Watching a clip of comedian/political pundit Bill Maher with “Science guy” Bill Nye, I was fascinated to hear Maher pontificate: Science and religion cannot be reconciled. That’s silly nonsense, of course but, frankly, I can’t blame him for saying such a thing. The definition of “religion” in such contexts is something like, “Religion is a meeting point for people who are afraid of knowing anything.”
I’ve been active in the church — and therefore watching the worldwide church carefully — for 52 of my 72 years. I can say with a great sense of confidence that Maher is over-generalizing but is not entirely wrong. There is a strong but vocal contingent in every religion that is marked by ignorance and convinced that if one just shouts his ignorance more loudly than the next guy, he’ll sound intelligent.
At a different time, Maher had as his guest the British atheist Richard Dawkins, who wanted to make the point that religion has caused most of the human-to-human suffering in the world. He spoke of Germany and noted that Hitler was his own religion (a silly extension of the idea of religion) but that his soldiers and exterminators were all either Catholic or Lutheran. They “had been schooled for centuries to hate Jews. Both Catholics and Lutherans had been trained to believe that Jews had been responsible for killing Jesus, so Hitler had a ripe field to plow there in the Christian heritage of Germany.”
I have two responses. First, I would like to ask Dawkins, “Since I took physics 101 at the university, am I considered a scientist?” Obviously, the answer is No. It is just as true that when a child attends a few services in a Catholic or Lutheran church, he or she is not thereby to be called a Christian.
Second — and for me more importantly — I am convinced that it is the church’s fault, more so than it is Dawkins’ or Maher’s, that Christianity looks so bad in the eyes of non-believers. German churches were a small but real part of German anti-Semitism. The great majority of German pastors cheered for Hitler and the Nazis, at least for the first few years. And only a tiny minority spoke out against the persecution of the Jews even when it was most blatant and unjust.
And in the U.S., conservative Christians make the whole church look bad by their support of people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, specialists in hatred that is entirely counter to the Spirit of Jesus Christ. And they make the whole church look bad by their utter rejection of science.
One would think that we would still be so embarrassed by our insistence, a few centuries back, that the sun and stars and planets circle the earth, that we would have learned our lesson and not be telling science what it can and cannot discover. God told us in the beginning to “subdue and rule over” nature. Science is our way of doing that.
“Subdue and rule over. . .” Hmm, that doesn’t sound quite right, does it? to the degree that we hear the words through our modern western mindset, we tend to misunderstand what that passage in Genesis is teaching. Our word “dominate,” which we hear as something like “overpower,” is really a Latin word whose meaning is more “rule as does the Lord (Domino).” If we subdue and rule over the earth, we will do so as stewards, caring for nature and cooperating with nature as does the Lord.
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