by Shane Swenson

Created on: December 18, 2006   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

What is the difference between truth and fact? This is the seminal question when trying to decide whether or not to include the Bible or any other religious text into the scientific canon.

Religion, and thus religious texts, are more concerned with truth rather than fact. In Christianity truths are gleaned from communication from God. In Buddhism truths are received from intensive personal meditation. In either case being truly happy comes from knowing truths. What are truths? They are they answer to questions like these: Is there a God? What is the purpose of life? Is there any place I will be after death?

Science cares about fact that it can establish through observation and experimentation. Science takes the greatest knowledge that man has obtained and tries to expand it. The problem is that the knowledge of man is limited and thus we can never really know truth from science.

Sometimes we have tried to mix the two and usually it has disastrous effects. For example in the thirteenth century, there was a priest and philosopher. Thomas Aquinas tried to reconcile the Church's beliefs with current scientific theory. One of the scientific theories that he used was Ptolemy's model of the universe which had the earth in the center with the sun revolving around it. Ptolemy was a great scientist who cared about fact. He studied the wrings of those who believed the Earth was at the center and those that believed that sun was at the center. He though that there was more evidence that the Earth was at the center. So he created an elaborate model that combined that scientific theory with as math and astrological observation into the most elaborate earth-centered model yet to be put forth. Even though a over a thousand years had passed by Aquinas's time, the Ptolemy model was still counted as the best scientific model of the movement of the heavens. Aquinas thought that this model fit quite well with the teachings of the Bible and so helped canonize it as Catholic doctrine. The problem of course is that theory, although based on the best evidence available at the time, was wrong. Thus the Church was now teaching doctrine that could later be proved to be false. This ran the Church into real problems in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries when the scientific evidence, and thus the theories, started to change.

If we try to integrate science with faith, it will make faith a slave to science. Every time our understanding of science changes it will change our understanding of faith. Science can easily adapt to this sort of change, religion cannot. Truth is truth. If God exists, He exists. If Christ is the Redeemer, He is the Redeemer. If the only way to be free from despair is through a state of enlightenment, then that is the truth.

The Bible can't be considered scientific writing because it deals with the truth. If we try to mix scientific facts in with it, it will bind us to those facts. So let theologians preach the truth and let scientists go down whatever path the facts take them. If the Bible is indeed the truth, the scientists will come to that same truth after they have discovered everything there is to discover, although they will have arrived there by different paths.

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