Fitting Facts with Faith

The Texas Board of Education has been creating controversy by considering creationism for the state's biology courses.  It had met to approve a series of textbooks, but some groups inserted last minute changes into the proceedings, causing derailment of the approval process.  For instance, a book by national publisher Pearson has been indefinitely delayed due to objections by Christian conservatives.  However, this is not just a problem for Texas: the article notes that Texas's size (everything is big in Texas!) means that it can determine the content of books that publishers sell nationally.

The root of the problem is the age-old debate between creationism and evolution.  I happened to read about the to-do in Texas right after watching a YouTube video of a debate between Richard Dawkins, famed atheist and Oxford biology professor, and John Lennox, a deeply religious mathematics and science professor also at Oxford University.  What made the debate remarkable was that both men were firm believers in science, the scientific method, and evolution, yet had radically different perspectives on the existence and role of God.  To use the terms of science, the variables of belief in empiricism and rationalism were kept constant, yet the dependent variable, religion, had fluctuated.

To me, Dawkins represented extremism: all science, no God.  Lennox seemed like the other extreme, but in reality he was just compromise: science and God.  Unrepresented in the debate was a third point of view that is being expressed by some in the Texas book controversy: all God, no science.

Two highly educated, well intentioned, and incredibly bright Oxford professors had seemed to demonstrate that there was real clash over the overlap of science and religion.  It seems like often they are portrayed as entirely overlapping and mutually exclusive in the media or public discourse.  Dawkins largely articulated this point of view.  More surprising was Lennox, who opined that the two fields are indeed entirely overlapping, but also mutually consistent.  His argument was that the tenets of science are the ones encouraged by his view of Christianity: proof by reason and argumentation.  He asserted that atheism undermines science by failing to explain randomness that occurs in nature, for instance at the subatomic level.

Personally, I see evolution (or science more broadly) as a mechanism and God as an agent, so nothing about Pearson's new Texan textbook has me up in arms.  Nevertheless, new ways to reconcile my faith with facts always fascinate me.  I certainly do agree with most (but not all) of what Dr. Lennox said, but more significantly I was very glad to see that some middle ground can be carved out at all in this oft contentious debate.