Science and religion: is it all just “how?” and “why?”

John Anderson has a good set of quotations in a post setting out his “modest proposal” on science and religion:

I think it is feasible to speak of each as having a specific role and addressing very specific questions that the other does not. This is an approach that, near as I am aware, is ‘unique’ to Baylor. To clarify, on the topic of creation . . .
Science can answer the question how and how long.
Religion can answer the question who and why.

As I noted in the comments there, I was surprised to find this being described as unique to Baylor. I have heard variations on this theme ever since I became interested in the question more years ago than I care to think. Perhaps, as I replied to John, the Atlantic is a bigger gulf than just an ocean should be. On the other hand, what he proposes is surely a variant on Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” view.

I think Arthur Peacocke’s view, as expressed in his Gifford Lectures, is more interesting.. He may accept different disciplines, but he feels that they need to interlock with and interpenetrate each other. He articulates the viewpoint that science is a search for intelligibility and religion a search for meaning. So, perhaps over-optimistically given the retrenchment of both creationism and atheism since the early 1990s when he wrote, Peacocke says:

So after two centuries or more of bickering, or of sullen silence with demarcation of spheres of interest, these two fundamental activities, the search for intelligibility and the search for meaning, that characterize respectively, but not exclusively, science and religion, find themselves inextricably interlocked with each other in the common human enterprise of seeking both intelligibility and meaning. Each now provides the other with challenges to and resources for an interaction gradually becoming more fruitful and wholesome. This judgement on the contemporary scene could be illustrated from many spheres: the understanding of the human person as a psychosomatic unity in both science and religion; the integration of biological evolutionary ideas with the sense of God as an immanent, ever-working Creator; or reflections on the origins of the cosmos induced both by astrophysics and cosmology, on the one hand, and clarification of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation on the other.

I am not certain of Peacocke’s specifics (nor his panentheism). I do, however, think he is right to insist that the “how” questions and the “why” questions don’t exist in completely separate compartments. For example, the fact that the universe appears incredibly well organised and so amazingly susceptible to rational investigation is not only consonant with the myth of divine ordering in Genesis, but poses a “why” question all of its own. On the other side of the equation, the wastefulness and violence of evolutionary processes, obvious from “how” examinations offer a profound critique to many of the answers people of faith have given to “why” questions.

There are many areas where the separate disciplines of theology and science do indeed overlap, and answers to “how” questions raise “why” questions in new ways. I think there’s a shorthand value in sometimes stressing the different disciplines as “how” and “why”. I also think there are limits on how much we should keep them separate. As Peacocke puts it they ” find themselves inextricably interlocked with each other in the common human enterprise of seeking both intelligibility and meaning.”

Tagged as: creation, evolution, science and faith