Ever since Galileo was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy after theorizing that the sun, not the Earth, stood as the fixed point in our solar system, the relationship between science and faith has been icy at best. Like a marriage that has gone horribly wrong, faith and science have been enjoying a “trial separation” for centuries now, and it seems that every time they meet on the street, the illusion of civility quickly breaks down and the angry name-calling associated with jaded lost love ensues. Yet, this wasn’t always the case.
Once upon a time, faith and science enjoyed a romance that was fresh and exciting, as they shared a mutual appreciation for the same wondrous performance. Science listened to the glorious music, and looked at the finely tuned instrument that manifested such beauty, and naturally assumed that it was held firmly in the hands of a Master musician. Faith, on the other hand, looked to the Master, and in appreciating His perfection, were filled with wonder at the music He created. Both were watching the same performance, and were awestruck by the same music, and therefore shared a mutual respect.
The Middle Ages, however, saw a gradual, yet violent breakdown in that relationship. History is an undulating ocean of events, individuals and worldviews, so we can no more point to one instance as the turning point as we can say why a piece of seaweed twists one way rather than another. We can, however, hypothesize primary causes and say that one of the driving forces of this relationship breakdown was over power. Take, for instance, Galileo’s plight. He’s poked his head up in the middle of one of history’s largest power struggles, as the Protestant reformers earnestly try to reclaim the 1st century biblical faith, flying in the face of centuries of developed tradition rigorously guarded by Rome. The difference between ‘revolution’ and ‘rebellion’ is solely one of perspective, so while Galileo thought he was enjoying the liberty of the surrounding Protestant revolution, he was quickly snatched up by Rome as a rebel – labelled another foot-soldier in the army assaulting the faith.
As though seeking vengeance for Galileo’s wrongful condemnation, science has often seemed to aggressively assault the realm of faith, often with cataclysmic results. It was the gross misuse of Darwinian thought, for example, that was the driving scientific justification behind the eugenics movement, which would later come to be known as ‘racial hygiene’ in Germany’s national socialistic regime. The Nazi’s so-called “Final Solution” was nothing more than an attempt to speed up and guide the process of natural selection, and many of their early experiments were actually lauded by various members of the scientific community, especially the forced sterilization (and eventual euthanasia) of the mentally challenged or those with birth defects. While the madness of such inhumanity seems extremely obvious to us today, have we really wandered that far from it? Do we not still euthanize inconvenient human life through abortion, or attempt to steer natural selection through selective fertilization of tested embryos? I’m not equating such initiatives with Nazism, but it’s definitely something to think about.
Are science and faith really destined for a messy divorce? Are we really going to spend the rest of existence playing “that is yours & this is mine” as evolutionists bash away at creationists, while geologists and overly zealous Judeo-Christian try to take a rock’s age and try to carve it into a lynch-pin in their argumentation. Are the two camps predestined to sit on either side of the battlefield, separated by a mine-field of fossils, comets, archaeological finds and improvable theories?
I don’t believe that to be the case. Long before I ever became a Christian or engaged in theological studies, I’ve been a fan of theoretical physics. I was particularly fond of Einstein, especially his mind-blowing thought experiments. I remember the first time I read and pondered the basic premise of his windowless elevator. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a very simple experiment in imagination. Here on the planet Earth, we are under the constant grip of gravity, a force first described scientifically by Isaac Newton. When you drop something from the Empire State Building, it doesn’t simply fall at a constant speed, but at a pretty constant acceleration of approximately 9.81 meters per square-second (9.81 m/s2) here on Earth. Now, imagine if we were to step into a windowless elevator, and that elevator, unbeknownst to us, started accelerating upward, not on earth, but in space. It accelerates at a constant 9.81 meters per square-second, and we’re in there merrily humming along with the musak. To us inside the elevator, that acceleration would feel exactly like gravity, because as everyone who’s felt their stomach drop while going up knows, as the elevator is accelerating upward, the contents we are being pushed downward. If I dropped a penny, it would hit the ground as though I dropped it on Earth.
After demonstrating that gravity and constant acceleration would be indistinguishable to us from our perspective, from our position relative to the elevator (yes, that’s the basis of the Theory of Relativity), Einstein then took the next, seemingly crazy leap, and thought “What if constant acceleration and gravity don’t just seem indistinguishable, but actually ARE the same.” That’s the sort of brain-games that allowed Big Al to come up with some pretty cool concepts about the universe around us, and amazingly, observation of astronomical events have proven him quite accurate time and time again.
In part II of this series, I want to talk about those instances where Einstein was wrong, why he was wrong, and why his wrongness was oh so right!Â
