Fides et Ratio

I confess that this is messy; I’m still recovering from a blessed and busy Holy Week. Yet this is meant not as a formal argument but as—forgive the cliché—a conversation starter. How does one even begin to approach topics this vast? My hope and prayer is that the following may be useful to our high school youth, and perhaps even to you, dear reader.

 Science and World Religions

A Presentation to St Peter’s Youth

So, a month or two ago, Mrs Arno told me that our youth had questions regarding science and world religions, and since I have a degree in each of those topics—a B.S. in Genetics and Developmental Biology, and a B.A. in Religious Studies—she asked if I would come talk with you guys and try to help answer some questions you might have. And I’m happy to be here tonight for just that purpose. Such is my job, after all.

Now obviously these are very broad topics and it would take a lot more than one evening for us to do them any sort of justice—and I really have struggled with where we could even begin—but I do have a couple initial thoughts that I hope might prove useful.

First up, science and religion are each part of humanity’s search for truth. Science seeks truth through empiricism, that is, through what is measurable, quantifiable, and repeatable. What we call today “science” used to be called natural philosophy. It has to do with figuring out how this world works through experimentation. And as the name implies, it is a spin-off or subset of philosophy, which seeks truth through reason.

Philosophy assumes the primacy of the mind. It starts with certain first principles—assumptions, givens, things we can’t not know—and proceeds to make reasoned arguments from them. I am a man; all men are mortal; therefore I must be mortal. In many ways, philosophy is the shared language that allows for science and religion to make sense of one another. The fact that we no longer study philosophy, and therefore don’t even know what it is that we don’t know, can be blamed for much of the supposed conflict between science and religion, or more broadly between faith and reason.

Science gathers data through observation, proposes hypotheses based on interpretations of that data, and then tests those hypotheses through controlled experimentation. Science is an excellent way of learning about the world around us and how it works. But even though it seems obvious today, commonsensical even, the truth is that the modern scientific method is a relatively recent invention and arose based on religious beliefs.

Here’s what I mean. Early religion might be thought of as a sort of early science, in that it sought to make sense of the natural world. We knew that there were processes and powers at work that were above and beyond our understanding, and we personalized them. Why not? It makes a certain sort of sense. The old gods, the pagan gods, were part of nature, personifications of nature.

If there were a storm, it was because of the storm god. If there were an eclipse, it was because a dragon swallowed the sun. Invisible spirits, invisible powers, were everywhere: spirits got you sick, spirits made you better, spirits gave you luck, spirits got you cursed. And you could try to make deals with these powers—offer sacrifices, do their will—but ultimately the gods were as fickle and troublesome as people and animals usually are.

Folks who’ve had Confirmation with me hopefully recall how we as human beings use mythology to make sense of our world. And most creation myths tell us the same things: that the gods are part of nature, arising from chaos; that the cosmos is at best indifferent and more often actively hostile; and that human beings don’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things. This is still the worldview espoused by many cultures today, including our own. And there’s not much incentive trying to make sense of a world like that. Why study what isn’t rational?

But then this new idea came along called monotheism—or sometimes classical theism—and this changed everything. It changed how we viewed Creation, how we viewed the nature of the world, and how we viewed human beings and our potential to know.

Monotheism is usually defined as belief not in many gods but in one single God, yet it’s an idea that goes far beyond simple math. And it sort of came to us from two directions: philosophy and religion. In philosophy there are many variations of what’s often called the argument from contingency. It goes something like this. Everything in this world is contingent; everything relies on something else to exist. Cause and effect.

Why do I exist? Well, because of my mother and father. My existence is also contingent on the air I breathe and the food I eat and the myriad biological processes that keep my body functioning. My existence is also contingent upon my neighbors, my government, and my society, all those who provide for me and protect me and structure my life for good. And all of those things upon which my existence is dependent are themselves dependent upon something else, back to the beginning of time.

But it can’t be contingency forever. It’s not turtles all the way down. That’s a logical fallacy, what we call an infinite regress. It’s just kicking the can down the road. Ultimately, if we are real—if the contingent things that make up ourselves and our minds and our world really do exist—then we are all dependent upon some sort of non-contingent reality, something that is real in and of itself, and upon which all other things depend in order to be real. Everything in this world has being, is a being, but we are all reliant upon Being itself, Being with a capital B. And this is what we call God.

God with a capital G isn’t like the gods with lowercase g’s. This God isn’t part of nature. This God is the One from whom nature arose. All things that exist, all things that ever did or will or even could exist, exist in Him. He is, by definition, beyond our world, beyond nature. And therefore, mind you, beyond the scope of science to either prove or disprove.

Yet this opens up a whole new world of possibility. For indeed, while philosophy—that is, the reason available to all human beings—can point to the existence of One God, yet it cannot tell us what God is like, because He is by definition greater than our reason. For that we need revelation; we need religion. God has to come down to us when we cannot reach up to Him. And that’s exactly what we find in the great faith traditions of classical theism: Judaism, Islam, Christianity, certain schools of Hinduism, Neoplatonism, &c.

And these traditions tell us that God created the world good, and that He loves and cares for human beings. He has made a world that is rational, logical, and sensible. And He has gifted us with minds capable of following His Mind, in working out the underlying laws of Creation. This is what makes science possible: the religious and philosophical conviction that there is, out there, discernible reality, the product of a divine Mind—a Lawgiver who gives to nature rational laws—and that our minds are capable of re-thinking His thoughts, that is, re-cognizing Creation. The greatest wonders of the universe are (a) that anything exists at all and (b) that our minds can make sense of it. This is what we call truth, and we are universally driven to seek it out.

So science as we know it would not be possible without assertions provided by philosophy and religion. Moreover, science as a discipline has self-defined limits, dealing with what is observable, measurable, and repeatable. It can say nothing of God. It can say only a limited amount regarding goodness, truth, beauty, and the true mystery of the human mind. Science has no idea what consciousness is, because we cannot in any way quantify or observe awareness itself. And as for miracles—well, science leaves plenty of room for them. Ask me later about p-values and Littlewood’s Law.

That said, the discoveries of science must be taken seriously. Science allows us to explore the laws of the universe—God’s laws. All truth is God’s truth. The word of God and the world of God cannot logically contradict. Where faith and reason clash, we must grapple with the fact that the fault lies in us: we are misinterpreting either the data or the Scriptures. We must in humility seek out harmony. Science does not disprove the Bible, but it does a very good job of shattering our false assumptions about the Bible.

Having faith cannot and must not mean holding to blind faith. We access truth through many venues: through history, through poetry, through advanced mathematics and theoretical physics; through mythology and intuition and personal life experience. All these, properly understood, point us to God, that is, point us to ultimate reality. And when our understanding of God is too small—when we worship a little mental idol of our own fashioning—they then break down our illusions and open our minds to a far greater picture of a God who is in all ways infinite.

Because of this, and because we believe that God does not ignore those who sincerely seek out His truth, orthodox Christianity has always held that there are elements of truth in all serious religious traditions—that is, those which seriously and authentically search for truth in all forms, including the spiritual. Yet as Christians we believe that Jesus Christ is Truth Himself, Truth in the flesh, Truth come down to walk about on two legs with us. Thus all truths point to Christ, and all paths to truth find their fulfilment in Him.

To vastly oversimplify to the point of error: science deals with the world; philosophy with the mind; and religion with the transcendent, that which goes beyond the world. Together they help us understand the deep truths of God, the world, and humankind.

Way more could be said on this topic, and in fact I would like to discuss Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection specifically, but hopefully I’ve given you a bit of grist for the mill. For now I would like to hear your questions regarding science and world religions, so I’ll open up the floor.