Over the past few months I’ve been mulling over the question: “Why believe”. Increasingly I like my partner’s answer to the question: because Christ’s teaching is compelling. That it is. But I am not entirely satisfied with this answer alone. So I’ve been very interested in the increasingly vocal debate – here in the UK at least – over the past year between the theist and atheist camps.

What has caught my attention of late is the battle over science. Regular readers will know that my community here in London participated in this year’s Clergy Letter Project (we’re still working on our video series which seems to be expanding in scope at a frightening pace!). This morning I am reading Julian Baggini’s A Short Introduction to Atheism (OUP, ISBN 019 280 424 3) and it struck me that one element of the debate is the contention that at least one of the primary purposes of religion is to explain the world around us.

I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with this. In my experience of my faith I have never found myself turning to the Bible, or our tradition to explain the natural world. And here we enter the realm of the relationship between science and religion. Science is the pursuit of such explanations – the results are observable facts about our world and environment. I accept these findings as fact. What impact does this have on my faith?

In the run up to the weekend of the Clergy Letter Project I listened to a pod-cast of the National Academy of Science and in it, one of the speakers made a wonderful statement, something along the lines of: I do not believe in science, rather I accept it as fact. I found this a wonderful statement and have been mulling over it ever since.