Does Science Threaten Religion?

Source: Sociology 11th edition, John Macionis. P. 520 based on Gould (1981), Huchingson (1994), and Appleborne (1996)

About 400 years ago, the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo (1564-1642) helped start the Scientific Revolution with a series of startling discoveries. Dropping objects from the leaning tower of Pisa, he discovered some of the laws of gravity; making his telescope, he observed the stars and found that Earth orbited the sun, not the other way around.

For his trouble, Galileo was challenged by the Roman Catholic Church, which had preached for centuries that earth stood motionless at the center of the universe. Galileo only made matters worse by responding that religious leaders had no business talking about matters of science. Before long, he found his work banned and himself under house arrest.

As Galileo’s treatment shows, right from the start, science has had an uneasy relationship with religion. In the twentieth century, the two clashed again over the issue of creation. Charles Darwin’s masterwork, On Origin of Species , states that humanity evolved from lower forms of life over a billion years. Yet this theory seems to fly in the face of the biblical account of creation found in Genesis, which states that “God created the heavens and the earth,” introducing life on the third day and, on the fifth and sixth days, animal life, including human beings fashioned in God’s own image.

Galileo would certainly have been an eager observer of the famous “Scopes monkey trial.” In 1925, the state of Tennessee put a small-town science teacher named John Thomas Scopes on trial for teaching Darwinian evolution in local high school. State law forbade teaching “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” and especially the idea that “man descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. His conviction was reversed on appeal, so the case never reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Tennessee law stayed on the books until 1967. A year later, the Supreme Court, in Epperson v. Arkansas struck down all such laws as unconstitutional government support of religion.

Today-almost four centuries after Galileo was silenced-many people still debate the apparently conflicting claims of science and religion. A third of U.S. adults (and also many church leaders)say that the Bible is the literal word of God, and many of them reject any scientific findings that run counter to it (NORC, 2003: 157)

But a middle ground is emerging: Half of U.S. adults (and also many church leaders) say the Bible is a book of truths inspired by God without being correct in a literal, scientific sense. That is, science and religion are two different ways of understanding that answer different questions. Both Galileo and Darwin devoted their lives to investigating how the natural world works. Yet only religion can address why we and the natural world exist in the first place.

The basic difference between science and religion helps explain why our nation is both the most scientific and the most religious in the world. As one of the scientist recently noted, the mathematical odds that a cosmic “big bang” 12 billion years ago created the universe and led to the formation of life as we know it is even smaller than the chance of winning a state lottery twenty weeks in a row. Doesn’t such a scientific fact suggest an intelligent and purposeful power in our creation? Can’t a person be a religious believer and at the same time a scientific investigator.

In 1992, a Vatican commission concluded that the church’s silencing of Galileo was wrong. Today, most scientific and religious leaders agree that science and religion represent important but different truths. Many also believe that in today’s rush to scientific discovery, our world has never been more in need of the moral guidance provided by religion.