Blog 24

The Chapter Seven reading of Dr. Pennock’s book was easy to connect with. I love science and everything about it. It provides humans the ability to gain further understanding about the natural world, and to appreciate all of the mysteries within it. However, I regularly have internal dilemmas about which side is right, religion or science. Being a practicing Christian, I sometimes find it difficult to believe everything that I read in the bible when science directly contradicts it. In the reading, Dr. Pennock gives several examples, such as Copernicus and Galileo, of how scientists struggled against the church in order to advance science as a whole. This made it seem as though science and religion will always be enemies, but Boyle and Einstein make it seem like they should coexist. I like to believe that science and religion can work together, as Einstein said “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Even though the virtue of faith goes directly against the telos of a scientist, I believe that there are areas of this world in which faith is needed, and other areas when empirical evidence is necessary to explain scientific phenomena.