The Relationship Between Religion and Science in the Light of Cosmology and Biology in the 20th Century

The following two major scientific discoveries in the fields of Cosmology and Biology during the 20^th century have had huge philosophical and religious implications. Many people believe that Religion and Science are at opposing poles; however, these discoveries show that Religion and Science are actually complementary.

1 – Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory, which is one of the most established scientific theories of our time, postulates that the universe had a beginning. If the universe began to exist, there had to have been a cause for this universe. There is no faith (except faith in science and logic!) involved in this process; rather, this is all science and logic. We can show this as a valid logical argument:

Premise 1 - Everything that begin to exist has a cause (The law of causality)

Premise 2 - The universe began to exist (The Big Bang Theory as well as the Second

Law of Thermodynamics establish this premise)

Conclusion – Therefore, the universe has a cause (deduced from the two premises)

This argument doesn't establish the existence of God, but it does provide support for the hypothesis that some “God” exists. This argument also shows that science cannot in itself prove God’s existence or non-existence. Rather, science can be used as a premise in a logical argument that can support the existence or non-existence of God. Remember that science is the best method to understand the truth concerning the material realm. But if there is no ‘matter,’ then there is no science! If God exists, he must have existed prior to the Big Bang, during which all matter began to exist, which means that He must be immaterial. Thus science cannot prove or disprove God.

The Bible, which is the source of Judaism and Christianity, begins with this verse  – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).  This was written about 3500 years ago and it emphatically states that God, an external agent, caused the universe to begin.  A quote from the late Dr. Robert Jastrow, the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is very relevant here: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Equally important is the fact that this argument is a clear defeater for religious statements such as “the universe has always existed.” If a religion teaches that the universe has always existed, it must be incorrect because this claim can clearly be disproved by science. In this way, science can help a person to either confirm or abandon his religious beliefs.

2 – DNA’s (deoxyribonucleic acid) double helix structure

In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. This discovery has widened our understanding of DNA beyond anything previously imagined. They correctly identified DNA as the “information repository” of the body. DNA contains the biological instructions (specifications) that make each species unique. DNA, along with the instructions it contains, is passed from adult organisms to their offspring during reproduction. DNA is found nearly all living cells and it is what makes each life unique.

Based on the current available evidence, it is reasonable to believe that life appeared on earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago.

We can compare DNA to a hard disk. DNA is made of chemical building blocks called nucleotides, just like a hard disk is made of silicon and other materials. But the genetic information (code) is kept inside the DNA, just like software is kept inside the hard disk.

One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that the “genetic code” in DNA is very similar to the “digital code” we use in our computers. Living organisms synthesize proteins, polymers of amino acids, using instructions ‘encoded’ by deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

So now we understand from science that life is not just about ‘chemicals,’ but also about ‘information.’ We can look at science for an explanation of the chemicals (matter), but science is helpless when dealing with the origin of the information. If we find a hard disk with software on it, we know without a doubt that the software originated in the mind of a software developer. Similarly, the inference from the genetic code (specified information) in DNA is that there is a ‘mind’ behind it.

Put into a logical argument:

Premise 1- Specified information has to originate in a mind

Premise 2 – DNA, which makes life unique, has specified information (a digital code).

Conclusion – Therefore, life has to originate from a mind

This argument doesn't prove that life is from God. But it does support the hypothesis that God is the author of life, which is the claim of classical theism. According to theism, God is an un-bodied mind. Since information is immaterial, science cannot prove or disprove where it originated.

An interesting quote from Francis Crick, an ardent atheist, is relevant here: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.”

Richard Dawkins even stated that life on earth could have been designed by a higher intelligence from somewhere else in the universe as long as that higher intelligence itself was evolved by Darwinian means. You can see his statement 1 hour and 30 minutes into the movie “Expelled,” when Ben Stein interviews Dawkins about the origin of life.

By proposing that aliens seeded life on Earth, Richard Dawkins only complicates the matter. The question remains the same - where did this intelligence from outer space originate? If it was seeded by something else, where did that something else originate?

In summary, my point here is that as science discovers more of nature’s secrets, it also exposes its own limits, while also complementing religious truths such as that God created the universe and God created life on earth.