As you are driving on Interstate 5 just north of downtown Seattle, a home with purple floor-to-ceiling windows stands out prominently. I noticed it again the other day: it’s on a hilltop adjacent to the freeway, bearing large letters on a clear glass display: “Science is God.” I wonder how many progressive Seattleites have driven by, looked up at the sign, and said with a touch of pride, “I already knew that!”
The sign is associated with an outfit called the Universal Life Church. Their mission: “To reveal our universe and learn the true meaning of our existence, we must recognize that for all of us as a human species, Science is God.”
Well, that’s one way of thinking about the relationship between science and faith.
“Endowed by Our Creator”
Another way was described at this year’s Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, with the theme, “Endowed by Our Creator.” The conference included scholar and CSC Fellow Nancy Pearcey, who spoke on a very good question: Why does intelligent design matter? A video of her presentation is up now.
Her answer was threefold: ID matters because of the ways that awareness of God’s design of humanity has, through the vehicle of Christianity, influenced Western culture. She cites advances — genuine progress — in thinking about slavery, about women and children, and about science itself.
Pearcey concludes with a statement by the late sociologist Rodney Stark, from his book How the West Won. What is the very best confirmation of design in nature? The answer, according to Stark, is the existence of science:
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that they found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.
Why Should Nature Be Cooperative?
In other words, if you were to imagine looking at the world with truly fresh eyes, not knowing if it bears an imprint of design, then you would have no immediate reason to expect human beings to be successful in seeking out nature’s laws. Maybe they would succeed in the quest. Maybe they would fail. Why should nature be cooperative in allowing herself to be understood? Why should men and women possess the power of understanding?
If you were then, and only then, introduced to the principle that a designer imprinted humans with his own divine image, including the ability to reason, that would tell you that the search for scientific truth was likely not a hopeless endeavor. Instead, it could be a way for humans to imitate their creator — by exercising the rational mind that God gave them.
Every success of science is, then, not evidence against faith — or as geneticist James Watson put it, “Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely.” The opposite is the case. To adopt Watson’s formulation, “Every time you understand something, religion becomes MORE likely.” Watch: