Science and religion can coexist

cody.lowe@roanoke.com 981-3425

Two of my early memories of formal education come from different classrooms.

One was in the first grade of Lower Creek Elementary School in Lenoir, N.C., in the late 1950s. We had no public kindergartens, so that was my first foray into the education system.

Sometime in that year, Mrs. Barlowe drew a huge mural in colored chalk on one of the blackboards. It depicted dinosaurs and prehistoric plants and described the millions-of-years-long processes by which coal is formed. I was fascinated.

About the same time, Sunday-school classes at Lower Creek Baptist Church became structured a bit more like school and we began bouncing questions off our teachers. Are there dinosaurs in the Bible? Was the world created in seven days or over billions of years?

The lesson I learned - at school, at church and at home - was that I didn't have to make a choice between believing science and believing in my religion, specifically the Bible. Peaceful co-existence, to use a Cold War term of the era, was perfectly possible, I was taught.

Seeking the universe

Over the years, I continued to be taught that the lessons of science need not threaten faith.

Mr. Austin, who taught me high school chemistry and physics, had no trouble believing in the periodic table, in the infallibility of Newton's third law (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction), in Einstein's theory of relativity. He also had not the slightest difficulty believing that the Red Sea parted before Moses, nor that Jesus Christ healed a blind man with a daub of mud made with his own spittle.

I thought of those lessons last week while listening to the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne. A distinguished, Cambridge-educated physicist who became an Anglican priest in his 40s, Polkinghorne was the featured speaker for Blacksburg Presbyterian Church's Smyth Lecture series. An expert in quantum physics, Polkinghorne studied forces that most of us can hardly comprehend. It uses extremely complex mathematics to try to predict the behavior and effects of subatomic particles.

Even though it's impossible to fit the "quantum world" into "a purely objective view of the physical world in the classical sense," Polkinghorne has noted, "all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world."

They can do that, he said, because it "enables us to understand, to a great extent, physical experience."

The unnecessary war

Unfortunately, ever since the Enlightenment, science and religion have been engaged in battle.

Scientists eager to shake off crippling superstitions that blocked the pursuit of knowledge often were convinced that the only way to do that was to stamp out religion.

Some pious folk believed that the pursuit of scientific fact that often led believers to doubt the truth of the scriptures, even of God himself, was too dangerous to allow.

The result may be best exemplified in the debate over evolution. That argument always seems reduced to banter between those who assert that only a fool would believe that a god had a hand in the creation of the universe and those who believe that only a fool would deny the plain statement of the Bible that God created the Earth in seven (24-hour) days.

Of course, there have always been those like Polkinghorne - like those who taught me - who see that science and Scripture are actually harmonious; that scientific discovery can reveal, not contradict, the divine intention.

It's important to remember that science and theology answer different questions. "The doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology," Polkinghorne points out, although both serve to inform us.

So, he can believe in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, but also embrace evolution and scientific evidence that homosexuality isn't simply a voluntary condition.