Expelled, Science, and Faith

I recently enjoyed viewing “Expelled”, a documentary in which Ben Stein investigates instances in which the scientific academic world reacted violently against those who dared to consider intelligent design, even when ID was considered from a non-Christian perspective. The conclusion of the film was that the academic world of science has a fanatical devotion to Evolutionism/Darwinism and rejects even faint references to Intelligent Design with a truly religious fervor. Although the film itself was just a little too entertaining, a little too near a “mockumentary”, to be persuasive to me, the fact is that atheism does have some disturbing resemblances to religion. In coda it is more like an anti-religion, defining itself by what it is not, but the varieties of atheists and agnostics are converging into an identifiable system of (un-)beliefs. Generally near the core of these beliefs is the assumption that science and faith are mutually exclusive.

This perspective is somewhat surprising to me. My own experience with religion centers on the search for truth – the same goal that drives my interest in science. My deep appreciation for science is  based largely on the ways in which it helps me to understand God’s powers and methods. Although I have embraced the ideals of a liberal arts education and enjoyed looking at science across a range of spectra, the challenges science has posed to my faith in God have been no more significant than any of the challenges that make faith what it is. Faith that is not challenged is, by definition, not faith. There seems to be to be a misunderstanding that allows people to indulge in the fallacy that faith is opposed to an open mind, and that it cannot coexist with science. But this is a faulty conclusion.

Faith here needs to be defined, and to do so in a fully satisfactory way would require lengthy inspection (the Lecture’s On Faith are an excellent starting point). For our purposes, we can try to consider it in the definition the atheists seem to use: that which makes belief in a supreme being unreasonable; namely, willingness to believe despite lack of proof. Now, the debate of how much evidence exists, and the nature of that evidence, is beside the point here. The fundamental problem with this definition is in the concept of scientific proof.

Sir Karl Popper was a notable 20th-century philosopher who was interested in this concept. He understood that science is based on empirical evidence, and that evidence is explained by scientific theories. In order for a theory to be scientific, is must be possible for it to be proven wrong (it must be falsifiable). Developing the philosophy of critical rationalism, he pointed out that all scientific theory – and human knowledge in general – is fundamentally conjectural, and a product of the creative human imagination. You compose an explanation for the data you see around you – the theory – and perform experiments that either prove your theory wrong or maintain the theory. Theories are developed to explain the data, but no theory can be proven true because any future counter-example may refute it. In other words, scientific theories cannot prove things true – they can only prove them “usually true” or be proven false themselves. Now, this does not reduce the validity of theories; after all, things like gravity and aerodynamics are explained by theories that have allowed the development of amazing technology. But it does mean that we never really act on irrefutable proof, even given the most sound of scientific theories. We deceive ourselves when we say that we know something to be certain because of science – the truth is, it is not proven certain, but we are choosing to lay our faith to rest on it and trust it as if it were certain. And so to decry faith in the name of science because it involves conviction without proof is a rather hypocritical mistake.

Regardless of the validity of Expelled’s investigation, the growing perspective that science and religion are opposed is an unnecessarily destructive conclusion. The fact is that faith – the deliberate and volitional choice to believe in something – is at the root of both religion and science. More particularly, my faith in God the Father and Jesus Christ inspire my interest in science and inform my testimony of eternal truth.

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