Science & Religion: Contradictory or Compatible?

For once I'm going to talk about school without complaining about how stressful the workload is or how I have trouble staying awake in class. This is because I actually have a great deal of interest in all of my classes this quarter. There's my Sociology class about what makes certain conditions social problems and how they come to be. My professor's pretty enthusiastic, plus we talk about stuff like the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy and actually try to formulate some sort of useful conclusion about the situation - "isolated incident or social problem?" Interesting stuff... Then I have my International Studies class where I actually feel like I'm learning about things that are applicable to society today. Ever since AP Gov in high school I haven't done my best to keep up with global affairs - hopefully that will change. But what I really want to talk about is my Philosophy of Biology Writing class.

"If God cannot prevent evil, God is not omnipotent; if God can prevent evil but does not, God is not benevolent. But if God is both, and evil exists - how come?"

I honestly don't think that I've ever had to think so hard in one class. Not about formulas or pointless facts that I most likely will never have to apply to my life, but real critical thinking about faith, evolution, and religion, even to the point where I find myself questioning my stance on some of these issues. To be honest it's a little unnerving, the possibility of abandoning some convictions that I've held onto for a long time, but either way the outcome is what's best. Making sure I know why I choose to believe in something is what's most important to me, whether it's a set of new ideas or reinforcing my previous ones.




The basic premise of my class is the debate between evolution and Intelligent Design, which is pretty much the argument that God created the world but it's structured more scientifically, or so it tries to. In a nutshell, the way things are in the world, the great diversity of life, the nature of the world, all are credited to a higher power. One of the most important points of ID is that the designs and structures of organisms are so complex, they cannot have just arisen out of nowhere, so they must have been created by an "Intelligent Designer" (God is never mentioned throughout ID's theory). Furthermore, this Designer is omnipotent and benevolent, which helps to explain how the designs came to be so efficient for each specific creature. He's all-knowing because all organisms were designed perfectly to fulfill their role in nature, and benevolent because this Designer has human attributes, a personality.

An argument used for ID involves a rock and a watch. Say you were out walking and stumbled upon a rock. Your friend asks you, "How did that rock get there?" Most likely you're going to say something about how it's probably just been there all along, just as a part of the natural world. But if you stumbled upon a watch and your friend asked you the same question, you would be inclined to say that it must have come to be because someone made it - a watch wouldn't just come to exist out of nowhere. This is the same logic that advocates of ID use to justify the complex design of life in the world, most importantly humans.

My professor, Francisco J. Ayala (author of the book above that we use in class), argues that Intelligent Design is faulty within its own theory and isn't even compatible with religion as a whole. First there are the imperfections in the design of organisms, like the human appendix & vestigial tail that we grow as embryos (no function) and the blind spot in the eye, which can actually be considered harmful. If the Designer did create everything, and these flaws in design things exist, would he really be that all-knowing? Then take all the cruelty in the world, in the animal kingdom and even human pain & suffering. Is the Designer still benevolent if cruelties & disease exist in the world and were made to be that way? If that's so, ID would have to hold the Designer responsibile for real problems in a not-so-perfect world, like the fact that 20% of all human pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion within the first 2 months. Do supporters of ID really want to hold the creator accountable for such atrocities? What it comes down to is that ID cannot claim that a omnipotent and benevolent Designer is responsible for the design of the world if things such as cruelty, disease, pain & suffering are attributed to that same Designer.

The reason why the argument for evolution is so compelling is that it can account for all the "imperfections" of the world through Natural Selection. Evolution claims that all living organisms are descendants of one last universal common ancestor (LUCA). Unlike ID, evolution is a theory that you can test and observe, and since Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, more and more evidence has supported this theory - including discoveries in paleontology, comparative anatomy, biogeography, and most importantly molecular biology. The first skeptics of evolution questioned the notion that one species could evolve from another, but fossils of animal intermediates have been found since then, including ones providing the link between birds & reptiles, fish & amphibians, and most importantly chimpanzees and humans. If you were to compare the bone structures of a human arm, whale fin, a bat wing & other animals, you would be surprised to see how similar they all are to each other.

The best supporting evidence yet for evolution is molecular biology. The fact that all organisms, from bacteria to humans, are all made up of the same components (same nucleotides for DNA & proteins made of the same 20 amino acids) hints at a common ancestor from which we all diverged from. What are the chances of that if each species was supposedly created independently from each other? Differences in genetic information also correlate to how closely related 2 species are - there is only a 2% difference in genetic make-up of humans and chimps. Also, each protein is able to tell its own evolutionary history by tracing it through different organisms and observing the differences.

I really didn't intend for this entry to turn into some persuasive essay or anything. I could go on and on about evidence for evolution, which I personally believe in, but instead I'm going to cut straight to what I really wanted to say.

Sure, we might have heard all of this before about evolution and Intelligent Design, whatever. That's not even what gets me the most. The whole reason why I wrote this blog and the thing that I'm having the most trouble with is the idea that evolution, under science, and religion as a whole do not contradict each other at all and in fact compliment each other, according to my professor. First of all, it needs to be clarified that Intelligent Design proclaims itself as a scientific theory but it really isn't one because it cannot be tested with experiments or observation. It isn't compatible with religion either, because it cannot backup the existence of an all-knowing and loving God. But with that aside, I'm having trouble trying to fathom how evolution/science and religion can coexist without contradicting each other.

One reason why the science and religion supposedly compliment each other is that both cover 2 totally different realms of knowledge. Science deals with the physical world and nature where it can be either rejected or accepted through observation and experiment. Science has laws to explain how the natural processes of the world work. But outside of that world, science hold no authority; that's where religion comes in. It deals with phenomena that we can't observe with our senses, like morals & ethics; these are just as important as Newton's laws for physics or Mendel's for genetics. Religion gives meanings to the world in ways that science cannot. In other words, science & religion ask different questions and seek different answers.

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind" - Albert Einstein

I get the argument for this and the logic behind it, but I just have the hardest time applying it to my real life and just sorting this whole thing out. I believe in evolution 100%, but then there's the religious side of me, and both still seem like they are at odds with one another. I still feel like I have to compromise part of my Catholic upbringing in some way in order to accept evolution, and although I'm being told that it doesn't have to be that way, I'm still asking "HOW?". It's like, I know what I believe but I don't exactly know how to explain it, and that's what frustrates me...

Sorry for the all of the word vomit on this entry, but I felt that some things needed to be clarified and understood before I could even try to express my feelings about this subject. I hope I was able to convey where I'm coming from at this point. I usually don't get so worked about something, especially when it originates from school, but this class has really made me think and rethink things that I believe help shape a big part of who I am. Even if this whole entry flew over your head or you don't give a shit about this subject, I would at least recommend reading Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion for some real thought-provoking stuff. Thoughts are greatly appreciated.