Educated Christians are often fence-builders. They are hesitant to impose on science’s domain by asking scientists to validate their religious dogmas. They are equally wary of any signal that anti-theists operating under the banner of science will encroach on their spiritual turf.
Hugh Ross is an educated Christian, with a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto. He is also an outspoken anti-evolutionist and creationist. Although he is educated, from a functional perspective, he dangles precariously at the lower end of the spectrum like a moist dingleberry.
Ross is founder of the Reasons to Believe website, featuring the tagline “Where Science and Faith Converge,” as if that ever happens. Like Alvin Plantinga and apologist Jerry Walls, Ross thinks Christianity is in tension only with naturalism (which these guys equate with atheism), not science—or at least their redacted version of science.
Ross, to prove that science and Christianity are mutually compatible, contends that the apostle Paul’s observation (Romans 8:21) of moral decay all around him alludes to the modern thermodynamic principle of entropy. Ross’s blatant misreading of Paul feeds into the popular myth that science and faith are not ultimately in conflict.
They are in conflict. The scientific method is the antithesis of faith. Science prioritizes facts, whereas faith prioritizes sacred texts. If you say that you accept science, but only up to the point where you defer to Scripture or faith, you in fact accept only selected findings of science, not science itself. Embracing science requires applying its methods and practices, irrespective of how you feel about the results.
Believers often seek refuge in the casuistry that, while science is about cause and effect, religion is about a deeper spiritual interpretation. This distinction between causation and purpose resembles that made by Aristotle between efficient and final causes. Stephen Jay Gould granted science its worldly purview, but he ceded a privileged role for religion: “The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and morality.”[i] Likewise, Pope John Paul II declared, “The sciences of observation describe and measure with ever greater precision the multiple manifestations of life . . . while theology extracts the final meaning according to the Creator’s designs.”[ii] According to this view, religion relinquishes to science the explanation of phenomena, while religion illuminates the grand purpose behind the phenomena.
Hogwash. Balderdash. Codswallop. Religion has never voluntarily relinquished to science the explanation of phenomena. The Genesis account of creation is taken by many believers to be a factual description of how the universe came to be.[iii] That makes creationism an empirical claim open to scientific scrutiny and refutation.
Accommodationists recite a roster of luminaries who have engaged prominently in both science and faith, as if that could effect a reconciliation. They point to Isaac Newton, a renowned scientist who formulated the law of universal gravitation, invented a reflecting telescope, calculated the elliptical planetary orbits, and invented integral and differential calculus at age twenty-six. Newton was brilliant. Yet his belief in astrology doesn’t make it compatible with astronomy. His belief in alchemy doesn’t make it compatible with chemistry.
Consider Robert Lee Yates Jr., a lifelong Christian and self-proclaimed family man, a decorated military helicopter pilot and father of five children. He was also convicted of fifteen murders and suspected of eighteen, had sex with his victims both before and after murdering them, and even buried the remains of one of his victims outside the bedroom window of his upper-middle-class suburban home. Does his case prove that serial rape and murder are compatible with Christian precepts such as “love thy neighbor as thyself”? No.
People are inconsistent. They believe incompatible things. They perform actions that are mutually contradictory.
Religion conflicts with science when it misrepresents the Big Bang, evolution, and other matters—topics far afield of religion’s supposed magisterium over the realm of purpose. Even the claim that there is purpose in nature is a scientific claim, open to empirical investigation, as so eloquently argued by the intelligent design movement.
[i] Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999).
[ii] Pope John Paul II on October 27, 1996, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome.
[iii] Megan V=Brenan, “40% of Americans Believe in Creationism” Gallup, July 26, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx