Vatican for perpetuating the Copernican thesis that Earth is not the center of the universe. The idea, said the Holy See, was “false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures.” Galileo was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life and was also ordered to recite “the seven penitential psalms” once a week for three years. Yet he never gave up his faith in God or his understanding of science.

“I do not feel obliged,” he said, “to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forgo their use.”

Other great scientists not only see no contradiction between science and faith in God but say one is incomplete without the other.

“Science without religion is lame,” said Albert Einstein. “Religion without science is blind.”

“I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science,” said Wernher von Braun.

And, said Louis Pasteur, “the more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the creator. Science brings men nearer to God.”