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Newspaper headlines today often expose divisions between science and faith. The most commonly covered issues range from sects claiming to have cloned babies to stem-cell research to local school boards fighting over evolution. While these particular arguments are relatively new, the tensions are anything but.

Larry Witham covered several evolution vs. creationism fights as a newspaper reporter with The Washington Times. To further look at what he couldn't in newspaper articles, Witham wrote Where Darwin Meets the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2002).

He's also written for Scientific American, Nature, and The Christian Century. His most recent book is By Design (Encounter Books, 2003).

How has the relationship between faith and science shifted over the years?

Natural theology was very strong through the 1700s and 1800s. Natural theology means you look at nature and then you logically conclude that a God must exist—because things look designed.

In the history of theology, thought had it the other way around. You believed in God because that was natural and then you looked for evidence of God. With the Enlightenment, there was a challenge to that idea. Natural theology came to the floor to say science could look and find design in the planetary systems, in the human being, and in how things adapt in nature.

Natural theology was finally debunked—as science tells the story—by Darwinism, which said all the things, all of design, actually, could have come into place by random mutation.

When was science in its strongest period?

Inarguably, the 1950s were the high point of confidence in science. The world wars put a lot of money into science so, in the '50s you have all the results. You find the genetic code. You put Sputnik up into the sky. There's the first experiment that says we can turn chemicals into living cells.

The famous Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey in 1959 found the skull of what became called Zinj, or the East Africa Man. Their enthusiasm was so great that they proclaimed, "We have finally found the human ancestor."

Also in 1959, you have the Darwin Centennial at the University of Chicago. They had 2,000 people from around the world and 100 key speakers. Even though scientists are skeptical, the mood was: Science is going to finally crack all the secrets of life.

That's where I open the book By Design. What I try to show in the book is that with every discovery, scientists are so confident that they've found the missing link or the secret of life, but then in ten years another scientist finds something that will totally contradict it.

Where does the relationship between faith and science go from there?

In the '70's, people began to question the very validity of science. It created atomic bombs. It created pollution. Scientists were coming off as sort of élite technocrats. That was a period when people began to think, "Maybe science has openings for other kinds of thinking, theological thinking, or artistic thinking."

This began a whole new debate about where you could shoehorn religion into the hard sciences. In England, Michael Polanyi, a world-famous chemist, argued that chemistry and physics do not explain the life of a cell. There's something more holistic happening there.

Arthur Koestler said scientists are not rational people who walk in a straight line to discovery. He called them "dreamwalkers." So we're opening up new views of the scientist.

What was the result from this new thought process?

With doubts about science in the '70's, theists with Ph.D.s—people who were in the closet, frankly—decided they had more freedom to talk about a creator. When we discover those laws we can say, "God did it this way or that way." Coming out of the '70s, more orthodox Christians are saying, "The God of the Bible can be talked about in science."

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47