Hugh Ross, an outspoken anti-evolutionist and creationist, holds a Ph.D. in astronomy and a B.Sc. in physics. Despite his formal education, he dangles precariously at the lower end of the intellectual 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 philosopher Alvin Plantinga, apologist Jerry Walls, and others, Ross thinks Christianity is not in tension with science, but only with naturalism, which he falsely equates with strong atheism. Ross contends that the apostle Paul’s observation (Romans 8:21) of strife and of spiritual and moral decay alludes to the modern thermodynamic principle of entropy. His 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 dogma. If you accept science, but only up to the point where you defer to faith, you don’t accept science. You accept only selected findings of science. Genuinely accepting 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.”[1] 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.”[2] Religion, we’re told, relinquishes to science the explanation of phenomena, while directing its own efforts toward illuminating 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, in the view of many believers, a factual description of how the universe came to be.[3]
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, constructed the earliest known 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, self-proclaimed family man, father of five, seen in home movies saying grace before dinner. He committed at least fifteen murders and was 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 is irreconcilable with science. Faith has no legitimate magisterium. Even the theists’ claim that there’s purpose in nature is a factual claim that is, in principle, open to empirical investigation.
[1] Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1999).
[2] Pope John Paul II on October 27, 1996, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome.
[3] Megan V=Brenan, “40% of Americans Believe in Creationism” Gallup, July 26, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx