LENGTH: 950 words

Science in search of God; Face To Faith
Denis Alexander

When I worked at the American University Hospital, in West Beirut, during
the Lebanese civil war, shells often whizzed over our heads. Minutes later,
a salvo would be returned in the opposite direction, and the first
casualties would be rushed into emergency. We usually had no idea why the
shelling had started, nor why it stopped.

Being a Christian in the scientific community is somewhat analogous. Now
and again, some Texan creationist lobby will make a fresh attempt to ban
the teaching of evolution in schools. Amid scientific howls of protest,
Professor X writes another book claiming that science supports an atheistic
worldview. As the shells are lobbed between the extremist camps, the public
impression that science and religion are at loggerheads is reinforced.
Meanwhile, the silent majority - those many scientists who hold to
religious faith - look on in wonder. Generally, we are simply too busy to
engage in such debates. In my case, however, I got so fed up with the
antics of the extremists that I ended up writing a book - Rebuilding The
Matrix: Science And Faith In The 21st Century (published this weekend).

The fact of the matter is that when it comes to religious faith, scientific
communities reflect the societies in which they are embedded - as for
nearly a century, 40% of American scientists believe in a personal God who
answers prayer. The level of belief is highest among practitioners of the
hard sciences, such as physics and geology, lower for the soft sciences,
such as anthropology. The UK has organisations such as Christians in
Science, and UK church attendance among science students is proportionally
much higher than for the arts. There appears to be a selection pressure
operating here: people interested in science are more likely to become
Christians, and/or Christians are more likely to study science than the arts.

Those who have studied the history and philosophy of science will not find
this surprising. Modern science was incubated in a theological womb,
emerging in a form recognisable by today's scientists during the 16th and
17th centuries, an era when new ideas failed to flourish unless
theologically validated. Many founders of today's scientific disciplines -
Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Ray, Newton, Priestley, Maxwell and Faraday - drew
attention to fruitful interactions between their science and their faith.

The idea that science and religion were historically always at loggerheads
- the so-called conflict thesis - became popular during the late 19th
century, but is no longer considered a valid, overarching model for the
history of science-faith interactions.

Contemporary affinities between science and faith no doubt also arise from
the his torical framework of the three great monotheistic religions,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Unlike their colleagues in the humanities,
scientists remain firmly wedded to the idea that some things are right,
whereas others are wrong. No scientist would sweat long hours in the
laboratory for low pay unless they believed that their hard-earned results
reflected a reality that was built into the properties of matter. The
reality remains the same, irrespective of the language or cultural milieu
in which it is described.

Likewise, the monotheistic religions make truth-claims about history and
human nature that can be assessed by a review of the evidence and rational
discourse. In talking about scientific data one moment, and the evidence
for Christian faith the next, there is no need to change one's mind-set.

None of these explanations for the contemporary affinities between science
and faith should be taken as justifying the use of science in arguments
for, or against, religious belief. Attempts have often been made to utilise
the prestige of scientific theories to prop up particular personal
ideologies. Darwinian evolution has been used to justify capitalism,
communism, racism, and a number of other isms'. This is an abuse of
science; evolution is an excellent theory to explain the origins of
biological diversity, but it has little or no religious significance - it
can be placed equally well within an atheistic or theistic context.

The big theories of science - like evolution and Big Bang cosmology - tend
to become encrusted with all kinds of religious and scientific barnacles.
But these should be scraped off to let the theories do what they are good
at doing - and no more. For the Christian, God can bring about his
intentions any way he chooses, and all that scientists can do is try to
describe how he did it.

For all its explanatory powers, science is very limited in the kind of
questions that it can address well: how things work, problems amenable to
quantification, and deriving general laws about the properties of matter.
But many types of human knowledge do not make their way into scientific
journals - such as aesthetics, ethics, history, political theory and
ultimate questions ( Is there a God?', Does life have any meaning?').
Scientists are as interested in them as anyone else. But they do not
comprise part of their science.

Science continually throws up questions it is unable to answer: ethical
questions, questions about the application of science, questions about
human identity. Christian theism provides a matrix which affirms the
validity of scientific knowledge, while undergirding human values at a time
when scientific discoveries for many people may appear threatening and
dehumanising.

Dr Denis Alexander is chairman of the molecular immunology programme at the
Babraham Institute, and a fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He
edits the journal Science and Christian Belief

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