Roush+Week+6+assignment

Ever since humans first performed experiments and found results that contradicted superstitions, people have had the idea that science and religion must always be at odds. However, almost all of the great scientists throughout history, including Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, all believed in some kind of god. Obviously in the minds of these scientists, science is not at odds with religion. Ken Miller is another example of a person for whom science and religion are not at odds. If any one scientific idea has divided people the most in history, it is probably evolution, and that is exactly the field that Ken Miller works in. Some people would find it very strange that a practicing Catholic like Miller would have no qualms about being an evolutionary biologist, but really there is no need to have such qualms. In the face of such incontradictable data and logic as that which supports evolution, I would suggest that a practicing Catholic might have more qualms about not believing in evolution. Personally, I find the debate over evolution to be a purely semantic one. Whether or not evolution is true, and it can never be proven 100% true, it definitely does provide a model that we can work with when doing calculations or trying to further understand other aspects of biology. It works the same way for other revolutionary theories like general relativity. General relativity’s proposal of a model of the universe where gravity is a result of matter causing curvature of space-time might not necessarily be true. Whether or not it is true, it provides a model that allows us to make sense of the data and draw accurate predictions.

The idea that makes people think that science is opposed to religion is the extrapolation of philosophies from scientific theories. Science is not in the business of either building or deconstructing philosophies, regardless of whether or not that is the scientist’s objective. Darwin’s Evolution, stated in any simple form, says nothing about the presence or absence of a god. The idea that it does is a purely argumentative invention. People on one side say that evolution is true and therefore there is no god, and people on the other side say evolution is false and therefore there is a god. People like Ken Miller sit outside of that debate, accepting evolution as a scientific theory, but still believing that there is room for a god in the universe.