Ordinary Faith, Ordinary Science

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I keep coming back in these blogs to the perceived conflict between faith and science, mostly because so many people cite it as a reason for having lost their faith.

A common view is that all scientists, at least the most respected ones, are non-believers and that faith and science are incompatible. (And from what I’ve read, I believe some scientists who are not believers disparage scientists who are.)

But some of the most famous scientists in history were believers. They include Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, and Georges Lemaître, physicist and astronomer who first proposed the “Big Bang. (The latter two were priests.)

Science Had Few Answers

All of them lived in the past, and some skeptics might say that, of course, people who lived in past eras were believers because science had few answers to questions about the universe. But many modern scientists are believers as well.

They include Francis Collins, a geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and former director of the National Institutes of Health; Jing Kong, an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Russell Cowburn, professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge University; and Dean Daniel Hastings, head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.

Another prominent scientist who is a believer is William Phillips, a professor at the University of Maryland and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. I recently read an interesting article by Phillips entitled, “Ordinary Faith, Ordinary Science.”

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“I was born into a family that took religion seriously,” he wrote. “We said grace before meals; we said prayers before bedtime; we belonged to a Methodist church and attended church almost every Sunday. …It never occurred to me that religious faith was anything but a natural, ordinary part of life.” But that was far from his only interest.

“As early as I can remember, I was interested in science. At first, I suppose, this was simply the usual child-like curiosity about the way things work. As I became aware that this kind of curiosity could be a profession, I understood that this was what I wanted. By about the age of ten, I knew I wanted to be physicist.”

And Phillips didn’t, and still doesn’t, see a conflict between his faith and his profession.

“Of course, I knew that the stories in the Bible, especially accounts of the creation, were in literal conflict with the scientific understanding of the origins of the universe and its inhabitants. But by the time I could see those conflicts clearly, I had also learned about the variety of literary expression, and the ways in which deep meaning emerges from devices like metaphor, allegory, and poetry,” all literary devices used by the biblical authors.

Wants Good Things for Us

“I believe in a God who wants good things for us, and who wants and expects us to care for our fellow creatures,” he writes. “I believe that God wants genuine, loving relationships with us, and wants us to have such relationships with each other.”

Phillips believes that doubt is part of faith, which we wouldn’t need if we had all the answers.

“I have repeatedly asked myself whether this belief in God is just a psychological crutch or an unreflective acceptance of tradition,” he writes. But he includes those questions among all the things we don’t know, and accepts that such doubts are part of a life of faith.

And he sees the story of the Apostle Thomas, who in the gospel of John expressed doubt about Jesus’ resurrection, as a support for this view.