The competition

Between science and religion

“We are stardust.”

This is sometimes said of human beings. It is true. It follows from the Big Bang theory, first proposed 90 years ago by the Belgian mathematical physicist Georges Lemaître. He called it the “hypothesis of the primeval atom.”

From a tiny, intensely hot, dense moment of conception, the universe explosively expanded. As it stretched, it cooled. In the beginning, there was hydrogen and helium. Then, after 100 million years, there were stars. In the bellies of the stars were thermonuclear reactions through which other molecules were forged, including carbon and other basic elements of life. No stars: no life, no us.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by friendly astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, was the highbrow television highlight of the year. Scientifically, I found the series informative and visually compelling. Its depiction of the evolution of the eyeball, for example, was vivid and convincing.

Religiously, alas, the series was subtly but sharply opinionated and tendentiously simplistic.

These flaws mostly surfaced in the Cosmos cartoon history of the rise of modern science. Too often, the storyline seemed couched to reinforce the all too popular perception that science and religion are inherently in conflict, so that, as science advances, religion must inevitably decline. That mischievous idea dates back to Auguste Comte (1798-1857). It would hold true only if science and religion offered competing explanations for the same facts. In general, however, they do not.

Consider the evolution of the eyeball. Charles Darwin showed how eyes could organically evolve through time. It is true that his theory overthrew the notion that something as marvelous as eyesight could only come about by miraculous design. It is not true that his natural explanation replaced God.

Long before Darwin, Thomas Aquinas understood that natural events usually do have natural causes. (Aquinas believed there have been some miraculous exceptions, and I do, too.) But where the cause is natural, and the explanation scientific, that does not remove God from the picture because, according to Aquinas, even where God is not evident as a doer in the world (as with miracles), God remains present