“Science is the answer to how. God is the answer to why.” Discuss

One of my most recent facebook status' was a paraphrase of something someone said in a recent BBC documentary. The programme was called Did Darwin Kill God? and the paraphrase was taken from Francis Collins, “Science is the answer to how. God is the answer to why.”

He's a very interesting man who for more than a decade headed up the Human Genome Project. He's a firm believer in God whilst being an active and influential scientist, another quote attributed to him is, "Evolution is God's way of giving upgrades."

My facebook status garnered a few comments and quickly descended into a full blown debate on the merits of science and faith, which ultimately lead me to the conclusion that a more accurate description of my own position would be, “Science attempts to answer how but God will always answer why.”

For me science is very important - without it many of the things we take for granted wouldn't exist, I wouldn't be able to travel to work nor would my job exist; without the scientific discoveries over the centuries we'd still be stuck in the same position we were in thousands of years ago. I guess there may be a small band of Christians that wouldn't have a problem with that but most can surely acknowledge that as knowledge and technology increases so does the human experience.

Most Christians happily take advantage of the comforts that modern technology can provide, nor would anyone want to see the medicines and treatments that have been worked on for decades be simply taken away. And yet the majority of conservative Christians seem to have this rather worrying phobia of science, as if there really is only one option Science or Religion.

There are very very few places where there is even the potential for the bible and science to clash yet a lot of Christians do get rather hung up on them and as a result seem to have a rather wary view of science. In defense of fundamentalist Christians I would say that it isn't the role of science to answer the big philosophical questions of life, strangely enough that's more ... well ... philosophy than science. Lets make sure it's only the bathwater we throw out though, the vast majority of science is there to further our existence. It's to improve our health, our technology, our transport, to better understand our surroundings et cetera.

You'll have noticed I've not yet expressed my position on the whole creation versus evolution debate, I'll leave that for another day. The other debate that might be worth delving into off the back of this is does modern technology make life too comfortable and stop us from being fully aware of our own humanity?

The cheats way out

Today I've been inspired to write two seperate blog entries, neither of which I'll publish right now.

One was on a truly historic UK Budget, as delivered by Alistair Darling, however I've not fully digested all the detail so I'll save that for another day. The other was on how some Christians view science, I've not quite finished writing that but I promise to publish it very soon.

So instead I'm going to cop out and draw your attention to an article my friend recently wrote,

http://www.localmotoring.com/pages/local-motoring-news.php?b=2&a=1161

My old school friend Paul Forrester wrote a lovely message to me last week saying how he'd enjoyed reading parts of my blog so to return the favour a few of our mutual friends (if no-one else) may find the above link worth a view. I certainly enjoyed reading it.

Tomorrow I promise to actually write something of merit myself though...