One of the more important questions that many people who find it hard to believe in Christianity have is the question of how the Christian faith can be reconciled with science. In our culture and society, science seems to have become the singular source of absolute truth and all other truth claims are, rightly or wrongly, pitted against science. Furthermore, many who are skeptical about the Christian faith find it difficult to even consider the claims of Christianity because it seems to be so anti-scientific. Probably the first place to start is the question of how we make sense of Genesis 1, the biblical creation account. Without going into too much detail, I think the interpretation that is most faithful to the text is what has been termed the Literary Framework View (see the Wikipedia article for a quick overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_interpretation_%28Genesis%29). What this view does is that 1) it most sensitively seeks to capture the literary and theological intent of the author of Genesis 1, 2) it make sense of apparent contradictions and difficulties of the text and 3) it opens up a space where we can begin to see that science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Given this view of the creation account, I think a few further thoughts are important to at least inform a discussion of science and faith.

First, we must admit that both science and Christianity are seeking to know truth but that they do so at different levels, so to speak. Here's what I mean. There are a number of different ways that you can get to know an person. At one level, you can get to know them biologically. You can examine their biochemical contents (which boils down to a couple of dollars worth of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and some bits of phosphorous and nitrogen), their neurological and electrical impulses, their physiological systems, etc. and get a sense of who they are. All of this, of course, is accurate and extremely important information to have about humans. At another level, though, you can get to know someone by going through their diaries and letters and getting a sense for who they are. You can go through old photo albums and talk with people who knew them at various stages in their life and ask what they were like. Here you would get the information of a historian or a biographer. Again, accurate and important information. But the most satisfying and rewarding way of getting to know someone, of course, is to sit down with them over a meal and have them tell you all about themselves: their loves, dreams, hopes, fears, passions, etc. It is there that you will gain knowledge of them on a completely different order. And it is this sort of knowledge that is the most humanly satisfying.

Similarly, when it comes to understanding the cosmos and the created order (which includes homo sapiens), we can know truth at varying levels--all of which are accurate and important and not mutually exclusive. I might go one step further and say that it is only in a personal communication of what all of this is for that we find knowledge that is most humanly satisfying. This, of course, is what the Christian theologians have called "revelation"--that the Bible is God revealing personal knowledge about the Creator and his universe. Stephen Jay Gould, the preeminent Harvard evolutionary biologist (and agnostic) referred to this relationships between science and faith as "non-overlapping magisteria" and once put it this way:

"To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time … : science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists … Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres… Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs …"

Second, I think we need to make the distinction between science as a "physic" and science as a "metaphysic". Science as physics is a powerful tool to explain and explore the natural, physical world. But when science begins to go beyond its sphere of influence (its "magisteria") and begins to be used to function as a metaphysic (i.e. that which is used as an all-encompassing explanation for all of human experience), it begins to fail and groan under the weight of its new role. For example, if we assume science as our metaphysic, then we must explain love and romance (one of the things that we would say makes us most human) as merely the biochemical and neurological response we have when we encounter a member of our species of the opposite sex who provides for us the best prospect of propagating our genetic information into the next generation. While we might agree that, at one level, this may be a true and accurate explanation of what we call "love", it is not the most satisfying. Indeed, our greatest experiences of love enable us to have moments when we transcend ourselves and our self-concern. We would have to say that Shakespeare, Bronte and Austen help us understand human love better than this. The same could be said about human experiences of beauty, morality, purpose and justice. Where Christianity and science seem to conflict is when science is taken not merely as a physic, but as a metaphysic. At that point, however, we are not talking about science qua science, but "science" as an attempted worldview.

Third, from where I stand, I think that we can fit science into Christianity but we can't fit Christianity into science. C.S. Lewis once wrote this on the subject:

"This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else."

It is also important to point this out from an historical perspective. Throughout the history of the human race, there were many very culturally advanced civilizations (e.g. Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Incan, etc.). However, it is interesting to note that the modern scientific age did not grow out of any of these worldviews. Why? Because science required a specific view of the world that was unique to the Judeo-Christian faith. In other explanations of the universe, the physical world is either an illusion, a part of God, or God himself. In any of these worldviews, scientific exploration and discovery would either be a waste of time (an illusion) or sacrilegious (a dissecting of God). It is only when one believes that the world is a contingent (i.e. not-God), rational (i.e. can be understood by the human mind) reality (i.e. not-illusion) that space is cleared for the possibility of scientific exploration--which is uniquely found in the Judeo-Christian faith. This should at least point us to the likelihood of a fundamental compatibility between science and Christianity. Science, it seems, fits inside Christianity because Christianity was the thought world that birthed the scientific endeavor.

While much more could be said on this topic, these thoughts (among many others) have led me to conclude that much of the so-called conflict between science and Christianity is not between science and Christianity at all. It is a conflict between Science-as-metaphysic and Christianity-as-fundamentalism. If, however, we consider science as science and its relationship with a more nuanced Christian faith, I think we will begin to discover that the two need not be mutually exclusive.