One of the most fascinating aspects of living in the 21st century is watching the growing animosity between science and Christianity.
By "science" I mean the use (or misuse) of science by individuals when attacking religious beliefs they do not agree with.
In recent months we have watch the unfolding of "Climategate". To recap: much of the scientific evidence underpinning Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) came under fire when it was revealed that some of the leading climate scientists behind the theory had been falsifying data to make the planet seem warmer that it actually is. Worse still - there were active attempts by many of these same individuals to silence critics by preventing them from publishing in scientific journals.
AGW, we have been told, is "settled science", and that even raising questions about it makes one some sort of ignorant barbarian. Although NASA scientist James Hansen and scientists at University of East Anglia have been leading proponents, the loudest voices supporting the "settled science" claim have arguably been Hollywood stars and journalists the media, whose scientific credentials are meager at best.
The debate about evolution is eerily similar to the AGW debate. Like AGW, evolution is considered "settled science". Like AGW, evolution has its most vocal (and unprincipled) support outside the scientific community, particularly in the media and Hollywood. Just as AGW skeptics are portrayed by the media as tools of the oil industry, evolution skeptics are labeled as Christianist theocrats determined to cover the world in a second Dark Age. And like AGW, there is no room for skepticism in the evolution debate.
In both the AGW and evolution debates, there are scientists of good will and integrity on both sides. And - this must be pointed out - the ill behavior of a James Hansen or a Richard Dawkins does not disprove either AGW or evolution.
My background is in engineering and mathematics, and I am a skeptic of both AGW and evolution. A scientific theory is supposed to be experimentally verifiable or directly observable, and evolution is a theory spectacularly lacking in this regard. To accept evolution one must believe that life arose from purely natural causes, although no one can yet demonstrate how this might have happened in a scientific experiment, much less seen evidence for it in Nature. These simple life forms then changed over time (evolved) into more and more complex organisms - again, without any way to observe or experimentally verify whether this has happened or not.
Evolutionists point to the fossil record that they say shows more and more complex organisms coming into existence over time as one organism changed into another, but this is conjecture. How do they know (for example) that fish crawled out of an ocean millions of years ago, and these fish somehow became land-dwelling animals? As evolutionists will admit, fossils suggesting one species changing into another are rare, and none are without controversy. For this reason evolution has to be considered a "safe" theory since it is forever beyond proof or disproof by experimentation or direct observation. I have to ask: is this really science?
When pressed, many non-scientist (and some scientists) who subscribe to the theory of evolution claim that scientists are motivated by a dispassionate search for truth, while Christians are motivated by less intellectual goals (or worse). In short: naturalistic science is true while religion is false.
The cold, hard truth is this: science can become a "religion" (meaning as system of metaphysical beliefs). Naturalistic science starts with the assumption that everything in the Universe can be explained without resorting to the supernatural - a metaphysical argument, not a scientific one. And the suggestion that science is engaged in a dispassionate search for the truth misses the point - science may be a lofty ideal, but is also a discipline practiced by all too human scientists. Scientists, as recent events in the Climategate fiasco has shown, can be just as biased, reactionary, bigoted, close-minded and dishonest as non-scientists.
