Faith and Science

The Heavenly Banquet

On this episode Charlotte Elia and Chad Rhodes discuss the relationship between faith and science. What threats might they pose to each other? Could they possibly enhance one another? Are there even ways that science might bring us to a deeper understanding of faith? And what might we do when faith and science seemingly come into conflict?

Charlotte: These folks are in a position of protecting a particular reading of scripture because it has become their god. That’s the thing that is at risk, right?

Chad: The scriptures have become god, yeah.

Charlotte: Like we’ve talked before about this confusion between the word of God in scripture and the Word of God in Jesus, and there’s not a one-to-one relationship. Not only does that seem to exist, but it seems to exist around a particular reading of scripture, so that what science is threatening is the whole faith itself, so that’s why there’s this kind of crusade energy against it. And I think the distinction there between the way that those folks are reading scripture and the way that we’re reading scripture is that as science informs my worldview more and more through what I learn or through new discoveries, then I’m realizing that the thing that I might be modifying is my own understanding of scripture, again with all of those variables that I’m bringing to the table, and one of those variables is always how much I know about the world, right? And that’s okay for me because the whole scheme isn’t going to fall apart. It’s the one little piece of it that I was grasping in a particular way and now have a different handle on because I’m trying to fit these pieces in some congruent way. But it’s not going to threaten my idea of the existence of God because I haven’t hinged everything on my one particular understanding of a piece of scripture.

I wish this didn’t sound as condescending as it’s going to, but here it goes: One of the things that I think ultimately is so sad about folks who are rejecting science in favor of a scientific reading of scripture is that they put themselves in a very defensive position and that, I think, is antithetical to our faith, to be clutching onto a particular idea, whatever it is, but being closed to one another, to the world around us, ultimately to the Holy Spirit. And it’s not just defensive; it’s a defensiveness that manifests itself in a very combative way often.

Chad: And it can be so rigid that instead of adjusting, it just breaks.

Charlotte: Exactly. Exactly. You took that right out of our podcast description, I think.

Chad: That’s right. I actually thought about that when it occurred to me.