Science and religion; holy book tables and holey logic

I've been thinking for a short while about the conflict between science and religion.

There is no fundamental conflict: if you believe in God, then as a scientist you are simply discovering God's ways through science.

At Alpha, there's a book table where you can sign out volumes that answer questions that occur to you during the course that you may want to find out more about on your own time. Predictably, it is a one-sided conversation and, while C. S. Lewis was prominent, I didn't see a Richard Dawkins book there, nor did I see anything remotely similar in unpleasantness. There was, however, a book on the subject of science and religion, written by Alpha creator Nicky Gumbel. The reparation of the apparent chasm between the two seems to be an issue that is being addressed forward forcefully in dealing with the neo-atheist challenge to Christianity presented by Dawkins and others like Christopher Hitchens: that religion and science don't overlap and/or that science offers a "how" response while religion offers a "why".

As above, I don't think there's a fundamental disagreement between the two as far as day-to-day life goes, but I could be convinced otherwise and I can see a path toward a different position. I browsed briefly through the book by Gumbel and there were a number of refutations of science within, or defences of religion based on the "science can't prove everything" angle. If there's no conflict, why the defensiveness? I'm sure this book would have been much larger in a time when science couldn't prove as much as it does today, and I think that this book may get smaller and smaller in future until the point that it amounts only to a double-sided wallet card being peddled by a homeless guy from a shopping cart.

If there's no conflict between science and religion, why would you have to defend, within a book that claims there is no conflict, religion from science by cherry-picking the gaps in scientific discovery? Well, because you can't, for example, believe in creationism and evolution at the same time but one is religious and one is scientific. Creationists who argue that it's incredibly improbable that life could have organized itself randomly have to answer for the fact that it's even more improbable that a single invisible creator appeared randomly and is responsible for everything that exists in the world, particularly with modern knowledge about evolution and genomics. Even if you reject both prospects, it is far more probable that life began small and evolved to something larger than it is that some invisible life force came out of nowhere and created it all intelligently in 7 days without even thinking about it too much.

Evolution doesn't say that we woke up one day to find ourselves in bed with a randomly-assembled giraffe wandering around in the back garden; it says that we began with an incredibly simple building block of life and this basic block fed on inertia and responded to its environment to develop into something larger. As the evolution progresses, the progression toward more advanced species accelerates. This is in conflict with the idea that God created Adam out of dust; Eve from Adam's rib; and that a talking snake derailed the trajectory of human existence because it couldn't keep its mouth shut (nevermind that someone would place trust in a talking snake on a critical life issue). Noah's ark, too, would have been quite a feat considering the relatively primitive engineering on offer at the time. Which one is more probable?

Well, this begs a question: you assume a regard for the notion of probability. If it's all a matter of faith then the question of probability has no value. But, then, why invest your life worshipping a higher being that ostensibly wants so much attention but doesn't even seem to want his presence to be known? As a human being, you must weigh probabilities at some point when you decide to do that because, presumably, you are doing it for eternal saviour and you see Christianity as a probable road toward that end.

So, at least from one perspective, religion and science are quite clearly similar in that each one prompts questions that multiply rapidly into further questions. The difference is that I can imagine one day that science will offer a consensus answer to each of the questions it raises, while I can't imagine that religion will ever offer the same: religion is satisfied with ignorance.

You could go on talking about this forever until you go mental (or become religious -- you can make an association if you want). Asking one question gets a response. Following up that response with another question often yields a response that contradicts or invalidates that response to the first question. Push it too far and you'll be told that you can't understand God's ways. When faced with so many people who seem so sure that it makes sense, if you don't have a strong will that demands reason then you may doubt yourself.

And that's probably why Alpha and these non-denominational churches take the approach of trying to offer something else to lonely, rejected, and troubled people in the hope that they'll put aside the inconsistency of what they're hearing in order to enjoy the other benefits of association with the group (notice the images of wholesome belonging and family in the marketing material being waggled in front of you like a carrot). Most importantly, though, they'll keep filling the donation basket -- with the kind of money that doesn't jingle and interrupt the message of God.

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