How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [84]
Both Draper and White presented simplified histories of the alleged war through such prominent events as the discovery of the earth’s sphericity, Galileo’s heresy trial, and the 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate over evolution. In our own century the most famous case study in the conflicting-worlds model is the 1925 Scopes trial, where the relationship was forced into a courtroom out of which a winner and loser emerged. The monument in front of the Rhea County Courthouse where the trial was held in Dayton, Tennessee, presents the case as a conflict, but gets the outcome wrong—Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 by the judge, allowing the Tennessee Supreme Court to overturn the conviction on the grounds that the jury, not the judge, should have imposed the fine. With that, there was no conviction to appeal, the case was over, and the anti-evolution law remained on the books until 1967. Never was the conflict model so evident in practice, and clearly distorting what really happened.
Among the holders of the conflict model today are fundamentalist Christians and many creationists who reject, bend, shape, or distort science until it fits their theology. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski, for example, is a fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Irving, Texas, where he argues that what believers need to do is “rather than look for common ground on which all Christians can agree, propose a theory of creation that puts Christians in the strongest possible position to defeat the common enemy of creation, to wit, naturalism.” Since science is based on the philosophy of naturalism, it is the “common enemy” to be defeated; stronger fight’n words were never spoken.
A roadside sign commemorating the Scopes trial. The 1925 trial is practically a monument to the conflicting-worlds model of religion and science.
2.
Same-Worlds Model. In the last couple of decades this position has become popular among mainstream theologians, religious leaders, and believing scientists, who have moved beyond the pugnacious conflicting-worlds model, and hope for an integrative conciliation. Religion and science, faith and reason, they argue, are two ways of examining the same reality. As modern science progresses to a greater understanding of the natural world, we are discovering that the wisdom of the ancients neatly matches the findings of modern scientists. Sometimes figuratively (as in day-age models where a biblical day represents a geological epoch), sometimes literally (where scientific findings are interpreted as supporting, point by point, biblical passages read nonmetaphorically), most residing on this tier are believers who work mightily to read into these ancient writings the findings of modern science, or to read into scientific theories biblical stories. The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, and his scientific counterpart, the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, meet at this level, arguing that theology and cosmology are rapidly converging into one sphere of knowledge. Two signs from the wall of the museum at the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, California, demonstrate the confusion implicit at this tier. In the first sign, creationists claim that “religion and science are not separate spheres of study,” and that “if both are true, they must agree.” The implication is that if they do not agree, one must be right and the other wrong—as explained at