Multiple Intelligences (Science and Theology

revised title for spelling and put in links 11/16/06.

I like Gardner's proposal of multiple intelligences. It isn't something that can be proved. Well, not very easily. Yet it explains why some people are smart in one area and a little bit less than intelligent in another. It speaks to having different gifts and yet all those gifts being important. The proposal fits in with much of Christian theologies that talk about different gifts but part of the same body. Yet if theology is to remain centered on God and the relationship of God and human, then theology should not rest or fall on what science says. Scientific theories are about what facts mean and are subject to change as new facts are discovered. Theology is about the eternal relationship between the human and the creator of humanity.

Christians who find a scientific theory, such as evolution, troubling to their faith are missing the point of both science and faith. Faith is about belief. Science is about facts. Both talk of truth, but they are talking of different aspects. The teakettle is boiling. Why? One answer is that I put it on for a cup of tea with a friend. Another answer is because I turned on the stove. Still another answer is the exchange of kinetic energy from a heat source to the water. All the answers are true and yet they speak to different matters.

Scripture speaks to a life of faith. It tells the story of many people who have wrestled with their faith and struggled with God. The creation stories in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not about whether evolution is correct or incorrect. The two stories speak to the one who created the world and why it was done. Evolutionary theory is only about how it was done and providing an explanation that fits the observed facts.

Science limits itself to the natural world. What can be observed? What can be repeated? Those are scientific questions. But theology is asking, "Why are we here?In what should we have faith? What is our purpose?" To say that theology answers the questions of what are the facts is to miss the point of both theology and science. Certainly what God does affects the natural world. Just as certainly what science does affects our understandings of God. But neither science nor theology really answers the questions that the other deals with and so both should stay out of the arena of the other.

Scientists can and should speak to theologians and on theology and talk about the nature of God. Theologians can and should speak to scientists and talk about the implications of scientific discoveries. Stephen Hawking once wrote a book in which he claimed that science proved the non-existence of God. Certainly the God that Hawking described could not exist, but that God was a creation of straw. Similarly when many Christianists attack science or current scientific thinking and theory they make up a science that is easy to attack, but is not what science really is.

Faith and science should be in conversation, but neither should pretend to be the other.