Dr. Denis Alexander shared his views on why science and religion are compatible in a lecture entitled “Beyond the Conflict: Similarities between Science and Faith” last Friday in Shanklin 107 before a crowd of around 75 students, faculty, and staff members.
Alexander, who currently serves as the director of the Faraday Institute for Science & Religion at Cambridge University’s St. Edmunds College, is a Christian and a former chairman of molecular immunology at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge.
“I’ve never personally experienced this conflict idea between science and religion,” Alexander said. “The conflict model seems to be associated with a good bit of intellectual confusion.”
Alexander specifically mentioned the views that Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and ethologist from Britain, expressed in his recent book “The God Delusion,” as rare within the Britain scientific community and the historical scientific community in general.
“[Many founders of modern scientific disciplines] used faith in God as direct motivation for exploring further,” he said, citing names like René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, John Dalton, Gregor Mendel, and more modern examples, such as Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
Alexander also briefly discussed Wesleyan’s namesake and founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, and how he encouraged his followers to become involved in science.
Alexander noted that it is an individual’s responsibility to look at his or her own system of beliefs.
“The belief that the world was made 10,000 years ago is in complete conflict with science,” he said.
According to Alexander, religious fundamentalists, a number of whom he says have beliefs about the age of the world or evolution that contradict science, are more prevalent in the United States than the United Kingdom.
“The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology,” he said, quoting evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. “It was Darwin’s brilliance to see the evidence in a new light.”
Alexander linked the development of life on earth to Christianity.
“In the Christian religion, God is the author, creator, and sustainer of everything that exists,” Alexander said. “[Many factors need to be] precisely right in order for us to live. Only a universe as big as ours could have lasted the 14 billion years necessary for humans to appear, [and] stars are simple [compared to humans]. The human brain, hopefully, is a little more advance than the brain of a shrew.”
Additionally, Alexander explained that evolution does not happen by chance.
“Only a few genomes will actually produce successful organisms,” he said. “It’s not a case of anything goes. It’s a highly organized process.”
Alexander then illustrated what the studies of science and religion have in common.
“There is no such thing in either science or faith as a completely coherent theory or map,” Alexander said after pointing out the apostle Paul’s assertion that Christianity, if not for the resurrection, would be a waste of time.
According to Alexander, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all hypothetically open to refutation. He gave the example that if the body of Jesus had been found and somehow confirmed, Christianity would have been disproved.
During the question and answer session that followed, Alexander gave some further thoughts on the need for people from the fields of religion and science to work together.
“[A polarized view] misses historical realities [and] puts people in conflict who really needn’t be in conflict with each other,” he said. “There is a great benefit to having an academic discourse. Scientific explanation is like going fishing with a net with holes of a certain size. You’re only going to catch certain kinds of fish.”
The lecture was sponsored by the Wesleyan University Colloquium for the Study of Science and Religion, the Wesleyan Christian Fellowship, and the Metanexus Institute Local Societies Initiative.
“Dr. Alexander’s objective was very modest: to show faith and science aren’t mutually exclusive,” said Nik Gavelis ’08 afterwards. “I’m not sure how successful he was, but I am sure he came up very short of justifying religious faith. Today at least, a disproportionately small percentage of scientists believe in the personal God Dr. Alexander talked about. He simply neglected to mention that involvement in science [today] is overwhelmingly correlated with religious disbelief.”
“I thought the lecture was very good,” said Glaister Leslie ’08. “I was really surprised by how many people turned up for it. I never realized that so many people on campus were interested in discussing the relationship between religion and science.”
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