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Where science and religion run parallel, part ways, and are inextricably paired
In the second day of this year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, the delegation’s keynote speaker forcefully highlighted a very profound divide in the way Americans view the universe. It took him only 14 words.
“In just four months, we will have an administration that actually believes in science!” former Virginia governor Mark Warner proclaimed to a clamor of applause and tambourine jangles. He paused to let the crowd fully relish his cheeky comment—eyebrows raised and lips pressed together, forming a smirking expression that seemed to sardonically say, “Now, imagine that!”
It may be that Warner was simply commenting on Barack Obama’s support of embryonic stem cell research—attempting to cast the senator from Illinois in a more progressive light than his opponent, Sen. John McCain. Whether this was his only intention, Warner nevertheless touched upon a debate that spans generations and speaks to far deeper reservoirs of conviction and belief than those underpinning the platforms of either the Democratic or Republican parties: He was speaking of the rift between faith and science.
However, as both history and the most current of events will demonstrate, both science and religion have plenty in common, and often work parallel to one another, if not hand in hand. From the earliest scientific minds to the amazing leaps now being made in biology and particle physics, religious thinkers and scientists have been interested in the very same questions for centuries. Who are we? What are we made of? How did we come into being? In many instances, the cleric and calculator seem to be one in the same.
Back in Time
 Copernicus (above), one of the first men to use science to successfully challenge religious doctrine, was also an ordained clergyman.
Charles Darwin shook the foundations of Christian doctrine again in 1859. Darwin’s seminal work, “The Origin of Species,” theorized that all living creatures on the planet—humans included—had likely arisen from one or few common ancestors. Though Darwin was a man of faith and said as much in the pages of “Origin,” his work was—and is—perceived by many as a direct assault on fundamental religious tenets. Ironically, natural selection, the mechanism Darwin used to explain how such a diversity of life could have developed from one common ancestor, was given credence in part by another man of the cloth. Gregor Mendel’s work with pea plants in an Austrian monastery demonstrated the existence of dominant and recessive genes, which account for one of several modes of genetic selection that biologists now understand to be at the core of biological adaptation and change over time.
 Clarence Darrow  John T. Scopes
In 1925, with the help of the American media and some highly partisan characters—former presidential candidate and avowed creationist William Jennings Bryan, and staunch evolutionist Clarence Darrow—Darwin was posthumously put on the stand in what would come to be known as the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. As much a political stunt as anything else, the defendant in the case, John T. Scopes, was hand picked to deliberately violate a state law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution in Tennessee public schools. His intentionally illegal lesson plan was encouraged by several locals in the town of Dayton, Tenn., where Scopes taught high school. The hope was that the media attention garnered would bring tourist dollars to the local economy, as outsiders flocked from all over the country to witness the ensuing legal circus. It worked.
It is useful to understand how the media covered the Scopes Trial, and also to note the dramatic fashion in which the event was later fictionalized in the play and respective motion picture, Inherit the Wind. During the reporting of the trial, and even more so in the artistic interpretations that followed, Bryan and Darrow were portrayed in dichotomy—two men in wholehearted disagreement over necessarily opposing principles.
This has been the predominant manner in which the American debate between science and religion has been framed ever since. Fundamentalist religious leaders and organizations will claim that certain principles, ubiquitously accepted within the scientific community, run counter to religious doctrine, promote amorality and are untrue. Similarly, when biting back, a defensive scientific community may depict the aforementioned religious leaders as zealots and unwilling to face the facts, clinging to antiquated and absurd religious texts.
Jeff Danese, a religious studies lecturer for San Jose State University’s humanities department, views this practice as counterproductive. “By highlighting the unresolved conflict and continuing to point to the two conflicting domains (of science and religion) it diminishes any hope or attempts to find a synthesis of the two,” he says.
Danese says he does believe that religion and science are necessarily opposed to one another, even though fundamentalists from all three Abrahamic traditions find fault with scientific theories, and even though certain atheist antagonists—such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins—rally against what they deem to be the destructive forces of religion. The way Danese sees it, there are certain highly polemic constituents on either side of the fence who have “something to gain from the conflict,” whether it be simple vindication in defending one’s views, a greater church attendance, or, in the case of the media, higher ratings for a news broadcast.
But however pithy an individual’s reasons may be for becoming a partisan in the debate, there is no question that the debate is real and that people are interested in it. In his book, “When Science Meets Religion,” Ian G. Barbour notes that according to the Library of Congress, the number of books published under the category “‘Religion and Science’ tripled from 71 in the 1950s to 211 in the 1990s.” In an effort to explain this phenomenon, Barbour identifies three main reasons for the perpetuation of the conflict.
Science vs. Religion
The first conflict, Barbour argues, arises from a literal interpretation of religious texts. For example, those who hold the Bible to be an entirely accurate record of human history will find Darwin’s theory rather disagreeable, as it conflicts with the Genesis account of human origins. Some may even reject the principles of radiometric dating and the geological community’s assertion that the planet is roughly 4.6 billion years old—holding instead that the world was created in six days, more or less in its current form, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
“I have other problems to worry about than the age of the Earth,” says Larry Pegram, a former two-term San Jose City Councilman and founder of the San Jose-based Values Advocacy Council, where he serves as president. Pegram says that he believes the Earth was created and populated in six days but cautions that he is not one to judge just how long those six days were. “Man calls a day 24 hours,” he says. “I don’t know how long God calls a day.”
Pegram places an emphasis on the word “theory” when referring to evolution. He believes that there are too many holes in the fossil record to conclude any one species could have evolved into another. “It is not a scientific law,” he says of evolution. “And while it’s being taught as gospel truth, there is scientific evidence that would lead one to believe that Darwin just didn’t get it right.”
Joel Primack, a professor of physics and astronomy at U.C. Santa Cruz, has recently coauthored a book with his wife, Nancy Ellen Abrams, a lawyer with an intense interest in cosmology. “The View From the Center of the Universe” explores where humans fit in to the modern scientific picture of our cosmos. Abrams says fear is the main reason many find it so challenging to reconcile religious beliefs with the newly emerging view of the universe.
“One of the reasons people are afraid to give up their story of the origins,” Abrams says, “is that they are afraid that if they let a tiny wedge come into what they believe, that they have to throw the whole thing out.”
 Jonathan Karpf
Karpf is a strong defender of Darwinian principles and believes that science and religion are “separate domains of human inquiry and experience.” He asserts that “religion does not, nor should it have, any influence in the scientific method.”
Karpf also supports the second of Barbour’s theories as to why people may favor religion over science: human dignity. “I think the evolution issue goes back to the simple fact that humans like to think that they’re special,” Karpf says.
“In classical Christian thought,” Barbour observes, “human beings were set apart from all other creatures, their unique status guaranteed by the immortality of the soul and the distinctiveness of human rationality and moral capacity.” If we are to believe that humanity is just another species of animal, then our seat at the pinnacle of all sentient beings is disrupted and we become just one of many.
The Discovery Institute is one of the nation’s leaders in the fight against Darwin. The institute uses its many branches to combat scientific tenets and applications it deems to be incorrect or harmful to humanity. One of the many ways the organization attacks the theory of evolution is by suggesting that Darwinian rhetoric can be and has been used to justify atrocities, such as genocide and the practice of eugenics. An article published July 18 on the institute’s website quotes Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who says, “The gas chambers at Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment.”
 Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack
Barbour offers a third and final catching point for those who have trouble accepting certain scientific theories. They pose a “challenge to design.” Many have a problem believing that all we are and all we can perceive came into being without the aid of an intelligent designer.
“How profoundly blind is someone that cannot see that a being that has the ability to understand spiritual matters is not separate and distinct?” Pegram asks, supporting his conviction that human beings were undoubtedly designed by a divine creator. “We have the ability to reason, we have the ability to understand right and wrong on a very high moral plain. How naïve can we be if we think that was merely the product of evolution?”
The Discovery Institute certainly shares Pegram’s view. It is responsible for the development and push of intelligent design theory, which posits “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” The theory has been used to challenge the teaching of evolutionary theory in American public schools and recently attracted media attention in November 2005, when the Kansas State School Board voted to have intelligent design taught alongside evolution as an alternative explanation to how life originated on this planet. The decision was subsequently overturned.
Dr. William S. Harris was one of the intelligent design proponents in attendance at the initial Kansas Evolution Hearings in May 2005. “I don’t know who did it,” he said in a May 6, 2005 New York Times article, in reference to the creation of the heavens and the earth, “I don’t know how it was done, I don’t know why it was done, I don’t have to know any of that to know it was designed.”
Karpf, the San Jose State biologist, doesn’t buy it. “The Discovery Institute has larger fish to fry than simply getting intelligent design taught in the public classroom,” he says referring to a once-secret manifesto, known as the “Wedge Document,” which was leaked from the organization in 1999. The document detailed the Discovery Institute’s broader goals: “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.”
“They want to change the entire American social landscape,” Karpf concludes.
Yet, however vehemently the most ardent proponents of the ethereal or advocates of the empirical may argue that theirs is the purest form of truth, there are many individuals who fall somewhere in the middle of the divide.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
 Dave Grishaw-Jones
“It worries me a lot when one religious tradition tries to insert itself into public education—into the minds and hearts of the entire school system,” Grishaw-Jones adds. “Science and religion can share some of the same insights about our connectedness to each other and to God. That’s a place where these two communities can really help one another.”
If Grishaw-Jones is emblematic of a member of the religious community crossing the aisle, then Primack and Abrams, the husband-wife coauthors of “View From the Center of the Universe,” certainly represent the desire of some in the scientific community to forge a middle ground between the two domains of science and religion. Primack contends that “humans are made of the rarest stuff in the universe” and finds plenty of reason to wonder at the metaphysical implications of his scientific endeavors.
“In terms of complexity,” he says, “our brains are the peak of complexity in the known universe,” adding that his studies have led him to conclude that the existence of human beings is special in just about every way. According to Primack, we live right in the middle of the life span of our solar system; we are also living in the best possible period for our planet to support complex life forms—a period that began half a billion years ago with a sudden explosion of atmospheric oxygen, and which he anticipates will come to an end in about another half billion years, when the planet will lose all of its water. “We’re in the middle of the best billion years of Earth … That’s got to have religious implications.”
To underscore his scientifically fueled mystical musings, Primack tells of when he and his colleagues originally proposed the theory of dark matter, an invisible gravitational force physicists believe to exist but can only observe via its affect on the visible universe. Primack’s team had no concrete evidence that it was true at the time, but they had predicted what effects the then-theoretical dark matter would have on the universe. Later, when another scientist announced that he had discovered exactly what Primack’s team had predicted, the Santa Cruz physicist experienced a moment of transcendence. “I got goose bumps,” he says. “I awoke in the middle of the night with strange sensations. I felt as if I were in touch with the true universe.”
Abrams likes to think of the amazing things she has learned about the universe in mythic terms. “People have come to believe that mythic language belongs to religion,” she says. “I’m trying to take back mythic language from religion and show that if we think about the universe mythically, we can experience something much, much deeper and much more fulfilling.”
 Bruce Rosenblume
“Physics has encountered a mystery at the very boundary of our discipline, and that mystery involves what I’ll call consciousness,” says Rosenblume, who has recently coauthored a book with Frank Kuttner, titled “The Quantum Enigma,” which discusses the implications of quantum theory.
“Free will is not really something we talk about in physics,” Rosenblume says. Nevertheless, according to him, free will or consciousness—the choices we make—directly affect the physical world, at least on the level of very small particles.
This has been empirically demonstrated, he says, through a series of experiments. In the first experiment, an object—an extremely small particle—is observed and its behavior is recorded. A different experiment is then conducted on the very same particle, and the resulting data directly conflicts with that of the prior experiment on the same particle. This has led physicists to conclude that many possible outcomes to the experiment are simultaneously occurring until they are observed and recorded by humans. “Schrödinger’s Cat,” a famous metaphorical explanation of this enigma developed by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, describes a furry feline that remains both alive and dead in a closed box. The cat will remain both alive and dead in the box until an observer removes the lid and finds the animal either purring or lifeless.
“Somehow, our consciousness is not separate from the physical world,” he says. “Somehow, it is mysteriously involved in the physical world.” And although experiments have only been able to demonstrate this quantum enigma on a very small scale, because the particles behaving so radically are the building blocks of matter, it follows that these mysteries of quantum theory in some way apply to us on a larger scale. Rosenblume stops short of ascribing religious implications to the mysteries of his field, but he is quite willing to acknowledge that there is more to the universe than what our senses can perceive.
“Some people have argued that science denies a reality beyond physical reality,” Rosenblume says. “Quantum mechanics denies that denial.”
Whatever the ultimate universal truth may be—if there is such a thing—there will be those who cling steadfast to their beliefs, arguing that theirs is the one true way. Others will demand a partition between science and religion, much as our constitution demands a separation of church and state. Still, others will hope for a continued dialogue, like Danese, the San Jose State religious studies lecturer, who believes “most people want a reconciliation between these two domains.” It is a warming thought, albeit distant and perhaps unattainable, that some day people may come to an accord on the issue. Then again, perhaps some already have, if only in their own hearts.
“I believe there is one universe,” Abrams says. “That’s what universe means—one. There can’t be a true religion and a true science that are inconsistent with one another. It’s not possible.”
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