Science and Religion in the 21st Century
When considering the relationship between science and religion we must recognize that the fundamental question is not about the existence of God. It is the question of how we know anything at all about reality.
From the beginning of the Enlightenment until the present day we have been trying to distinguish between what constitutes physics and what constitutes metaphysics and which is credible or whether both are credible. For much of the 19thand early 20th centuries it seemed that physics, or science more generally, was gradually excluding metaphysics and thus religion as a serious approach to knowing reality.
There was, however, a shift in the middle of the last century when it became clear that the universe we know of had begun with a “Big Bang.” At that time the astronomer Robert Jastrow famously said
“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Since that time numerous efforts have been made by cosmologists to get around this impasse; to find a way to describe reality that does not leave a mystery at the beginning of time. Adam Frank gives an excellent summary of those attempts in his book About Time, Cosmology and Culture in the Twilight of the Big Bang. He says: "The Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it.”
The basis for Jastrow’s mid-century comment has been deeply problematized by advances in both astronomical observation and theories seeking to unify relativity theory and quantum theory. Yet these theories also appear to be both mutually exclusive and currently untestable. So while the phrase, “we do not yet know what will replace it” can be read as a confidence that we will someday know, it may also be read as leaving room for religion as a way of knowing.
What has changed between the time of Jastrow and Frank is the rise of a vigorous scientism. Jastrow and other scientists who believed that a contemporary cosmology allowed for metaphysics are dismissed with the argument that only the scientific method provides a legitimate way of knowing reality. Only science is sufficiently rigorous in providing coherent testable models to be taken seriously as a way of knowing what is real. One of my colleagues at SMU says: “mathematics is the language of nature.“ It is only a short step further to equate nature with reality and say that what cannot be described mathematically can’t be taken seriously to be real.
Scientism doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it does claim to possess the only legitimate means of finding those answers. And this includes questions of ethics and meaning traditionally reserved for religion and philosophy. The popular works of Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss and others are contemporary examples of this scientism.
From this perspective the mere fact that we don’t know what will replace the Big Bang, or even that some contemporary theories are not yet fully coherent and cannot be tested doesn’t justify turning to metaphysics. As Steve Weinstein suggested in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, and Carl Sagan echoed in his Science a Light in a Demon Haunted World, science doesn’t need to provide answers now or even the promise of an answer in the near future. Its pursuit lifts human life from the realm of farce to that of tragedy. Put another way, science gives life authentic meaning precisely in its rejection of all other consolations. This is what the sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor calls heroic atheism in his book A Secular Age.
As there have been developments in science so there have also been developments in religion. One, which I’ll mention and dismiss, is the idea that mathematical tools can be used to prove God’s existence. Robert Spitzers work, New Proofs for the Existence of God, offers an example in its first part. But since he is a philosopher presenting what he regards as a scientific argument I see this as an internal scientific debate unrelated to religion.
Another I’ll note and dismiss is what is called the “God of the gaps” approach, allowing religion to speak where science is silent. Apart from the critique from scientism itself, this approach is inherently unstable since it allows an ever expanding science to define its boundaries.
A more serious religious approach, which really rises with Romanticism, is an aesthetic argument for religion as a way of knowing. As Ralph Hodgson wrote,
Reason has moons, but moons not hers,
Lie mirror'd on the sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But O! delighting me.
Romanticism as a movement sees art in all forms not merely as a way of presenting reality, or even the genius of the artist, but as a kind of revelation through which Reality discloses itself. Knowing is not merely formulating models of experimentally verifiable facts obtained objectively. It is a subjective experience of engaging reality as it speaks the language of aesthetic experience.
This kind of aesthetic reasoning typically makes more modest claims than scientism. It acknowledges that nature speaks the language of mathematics, but it also listens for other languages that are spoken through nature.
But my focus in this talk will be neither on scientism nor aesthetics, but on places where there may be a convergence of interests between scientists and theologians with regard to understanding reality as a whole.
I should note that there is an observable defensiveness on all sides here. The pride of place once held by philosophers, theologians, and artists has been displaced by science ever since the 19th century. One only needs look at funding patterns in the academy, business, and government to observe this.
At the same time scientists are fully aware that they and their work is seriously under attack by resurgent anti-intellectualism led by people who self-identify as religious and artistic.
What I hope to do this evening is avoid that defensiveness. I will survey briefly the perspectives relating religion to science that have arisen in the last 60 or 70 years and the questions they raise. And finally suggest some avenues through which science and religion may be able to seek a common language of discourse.
To get at the science side of things I’ll mention a book co-written by a physicist and colleague who has been working on the Higgs boson. The title is Reality in the Shadows: or What the Heck is the Higgs? Because it is a collection of independent essays written by three authors it is frankly difficult to read. So I read the book a second time and constructed a spreadsheet to trace the major lines of scientific development and identify their interrelationships. This allowed me to highlight themes that often got buried in the details.
The categories of scientific inquiry that emerged were: 1. Observation and experiment, 2. The development of new tools for observing nature, and thus new experiments. 3. Discoveries emerging from deploying these new tools, discoveries that gave new information about nature. 4. The evolution of mathematics, both applied and pure, that give scientists the language through which to articulate their theories about the inter-relationships of the emerging information about nature, 5. And finally the theories themselves, each replacing the last to account for new information arising from ever more precise experiments, and each demanding more complex mathematical tools.
Of the many stories that emerge as people and groups absorb and integrate these different lines of inquiry, one is central to the last 70 years: the gradual shift in emphasis from experiment driving the need for new theories, and new theories driving the search for mathematical tools, to mathematical models becoming theories that are then in search of validation through experiment.
Or as Steven Weinberg noted in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, physicists have almost become neo-Platonists, believing the abstract mathematical forms to be more real than nature as experienced through experiment. This is not so far from theology, a critique made by scientists themselves of some popular but unverifiable theories involving multi-verses and undetectable dimensions.
This internal critique not withstanding, the reach of complex mathematical models and the related theories seeking to achieve a unification of relativity and quantum theory may offer insight into an intersection between scientific and religious discourse. For these scientists are concerned with grasping reality as a whole. They are concerned with a “final theory” that unifies large and small scale descriptions of the universe. They seek something more than a collection of useful descriptions of reality. They have a concern for what Stephen Hawking called in his Brief History of Time (no doubt metaphorically) “the Mind of God.”
Turning to religious ways of knowing reality it seems to me that there are three broad approaches to justifying religion as a way of knowing reality that might be of interest.
These seek to demonstrate how an a priori assumption of the existence of a transcendent God is a rational, coherent, assumption similar to the a priori assumption of cosmologists that nature as a whole can be described within a single theoretical framework.
I’m thinking of several recent popular books in particular. Richard Beck’s The Authenticity of Faith, Alvin Planting’s Knowledge and Christian Belief, and Joseph Hinman’s Traces of God, as well as Andrew Newberg’s How Enlightenment Changes Your Brian. These books argue from different perspectives that human experience, properly and systematically measured and interpreted, strongly indicates that the a priori assumption of the existence of a transcendent God is not only coherent, but offers a credible addition to a scientific description of reality toward the goal of descriing Reality as a whole.
Obviously I can’t review all of these books this evening, but I think they can be characterized.
Beck, Hinman, and Newberg use psychological, sociological, and neurological approaches to analyze mystical experience. In them we see a revival of the work of William James, Rudolf von Otto, and Marcus Eliade. While Beck and Hinman focus on common observation of religious phenomena, Andrew Newberg argues that measurements of brain activity using a variety of brain imaging techniques show that religious practitioners of meditation have a physically unaccounted for change in the structure of their brains. What all these approaches assert is that through the working of the human mind, both individually and socially, Reality is speaking through nature a language that is more religious and theological than mathematical.
Plantinga’s approach is more properly philosophical. He argues that religious belief in general, and Christian belief specifically, is warranted by a careful examination of the way in which the human mind is constructed and articulates its inner working through language. His arguments are rigorous and complex, and it is problematic to represent them in a few sentences.
But it seems to me that he is arguing that just as the human mind coheres with the natural world that it knows and explores, so it also coheres with a transcendent God in such a way as to suggest that this God exists and has particular attributes. In other words, if the human mind is capable of grasping the language of nature in mathematics in such a way as to give confidence that what it grasps is real, so its capacity to grasp the language of theology should give confidence that the object of theology, God, is equally real.
It should be noted that these approaches to demonstrating the credibility of belief in God do not claim to constitute a proof of God’s existence. They are content to assert religious speech about God is warranted on terms similar to those that warrant mathematics as the language with which to explore the unity of natural law.
In closing I’d like to suggest that we can see some constructive possibilities for a dialogue between religion and science.
One of these stems from the relationship between revelation and transcendence. Such a discussion would focus on two things that are part of both scientific and religious discourse: 1. the beckoning call of the unknowable to be sought out and known, and 2. the idea of an epiphany in which the unknowable makes itself known without any traceable process of human reasoning. Like religious people, scientists find themselves caught up in experiences described with words like “wonder” and “inspiration.”
A second possibility for mutual discussion stems from a common concern with epistemology, knowing how what we know is true. As I’ve suggested above, Plantinga and others such as my colleague Billy Abraham are engaged in the kind of formal exploration of the warrant for believing that abstract representations of Reality comprehensible to the human mind that should be of equal concern to scientists who are presently must wrestle with whether complex mathematical models can be taken as actually representing reality to us.
And a third possibility, not unrelated to the other two, stems from a common concern with the relationship between human faith and human meaning. In my own discussions with science minded atheists this appears to be the most contentious point of debate, because typically atheists of a scientism bent argue that “faith” as commonly understood plays no role in their understanding of human meaning. Scientists are, they would say concerned only with that which can be observed and placed in bounded mathematical frameworks.
To which I must answer that such a claim is in itself based on faith, not accumulated evidence in a comprehensive framework.
As Kurt Godel showed, the one statement any formal system cannot make is that the system itself is complete. Such an understanding of completeness must come from outside the system. So whether we believe in God or deny the existence of anything transcendent at all, we cannot stand outside the framework of explanation we have adopted and declare that it is complete. Thus at least to the extent that we are seeking a Grand Unified Theory of reality, whether expressed in religious or mathematical language, we are living by faith.
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