Science and faith not totally separate, exclusive domains

By David Sorge     1/15/09 6:00pm

This winter break, I ran into a peculiar type of person. Most of you know the type I'm talking about - the one who thinks Ann Coulter is funny and who honestly has more respect for the talk show hosts who ridicule our politicians than the politicians themselves. The type who associates to the point of confusion the ideals of our Founding Fathers, those of the Republican Party and those of the Bible. The worst part was that they were related to me.On the other side of things, though, are people like my roommate from last year, whose devotion to the Democratic Party was total and unquestioning. Someone who was disappointed in both Democratic candidates because they were not radical enough. Someone who seemed to take the highly polemic work of Richard Dawkins at face value.

Both have something in common, besides being closely associated with me. Both share a perspective of seeing themselves as a persecuted minority in a country quickly falling to the other side. Welcome to the Culture Wars.

No one is really sure when or how the Culture Wars began. Some people point to the Scopes trial and its media coverage. Others, to the politicization of the Evangelical movement. While it is valuable to look at the history of this "war," it is the intellectual process that is more important. After all, the intellectual process is the one we are in danger of replicating.

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When I refer to the intellectual process, I am talking about the kind of thinking my father ran into in one of his biology professors. You see, my father went to a Christian college, and as part of his pre-medical degree had to take evolutionary biology. During office hours he asked his professor how he dealt with teaching evolution while being a Christian. The answer: "Six days a week, I'm an evolutionist. On Sunday, I'm a creationist."

While we laugh at this ridiculous display, though, we ought also to be examining ourselves. When we separate the secular and the sacred in our own minds, we are also sowing the seeds of a secular-sacred divide in society. That is to say that as the secular and the sacred separate in our minds, some will reject the sacred, others the secular. As the two parts of our intellectual lives cease to inform each other, the same plays out in a culture where two communities form, with less and less information passed between them. This process breeds ignorance, and ignorance breeds fear. And, to quote everyone's favorite little green alien, "Fear is the path to the dark side ... fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

Our generation prides itself on being different from the ones before us. We are a group that is far more concerned with togetherness than distance. We have to be: We are all minorities. If we weren't, we would quickly turn our country into another Somalia - a place where each clan is for itself, fighting for dominance over the others. But there are more differences than just ethnic ones. If any generation has the chance to stop the escalation of the Culture Wars, I believe it is this one. But to do that, we must be willing to understand each other's world views and view them with a mindset flexible and willing to learn. Not only this, but we must open the gate between the secular and the sacred in our minds, recognizing that if we were ever to grasp absolute truth, it would not fit into our artificial divides.

We are not the first to try this experiment. Many, both in the professional and academic worlds, are finding ways to live their lives more holistically. Rice University is privileged to host a talk by one such man next Wednesday. He is Francis Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project at the National Institute of Health. A Christian since the age of 27, he not only sees no conflict between his faith and his work, but he also brings them together into a picture of the world where faith informs and beautifies science, while science gives insight into the workings of the Creator's mind.

Some may dismiss this perspective as that of a man trying to use the fame of his previous success to sell his beliefs, even after he has left his field. This is hardly true of Collins. He is still very much involved in the worlds of science and public policy. In fact, if the ScienceInsider blog of Science magazine is to be trusted, he is being seriously considered as the new director of the NIH under the administration of president-elect Barack Obama. An appropriate move, since he only resigned from working for the NIH last August after working there since 1993.

As a man who integrates both worlds, it is not surprising that he should break the stereotypes of each. Collins, the scientist, challenges the view that the supernatural should be left out of the laboratory. Collins, the Christian, is a strong advocate of evolution as an explanation for man's origins. It is not surprising then that such a man finds it "deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of the spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years."

Rather than the shrill voices of the extremes, it is time for us to listen to a voice like that of Collins, one that is willing to search carefully for answers, and find them in unexpected places. There are two opportunities to hear him speak, both on Wednesday. The first will be at the Baker Institute at 5 p.m., where he will be talking about science and public life with Rice's own Neal Lane, former director of the National Science Foundation and assistant to the president for science and technology. This event is an RSVP-only event, though, so the spaces may fill up quickly. At 7:30 p.m., he will be speaking specifically about the ways that science and belief have met in his own life and work. This event is open to everyone, and will be in the Shell Auditorium of the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. It is sponsored by the Veritas Forum, a group that aims through forums like this one to help university students explore "true life."

I look forward to these chances, both to learn from someone who has succeeded in reconciling what we often think of as opposites and to have my own views challenged and even changed. But even after the event, I hope we can sit down together and discuss our views, not polemically, as our parents have often done, but respectfully and humbly. Will you join me?

David Sorge is a Martel College sophomore.

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