Expert panelists from the Conway community discussed how religion has impacted lives, science and communities throughout history in a Zoom event Wednesday, Aug. 31.
The event was part of a series of “Science Wednesday” discussions where panelists talk and answer questions about science and society centered on specific topics like love, sports, politics and more.
The panelists for this event, titled The Science of Religion, included Mark Bland, associate professor of biology at UCA and president of the Arkansas State Science Fair, Clayton Crockett, UCA Department of Philosophy and Religion professor and director of the religious studies program at UCA, and Rev. Ambrose Rush, Catholic Pastor and Benedictine monk.
An anonymous attendee asked the panelists: “How would each panelist go about trying to explain something like evolution to a very religious person, firm in their beliefs, without a scientific background?”
Rush said he wouldn’t try to explain it at all because the point of human life isn’t to gain scientific knowledge.
“I wouldn’t try to control how someone views the universe,” Rush said.
Rush said that even when people are wrong, “tolerance is key.”
Bland agreed that “we all need to exercise tolerance,” but added that “having a scientifically literate populace is more important than it’s ever been.”
Crockett said that depending on how firmly someone holds their beliefs, there is “no room for conversation or explanation.”
Bland said that people in this zone of firm attachment to their beliefs will “hang on to their belief even more tenaciously when shown evidence to the contrary.”
The panelists agreed that for a conversation like this to be productive, a person would have to enter the conversation with an open mind.
UCA senior Margaret Wetzel asked the panelists: “With the idea of intelligent design, why does evolution remain difficult for some to consider?”
Crockett said the difficulty arises because some people who believe in the idea of intelligent design believe “evolution is absolutely incompatible with religion.”
Rush said evolution is difficult for some people to consider because they feel something important is being lost or that a truth that can sustain people, such as creationism, is being overturned.
“The desire to defend truth is in everybody,” Rush said.
Bland said an issue with intelligent design emerges when people try to use it to validate integrating creationism into public schools, which disrupts the separation of church and state.
An anonymous attendee then asked the panelists: “If you believe in a deity or ultimate force, how do you think of that force and how does that concept relate to your scientific practice?”
Crockett said science and religion can seem like a “fight to the death of how to understand things.”
Crockett talked about how religion is used to answer the question of purpose or meaning.
“The modern scientific method doesn’t talk about purpose,” Crockett said. “It looks at how, not why.”
Crockett also mentioned the entanglement of matter and meaning, an idea in quantum physics that relates to science and religion. This idea notes that matter and meaning are not separate elements, so all knowledge-making and all actions have some material effect. With this idea of entanglement, things typically thought as different, like language and materiality, or being and doing are actually fused.
The moderator of the event, Ashley Hicks, UCA’s STEM@Hughes academic director, mentioned one of her favorite quotes from Sir William Henry Bragg that went along with this question: “From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.”
The next Science Wednesday event, The Science of Politics, will be Sept. 29 at 6:30 p.m. at Kings Live Music at 1020 Front St. The event will also be on Zoom for those that cannot attend in person.