Meet the Twins: Faith and Science
(Posted October 24, 2024)
“Science gives man knowledge which is power
Religion gives man wisdom which is control.
Science deals mainly with facts;
religion deals mainly with values.
The two are not rivals.
They are complementary."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Everybody knows how people can see the tower and small gold dome of First Congregational Church Danbury from all over town. But it wasn’t until the other day that I REALLY understood how significant that sight is to more than the people on the ground.
Faith Gets Us Safely Home
Our colleague, Bob Botelho, was talking to a pilot friend this week explaining how he is partners with us in preserving First Church and making beautiful renovations to the buildings. Bob’s friend was glad to hear this.
“Bob, I don’t know if you realize how important that church tower is to help us pilots to land at the airport. When we’re getting ready to start our descent, we all look for that little gold dome. That’s the exact point we can plot the coordinates that will bring us safely home on the landing strip.”
Meet the Twins: Faith and Science
A symbol of faith assisting science. Sort of a GPS: God-Positioning System. A place of hope helping us get safely home.
What a wonderful way to understand those two ways of knowing: faith and science. Contrary to some popular belief that makes the two things oppositional, to me faith and science are twins.
I believe the seeds that produced them were implanted in humanity so that the twins would both emerge into the world with a passionate curiosity. Science looks at the universe and starts to wonder what components and laws cause it to work as it does. Faith, and in a different way, religion, looks for the relationship between God’s creations and God’s own self. There is no reason why one mode of knowledge gathering has to exclude the other in their quest.
Faith and Science on ‘The Road to Wisdom’
For the past three Sundays we’ve been traveling along with Dr. Francis Collins through his book, "The Road to Wisdom." Dr. Collins is no stranger to the issues of science and faith.
Once a died-in the- wool atheist, as a young medical student he came to realize that many medical ills can be traced back to the structure of DNA—the building block of life. The more he tested and studied, the more he saw the fingerprints of a Grand Designer. Over time his research led to personal belief in God. Dr. Collins became a primary author in the discovery of the Human Genome – the “recipe” for all human beings, and the starting point for fixing errors that lead to human suffering.
This Sunday we will be take the next step, to look at God’s world through the lenses of faith and science, and see how Jesus, the Great Healer and Physician to us all, might view the holiness of what we are doing when we seek God’s creation. Join us at 10 AM!