Fertile Common Ground: Conservation

The stated purpose of this blog is to promote positive interactions between science and religion. While several of my posts have focused on how to avoid conflict (by noticing how it has been generated), today I’d like to focus more directly on positive interactions that are already taking place. If evolution has been the most contentious topic between science and religion, then certainly the topic of greatest agreement and cooperation between them in recent years has been biological conservation.

Many of the world’s religions are recognizing that the teachings of their faith prompt them to care for our planet and the life upon it. Religious leaders around the globe have taken an increasingly active role in encouraging their fellow believers to act responsibly with respect to our environment. Numerous organizations have formed to promote cooperation between religions and conservation groups. Here are two of the most prominent organizations, whose websites contain a wealth of information about religions and the environment: Alliance of Religions and Conservation and the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale.

From 2008-2011, I was fortunate to have the opportunity of serving on the board of the Religion and Conservation Biology Working Group, a sub-group of the Society for Conservation Biology. During part of this time (until the birth of my youngest child), I was chair of the curriculum committee, and we were charged with writing materials to serve as a starting point for cooperation-- a bridge-- between conservation professionals and religious groups. We wrote articles introducing religious groups to the views and goals of conservation professionals, and vice versa, as well as a series of Fact Sheets summarizing the positions of seven of the world’s major religions regarding the earth and the environment. (These are all available at the Religion and Conservation Biology resource page.) I remember writing the last of these summaries just a few days before my son was born-- whew!-- and I was grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this worthy effort.

As I complied my research for these summaries, I noticed a pattern: The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) centered their conservation ethic around the idea of stewardship-- that God, the Creator, has given us charge over his creations and holds us accountable for our use of them. Those religions whose beliefs include reincarnation (Hinduism and Buddhism, for example) centered their conservation ethic around the ideas of nonviolence and the interconnectedness of all life. And Eastern religions such as Confucianism and Daoism tended to focus on the balance of nature and our proper place and action within it. It is interesting to note that, while the core concepts leading to a conservation ethic may be different for each religion, every major world religion contains strong internal motivation for environmental responsibility. These are not values that have to be imposed from outside; they are already there and, interestingly, always have been. Often it is the most ancient of teachings that have lended themselves most effectively to a revitalized concern for nature. It is to the credit of these religions that many of their number have allowed themselves to be informed by modern environmental science and then have reached back into their own traditions to find a deeper motivation for improved action.

“And the reason I’m telling you this is because…” (Dr. Seuss) it demonstrates that when scientists and religious people have taken a step back to look respectfully and non judgmentally at each other’s beliefs and goals, they have found many common values and ways to work in cooperation. Hooray, hooray, that we don’t all have to hold the same worldview in order to work well together toward common goals! This fact gives me great hope for the future of mutual understanding and appreciation between science and religion.

To my fellow conservation scientists, I would say: Remember that Conservation Biology, as a discipline, is a marriage between a science (biology) and a value system (conservation). We are qualified to teach people the findings and tools of our science, but our moral authority to dictate value systems is no greater than anyone else’s. We must not expect religions to convert or adapt to a science-dictated worldview, and we must not present science as a moral authority on the environment. The wonderful news is that we need not (and should not) expect people to change their religious views in order to embrace conservation. Conservation is already proving to be a topic of agreement despite diverse worldviews, as long as we will work respectfully with religions to find common ground in our values. We can be more careful to avoid language that engenders strife and instead employ language with which religious groups can identify, such as “intrinsic value of nature,” “reverence for life,” and “stewardship.” We will meet with cooperation if we will remember what science is and have the intellectual honesty to report it accurately as a tool for understanding how things work, while respecting the diverse views of others regarding what people and societies should value.

To my fellow believers I would say: Let’s look to the best in our beliefs and traditions for motivation to care for this special planet, and then stand ready to listen to, learn from, and embrace the sound ideas and tools science can offer us for doing it more effectively. I, for one, am grateful that science can teach me biological principles that will help me be a better steward over my little corner of this beautiful earth. Trying to do so is part of my worship of the Creator.

Does Evolution Support Atheism?

After a long time away from my blog over the holidays (and beyond), I have been inspired (or provoked) to take up my pen (keyboard) again in response to a blog post I read by a fellow member of my faith. The author, Dave, cautioned that evolution contributes to atheism because of its materialism and “mechanistic underpinnings.” (Materialism is the philosophy that all that exists is matter, and mechanistic means explaining phenomena in purely physical terms). While he acknowledged that “There are no inherent problems with interpreting natural world events using a mechanistic-laden theory like evolution, as long as people recognize the limitations,” he maintained that danger arises “when they accept mechanism as reflecting the way the world really is, as a sort of ontological reality.” (Ontology, by the way, is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature and kinds of things that have existence.) While I think I agreed with the basic idea Dave was getting at, I was bothered by his claim that “the underpinnings” of evolution contribute to atheism. It struck me that the discussion could be aided by an understanding that science is based on one particular kind of naturalism (explaining things in terms of only natural causes and laws), and that philosophers recognize different types of naturalism: methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. The first is a method or tool; the second is a philosophy. Let’s look at these more closely (bear with me through the philosophical lingo-- it will pay off!):

Methodological naturalism is methodical study of the natural or physical world that limits itself to natural explanations that can be empirically tested, observed and quantified. Here’s a lengthy quote about that, if you wish to read it (or you can skip it and still get the drift):

“Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena.... Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea's worth. In deliberately omitting theological or "ultimate" explanations for the existence or characteristics of the natural world, science does not consider issues of "meaning" and "purpose" in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as ‘methodological naturalism’ and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a ‘ground rule’ of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.”-Kitzmiller vs Dover (2005:64-65)

In other words, methodological naturalism is what the scientific method is based on. The naturalistic “underpinnings of evolution" Dave refers to in his blog are exactly the same as the naturalistic underpinnings-- the scientific method-- that all of science is based on. We cannot conduct science in any other way. The Theory of Evolution is no different (or any more conducive to atheism) than any of the rest of science in this way.

Metaphysical or philosophical naturalism, on the other hand, claims that nature is all there is—that nothing exists beyond the natural world we observe. Metaphysical naturalism denies the existence of the spiritual and is therefore distinctly different than the methodological naturalism necessary for scientific inquiry, which must remain mute about whether anything lies beyond the physical world. And here is the key point: metaphysical naturalism is not part of science; it is a philosophy (taken on faith, ironically) entirely outside the power of science to confirm or deny. Hence, a religious scientist can be perfectly comfortable employing methodological naturalism in his science while firmly rejecting metaphysical naturalism. The problem is when people (and often scientists themselves) fail to draw the distinction. Others also recognize this problem:

“Methodological naturalism is distinguished from metaphysical (or ontological or philosophical) naturalism, the view that nature is all there is and that supernatural entities such as spirit and God do not exist. The former is a statement about the limits of science, while the latter is a statement about the whole of reality, but some philosophers argue that the distinction fails in practice because scientists tend to act as though the whole of reality is accessible to their methods.” –New World Encyclopedia (my italics. Quote found here)

Note that last line, to which I added italics. And now I’m sure you are saying, “Alisse, you are harping on the same subject again! We know, we know: science is a method limited to only some portions of reality, and problems happen when we try to take it beyond its bounds and turn it into a philosophy about all of reality. We get it, okay!” Good. I’m glad you understand this point, because I continue to find it at the root of most conflict involving science. In fact, this is the very thing that has led to the backlash against science in the U.S. For example, William Dembski, a prominent leader in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, declares, “Intelligent Design entails that naturalism in all forms be rejected” (1998). He further states:

“So long as methodological naturalism sets the ground rules for how the game of science is to be played, IDT [Intelligent Design Thesis] has no chance… The ground rules of science have to be changed. We need to realize that methodological naturalism is the functional equivalent of a full blown metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism asserts that the material world is all there is. …Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that the material world is all there is. But once science comes to be taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows at once that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become for all intents and purposes indistinguishable. They are functionally equivalent. What needs to be done, therefore, is to break the grip of naturalism in both guises, methodological and metaphysical.” –William Dembski (1996). 

Wait. Did I hear that last line right? Because some people think the scientific method is the only valid way to knowledge, we should overthrow the scientific method? We should ignore the valid distinction, recognized by philosophers, between the two kinds of naturalism and throw the baby out with the bath water? That's certainly what he seems to be saying. Although I obviously sympathize with Dembski's concerns about people placing science on too high a throne, I find his solution baffling. He doesn't just want to dethrone science; he wants to dismember it.

As summarized in the court decision of Kitzmiller vs Dover, “ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation" (2005:64). Let’s think about what would happen if we overthrew the ground rules of science-- of the scientific method that must leave questions about God alone-- and allowed all fields of science to address the “supernatural.” Everybody has different ideas about what is in that realm. Various untestable and unfalsifiable proposals of the supernatural would have to be entertained not just in biology and geology (the fields especially objectionable to ID), but in physics, astronomy, electronic theory, medicine, chemistry, engineering, etc., etc. Can you imagine the implications, here?  People could legitimately propose that invisible water fairies are responsible for hydraulic lift. In other words, attacking the theory of evolution by changing its “underpinnings” (scientific naturalism) has vast implications for how all of science—not just biology—would then be done. It would cease to be science as we know it and would resemble the more speculative versions of science known in previous centuries, before the formalization of the scientific method. You think I’m exaggerating, and yes, it all sounds ridiculous, but this is indeed the logical conclusion of rejecting methodological naturalism as Dembski suggests. It undoes science.

It seems abundantly clear that the real solution, which Dembski alludes to but does not pursue, is to emphasize that science is not “the only universally valid form of knowledge.” Instead, ID jumps on board the idea that science does provide the answers and sets about to disguise itself as a new scientific enterprise, all the while seeking to undermine the scientific method. I fail to see the logic in this approach, well-intended toward the "intelligent designer" though it may be.

Thank goodness, I say, for the naturalistic “underpinnings of evolution” and of science in general. Let’s just keep straight what kind of naturalism we are talking about. The Theory of Evolution is more likely to facilitate atheism (and a subsequent backlash against science) when its grounding in scientific naturalism is fundamentally misunderstood or ignored.

What About Evolution?

Undoubtedly, the topic which has caused the most conflict between science and some religions is the Theory of Evolution. Quite truthfully, it is the philosophical extrapolations based on evolution, not the science itself, which have been most problematic. Nonetheless, even the science related to things like the age of the earth and the origin of man have come into conflict with traditional religious interpretations.

Obviously, I can’t cover this topic in any kind of comprehensive way on this blog. But I am not going to shy away from it, either-- that wouldn’t help anybody. Because my own religious beliefs encourage me to accept all truth, from whatever source, I enjoy tackling this topic head-on and without fear. Exploration is non-threatening to my faith, because I only have to believe what is true; if I’m not sure of the truth, I can refrain from committing my opinion while I continue searching.

In my search for answers, here are a few books that have been most helpful and enjoyable. (I won’t say that I agree 100% with everything they say, but I found much to agree with, and they offer some wonderful insights and possibilities.):

• Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, by Kenneth R. Miller. Dr. Miller is a cell biologist and molecular biologist who is also a Christian.
• Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller. This is a must-read for anyone deeply interested in the debate over evolution in the U.S. in general, and in the intelligent design movement specifically.
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis Collins. Dr. Collins was the leader of the Human Genome Project and is also a Christian. Collins covers much of the same ground covered by Miller, but in a simpler format and a quicker read, and with a gentler tone. Highly recommended for those seeking an understandable, balanced, and fairly comprehensive introduction to important questions at the science-religion interface.

If you want to see my own conclusions (so far) about evolution, I will simply lift a passage from my novel, Emergence: A Journey of Friendship, Science, and Faith. In this passage, Miriam Bancroft is a biology professor, and Meg is her graduate student: Miriam On Evolution

What an intriguing mystery we get to try to unravel! I can’t wait to learn someday how all the pieces fit together, and I want to be in the front row when God eventually explains all of this! In the meantime, let’s all take a few deep breaths and keep our cool about it. Contention seldom generates understanding.

One more word is helpful when discussing topics so complex that none of us fully understands them yet: humility.

Why God is Not a Scientific Hypothesis-- And Why We Would Not Want Him To Be

Despite all I have said on this blog, there will still be some who say that God should be treated as a scientific hypothesis. Consider this statement by atheist Richard Dawkins:

“Either admit that God is a scientific hypothesis, or admit that his status is no higher than that of fairies or river sprites.” (in Stenmark 2004:74)

Dawkins is indeed correct that if God is not a scientific hypothesis, then he can’t hold any more prominent place in science than fairies do. However, Dawkins’ statement reveals two logical errors lurking in his philosophy. The first is his assumption that anything that isn’t a scientific hypothesis isn’t worth considering—i.e. he is revealing his scientism. The second error is the reasoning, common to many atheists, that if there is a God, and if he interacts with the natural world at all, then his actions should be empirically detectable. (Don’t ask me how they “know” this-- it is an untestable assumption. One could just as reasonably claim that the way to detect God is through our spiritual rather than our physical senses, and there would be no scientific way to refute that.) Ironically, the sign-seeking argument that a deity must be physically detectable is used not only by some atheists who say, “see, there’s no evidence for God, because we have never detected him,” but also by some believers who wish to make a place for God within science.

I have spent a considerable amount of time cautioning the first of these groups, including my fellow scientists, against representing science as atheistic. It is not. Science is agnostic—it  cannot claim any knowledge one way or the other about God. If you don’t want to take my word for it, I would refer you again to the UC Berkeley website and leave it at that for today: Science has limits

Now let’s turn the tables a bit and take a look at those segments of society that wish to embed God in science. Many religious people object to the idea that science tries to describe the natural world—God’s creation—without reference to God. While some of these groups openly regard science as the enemy, others of them try to couch their religious beliefs as a new kind of science that can include God. While I understand their desire to give the Creator credit at every turn (which I do from a religious standpoint), efforts to do so from within science quickly become problematic. This is a complex and multi-faceted topic that keeps me awake at night, and I can only scratch the surface here. But for a start, let’s consider this analogy:

Many believe that God has influenced various historical events. How, then, would you propose to teach in the public schools, to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, pagan animists, atheists, etc., history with God inserted? Everyone has their own account—commonly called scripture—of God’s dealings with mankind, and everyone has their own idea about how God (defined differently by all of them) has worked. What if, in the middle of a secular history class, the teacher or a student wanted to insert an explanation that the Hindu god Shiva had caused some historical event, or that Allah had, or that Jehovah had? And once that can of worms was opened, someone else could assert that fairies had caused something, or that aliens had. How would you test any of these claims, and how would you settle the disputes? It would be absurd to think that we could teach history or conduct scholarly historical research this way. But no less absurd is the idea that because the study of secular history does not include God, we should reject it as a discipline. The same could be said for political theory, sociology, economics, and innumerable other fields. We don’t throw out a hammer or a wrench just because it can’t saw a board, and we don’t expect any one tool to perform all functions.

It is no different with science. In order to study the natural world and communicate with each other about it, we had to devise a system (over the centuries) that put people of all beliefs on equal ground, with access to the same data, through their senses only. The scientific method seeks to do that by prohibiting up front all hypotheses that cannot be tested by the physical senses. Even this kind of evidence is hard enough to agree on, but at least it can be seen, measured, and experienced by people of any religious persuasion. To insist that science include Diety (and whose Diety?—we’d have to entertain all imagined types) would require us to abandon the hypothesis-testing foundation that makes science reliable. Science (and the centuries of work required to develop its methods) would regress and scientific progress would flounder under the infusion of disparate, untestable beliefs.

Those who have attempted to formalize a method for detecting God empirically have had to begin by adopting untestable assumptions about how God works, and some of these assumptions are objectionable to people of varying faiths. I am thinking specifically of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in the United States, which is the most sophisticated attempt to date to carve out a space for God within science. (Although spokesmen for ID are usually careful not to specify the designer or imply that they are talking about God, their arguments do indeed have direct theological implications.) On close examination, the assumptions of ID would produce a science that may be untenable for Buddhists, Taoists, and various Christian groups, such as Mormons, among others. (This is to say nothing of the scientific objections to ID, which are many.) Additionally, by attempting to create a scientific way to prove God, the arguments of ID would unintentionally create empirical ways to disprove God, something which science is currently incapable of doing. Thankfully, so far the methods developed by the ID movement don’t work, or else aggressive atheists would have all kinds of new ammunition in their hands! In short, ID is a prime example of why attempts to make God a scientific hypothesis are problematic from both scientific and religious standpoints.

I advocate the scientific method, not only for protecting science against untestable and unfalsifiable claims, but also for protecting religious freedom against the various philosophical claims of pseudoscience, both theistic and atheistic.

Calling for Education Reform in Science

All around us in society today, scientific knowledge and scientifically-developed technology are applied to value-laden situations and questions, which lie outside the jurisdiction of science. Such practical application, one could argue, is ultimately what science is for-- not only for understanding our world but for improving our situation within it. But in such application, scientists need to be very careful to understand where their science stops and where personal philosophies begin.

In a previous post, I gave you some examples of what I would call “boundary violations” by scientists. In each case, the scientist stated a non-scientific, personal philosophy as if it were a direct conclusion of science. And in each case, the statement could have been corrected and conflict could have been avoided if the scientists had recognized and respected the limits of science and acknowledged their own personal biases.

Because I am religious and I am a scientist, I have to cross the boundary between science and non-science on a daily basis. Therefore, I had better be darn sure of where that boundary is if I’m going to maintain credibility as a scientist. Why then, I wonder, have we allowed the science-supports-atheism misconceptions promoted by some scientists to go largely unrefuted by the general scientific community? Shouldn’t scientists making such claims have lost their credibility on that subject by now? The only explanation I can think of is that many scientists and certainly most of the general populace have quit thinking carefully about where science starts and stops. We are not being trained to recognize the limits of science, and I believe this poses a long-term threat to the credibility of science itself.

The Understanding Science project at UC Berkeley (and funded by the National Science Foundation) was initiated in response to concerns about widespread “misunderstandings of the nature of science.”:

“...research indicates that students and teachers at all grade levels have inadequate understandings of the nature and process of science.” (About Understanding Science)

I am calling for an adjustment in the way we teach science, with emphasis on recognizing what science is and what it is not. In our science classes, presenting a little flow chart of the scientific method and then moving on to a list of “facts” to memorize is not adequate. We should be looking back through the history of science-- to Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Popper, and others-- to remind ourselves why and how science came to develop and adopt the scientific method in the first place, and how that sets science apart from other fields. Our students need practice in how to construct hypotheses that can be addressed by that method and recognizing what kinds of hypotheses cannot. This will lead to added emphasis on the idea that science is not the only field with valuable insights to contribute to our broader knowledge. We will thus rediscover that it was the scientific method that allowed us to maintain the integrity of science as a system that is both reliable and neutral with regard to the religious and ethical portions of human knowledge. I will be so bold as to suggest that the scientific method-- the limits it imposes-- is the very reason science can be compatible with religion (nearly the whole spectrum of it) and with various human ethical systems.

In short, I am a staunch defender of the scientific method-- and an advocate for teaching it more effectively-- because of both what it can tell us and what it cannot tell us.

Love is Real

Once again I divert from my main line of thought to share something on a personal note. This past weekend, I attended the wedding of my brother. It was one of those rare, most memorable occasions when, as my author sister put it in her blog, “we packed a week’s worth of emotion into one day.” In fact, I would say that we packed the buildup of many years of emotion-- of love for my brother and hopes for his happiness-- into the one culminating day when our best wishes for him were realized. The wedding ceremony was beautiful and full of spiritual depth, as the two committed themselves to each other and to God. The obvious and peaceful happiness on the couple’s faces and the intensity of family love, with their parents and all siblings present at the celebration, made this the most joyous event I have ever attended. The story of how the couple met playing ultimate frisbee, of how he proposed (involving a lamp-lit table display set up in the frisbee field where they had met), and the events of the wedding itself are sure to become the stuff of family legend from generation to generation. Just as I love hearing the story of how my dad pushed my mom around in a wheelbarrow following their wedding reception, my brother’s posterity will cherish the story of how he and his bride waltzed in Denny’s restaurant at the family dinner following their wedding. In short, there are no words adequate for describing the joy and beauty of this union, and my gratitude for witnessing it.

There are those who claim that the whole sum of our experience, thoughts, and feelings as humans-- all of our experience with so-called love, beauty, or spiritual experience-- can be reduced to explanations of chemical reactions and the firing of neurons in our brains. These reactions, in turn, are the result of a long evolutionary history that made the development of such feelings and beliefs adaptive for our species. In this view, our emotional or spiritual experiences are only products of our physiological makeup rather than manifestations of ideal or transcendent principles that exist independently of our minds. In other words, the very feelings that make us human are illusions, artifacts of evolution, not external realities. This is the view put forward by E.O. Wilson, “father” of sociobiology, and promoted by those such as Dawkins.

After the events of this past weekend, just thinking about these spiritually impoverished philosophies feels like a punch in the stomach! Fortunately, Wilson and Dawkins cannot prove that they are right. But neither can I prove to anyone’s satisfaction that they are wrong.

Only those who have felt-- and trusted-- the kinds of things my family felt this past weekend know the truth of the matter. There is more to our minds and hearts than mere physiology or evolutionary expediency. I believe in God and in the godly nature of our human relationships, not just because I want to believe them or because my ancestor’s genes compelled them to believe for their own survival. The first-hand knowledge I have of love, of beauty, of the spiritual, and of God, is based in experience beyond the explanatory scope of science or empirical observation. I cannot convince you of them by logical argument, mathematical proof, or scientific hypothesis testing. All I can do is simply testify, by my own experience, that they are real. And they are wonderful. I know that each of us can discover-- through our own transcendent experiences-- the verity of all those good things for which our human hearts most hope.

Thank you to my brother and his wife for helping me glimpse the eternal.

LDS temple in Washington, D.C.

Is Science Value-Free?

While scientists must adhere to the moral of intellectual honesty in order to produce reliable results by the scientific method, science itself is moral-neutral. That means science cannot make judgments about values or morality. To emphasize that point, here are a few good, authoritative quotes:

“…science is not equipped (and it does not pretend) to make value judgments on these [emotional or psychological] matters.” –Massimo Pigliucci (2002:153)

“…while scientists must operate with ethical principles, some specific to their practice, the validity of these principles can never be inferred from the factual discoveries of science.” –Stephen Jay Gould (1999:4-5)

“…morality consists not in any relations that are the objects of science; …not in any matter of fact which can be discovered by the understanding…the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.”- David Hume (1740:Volume III, part I, section I) (I know this quote is a little hairy, but Hume is an important figure in the philosophy of science)

Here’s a great website about what science cannot do (presented by the University of California at Berkeley with funding from the National Science Foundation): Science has limits

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince you that science is limited and that it does not encompass all possible areas of human knowledge. And that is true. (Don’t forget it!) But now I am going to throw a fun little wrench into the discussion by giving you these quotes:

“Science is supposed to be value-free.  It is presumably completely objective and free from such human frailties as opinions, goals, and desires.  Because science is done by humans, however, it is never value-free.” –Gary Meffe and Ronald Carroll (1994:21)

“…All applied science is done because of value judgments.  Scientists in fact have a dual role.  First, they carry out objective science that both obtains data and tests hypotheses…They can also be advocates for particular policies that attempt to change society….But it is crucial to separate these two kinds of activities”–Charles Krebs (2001:12)

“No matter how objective scientific research might be, its findings often lead to conclusions that are value-laden.” –Ernst Mayr (1982:79)

“…science is neutral only at the level of methods and not at the higher level at which problems are selected and fields defined. That higher level is determined by values, politics, funding, and…paradigms…which in turn are products of culture, psychology, and political power.” –David Orr (2004)

This is certainly true of my own field, conservation biology, whose very name reveals that it is a marriage between a value system (conservation) and a science (biology). The same could be said of medicine, psychology, or various other fields that apply technology or scientific knowledge to practical problems. Therefore, I have found it helpful to use the following definitions:

Science is: The scientific method and the resulting body of knowledge (facts, hypotheses, theories, laws).

Applied Science is: The scientific method, the resulting body of knowledge, and the interpretation and application of this knowledge, including to value-based questions.

In applied science, we conduct our research in the realm of science but communicate and apply it outside that realm. Note that the values inherent in applied science are not subject to the scientific method and are thus open to debate from opinions contributed by sociology, economics, ethics, religion, and other segments of human knowledge. BEWARE: Representing one particular value system as the “scientific” one is intellectually dishonest and decreases the credibility of any scientist who would make such a claim.

Because applied science is so prevalent in our society, I believe that our science students today should be trained to think and converse across the boundary of science without violating it. In such communications, violations lie not in crossing the boundary from science to non-science but in failing to acknowledge the boundary. Communicating science as if the boundary is not there undermines scientific credibility and perpetuates conflict.

I believe that religion and science can either be competitors or cooperators in causes we all care about; the key lies in how the two communicate across the science boundary.