FASTLY - Faith & Science Teaching

Confessing Faith and Studying Nature

In Brief

This activity asks students to delve further into how careful reflection on the history of Christian faith is relevant to how we see the relationship between faith and science. It enables students to see that theology can affirm the study of the natural world and that thoughtful engagement on this topic is not just a recent phenomena. This activity expands the brief opener in Activity 2: The World Before Our Eyes.

Goals

Students will understand that theology and Christian confessions can affirm the study of the natural world and can help them grow in their understanding of it.

Thinking Ahead

This activity is based on an extract from the Belgic Confession, a Protestant confession of faith from the time of the Reformation. This confession was written in 1521 primarily by Guido de Brès, a Reformed preacher in the Netherlands. His purpose was to articulate the key doctrines of his church and show how they were in keeping with ancient Christian belief. The confession is still used as a standard for doctrine in some Reformed denominations.

While parts of the confession are intended as a polemic against Catholic and Anabaptist positions, the section considered here is not focused on denominational differences in church teaching, but on how we relate to the created world. You can read the whole confession here¹. Your students may or may not be familiar with formal confessions of faith. Consider how you might answer a student who asks why they are valuable or relevant. If possible collaborate with a Bible or Religion teacher at your school. Teaching FASTly means looking for constructive cross-curricular partnerships that strengthen connections between faith and science.

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

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Presentation slide or handout containing the quotation from the Belgic Confession

Directions:

You will be asking students to engage in thoughtful reflection, so consider how you will support this mode of engagement through your classroom practices. How can the arrangement of the classroom and the manner in which you introduce the activity set the tone?

Teaching the Activity

Display the title of Article 2 of the Belgic Confession, “The Means by Which We Know God,” and ask students to silently list the things they anticipate this section will mention concerning how we know God? Consider having students keep a journal of reflections on key questions; this journal could be used here.

Display or hand out the text of Article 2. Read the text aloud to students and then have them read it a second time, slowly and reflectively. Ask them to notice any ideas that surprised them or caught their attention.

Ask students what image is used to describe the universe (a book, letters), and what that image implies (the universe is something with meaning that can be interpreted; it has an author and an audience). Ask if this is a new idea for students, and whether it resembles how they think about the universe.

Have the students discuss with a partner:

• Has learning science helped you see “the universe before our eyes like a beautiful book”?
• Why or why not? Can you think of specific examples when this clearly did or did not happen?
• Could learning science lead to this?
• Is it appropriate to “ponder the invisible things of God” as we study nature in a science class? In what way have we then stepped beyond science (by no longer using scientific method), and in what way might this pondering be connected with science (since it frames and motivates scientific investigation)?

Give students 5 minutes to discuss, then ask them to share.

Optional extension: This extension activity goes into more depth and is a good candidate for cross-curricular collaboration with a Bible teacher if you can coordinate your classes. Display or hand out the following list of statements and ask students to work with a partner to sort them into the following categories on the basis of the article from the Belgic Confession:

A. Statements that agree with this Confession.

B. Statements that conflict with this Confession.

C. Statements on which the Confession takes no position.

List of statements:

(i) People of true faith should get their knowledge from the Bible alone.

(ii) Scientific investigation alone can give us a complete understanding of the world.

(iii) What we discover through science and what we read in the Bible will probably conflict.

(iv) Science is the most important way to study the universe.

(v) It is easy to see exactly what God intended by looking at the things he made.

(vi) “Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” – Stephen Hawking

(vii) “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” – John Muir

(viii) We may discover things through science that require us to rethink how we have understood our faith.

(ix) People of faith should study the natural world.

(x) There is no connection between science and faith.

Review students’ findings with the whole group, focusing on the space provided in this confession for confidently studying the “universe…before our eyes.” There are grounds for seeing the confession as agreeing with vi, vii, and ix, and it at least allows for the possibility of viii when it says that God reveals to us as much as we need, not that God gives believers full and perfect understanding of either faith or nature. The confession is in tension with i – v, and x. Note that it allows for inquiry and growth in understanding, and is in tension with views that close faith off from learning. Help students see this is one of the goals of this activity.

¹Used with permission from Faith Alive Christian Resources

Images of Science

In Brief

This activity enables students to investigate ways in which the wider culture sees science by looking at how science is represented in images and how the word “science” appears in published material. Teaching FASTly raises student awareness of how cultural stereotypes affect our view of science, and how that relates to faith.

Goals

Students will critically examine what popular images communicate about the nature of scientific work and consider how these images affect perception of the relationship between faith and science.

Thinking Ahead

This activity will work best if you have given some thought to how science is represented in popular media. Students may underestimate the benefits of modern science, taking its role in everything from medicine to transportation to communication for granted. Or they may overestimate the trustworthiness of results labeled “scientific” and the immunity of science from human fallibility. They may imagine the practice of science in distorted ways mediated by iconic cultural images, for instance seeing the scientist as a lone, male genius making startling discoveries, or as the modern opponent of old-fashioned faith.

This activity asks students to see more critically how science is represented in popular culture by engaging them in inquiry. Some issues to think about in preparing this activity include whether science is practiced individually or in collaboration with others; what kind of authority scientific findings should have; whether science is dispassionately technical or something that draws on human imagination and virtues such as honesty, humility, patience, and courage; and whether all science happens in laboratories.

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

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Students will need a computer or tablet and internet access.

Directions:

Consider how to set safe boundaries for searching. Will searches be filtered on the school network, or do you need to check safe search settings on devices?

Teaching the Activity

First show students an Ngram graphic generated from Google (see Images of Science and presentation slides Images of Science) and explain that it shows the prominence of the word science in all of the books Google has in its database, plotted against the year of publication. Ask what the graphic shows about the place of science in society, pointing out that it is a relatively new endeavor whose importance has risen significantly over time. Discuss with students how this rise could be both a good and bad thing:

• What are the benefits of the rise of the importance of science?
• Are there any risks involved, such as other avenues to knowledge and areas of human experience becoming undervalued?

The goal is to promote reflection on this question, not for the class to arrive at a uniform view.

Ask students to discuss briefly with a partner what kinds of images they would expect to see if they searched online for the words “science” and “scientist.” If time allows, ask them to sketch their own picture of a scientist at work. Gather their predictions and write them on the board, noting implied beliefs about science. Allowing students to voice their assumptions before investigating will sharpen their awareness of what might be new or interesting in their search results.

Ask students to conduct an online search for images using the search term “science,” ensuring safe search settings are used. Ask them to note any images that were not what they expected to see, what kinds of images are most frequent, and what they think the images are communicating about what science is and how we should view it. This should take about five minutes and can be conducted individually or in pairs. Consider asking different groups of students to use different search engines to broaden the inquiry.

Follow this with a discussion of the students’ findings. Consider what clothing, objects, actions, and settings are portrayed. The inquiry will be helped with some critical questions included on a handout and a presentation slide in Images of Science 2 and Images of Science 2.

• Are scientists shown more often working alone or collaborating with others? (The average working scientist has 13.8 collaborators.)
• Is science shown more often connected with one gender?
• Does science appear as authoritative and infallible or as a fallible process of inquiry?
• Is science tied to laboratory work or are other kinds of science represented?
• Is there any indication that virtues or questions of ethics are part of the practice of science?
• Is there any indication that scientists might be people of faith? (A third of working scientists are theists according to a recent survey.)
• Are scientists shown as having relationships and responsibilities to people outside the lab or to the broader society?
• Is science connected more with precision and technique or with imagination and wonder?

Return to the earlier discussion about the place of science in society:

• In what ways do the internet images help us see the benefits of science? Do they raise any concerns?
• Do any of these images make it easier or harder to imagine how science might be connected to faith?
• Do the images enable us to see how science might require virtues such as patience, humility, and care for others?

Share with students your own view of science, what attracted you to it, and how well you think it is represented in popular images. Consider what view of science is implied in your everyday classroom practices and whether it is a helpful view.

Not Just Warfare

In Brief

This activity provides a hands-on way of getting students to engage with the difficulties of a simplistic faith-versus-science view. It engages them in classifying claims about the world in increasingly complex ways in order to help them see the limitations of a simple two-view account of the world.

Goals

Students will understand that the relationship between faith and science is more complex than two sides.

Thinking Ahead

Students will attempt to categorize various statements as areas of agreement or disagreement between science and faith. This is not easy to do and forces students to interact with some ways in which the science-faith relationship is more complex than mere conflict. The frustrations involved in this process may support the reality of complexity better than simply being told. Students should be helped to see that:

• Science and faith may disagree about some things but not most things.
• Scientists and believers disagree among themselves, and there is not unanimous agreement on either side.
• A scientist and a believer may be one and the same person.
• The views of both scientists and believers change over time (e.g., the dispute over geocentrism, addressed in more detail in later FASTly activities, can be mentioned here because there was a time when both scientists and believers were geocentrists and also a time when the views of both shifted, and the position was denied by both scientists and believers.
• It is often not clear what “science” and “faith” mean. For instance, do we mean individual people who are scientists or individual people who are believers? Do we mean the official views of particular churches and which churches or organizations? Do we mean a body of universally accepted conclusions, or do we mean different ways of seeking truth?

It’s very important to think about how to frame the last part of the activity. Since the activity aims to have students experience growing frustration with a simple two-category model, and to see how complex the issues can get, the activity risks leading them to a point of giving up the entire effort to understand complexity. Emphasize that the point is not that it’s all too complex to sort out, but that patience, humility, and courage, and a larger community of thinkers are needed to persevere with important questions and to attend carefully enough to arrive at good answers. Incendiary stances and witty one-liners will not get the job done. Teaching FASTly values thinking about the connections between truth, virtue, and community.

Related Book Review: Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund.

Preparing the Activity

Needed:

• Copies of the Agreement-Disagreement Statements in Not Just Warfare

• Not Just Warfare slides and a projector

Directions:

Make enough copies of the Agreement-Disagreement Statements of Not Just Warfare for each group of 2-3 students to have one. Cut each statement apart and place the statements in envelopes so that each group gets an envelope with one full set of the statements.

Teaching the Activity

Have students form groups of two or three. Give each group an envelope containing the agreement-disagreement statements. Tell students that they are going to sort the statements using a variety of criteria.

First, ask students to take a sheet of paper, draw a vertical line down the middle, and use it to sort the statements into those about which science and faith disagree and those about which science and faith agree. For this and subsequent steps you can display the visual templates in Not Just Warfare to give students a guide. Give them a few minutes to complete this.

Ask:

• How much agreement or disagreement do you see?
• Does this work as a way of sorting the information? Do you think it gives us an adequate picture of faith and science? What does it not show?

Allow discussion. Avoid discussion of whether the statements are true. Instead focus on the way of classifying and whether it works. Highlight the point that there are many issues on which people of faith disagree among themselves, and also there are matters on which scientists do not agree. “Faith” and “Science” are not monolithic blocks to be pitted against one another. Therefore, ask the students to try again. Now ask the students to take a sheet of paper and draw both a vertical line and a horizontal line to divide the paper into fourths.

Display the second slide, and have them sort the statements four ways:

• Faith and science disagree
• Faith and science agree
• People of faith have varying views
• Scientists have varying views

Ask how this exercise went. Did it work better? Does it now give us a clear picture? Is there anything that is still difficult or not represented clearly? Allow discussion and check, for instance, where students placed “prayer can help sick people to heal,” an issue scientists are still not unanimous on because different studies arrive at different conclusions. Next introduce an additional idea: does the chart we have made give any sense of how things change over time? For instance, was there a time when both believers and scientists disagreed about whether the sun went around the earth or the earth around the sun? (Yes, during the time of Galileo). So do the statements remain forever in the same category?

Ask students to have another go at the process. Have them take a sheet of paper and divide the area into eight spaces. Display the third slide and have them re-classify the statements using the following categories:

• Faith and science disagree
• Faith and science agree
• People of faith have varying views
• Scientists have varying views
• Faith and science once disagreed but views have changed
• Faith and science once agreed but views have changed
• People of faith once had the same view but now have varying views
• People of faith once had varying views but now have the same view

Students may notice that this is still an incomplete set of categories. For instance, it does not explore whether consensus among scientists has changed, and so the chart may need to expand even more. The students may notice that the exercise is becoming more confusing, and even a little ridiculous. It will be unclear where to put each statement, and one statement may belong in multiple places. Allow discussion of how this step of the activity went. Ask if there are still things missing. For instance, does the map imply that believers and scientists are two distinct sets of people? How could we represent the fact that many scientists are themselves believers so that people of faith and scientists are often the same people?

Ask students why the interaction between faith and science is so difficult to categorize neatly. Ask why it is tempting to settle for simple pairs of categories—like faith versus reason or the Bible versus science—to explain the relationship. Do our verbal practices meaning the way we talk about faith and science—contrasting “believers” and “scientists”—paint a true picture? Why is it easier to paint the conflict and choose one side rather than to articulate a more nuanced understanding of how complex the relationship can be? Why do we gravitate to simple slogans more easily than to careful reflection? What fears and prejudices might make the simple view more tempting? And what virtues—patience, humility, and/or courage—might be needed to stay engaged in a more complex conversation?

Finally, return to the warfare metaphor and show the final slide. Give students a few minutes to journal on the question:

• What are a few of the problems with using a warfare metaphor to picture how science and faith relate to one another?

You will be able to use this piece of writing to check each student’s understanding of this topic.