Mind the gap – Stand clear of the Dawkins!

A short summary of a talk given at St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, earlier this autumn. This article was published in the December issue of the "Pompey Chimes", the newspaper of the Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth in the UK.

What happens when science and faith encounter each other? Is there going to be conflict, are they complementary, or can they coexist happily?

Conflict seems to be the order of the day, especially in attitudes to the formation of the universe and the development of life on earth. On one side there are the atheists, famously represented by Richard Dawkins, who cannot imagine a place for God in the world they observe. Dawkins writes eloquently about the beautiful, elegant theory of evolution and conveys his sense of wonder in books such as “The Ancestor’s Tale”. It’s a pity that he also chooses to rant against a very particular view of religion, tarring us all with the same brush.

On the other side there are a surprising number of people, especially in the USA, who stick to a very strict interpretation of the Genesis creation stories. They have hijacked the term “creationist” to mean something much more than a belief in God the Creator; they are unable to accept the ideas of a Big Bang billions of years ago, or of an evolutionary process by which we share common ancestors with every living thing. Some might try to reconcile belief in a six-day creation with science by imagining that God created everything with a built-in history. To the scientific mind, that idea is at best a bit silly and useless for understanding anything, and at worst speaks of a God who is a massive fraudster. So most creationists end up rejecting the huge weight of scientific evidence for evolution and for a very old universe, and some even believe that there is some kind of anti-God conspiracy in the scientific community. Such ideas unfortunately play right into the hands of Dawkins and his friends. They also show a profound disrespect for the richness of Holy Scripture.

A less antagonistic approach to the debate is to say that the two worlds are complementary. This is a common and attractive idea: let science speak about what we observe in the physical world, and let faith speak about what is spiritual and can’t be explained. There is a big flaw in this approach, though: as science helps us understand more about unseen things, from electricity and magnetism to the way our minds work, the space left for faith in God diminishes. This is the “God of the gaps” principle which Dawkins (along with many Christian writers) ably and rightly demolishes. Even if we accept that the spiritual world is infinite and poses questions that science might never answer, there is something very unsatisfactory about a belief system that retreats from scientific understanding.

One of the reasons for trying to put science and faith into separate compartments stems from a misunderstanding of scientific laws and theories. We talk about a scientific law as if it is something that is “obeyed” whereas it is only really a pattern seen in what is observed. And a theory (such as evolution) is seen as something that is either true or false, whereas it’s really a model that fits the patterns in the evidence we have observed and which can be used to make predictions. If a theory is found wanting, we change it but the old theory hasn’t really become “untrue” – just less accurate or useful. Over the last hundred years or so the ideas of scientific certainty and “truth” have anyway been blown apart by quantum physics with its strong emphasis on probability and uncertainty, and the old Western dividing line between matter and spirit has become more blurred.

Happily, there is a third way, in which science and faith come together. It is to recognize the “immanence” of God in the natural world – God living and breathing through the complexity and beauty of the world that scientists strive to make sense of. It is also to encourage scientists to understand the importance of religious faith in the human journey, and perhaps even more importantly to encourage Christians not to be afraid of scientific theories and endeavours. After all, it would be absurd to imagine that our great God somehow needs protecting from the Big Bang or from the theory of evolution! In the same way as most Christians can accept (even if we don’t understand) a God who can enter into human suffering, we can surely also accept a God who is tightly woven right through every other aspect of his world.