God and science

When I went home for Spring Break this past March, I was completely, utterly bored. Living in Southern California, a car is absolutely necessary to have any kind of fun outside of the home. Seeing as how my entire family was not on break and busily running about, I realized that a car was out of the question and that my Spring Break would have to be spent entirely in the living room with my laptop. But there are only so many movies you can watch in a day, and I was getting desperate to escape the walls of my house. That is why when my friend asked me to come to a documentary showing at Biola University (and was willing to pick me up), I didn't ask twice and agreed. I didn't even know what the documentary was about.

It turned out that it was a special showcase of the new documentary/movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I was hardly interested in the documentary itself, but became very excited when I heard Ben Stein himself would be there to talk! Although we were worried about how long the documentary would be, we decided to sit through it to hear Ben Stein talk and see if his voice would be the same as it was in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Once the program got started however, I realized what profound and serious issues they were talking about.

Unfortunately, they weren't showing the full-length movie but rather bringing in people to talk about it. The people that came to talk were mostly scientists, researchers, and professors who have literally been "expelled" from the scientific community for dealing with the idea of "intelligent design." At first it made perfect sense to me why they would be expelled — how did they expect to survive after mixing science and religion? But delving deeper I realized there were serious problems with how these people were dealt and how they were simply denied their fundamental constitutional right of free speech.

A speaker that especially touched me was Caroline Crocker, a professor of biology who became blacklisted in the academic community after she included a couple of slides about intelligent design in her lectures. What was interesting was that she was not even advocating the idea of intelligent design — rather, she wanted to present to her students many different interpretations (not just the straight orthodox Darwinism) and for them to form their own opinions. She was so unbiased in her presentation that even her students could not figure out which side she supported. However, she eventually got kicked out of her university and was blacklisted so she could not easily find another teaching position.

This was something of a shocking situation for me. I could not believe how hypocritical everything seemed. Science lives on the idea of unbiased research and scientific fact, but how is what happened to Caroline Crocker unbiased or based on the facts? She was ostracized just because she mentioned the idea of intelligent design and the rest of the scientific community was so blindly furious that they did not realize what they were doing. This opened my eyes to the state of the relationship between science and religion and how complicated everything actually was.

I have yet to see the movie but I have heard from many other people that it poses interesting questions and exposes certain situations. However, events like these further my personal belief that God and science are inseparable — that the beauty of science describes the beauty of God's work and His hand in every part of our lives. God created us and the world with a beautiful design, and I hope that science will continue to prove that.