You’ve read the title. Faith in science. Faith and science. Strange bedfellows, these. Maybe you’re wondering where all of this is going. So am I.
The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.
-Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Faith means being realistic, feeling the feelings, asking the questions. Which means that faith can live, grow, and change. While there may be certain tenets of faith to which we hold tightly for the long haul, certainty implies an absoluteness, a sense of rigidity that strains under questions and loses sight in the dark. In my experience, certainty is also no friend to science. Without doubt and inquiry we might still believe in geocentrism, a flat planet, blood-letting, or that infectious diseases are caused by miasmas. Instead, science wants us to ask questions, to let the data tell us what they will, and to come back for more in the ever-expanding landscape of inquiry.
If certainty is problematic for both faith and science, it is doubly so for attempts at intersectional conversation between them. When I first started teaching, I engaged these crossroads conversations from my standpoint as a biologist. I brought evidence. Whether the issue was evolution and human origins, vaccine science, or genetically modified plants, I prepared with and provided research articles from reputable, peer-reviewed journals. Clinical trials. Statistics. Well-honed texts and arguments. And I failed. I have stories. I failed because at least some of my audience comes with deeply held beliefs rooted in a lifetime of family and church culture. To them, I’m sure it felt as though my science was a hammer and their faith the nail.
How then do we have any kind of conversation at all?
As the years have passed, I’ve found it helpful to treat these conversations like research questions – gather background information, ask a question, form a hypothesis, make predictions, gather and interpret data, repeat. And most of the time, this works.
To illustrate: I teach a course on HIV/AIDS in which I assign Paul Monette‘s poignant memoir Borrowed Time, the chronicle of his partner’s journey through and death from AIDS in the mid-1980s with urgency, intimacy, and vulnerability. I used to jump right in and assign the book, but many students weren’t prepared to navigate a narrative from the perspective of a gay man. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had done various forms of pre-reading work over a span of years that prepared me to be open to Monette’s writing from the get-go; the question, then, was how to recreate that preparation in the span of days. I tried something like this:
- Introduce the book. I explain my choice of text to the class. It is helpful if my thought process is transparent to them, and they can understand why I chose a potentially controversial book.
- Respect gut reactions. We take some time as a class to think, write, then talk about any concerns; I also invite students who wish to discuss any concerns one-on-one to stop by my office.
- Connect to context. It is helpful if the students can see how reading such a text would fit into their context as university students at a Christian institution, so we often turn to the Bible for reminders and guidance as we approach the individuals portrayed in the memoir.
- Read and respond. If we’ve done the prep work well, students are able to recognize and accommodate their reflexive reactions if/when they happen.
In taking this route I release my certainty that the memoir be received a certain way (or received at all). At the same time, students are encouraged to acknowledge and explore their certainties, and to bring a self-awareness to the reading that ultimately enables them to step back and engage one narrative of a terrible time in history for gay men. Some amazing conversations have ensued in which I have watched my students create space to understand perspectives different from their own. It’s one of the reasons I embrace this particular memoir, and continue to seek out and use similar texts.
Have you experienced a dead end because of certainty? How have you navigated these tricky waters?
Having Faith In Science 