Science VS Religion: Tonight on Pay Per View

Recently, there has been a considerable amount of discussion regarding science and government. Some have claimed that due to President Obama’s new policy on stem cell research, science has been set free of the shackles of the Bush administration and we can finally move forward.  I do not know enough about stem cell research or science in politics to say if this is true or not.  I have also noticed that when discussions regarding science and politics take place, religion is almost always brought into the mix.

There seems to be a general acceptance that science and religion (or perhaps just Christianity) are, and always have been, at odds with each other.   At this point, my education in history compels me to correct this misconception.

So let’s go back to ancient Greece.  The three major philosophers of the Greeks were (as many know) Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Each of these philosophers was the teacher to the one before.  Philosophers contemplated matters regarding how the world works, the elements and nature as well as ethics, morality, and many of the studies we might consider to be oriented with religion.  The Greek philosophers treated all these subjects as one and, for the most part, all of them were equally important to a developed understanding of the universe in which we live.

So let’s fast forward to the renaissance.  Many of the contributions from the Greek philosophers are still accepted.  The new world was recently discovered (NOTE:  All educated people knew the world was a sphere but they did not know how large it was) and many were questioning what else there was to be learned about the world.  In the renaissance it was accepted that the universe (what we call the solar system) operated as a system of spheres with Earth in the middle.  According to Aristotle’s physics, the earth was the densest and therefore sunk to the center of the solar system and hence all other things revolved around the Earth.  So far, we can understand the logic even if we know that the conclusion is false.

The problem with this model of the solar system (or universe as they called it) was that certain things did not follow as expected.  One particular problem was that there was difficulty predicting the positions of the stars.  Then along comes Copernicus.  Copernicus suggested that Earth was not the center of the universe but instead the Sun was.  Copernicus published this idea…no one cared.

So why did the few that read Copernicus’s ideas about a sun-centered universe reject it?  Blame Aristotle.  Remember when we talked about the Greeks?   Aristotle stated that Earth was the center of the solar system because it was most dense.  If the Sun was the center, then the Sun was the densest, which would refute Aristotle’s system of physics.  Copernicus’s solar model was based on aesthetics and not Physics and therefore it raised more questions than it answered and was rejected.

It is at this point of the story that along comes a spider.  This eight legged trouble maker is none other than Galileo.  Galileo was the first to really push the idea of a sun-centered solar system.  As a matter of fact, Galileo argued for a sun-centered universe so fervently that he managed to anger people pretty badly.

At this point in time, science and theology were not separate as they are today.  In fact, the word science is derived from the Latin word scientia which means knowledge, so science was anything concerning knowledge.  Theology was considered the head of the sciences.  What we call science today was then called natural theology.  All this was based off the idea that God created everything and therefore we can learn about God by studying what he created.

But this is where things get messed up.  Galileo continues to argue for the Sun as the center of the universe.  Natural theologians continued to reject this because it contradicts Aristotelian Physics and therefore failed to explain many things.  Regardless, Galileo continued to push natural theologians.  Perhaps in anger or poor judgment, the theologians in question decided to try to shut up Galileo by bringing the Bible into things.  The Bible WAS NOT USED TO DISPROVE GALILEO, but was merely an attempt to scare him into leaving Aristotelian physics alone.

At first glance this may seem like cause for the church and science to fight.  In actuality it was a disagreement between natural theologians that became very heated.  The argument became so heated that it ceased to be about physics and the nature of the universe (and possibly God) and became a personal (and perhaps illogical) battle.

It is this very same mind frame that exists today.  We are now at the point where we have stopped working together for knowledge.  Because someone may see the world differently than us we assume that they are foolish, narrow minded, perhaps brainwashed or Godless.  But truth is valuable regardless of where it comes from.  Furthermore, things that are false have value because they allow us to better question and understand the truth itself.
But fear not.  I have the remedy for this conflict between religion and Science.  I hope you will stay tuned for the exciting conclusion in my next post…

Quantum Theology:  Where Science and Religion Kiss and Make up