Are Religion and Science in Conflict? — Science and God | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02Can you believe in God and science at the same time?
2. 0:06So-called “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and scientific materialists like Neil
3. 0:10deGrasse Tyson certainly don’t think so.
4. 0:14To them, religion gets in the way of science.
5. 0:16In their view, more science leads to less God.
6. 0:20This is not a new position.
7. 0:22It was first expressed over a hundred years ago by English physician John Draper in a
8. 0:26book titled, A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.
9. 0:31Draper, who was deeply influenced by Darwin’s then new theory of evolution, regarded organized
10. 0:37religion as a direct and existential threat to the advancement of science.
11. 0:41As he put it “. . . [Religion] and Science are… absolutely incompatible; they cannot
12. 0:46exist together…mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.”
13. 0:51So, are science and religion inevitably in conflict?
14. 0:55Have they always been?
15. 0:57Well, not exactly.
16. 0:59In fact, the giants who established modern science—astronomer Johannes Kepler, chemist
17. 1:04Robert Boyle, physicist Sir Isaac Newton and others—were deeply religious men.
18. 1:11They didn’t see any conflict between science and religion.
19. 1:14On the contrary: they thought that by doing science, they were discovering God’s design
20. 1:19and revealing it to mankind.
21. 1:21Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Judeo-Christian religious tradition led
22. 1:26directly to modern science.
23. 1:28To back up this claim, Cambridge University historian of science Joseph Needham posed
24. 1:34a famous “Why there?
25. 1:36Why then?”
26. 1:37question.
27. 1:38Why there—in Europe.
28. 1:39Why then—in the 16th and 17th centuries.
29. 1:44Why didn’t modern science start somewhere else before then?
30. 1:47After all, the Egyptians erected pyramids.
31. 1:50The Chinese invented the compass, block printing, and gunpowder.
32. 1:54Romans built marvelous roads and aqueducts.
33. 1:57The Greeks had great philosophers.
34. 2:00Yet none of these cultures developed the systematic methods for investigating nature that arose
35. 2:05in Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
36. 2:10This realization led Needham and other historians of science such as Ian Barbour and Herbert
37. 2:14Butterfield to look for some other “X factor” to explain why “the scientific revolution”
38. 2:20occurred where and when it did.
39. 2:22Here is the conclusion they reached:
40. 2:24Only the Judeo-Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions” to enable
41. 2:30“the rise of science.”
42. 2:31So, what were those presuppositions?
43. 2:34We can identify three.
44. 2:37All find their origin in the Judeo-Christian idea of a Creator God who fashioned an ordered
45. 2:42universe.
46. 2:43First, the founders of modern science assumed the intelligibility of nature—that nature
47. 2:49had been designed by the mind of a rational God, the same God who also made the rational
48. 2:54minds of human beings.
49. 2:56Thus, these men assumed that if they used their minds to carefully study nature, they
50. 3:00could understand the order and design that God had placed in the world.
51. 3:04Second, they assumed an underlying order in nature.
52. 3:08This was best expressed by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who argued, “There can be
53. 3:13no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the . . . Order
54. 3:18of Nature”—a conviction he attributed to belief in “the rationality of God.”
55. 3:25This idea led to the unprecedented use of mathematics to describe the orderly processes
56. 3:30at work in the world, and inspired the invention of better instruments, such as telescopes
57. 3:36and microscopes, to see that order.
58. 3:39And third, these founders of modern science presupposed the contingency of nature.
59. 3:45This simply means that God had many choices about how to make an orderly world.
60. 3:50Just as there are many ways to design a clock, there were many ways that God could have designed
61. 3:55the universe.
62. 3:56To discover how He did, scientists could not merely deduce the order of nature by assuming
63. 4:01what seemed most logical to them; that is, merely using reason alone to draw conclusions,
64. 4:07as the Greek philosophers had tried to do.
65. 4:10For example, the Greeks thought that since the most perfect form of motion was a circle,
66. 4:14they assumed that the planets must have circular orbits—something Kepler later refuted by
67. 4:19careful observation.
68. 4:22Indeed, because of their theological convictions the new scientists realized they would have
69. 4:27to observe, test, and measure in order to understand God’s design.
70. 4:33To these men nature was like a book—a form of divine communication intelligible to human
71. 4:38investigation.
72. 4:40For this reason, they also developed the concept of “the laws of nature,” implying God’s
73. 4:46governance over the natural order.
74. 4:48Science was a way to decipher that order.
75. 4:52The idea that science and religion are in conflict is a popular belief today.
76. 4:57But the history of science shows otherwise.
77. 5:00All of us—laymen and scientists alike—owe a great debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
78. 5:06Without that tradition we’d be living in a much more primitive world—morally and
79. 5:11scientifically.
80. 5:13I’m Stephen Meyer, historian and philosopher of science at the Discovery Institute, for
81. 5:20Prager University.