When Lamoureux was in university in the 1970s, there weren’t many God-fearing scientists who were vocal about their simultaneous belief in God and their trust in the scientific evidence for evolution. Of course, there were many people and scientists who believed in both, but their voices were drowned out by the loud and abrasive political rhetoric that continues to characterize this debate.
As a result, Lamoueux says he was “trapped in the dichotomy. There was no middle ground. There was no Francis Collins [current Director of the National Institutes of Health in the US and author of The Language of God]. You know,” Lamoureux says, as if for the first time, “if there was a Francis Collins in the 1970s, my life may have been a whole lot different.”
Things have certainly changed in the last 30 to 40 years, but we still have trouble breaking out of the binary thinking that makes science and religion enemies of one another.
For example, in his debate with Nye, Ham tried to undermine “secular” science by driving a wedge between historical and observational science. The problem is that all science is, in practice, historical science. There are lots of things we accept as true in science that we don’t directly observe, like atomic theory. No one has ever actually “seen” an electron before, but we believe it exists because the idea of an electron explains the natural world extremely well.
If we fall into the trap of separating historical science from observational science, then we begin to lose our idea of what science is as a whole; this is why science has sometimes become a caricature of itself, or an enemy of religion.
But many evangelicals don’t really care about science. They actually don’t think the evolution versus creation debate is all that important. They say it isn’t a faith issue. That it doesn’t determine whether Jesus can save someone from his or her sins.
Kids are losing their faith at record numbers in record speeds. And the debate over evolution is one of the issues that drives it.
But, here is the thing: it is a faith issue. As Lamoureux tells me, “Kids are losing their faith at record numbers in record speeds and the debate over evolution is one of the issues that drives it.”
Lamoureux’s class on science and religion at the University of Alberta has doubled in size in recent years. Why? “Because the kids are seeing the evolutionary evidence, they are having a divine experience, but they are not equipped and no one is showing them how to relate faith and science appropriately. They are yearning for that,” says Lamoureux.
There are many reasons why the crevasse between science and religion remains distended. One reason, of course, is that this stuff is complicated. The nature of evolutionary biology, let alone the entire endeavor of modern science, can take years to grasp. Evolution isn’t as simple as “survival of the fittest,” or “natural selection,” or even “descent with modification.”
At the same time, to believe in a God, let alone the Christian God who became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, is no less complicated. I mean, how do you put your faith in someone you can’t see or touch? And on top of that, the Bible, the thing that the Christian faith depends on, requires a deep knowledge of language, history, and literature to appreciate — subjects that in their own right take years to grasp.
