One day in astronomy class, my professor started discussing the possibility of life on other planets. He maintained, unlike the Star Trek scenario, we’ll probably never contact other civilizations. But, he added, the idea of our planet being the only one with life on it somehow implies the earth was created deliberately by some creator. He left it unsaid, of course, we should know better.
Huh? I was under the impression religion is not allowed in public university classrooms. Why then are such blatantly atheistic viewpoints allowed to be expressed? Unfortunately in some circles religion is seen as the antithesis to science. In the September 1988 issue of “Discover” magazine, an article entitled “Ignorance 101” detailed a survey of college students. The survey reported a large percentage of them, especially in the South and Southwest , did not believe in the theory of evolution and 38 percent believed in the creation story as told in the Book of Genesis.
Belief in the Genesis story was equated with being on the same level of ignorance as agreeing with the statement “Cavemen occasionally had to protect their homes from marauding dinosaurs”. How humans came to be is a controversial point in the evolutionary theory, but it’s only one small aspect of this theory, which also includes natural selection and adaptation to environment.
Not all Christians dismiss the theory of evolution. The Catholic Church says this theory is not against Christian doctine. However, the church also teaches that God, at some point in the evolutionary chain, intervened to create a human soul.
Another example of a case where religion sometimes clashes with science is the issue of blood transfusions. One of my friends, a Jehovah’s Witness who hopes to become a doctor, was recently harassed by a medical-school admissions officer because of her beliefs on this issue. Jehovah’s Witnesses base their refusal to accept blood transfusions on their interpretation of certain passages in the Bible, but they don’t impose their views on other people. My friend was quick to point this out to the admissions officer. She later bitterly stated that if someone refuses blood because of religious reasons they are thought to be crazy. But if someone refuses for health reasons, such as the fear of getting AIDS or hepatitis, that’s acceptable.
I think one of main reasons religion has a bad reputation in the scientific community stems from the Middle Ages; the Catholic Church condemned Galileo as a heretic because of his model of the sun-centered planetary system. This must be taken within the context of the times when such an idea rocked everyone’s boat about the way the solar system was created.
Now the tables have been turned, and it’s science that tends to look at religion with scorn. One of my friends said that science, unlike religion, is based on proof and exists to further man’s knowledge of himself and the universe. But the very essence of religion is to answer the question of why we are here.
Actually science itself is treated almost like a religion these days--infallible and always right. Although the emphasis is on recording and examining data, a lot is still taken on faith and speculation. After all, how many of us were there for the Big Bang, and how can we know what happened before the Big Bang?
Science conveniently forgets religion was one of the motivating factors in the lives of many famous scientists such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, who once said, “When judging a physical theory, I ask myself whether I would have made the Universe in that way had I been God.
Physicist Stephen Hawking, in his book A Brief History of Time, talks about a grand, unified theory that would be created not only by scientists but also by philosophers and ordinary people. By this ultimate triumph of human reason, we would “know the mind of God”. Physicists’ egos aside, we see religion doesn’t in any way need to be seen as anti-science.Science and religion may ask different questions and have different ways of answering them, but they can coexist as complementary ways of learning about and exploring our great universe. <.p>copyright 1996