The Gap between Science and Faith

I had a bit of an epiphany the other night. As those of you who read this page on a relatively-regular basis know, I have a rather deep interest in the recent debate between the theory of evolution and creationism (or its more politically-correct cousin: Intelligent Design), and for the most part, my position has been pretty consistent: teach science in science class. Intelligent design "theory" has no more place in a science class than evolution has in church.

All throughout this time, the one question I never asked, largely because I couldn't see any way of answering it was "why?" Why would people who are otherwise relatively intelligent either deny or ignore the very plain evidence for biological evolution? How can they claim that what they provide is science when just about every claim they make is directly contradicted by scientific data? To take the extreme position of Young-Earth Creationism; namely that the earth (not to mention, the universe as a whole) is actually thousands, rather than billions of years old, one has to completely ignore just about every scientific finding that has been made in just about every branch of the sciences in the last three hundred years. How can they claim to be acting on behalf of a benevolent God, then completely ignore that whole "not bearing false witness" thing She laid out in the book of Exodus?

And more importantly, what on earth makes people dumb enough to listen to them?

Anyhow the realization I came to was remarkable only in its simplicity. People like absolutes. They like for the world to be divided into black and white; up and down; good and evil; us and them. They paint the world in black and white, ignoring in the process that the entire world is a gray area.

So coming back to the intelligent design debate. Basically, what you have is a group of religious fundamentalists whose faith is so weak that they simply cannot accept that a given passage of the bible is not literally true. From their perspective, the Bible is either absolutely 100% correct, or it's 100% wrong. Apart from being a demonstration of unfathomably weak faith, in my opinion; this is also the type of very dangerous thinking that leads to things like crusades, Holocausts and 9/11s.

Once they have people on the hook, though, they start applying the same logic to science. Evolution, they posit, is either 100% right, or 100% wrong. They nitpick little flaws in the theory (real or perceived); with the (oft unverbalized) assumption that unless a scientific theory is 100% right on every single point, then it's completely wrong.

It should be mentioned, critically, that these people claim to be scientists; or at the absolute least, they claim that their approach is scientific; and yet this approach belies a complete lack of understanding of how science works.

The difference between faith and science is that any scientific theory carries with it the implicit assumption that it is wrong. In fact, as soon as a theory is concocted, the first thing you do is start looking for ways in which it is wrong. You design new experiments, you put together new systems, you try new models. In short, the first thing you do once you have a theory worked out is try to prove yourself wrong.

No scientist, to the best of my knowledge, has ever made the claim that the theory of evolution; or any scientific theory, for that matter; is absolutely correct (Although I suppose one might (and I emphasize: might) be able to argue that by calling his theories "laws," Newton was claiming that he was working with immutable truth, but he was a bit of a pretentious asshole; he was a brilliant scientist, make no mistake, but that doesn't make him immune from being a prick). Even as Einstein crafted his theory of relativity, he knew there were parts of the theory which wouldn't be absolutely correct. Even as Darwin put together his theory of evolution, he knew there were some points for which he didn't have evidence. When Hodgkin and Huxley developed the ionic theory of membrane excitability, they knew that the science they were founding would be very different than it was now; and when Frank and Starling came up with the so-called "law of the heart," they knew that it would be added to and changed as time passed. In short, science, by its very nature, changes. It is a living, changing approach to the universe where the assumption is always made that anything we know today may be seen as absurd tomorrow. To try to approach science with the assumption that it deals in a black-and-white world is ludicrous.

And the beautiful irony of the whole situation is this: let's suppose that tomorrow, the theory of evolution is completely disproven. This would pretty much be the ID proponents' greatest fantasy: to see the evil theory of evolution proven incorrect. The irony of the ID position is that if evolution is disproven, that doesn't make intelligent design right. It just makes evolution wrong.

A friend of mine said that trying to mix faith and science was like mixing vanilla ice cream with a spoonful of manure. It won't hurt the manure much; but it'll ruin the ice cream. It's worth noting that he didn't specify which of the two represented which. And he was right. When you mix science and faith; neither one gets the one thing that they both want: answers.