Grass: In Search of Human Habitat

3. Science and Faith

T H R E E Science and Faith 12 Figure 3. Science and faith, uneasy companions. Photo by author. At university I ran head on into the contradiction between science and faith, something I cannot recall being an issue before that. I attended church very irregularly in grade school and almost never in high school, I think now because of my father’s mistrust of rural Baptist preachers. Only one teacher at my high school had dared venture onto the treacherous ground of evolution. That state of blissful ignorance ended at Texas A&M. One memorable incident took place the first day of a beginning class in ecology. After the professor had described how we would study plants and animals from an evolutionary perspective, a student raised his hand and announced that his church didn’t believe in evolution. I was dumbstruck , accustomed as I was to respectful attention in class even from dissidents . My marveling continued when the professor invited the student either to drop the course or keep his opinions to himself. Intrigued, I took a course on comparative religions, which complemented the campus church services I’d taken to attending with my Southern Baptist roommate. On Sundays, preachers held forth on the merits of faith. During the week, professors of biology hammered home the lessons of logic. I liked the feel of logic. It made sense of the strategy I’d used for hunting squirrels and evading chores. But in classroom and dormitory, on the military drill field, and in the mess hall, my compadres seemed to swallow science and religion simultaneously without choking. I decided to compartmentalize the two for the time being, hopeful that a miracle eventually would reconcile their differences. In advanced courses we learned the tenets of the scientific approach. Identify the source of the information—that was one. The vague “they say” I’d previously taken for authoritative would not do. Another emphasized replication as the cornerstone of science: drawing reliable conclusions requires repeated observations, not just one. There went most of my grandfather ’s pronouncements about where to find wild hogs, which tended to be based on his last previous hunt. “Show me the evidence,” scribbled the professor on the margin of a paper I threw together late one night without access to the library. “Let’s see the references. Where are the data? And remember that the word data always needs a plural verb.” 13 I began to see that my father had tried to teach me science on the basis of his fifth-grade education. He had called it common sense. At the campus church my roommate and I usually attended, the minister and Sunday school teachers offered the Southern Baptist version of Christianity. “Read your Bible,” they said. “It has endured for two thousand years and you can take our word that it is the absolute truth. Those who attend other churches, as long as they are Christian, have good hearts but flawed interpretations of what the Bible really says. Non-Christians need saving, and that’s part of our job.” Stories in the Old Testament, most of which I’d never read, began to fascinate me. The power of simple prose, of earthy parables, lured me into and through Genesis, Exodus, and other epics of human fallibility. The New Testament, meanwhile, discouraged me from doing a lot of things that could have gotten me into trouble. The most interesting part of Christian dogma was the promise of life after death. To arrive at this posthumous experience you not only had to believe it existed, but you also had to know how to get there. Grace, Rapture , Heaven—the Ultimate Destination seemed to have a lot of names, and all the preachers said it was up, not down. One made it there through a succession of triumphs over evil. Although backsliding to lower levels often happened, with proper behavior you could regain lost ground and eventually arrive at that city of gold. The hymns I liked most pictured Heaven somewhere beyond a river. “Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river. . . . ” I could see parallels between fishing on the banks of the Angelina near my home and the approach to Heaven. Life after death seemed like a good notion, and devoting at least part of my time qualifying for Heaven seemed a small price to pay. Although science and logic gave no indication that Heaven...