FASTLY - Faith & Science Teaching

Why Do Science?

In Brief

This activity aims to engage students in thinking critically about why science is done, why people enjoy science, how it should be done, and the limitations of science. By looking at a historical example through other peoples’ eyes, students can consider what science should be for. This activity can serve as a primer for Activity 4: The DNA Drama.

Goals

Students will understand that science as a human practice is connected with questions of motivation and character and with ethics and worldview.

Thinking Ahead

Like any other human practice, science is pursued amid a variety of motives, character strengths, and flaws. People can engage in science, applied science, and related technologies for a range of reasons, including pursuit of truth, a sense of the beauty and wonder of what is there, the desire for money or fame, or a desire to help others. Often there is a mix of these and other motives. Also people look at science through a variety of worldviews.

While science classrooms rightly focus on scientific inquiry, skills, and understanding, if no attention is paid to the human context of science, it can create a false image of science, as a human practice can be created and some of the connections between science and faith will be obscured. Since a wide variety of personalities and motivations are involved in the drama of DNA’s discovery, it provides an excellent historical example for discussing motivations and methods for doing science. A brief history of the discovery is included in the activity below.

Think about the mixture of motivations that led you to focus on science in your learning and career and how these motivations relate to faith – this activity creates an opportunity for you to share personally with students.

Related Book Review: God in the Lab: How Science Enhances Faith by Ruth M. Bancewicz.

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Copies of the handout Why Do Science?

• Student internet access

Teaching the Activity

Begin by asking the question: “What is the purpose of doing science? Why would people give their time and energy to it?” Responses might include: to understand the world, to learn more, to earn money, to help other people, to control something, to be famous, to figure things out or solve problems, to learn how to care for God’s world, to see more order or structure in the world, to feel smart, etc. You may wish to prompt students to think about both “pure” or “basic” science and applied science in order to broaden the range of motivations.

Next, ask: “What are the personal rewards or motivations for people who do science?” Responses might include: money, fame, satisfaction, excitement, seeing beauty, status, contentment in solving something, joy of discovery, learning new things, etc.

Next, ask: “How should we do science? How should the work of science happen?” Answers may vary widely. Some students may focus on the concrete steps of the scientific method while others may think about how people will interact and engage each other in the process and how those relationships might look or work. Encourage both of these approaches. This is the point at which to begin to help students to think about the “how,” including both technical processes and issues connected to commitment and character (such as commitment to honesty and integrity, treating colleagues well, maintaining a sense of wonder, etc.).

Finally, ask: “Does science have a limit? Are there things it should not pursue? If so, who determines the boundaries?” Answers may vary significantly here as well. Some may focus on the technical limits, some may focus on the philosophical limits (science is limited to the physical world), and others may focus on God’s sovereignty in controlling what humans achieve.

If at first students think science has no limits, ask questions such as: “Can science tell us how to interpret a poem? Should scientists be able to use people for testing dangerous things?” (Students may not know, for instance, about processes for approving research on human subjects through a review board that considers ethical constraints.) “If science finds that people are selfish does that mean we should accept being selfish because science says it is normal?”

Draw together the discussion of this series of questions in a brief summary: science involves careful, repeatable, technical processes, and is also connected to matters of character and to questions of what is right and how we should live.

Direct students to this interactive website timeline on DNA’s history. Have them read through the timeline paying particular attention to the brief biographies of Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, and James Watson. This will provide adequate background for students when they engage the quotations in the next step.

Hand out Why Do Science, which contains various quotations and a grid for organizing them. Ask students to sort each quotation into the most fitting category by writing its number on the grid and adding a few words about how it answers the question for that category. Tell them there is more than one way to organize the quotations, but that there ought to be a reason or reasons for their decisions. They could do this individually or you can arrange them into pairs or groups.

When this is completed, ask students, as a group or as individuals, to pick the statement that they agree with the most, and the one that they agree with the least, and give reasons why. Go around the room and solicit responses.

Finally, have the groups or individuals go back to their statements and pick one more quotation. Ask them to answer the following questions in writing more fully than they did on the grid:

• What does the statement say about how the world works or why people do science?
• What does the statement miss or hide about how the world works or why people do science?

You can use these written responses to assess whether students are able to think with the aid of the categories framing the exercise and see scientific practice as connected with character, motives, ethics, and worldview.

Believe It or Not?

In Brief

This activity for science or Bible class engages students in thinking about what makes us accept things as true. What constitutes evidence for us? Students will consider a wide range of claims that certain groups of people accept as true, will attempt to identify whether they also accept them as true, and how faith and evidence are involved.

Goals

Students will think critically about the roles of trust and evidence in coming to believe the findings of science as compared to other kinds of belief.

Thinking Ahead

Activity 1: Science, Technology, and Motives focused on motivations for doing science, and Activity 2: Why Do Science? placed science in the context of character and worldview. This activity again connects science to worldview in terms of how we come to believe. It could be used in a science class or in Bible class to create cross-curricular connections around the topic of faith and science. Each of these activities seeks to help students see science as embedded in human practices and prepares them for considering the story of DNA and its human dimensions.

What counts as evidence? What makes someone believe something? Whose authority do we trust? Are we more persuaded by evidence or by our prior convictions? These questions are basic when considering the nature of science and also confront us every time we read an article on the internet. We typically choose to believe or not believe things in ways based on our underlying sense of what is plausible. Our motives may also affect what we are inclined to believe. We do not have first-hand access to the evidence for most scientific findings, and so our degree of trust in those who report them plays a significant role. We did not witness the events of the New Testament firsthand, and so our degree of trust in those who report them plays a significant role.

Science offers the reassurance that its results are testable and repeatable. But its methods are not well suited to “why” questions, to bigger questions of meaning and ethics, or to unique historical events where testimony becomes more central. Think about the different kinds of trust that are involved in your own beliefs, whether scientific, religious, political, and so on. Consider how to help students learn to be discerning in a way that balances the need to be critical with the need to trust reliable testimony.

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Presentation slides from Believe It or Not

• Student copies of the handout Believe It or Not

Teaching the Activity

Hand out the guiding questions in Believe It Or Not and display the first slide of the presentation which also displays the guiding questions. The questions are:

1. Do you believe it? If you do, what convinces you? If you don’t, why not?
2. Rate, from 1-10, how much you trust the authority or believability of the source.
3. What background or preexisting knowledge do you have on the subject?
4. What evidence would make you change your mind?

Explain to students that you are going to present five scenarios where claims about the universe are being presented, and they are to answer the guiding questions for each scenario.

Advance the presentation to the first scenario and either read it to students or allow them a few moments to read it for themselves. Then give them five minutes to answer the guiding questions. Repeat this for the next four scenarios. The scenarios include a UFO conspiracy theory, the current rate of species extinction, the view that the earth is flat, unusual caterpillar behaviors, and belief that Jesus is God’s Son.

When finished, quickly work through answers to guiding question #1 for each scenario by asking students to raise their hands if they believed it. Keep the tempo quick through this so students are looking and listening to you and not looking around for an opportunity to judge others. Aim to get a sense of what the majority did each time. Then ask students the following discussion questions:

• What was the most important factor in determining whether you would believe each scenario? Why did you trust it or not trust it?
• How would you define “trusted sources of information”? Is this a definition that can be applied to anything?
• How does the scientific community accept something as truth or knowledge? What types of knowledge or truth does science not consider?
• Is your trust in the Bible similar to or different from your trust in scientific findings? How so?
• How is scientific information different from or similar to other kinds of information? Can we do an experiment to test the resurrection of Christ?
• Is it valid to believe things based on the testimony of others? How do our prior ideas of what is plausible affect whether we believe others?
• How might different motivations for learning about and doing science influence what you tend to find plausible? How does science try to limit the influence of our motives on what we conclude to be true?

The goal of this activity is to get students thinking about what they put faith in rather than to resolve all questions about what to believe. In concluding this activity, draw students’ attention to the role of prior assumptions. Can we determine whether to trust the caterpillar science aside from the question of whether we trust scientists and their reports? Can we determine whether the incarnation is plausible aside from the prior belief that God does or does not exist? Why does it matter that we can trust the work of others?