Complementarity: An Approach to Understanding the Relationship Between Science and Religion

COMPLEMENTARITY: AN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION FREDERICK GRINNELL* I. Introduction Everyday experiences include many mundane activities such as getting up, washing, dressing, eating, and going to work. Although most people take these activities for granted, it is possible to reflect on and experience them in special ways [I]. One can, for instance, adopt a scientific attitude. According to this view, there are universal laws that can account for the content of experience, and these laws can be revealed through scientific investigation. In this case, a scientific domain is superimposed on life experience. Alternatively, one can adopt a religious attitude, in which case the mundane activities of life become full of religious meaning, reflections of God's creation of the universe and of life. In this case, a religious domain is superimposed on the experiences of everyday life. Of singular importance, the scientific and religious domains are derived from and then imposed back upon the world of experience. The world surrounding an individual stays relatively constant as the individual matures from infancy to adulthood. With maturation, however, the individual learns how to view the world from new perspectives. Historically speaking, the scientific attitude of empirical observation and experimentation (often dated beginning with Galileo) and the religious attitude of monotheism (often dated beginning with Abraham) represent recent developments in recorded human thought. Prior to these developments, man still got up in the morning and carried out the The author expresses his appreciation for helpful suggestions to Drs. Zvi Ankori, William Snell, and Baruch Brody. *Professor of Cell Biology, University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas, 5323 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, Texas 75235.©1986 by the University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/86/2902-0473$0 1 .00 292 I Frederick Grinnell ¦ Relationship between Science and Religion mundane activities necessary to go on living. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that life in the future would cease if the scientific and religious attitudes disappeared. Taken as complete and all-encompassing views ofexperience, the religious and scientific attitudes appear to be contradictory. Recognizing, however, that these attitudes present only limited views of experience raises the possibility that they are in some sense complementary, rather than contradictory. A complementarity approach to describing experience is a familiar feature of systems analysis. In order to understand organized systems, it is necessary to know about the parts of the system and to know how the parts of the system are arranged [2]. Sentences, for instance, are systems composed ofwords. Consider the following sentences: 1. The earth goes around the sun. 2. The sun goes around the earth. The words in each sentence are the same, but the meaning changes depending on the order in which the words are used. In order to understand a sentence, one must understand the meanings of individual words in the sentence as well as the arrangement of the words. Another example of complementarity comes from the realm of physics . According to the classical explanation by Bohr [3], understanding the behavior of light requires two separate views: the particulate theory and the wave theory. Either theory alone is insufficient. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the view that science and religion are complementary universalistic and particularistic approaches to understanding life experiences. I will argue that modern science constitutes a method for understanding and modifying the world but has no inherent direction, whereas modern religion describes a messianic world view but lacks a useful method to bring about this state of affairs. II. The Scientific Attitude In order for the scientific attitude to determine the universal laws describing experiences, individuals must learn to see events or things as typical members ofcommon classes and try to establish constant, general relationships (laws) between these classes [4]. For instance, the laws that explain (predict) the movements of the planets around the sun are not limited to any single planet or to our solar system. Rather, they are general laws that can be used to describe the movements of any planet around any sun. Although the laws originally were derived from observations of our planets and our sun, the goal of science was to find laws that...