Comparing science and faith is often seen as comparing apples and oranges. Or perhaps apples with apples - Adam's and Newton's. Not so, said the Christian scientists at the Science and Christianity symposium held at the University of Auckland in April. God is revealed through both.

The symposium was held in honour of two of New Zealand's leading Christian thinkers, theologian the Rev Dr Harold Turner and biologist Professor John Morton who, although widely respected academically, have had little public exposure. As John Stenhouse, a senior lecturer in History at Otago University, told a crowd of around 170, "Turner and Morton are the kinds of people who give the lie to the argument popularised by people like Lloyd Geering and Keith Sinclair that this society is secular and has always been."

Both believe science and faith are inseparable, and both have testified to that belief in words and through their careers. The claim that either path holds all truths is arrogant. "It's one uni-verse," says Turner. "The universe is a unit, our minds are one mind, everything is interlocked with everything else."

Dr Neil Broom, who teaches Materials Science in the Engineering School at Auckland told the symposium that while science had unearthed the building blocks of life, it told us little about why it took the shape it did. To build a stately mansion, for example, no one would order a construction of silicate pyramids, even though they were the molecules that made up clay particles, which, in turn, formed the substance that was made into bricks. Evolutionary steps were required before silicate pyramids could become a mansion, he said.

Science could tell us the natural laws involved, but failed to answer how and why those silicate pyramids came to take the form of a mansion. Religion supplied that answer, in the form of a divine architectural plan. Stepping into the creation versus evolution debate, fellow speaker Dr Robert Mann, formerly environmental studies senior lecturer at Auckland University said, "to admit evolution as a fact is not to deny creation but only to say that it has been more or less continuous."

Turner, who at 90 spoke clear and strong for over 20 minutes, concluded that the antagonism between science and faith is misleading. "Their inescapable relationship is found in their common allegiance to the one truth about the one and the same universe."

<typohead type=2>Rev Harold Turner, 90 and Going Strong</typohead>

The Rev Dr Harold Turner has reached the age of 90, but mentally he's still seeking out undiscovered peaks. His 1998 book, The Roots of Science, argues that rather than the Genesis story and science being poles apart, it was the Hebrew world-view that tilled the ground in which science took root.

Well-known in Dunedin circles, Turner was ordained a Presbyterian minister and founded two halls of residence, the University Book Shop and the student chaplaincy there before embarking on a career overseas.

Over a couple of decades he taught theology in west Africa. It was there he first picked up on the idea that the Greeks, for all their insight, could not have been the sole fathers of science. The Greeks held too many things sacred to allow dispassionate experimentation.

The Hebrews, on the other hand, drew a clear distinction between a creator God and creation. Certainly, Greek laws and philosophies added to Arabic numbers and many other international revelations made science possible. But it was the Hebrew de-sacralized view of the world, as spread through Judeo-Christian religion, that was "the greatest cultural revolution in the whole of human history."

"With this new natural philosophy the world was cleared of gods and spirits, and declared to be the good creation of the one rational God: the foundation had been laid for the study of the universe that we know as science."

Turner says it is foolish to try and separate science and religion; both can point us to the realm of truth. He retired to Auckland in 1989 and lives in Mt Albert with his wife Maude. A member of Somervell Presbyterian church, he is still active organising and writing for the Deepsight Trust, formerly called the Gospel and Cultures Trust.