Back to Work: Confident Humilty

In a chapter I started on evolution I wrote:

The evidence for evolution comes from many areas of science. Because the evidence is gathered with the tools of science we can have confidence that it is accurate.  If the evidence is not accurate the self correcting nature of science will disprove it. 

After reading this my writing partner asked:

How does this fit with the concept of humility from the previous chapter?

He was referring to the following passage:

Humility is one of the most important things that I have learned about science, and that has ultimately helped me to continue to pursue science.  Humility in science reminds us that science is not perfect and it is limited in its scope. Good science in the purest form uses evidence to describe the natural world with natural causes.  Scientists strive for this every day and have been doing so for centuries. 

People have always been curious about the world around them and science, in a way, has always been useful in satisfying those curiosities.  That isn't to say that science has always done the best job at answering questions or even at following the guidelines described earlier in this chapter.  Some of the great benefits and great shortfalls of science come from who science is done by: people.  

While the discipline and nature of science is impartial, the reality is that science is done by people and people are not perfect. No matter what venture engaged in, people bring with them their own personal experience and bias that can color the conclusions they draw.  Science attempts to filter for these irregularities through methodology and peer review but I submit that science can never be 100% pure. 

This could have been a big discouragement to me when deciding if science was an acceptable co-author author of my life. However, the things I have learned about people and our relationship with God through the Bible, Church, pastors and friends, has encouraged me to pursue science with confidence. 

God makes it clear through the Bible that we are not perfect.  Sin has infected us in such a way that corrupts our hearts and minds so that we are guaranteed to mess up. But God also makes it perfectly clear that we are made in his image and we reflect his image to the world around us.  God is creative. God is intelligent.  A scientist reflects these same qualities.

As I reread the comments and reflect on what I wrote and the question it generated I wondered myself how the confidence of science is reconciled with the humility we are called to as Christians and the inherent humility I had recognized in science.  I couldn’t seem to articulate how the two were connected or what type of bridge brought the idea of scientific confidence and humility together. I did, however, remember that C.S. Lewis wrote on humility in The Screwtape Letters and I think his comments are pertinent.

Thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools...God wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. God wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor's talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own. C. S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)

We can look on the cathedral of evolution that science has built, know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, with humility.  I was reminded in a recent excellent sermon (The Wisdom of God and Human Wisdom) that all truth is God’s truth whether articulated by an atheist or characterized by a Christian and that to deny that is the epitome of arrogance.