Science and Religion, Part One

There's this nice lady I know who is both more conservative and more religious than I am. We get along marvelously, and every once in a while we have interesting debates in which we each fail to convince the other, but pleasantly and without rancor. As happens so often, I usually end up realizing that in truth our positions aren't so far apart as they seem. Case in point: intelligent design.

The other day, a bunch of us were discussing earthquakes, and someone whose father was a geologist got to talking about deep time (one of my favorite aspects of geology, as it happens, because the perspective it provides is so mind-bending: for a geologist, the smallest unit of time even worth thinking about is a million years). I then cracked a little joke: "But wait, the earth is only 10,000 years old." Jo (we'll call her Jo, because her real name is--well, Jo) then proclaimed that this little "crack" was aimed at her. (Well okay, it was a little, but it was more a "rib" than a "crack," and suddenly I find myself wondering why the names for types of jokes seem to be so anatomical....) A few minutes later, Jo printed an article from a website and handed it to me. "Here," she said. "This is very interesting."

The website is an online magazine called Science and Spirit, and the article was the text of a speech that Albert Einstein delivered in 1941 to a conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion. Jo even highlighted a sentence for me, in which Einstein asserted that "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." For me, though, at least with regard to the intelligent design question (the most interesting current conflict between science and religion), the more interesting sentence was this: "...a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs."

Jo and I began to have a discussion on these issues, in which I asserted what seems to me to be the accepted liberal position, namely that intelligent design should not be mandated in science classes precisely because it is not science; but that anyone is free to teach it in Sunday school, or in a philosophy class, anywhere that isn't strictly about science. Jo responded by beginning to attack the notion that evolution is proven science, to which I noted that "natural selection" and "evolution" are not the same thing. This last was an attempt to keep the conversation pointed in the right direction, but Jo instead accused me of splitting hairs, reducing the argument so that I could win it. And then, alas, our merry conversation was interrupted, and never resumed.

(For the record: natural selection is essentially a subset of evolution. Evolution posits that organisms change from less-complex to more-complex over time; natural selection is one of the theories as to exactly how that change is accomplished. It is fair to say that natural selection as a theory wobbles a little from time to time; but evolution itself stands on much firmer ground.)

But here's the bit that would probably surprise Jo: in fact, I generally find myself in agreement with the general thinking behind intelligent design, but I still don't think it ought to be taught in science classrooms.

Why? Well, that's for Part II.