Science and Religion
This past week there was a good bit of news coverage about Stephen Hawking’s new claim that “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” Hawking has apparently moved to the point where he sees no need to posit a Creator.
I certainly respect Hawking’s intelligence and contributions to science but when he makes such a claim I realize this is simply his opinion. He can no more prove that God was not behind Creation any more than I, or anyone else, can prove that God was. In the end, both conclusions are faith statements. They are what we have come to believe based on our observations and experience.
Ironically, on the same day that news of Hawking’s statement broke I received in the mail a new book by William P. Brown called The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder. In this book Brown seeks to show how theology and science are not mutually exclusive and that both benefit from the other. He recognizes that both disciplines “represent independent fields of inquiry” but that they also have “common points of interest.” One common point of interest is wonder.
In the introduction to the book Brown writes: “Is science really hell-bent on eroding humanity’s nobility and eliminating all sense of mystery? Not the science I know. Is faith simply a lazy excuse to wallow in human pretension? Not the faith I know. What if invoking God was a way of acknowledging the remarkable intelligibility of creation? What if science fostered a ‘radical openness to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.’ The faith I know does not keep believers on a leash, preventing them from extending their knowledge of the world. The science I know is not about eliminating mystery. To the contrary, the experience of mystery ‘stands at the cradle of true art and true science,’ as Albert Einstein famously intoned. ‘Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.’”
I realize that many Christians today see science as the enemy but I concur with Brown that we need both theology and science. I believe that he is on target when he says, “The God in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28) has all to do with the world in which we do indeed live and move and have our being. The world subsists in God even as God remains present in the world. It is, admittedly, a mystery. But through science we become more literate in the mysteries of creation and, in turn, more trustworthy ‘stewards’ of those mysteries.”
Even though I disagree with the conclusion Stephen Hawking has come to, I’m glad that it has gotten people thinking once again about the relationship between science and religion. In my humble opinion, when it comes to “seeing Creation” fully it will take both.
–Chuck
( I took the image of Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake shown above at Denali National Park in early September a number of years ago.)