There are a lot of phrases uttered by fundamentalist Christians that enrage me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been having a perfectly pleasant conversation with someone and he or she comes out with something like, “Well, you know, ‘science’ [makes air quotes] is just another religion.” I can actually feel my blood pressure rising just typing that sentence.
The difficulty with such a proclamation is that, regardless of its veracity, it is an effective conversation stopper. The person who says it is not interested in continuing to discuss the issues. People who use this tool either believe themselves to have “won” the imaginary battle (“You can’t argue with my opinion, therefore I win!”), or else they fear they are in danger of losing (“You have valid points, so I’m going to pretend they don’t exist!”). The good news is that I simply don’t engage these people anymore, at least not in person. The bad news is, it still gets to me.
Aside from that, “science is a religion” isn’t even a true statement. It’s filler, a way to avoid having to make a reasonable case for your point of view. Science has never been, nor can it ever be, a religion. It’s an academic discipline. While some people may use science to bolster their religious or non-religious beliefs, in and of itself it is neither. Calling science a religion is like calling math or literature or medicine “religions.” Saying that science is good or correct right up to the point where it disagrees with my religion is equally silly. Replace the word “science” with another word: “I think Hemingway’s works are well-written, except for the parts where they doesn’t jive with my faith. Then they’re badly written.” Just as Hemingway’s works don’t suddenly develop poor grammar, spelling, and syntax, scientific discoveries don’t suddenly become false because of our interpretation of the Bible.
Science is meant to discover things about this physical world. We learn about the past, observe the present, and make predictions about the future. It’s meant to answer questions about what has happened, is happening now, and will happen someday. Science leads us to who, what, where, when, and how. The one question science can’t answer for us is the big Why. And that’s where faith comes in.
That’s not a perfect analogy. After all, we do discover why things happen in the sense of one thing leading to another, cause and effect. That’s not what I mean. I mean the really significant whys in life: “Why is there life on earth? Why am I here? Why do bad things happen to good people?” Why is the mystery of this life and the next. The unknowable. The unexplainable. The things that are left when we strip away all other reasonable possibilities.
The two are not incompatible. No matter how much information we have from scientific discoveries, there will always be mysteries. We who have faith should not feel threatened by science, as though this information is going to lead people to conclude there is no God. I have yet to meet anyone who stopped believing in God because the scientific evidence against God’s existence was too strong. I suppose such people exist, but I’ve never met them. The few people I know who have left over the disagreement between faith and science left because of their church’s refusal to acknowledge science, not because God was proven false.
I don’t mind if you want to disagree with the conclusions drawn by scientists. I may think some of the disagreement is foolish, but everyone has the right to his or her own point of view. Just don’t call it a religion. Aside from being untrue, you’ve also just told me that my Christian faith is impossible because I do agree with the conclusions. It’s time that Christians stop seeing science as the enemy of faith.
