Jonathan R. Foote
Senior Fellowship (Interdisciplinary Honors in Biology & Religion):
“Science and Christianity: A Necessary Tension?” 

Throughout modern history, there has often been an underlying tension between science and Christianity, which within the last two centuries has taken on a new fervor in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that introduced the Theory of Evolution. Over the past 150 years, since the publication of Darwin’s book, Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals have responded with their own creation science and creationism, which is starkly set against Darwinian evolution. The question arises: must there be tension between science and Christianity in the first place? Do not science and Christianity both seek knowledge, at least in part, through observations of the physical world? Indeed, science and Christianity interact and seek knowledge through the observations of the world, and insofar as this is the case, the tension between science and Christianity is unnecessary. “Whatever falls to a science must be contained under its subject…that what is chiefly sought in a science is knowledge of the subject…[and such] a science is distinguished from all others by its subject, since sciences are divided somewhat as are things” (Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on Sentences, Book 1 Q.1 Art.4). In other words, the natural world is the subject of science; this distinguishes what we would call natural science from all other fields of knowledge. However, the field of natural science also lies under the subject matter of Christianity, for “ever since the creation of the world [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20 NRSV ).  In this manner, science and Christianity are inherently cooperative, at least to the extent that “which the human reason is naturally endowed is clearly most true; so much so, that it is impossible for us to think of such truths as false…therefore…it is impossible that the truth of faith should be opposed to those principles that the human reason knows naturally” (Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles 1.7.1-2, 4).