What is the relationship between religion and science? The emphasis has ordinarily been on using our knowledge of Nature to teach us about God. I think it would be more fruitful to use our knowledge of God to teach us about Nature. Let me explain.

First, what can we learn about God from Nature? Some, but not a lot. This is a question at least as old as Thomas Aquinas, who thought that, for example, the existence of God could be proved without the Bible, but not the existence of the Trinity. Hume, someone at SEAL conference said, pointed out in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that even as far as proving the existence of God, the Argument by Design doesn't get us much beyond bare existence. Consider Paley's Watchmaker. We discover a watch in the woods. We can conclude that somebody made the watch, since it is hard to see how it would have arisen naturally in the woods. But although we can conclude that the Watchmaker was skillful, we cannot conclude that he was wise, or good, or still alive, or that there are not lots of Watchmakers out there. So the design of Nature generally cannot teach us much about God. (Design of the human mind has greater potential to teach us about God, but let's put that subject aside.)

Second, what can we learn about Nature from God? Potentially more. Taking the causality this way, don't think about proving anything about God. We take that as given--that somehow a particular scientist starts with a belief in the Christian God. There are a lot of scientists in this position. In the October/November 2003 American Enterprise magazine, Rodney Stark (whose work I have read before and greatly respect) cites a massive 1969 survey of 60,028 academics by the Carnegie Commission that found that 55% of scholars in the "Physical Sciences" were "religious", 34% of them "religious conservatives", with only 27% having "no religion". For "life sciences" the figures were practically identical (55%, 36%, 29%). 1969 is just one year, and 30 years old now, but the article also discusses a 1914 survey by James Leuba of a random sample from American Men of Science. He offered three options:

1. I believe in a God to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer. By "answer," I mean more than the subjective, psychological effect of prayer.

2. I do not believe in God as defined above.

3. I have no definite belief regarding this question.

Suppose such a scientist is working on evolution. For him, God's existence is a fact. He cannot rationally ignore any facts in forming his beliefs about Nature, and there is no reason for this to be an exception. Therefore, if God is a useful part of a theory, this scientist ought to include Him.

This does not imply that the scientist is right. He could well be wrong in believing in God--- but his mistake would come in believing in God, not in applying that belief to the task at hand. Or, it might be that God, even if He exists, is not a useful part of the theory attacking the task at hand. That is true of most scholarly theories--I myself believe in God, but I have not found Him useful in explaining economic behavior in any of the articles I have written. But to accept God existing, and then to deny the implications of His existence merely because that would mix religion and science is to put disciplinary boundaries ahead of the pursuit of truth.

I do not know evolutionary theory well, but I imagine this would apply there. If it is hard to explain how genes got us from A to B, then God might well be a useful hypothesis. If you already believe in God, then Ockham's Razor might well suggest that you use God in your explanation, as resulting in the simplest overall theory that explains the evidence.

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