Religion and science are often described as being in opposition.  In reality, they are complimentary.  A fact based approach to thinking is better when there are facts to drive the thinking, and a faith based approach works when there are no facts available.

It’s pretty easy to see the benefits of fact based thinking.  We do it every day.  For example when we go to buy a car, hopefully we think through what we need, decide what kind of place we want to buy it from, compare prices, and make the purchase.  We may “accidentally” come home with a red corvette, but if we do we KNOW we have not done things the right way.  If we can manage to make a fact based decision, we will have given ourselves the best chance possible to make ourselves happy in the long run, and we know it.  There isn’t really any room for faith based thinking here.

And it’s pretty easy to see the benefits of faith based thinking too.  Imagine that you are in some life or death situation, and everything you can think of hasn’t worked to get you out of it.  Maybe you are trapped in a wrecked car at the bottom of a ravine and no matter what you try you just can’t get out.  Your phone’s battery is dead, your car’s battery is dead, and you are too far from the road for anyone to hear you.  You have no facts in your favor, nothing to form a plan with that can give you hope of thinking your way out of the problem.  If you rely only on facts, you become helpless.  You have nothing left but faith.  Your survival becomes a waiting game, as you wait for someone to find you.  Without faith, you may be tempted to just give up.  Faith can make a real difference here, and in your day to day life.  You will not always have facts available to guide you.

Both types of thinking are powerful in their own way.  There is no inherent conflict because they both work best in different circumstances.  I think people cause problems for themselves when they use the wrong kind of thinking in the wrong circumstances.

For example, if you are naturally more of a fact based thinker, then you may believe that there is no god because there is no proof of one.  Which is actually very flawed logic and not scientific at all.  You have an absence of fact – you have nothing to support either existence or non existence of a god.  How can you use fact based logical thinking in a situation where there are no facts?

Let me give you, in scientific terms, an example of how wrong this kind of misapplied thinking can be.  Let’s say you were able to go back in time to the 1800’s and talk to one of the scientists there.  And let’s say that you decided to enlighten him on many of the scientific discoveries that have happened in the intervening years.  So you describe black holes, quasars, and DNA to him.  You are not showing him the results of experiments, no real proof – he will only have your word to either believe or disbelieve.  If he insists on making his decision based only on the facts you have shown him, then he would pretty much have to decide that you are crazy or making it all up – and he would have been wrong.  If he allows himself to take a leap of faith and believe your wild stories without any facts, then he would have been right – this time, but he would have opened the door to being lied to in the future.  The most logical way for him to react would have been for him to decide he didn’t have the facts to support making any kind of decision.  Trying to use fact based thinking in the absence of facts would practically force him to come to the wrong conclusion.

It’s the same with faith and religion.  If science sees no facts to either prove or disprove the existence of a god, it doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.  An equally plausible theory is that a god exists and we just don’t know enough yet to prove it.

An overly strong faith can also cause problems in logical thinking.  One of the best examples I can give you is someone I know that quit her job, cashed in her retirement, and started travelling around the world on it.  When asked what she would do when she had spent everything she owned, she would answer “God will provide”.  Needless to say, when she ran out of money and crashed head first into poverty, she found her faith shaken.  God hadn’t provided.  She would have been better served to have adopted the slogan “God helps those that help themselves”.

You should never use your faith as proof certain facts don’t exist.  That kind of thinking won’t stand the test of time.  For example, Galileo was convicted of heresy for insisting that the earth revolved around the sun, in contradiction to the beliefs of the church.  At the time the church believed the earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it.  Who do you know that believes that anymore?  The church’s attempt to ignore facts failed, as it always will.  You can’t just believe the sky to be yellow and have it be so.  Faith gives you an answer when there are no facts, it does not give you an answer in conflict of facts.

Don’t let facts weaken your faith, instead find a way to include the facts you encounter into your beliefs.  Be prepared to reexamine and reinterpret what you know.

For example, dinosaurs.  Many Christians see a conflict between their faith and the existence of dinosaurs.  One perceived problem is that they aren’t mentioned in the Bible – specifically not mentioned in Genesis.  The Genesis account says God created all kinds of animals that walk and crawl on the ground, but didn’t mention dinosaurs.  When you think about it, reptiles and birds weren’t mentioned either, but they obviously exist.  And in thinking about it a bit more, Genesis wasn’t written as a scientific chronology of creation.  It was written for a specific purpose – to let the ancient Israelites understand they were created in God’s image, and that God created them as the crown of his creation.  So you shouldn’t expect it to chronicle everything created, only what it was necessary for the Israelites to understand his main points.  Anything else would have distracted from his message.

When you find facts in conflict with your beliefs, it isn’t really a problem.  Really what has happened is that you have been given an opportunity to deepen your understanding about something.  And that is a good thing.

So use facts to drive your thinking when facts are available, and faith to drive your thinking when they are not.