Science and Religion

I believe that I may understand.

ST. AUGUSTINE

I was watching an old video with the late great Fulton Sheen as he gave an important lesson about applying the right thinking to the right spheres of understanding. None of his lecture was overtly religious, but it was profound in its impact as he showed how thinkers applied scientific thinking from one field of endeavor to another with disastrous results. For instance, some in the social sciences applied evolution to social thinking creating Social Darwinism. Others applied Einstein to everything from philosophy to politics to come up with relativism. These things constituted intellectual fads that triumphed for a time and then faded. The lesson was that it is never smart to mix your thinking in this way. The tools and ideas of one field should be used in that field and not others.

If I said that I wanted to do an interpretation of Shakespeare using Newtonian Laws of Motion, most rational people would laugh. What does inertia have to do with Hamlet? It may be humorous, but atheists attempt the same sort of feat when they claim that science can answer moral questions. How can Darwinian evolution tell us if it is right or wrong to lie on an expense report, cheat on our taxes, have an adulterous affair, have an abortion, or kill our annoying neighbor? It can’t. It is ludicrous to think it ever could.

I love science. I think science is done best when it is free from superstition. I think science should be the focus on the natural and not the supernatural. Religion should not interfere with science as pure science. It may have something to say about nuclear weapons or frozen embryos. But natural events should be explained in terms of natural causes. Science can answer the what and the how. It cannot answer the why. The best it can do is leave a blank.

Science is not philosophy. Science springs from philosophy. The scientific method commands us to use empirical methods to discover truth, but its own foundation is non-empirical. We always start with presuppositions, and this requires faith. This is what Augustine was getting at when he said that he believed in order to understand. Likewise, the scientist begins with the premise that the universe is intelligible despite having no empirical evidence for this premise. He believes it in order to do it. Or consider that science would be problematic if scientists did not believe in telling the truth. Lying advances people’s careers in business and politics. Why shouldn’t scientists do the same thing? Why have a commitment to truth?

It causes me to cringe to see a fundamentalist try to deal with geology and evolution especially in debate with a scientifically minded atheist. It can be great sport to bait and mock the unlearned. But I feel the same way when that same atheist tries to make some normative moral claim. This is why Catholics make atheists look as ridiculous as any fundamentalist. The atheist simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He or she must appeal to some metaphysical standard. The scientific attempt to come up with normative morality is about as successful as the philosophical attempt to do the same after Nietzsche pronounced the “death of God.” Ultimately, the atheist must concede that without God all things are permissible.

Atheism leads inevitably to nihilism. Nihilism is simply a belief in a universe devoid of transcendant meaning. Nihilism is death both mentally and spiritually. It is the abyss. Evil as defined by the Catholics is simply the absence of good. Nihilism empties the good out of what exists leaving despair, confusion, and a desire to die. The best an atheist can do is forget momentarily that his or her existence is fundamentally empty.

The Christian sees meaning in everything. Everything has purpose to the Christian. But is it real? This is an absurd question. Does the drowning man ask if the life preserver tossed to him is real? We believe in order to live. This is true even of the atheist. Even the atheist who remains alive chooses to do so in the hope that his science and philosophy will yield some sort of answer to his or her existential dilemma. So, we believe in order to understand. We hope in order to go on living.

This brings us to the fundamental point where science and religion meet. This is the miracle. Miracles are where the supernatural intrudes into the natural. Do miracles exist? For the person of faith, the answer is yes. For the materialist, the answer is no. The issue of miracles can never be resolved. Here’s why.

Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Christ. This can never be scientifically tested. The same applies to the Resurrection or appearances of the Blessed Mother. The one miracle that can be tested is the Real Presence as a Catholic priest turns bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ. But a scientific examination of the elements will only show bread and wine. But what if they actually showed flesh and blood? The scientist will simply conclude it was merely a clever trick, and the priest is nothing more than a clever magician on par with a Vegas nightclub act. I doubt that any event can ever satisfy the mind of a skeptic. This is because miracles go against the presupposition of science which is that all natural events are the products of natural causes. Conversely, no true Catholic doubts the Real Presence of Christ in the Mass no matter what the scientist may say.

This may seem ridiculous and stupid, but we engage in these sort of things on a daily basis. For instance, take a stop sign. The scientist can tell us that it is made of metal and paint and has a sign and symbol that many agree on as a command to stop at an intersection. But if we reduce it, the sign doesn’t mean anything at all. It is just paint on metal. The meaning is something we bring to it. That meaning has no material existence whatsoever. It doesn’t exist in the tangible world. That meaning possesses no physical attributes. But we believe it. It is real despite not having a physical existence. This probably seems absurd to you at this point. But here is why it is important.

Everything in the world can either be sanctified or diminished in this way. For me, the stop sign is turned into a command to stop. For the materialist, it is purely an object. For me, a person is a human being made in God’s image. For the materialist, it is simply a body no different than any other animal. For the physicist, it is the Higgs boson. For the skeptic, it is merely the lie of a scientist wanting the billions spent on a supercollider to be worth it. You may scoff at this, but we already see how scientists will lie for pharmaceutical companies and tobacco companies.

Our understanding of reality rests on faith not evidence. Faith precedes evidence. We believe in order to understand, to function, and to be fully human. We may get it wrong and make mistakes. But we can never live without faith. We take it on faith that scientists tell us the truth. We believe math accurately describes our universe though numbers have no material existence in themselves. And God may or may not exist. But the only thing science can say is that God is not a material being. This is what Christians already profess.

Science is simply the description of what our senses tell us about the universe. Beyond that, it is speculation. The belief that the universe is intelligible and orderly is virtually identical to what the ancient Greeks believed which was the Logos. The Logos is a huge concept for those Greeks, but I can only sum it up as the basic ordering principle of the universe. The Christians especially St. John said that the Logos and Christ were the same. The Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The Logos is what gives meaning to the universe. The Logos is the light of existence.

To say that the Logos does not exist is to say that existence does not exist. The Logos is why we know anything at all. I think this is what St. Augustine was getting at. He clearly understood the concept of the Logos. And St. John explicitly tied the revealed religion of Christianity to the natural religion of those philosophers. Faith was no mere starting point. Faith is understanding.

To end on a practical note, I think it best to let science be science and let religion be religion. Whatever conflicts may exist will be resolved in the future. How do I know this? I don’t know it. I just believe it.

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