From UT Southwestern, a Prof Reconciles Science With Religion

Oxford University Press has just published Everyday Practice of Science:
Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic, written by UT Southwestern Medical Center professor of cell biology Frederick Grinnell, pictured here. In the tome, Grinnell writes on his Web site, “I will suggest that science and religion represent distinct human attitudes towards experience based on different types of faith.”

In conjunction with its publication, Grinnell has written a 1,755-word essay about that very subject for the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which, alas, is subscription-only. Provocative title, though: “Intelligent Design or Intelligible Design?” And worthy of an excerpt, which you’ll find after the jump. –Robert Wilonsky

Update: As a Friend of Unfair Park points out in the comments, the full essay can be found here.

A conventional way to contrast scientific and religious thinking
attributes reason to the former and faith to the latter. That approach
obscures what seems to me to be a central element in trying to
understand the relationship. Science, too, requires faith. The British
empiricist philosophers emphasized that point in their critique of the
possibility of knowledge. We have no assurance of our own existence or
of matters of fact beyond immediate sense experience and memories. The
idea of cause and effect, a central tenet of scientific thinking,
depends on one’s belief that the course of nature will continue
uniformly tomorrow the same as today, a belief that cannot be proved.

Such
ideas presented a potential challenge to the development of modern
science — a challenge that science ignored completely. Instead,
commented Alfred North Whitehead, we have an instinctive faith in the
“order of nature.” Einstein described that as faith in the rationality
of the world, which he attributed to the sphere of religion. How
ironic! I call it faith in intelligible design — faith that nature’s
patterns and structures can be understood.

Those of
us who practice science share a faith in intelligible design. But when
we do our work, how do we go beyond the me/here/now of personal
experience, along with its potential for misinterpretation, error, and
self-deception? The answer is that by sharing our experiences with one
another, we aim to transform personal subjectivity into communal
intersubjectivity. Through that transformation, the discovery claims of
individual researchers become the credible discoveries of the
scientific community — knowledge good for anyone/anywhere/anytime. Of
course, the credible knowledge of science always remains truth with a
small “t,” open to the possibility of challenge and modification in the
future. Nevertheless, given the extent to which humankind has succeeded
in populating and controlling the world, science’s faith in
intelligible design appears to be well justified.