Rhetoric Race and Religion
The reconciliation of science and religion is one of the most compelling tasks confronting religious believers today. For we are truly faced with a pair of hostile, warring camps. Many religious believers have drifted into a kind of pietistic mistrust of science that seeks comfort in demonstrably false propositions like young earth creationism. On the other hand, we find a number of scientist who dismiss the possibility of a spiritual dimension to human existence. Some dismiss faith altogether as an outdated mode of explaining the inexplicable. Religion is superstition, they contend, and empiricism must finally triumph over the irrational.
Thus I picked up Amir Aczel’s book, “Why Science Does Not Disprove God,” with eager anticipation, hoping that he might make peace between these contending factions. Alas, I sighed, upon finishing the book, the chasm remains unbridged. Rather than grappling with the truly challenging, foundational questions, Aczel, I discovered, preferred to recite middle-brow explanations that might give consolation to people of faith but that never really come close to achieving a reconciliation of science and faith. Certainly, no one who is not already a believer will find much that is persuasive in these pages.
Let’s just consider a couple of Aczel’s arguments to see his method at work. Take evolution. Aczel’s chapter on evolution opens with a nod to Charles Darwin’s early training in theology. It notes that in the second edition of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” someone — Darwin himself, perhaps, or an anonymous editor — inserted acknowledgement of a “Creator.” So, the argument goes, Darwin maybe did not see an essential incompatibility between his findings and conventional Christian faith.
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