Hand in hand

The vocal atheist PZ Myers thinks that science and religion are at odds with one another. His argument is that they are direct competitors vying for the position of sole pathway to truth in the universe. As science is true, he reasons, religion must be false.  Well the good news is that in this competition everyone's a winner!

But let's go back to the argument.  He justifies the claim by stating that our goal is to find out...

'about the nature of the universe, about our history, about how we function, and then we encounter a conflict: religion keeps giving us different answers. Very different answers. They can't all be right, and since no two religions give the same answers, but since science can generally converge on similar and consistent answers, I know which one is right. And that makes religion simply wrong.'

Well to begin with, I agree. Not all religions can be right, but that's a red herring for this discussion. What's far more relevant is that my experience of faith is the exact opposite of what Myers is suggesting. Convergence does in fact happen and this hits on important feature of Myers' writing: he consistently misrepresents faith (basically I think because he doesn't understand it). Here's a classic example:

'science is a process, a body of tools, that has a long history of success in giving us robust, consistent answers. We use observation, experiment, critical analysis, and repeated reevaluation and confirmation of events in the natural world. It works. We use frequent internal cross-checking of results to get an answer, and we never entirely trust our answers, so we keep pushing harder at them...

Religion, on the other hand, uses a different body of techniques to explain the nature of the universe'

Well no, actually, and again I just don't recognise my own experience of faith in what Myers is saying. I recognise that there is first a step of faith that entails believing in divine revelation but after that there are actually remarkable parallels between scientific method and religion. Collect evidence, make a hypothesis, test it, consider other lines of evidence etc etc - that's good theology!

The rest of what Myers writes about is the common descent of picking up examples where religion has gone wrong and extrapolating that to the whole subject. That's just poor logic but its amazing just how often it comes up. Does bad science mean that we reject all of science? Of course not, the argument is idiotic.

The Bible and the Natural World are both products of God's Word so in the final analysis they are absolutely compatible - in fact they go hand in hand.