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| Photo Word on Fire.org |
Scientific endeavour that limits itself to only what can be counted and measured will remain blind to the state of pleasure or joy or bliss that are the product of art and music and friendship. These feelings are generically different from more ordinary psychical outcomes.
For example, people have always seen evidence that a Supreme Being exists and that there is more to our existence than meets the eye. Roy Abraham Varghese, an author the subject of science and religion, has written*:
While primitive animism and nature deities can be easily explained as attempts to personalize the forces of nature, the same cannot be said of the concept of a Supreme Being. It is entirely abstract and with no physical or imaginative correlate; and yet it came naturally to humans throughout history.
Scholars call this intrinsic awareness the numinous. It is the experience of the "uncanny" and the "awe-inspiring", which can have a positive impact on our lives. See this article on the BBC website that explores how intentionally seeking the feeling of awe can improve memory, boost creativity and relieve anxiety.
The interest in what might be called "neopaganism" and in the occult also reflect how people recognise that a "creature-feeling" that causes a "shudder" in their self-consciousness can give those people a sense of the true nature of their place in existence, and that "the feeling of personal nothingness before the awe-inspiring object directly experienced", as Rudolf Otto described it, can be related to the Christian understanding that "God is near us, that we can possess and apprehend Him, and that [each person] is His image and likeness".
But let's look at the way "science" is thrown at Christianity, and religion as a whole, as a kind of grenade in the hope of disabling belief in God, the transcendent, the holy, and perhaps (for some atheistic proselytizers) the hope of undermining the morality common to religions.
"The number one reason young people say they disaffiliate from religion," says Bishop Robert Barron of the Los Angeles archdiocese, "is that religion is in conflict with science. And in that conflict, science wins." He continues:
They have great reverence for science; religion's out of step with it; therefore, religion has to go. The warfare between religion and science is kind of assumed by a lot of young people who disaffiliate today.
And just think of the rhetoric that you'll pick up all over the culture. People just say “Galileo", and right away you think, "Oh, there's obscurantist, oppressive religion standing in the way of the advance of the sciences."
The idea of there being conflict between religion and science is a relatively recent phenomenon, as Church scholars had largely laid the foundations of modern science. The rift arose particularly in the 1800s:
For the first roughly three centuries of the natural sciences, most of the great figures—Descartes comes to mind, Galileo himself, Gregor Mendel, so many others, Newton—were all devoutly religious people. So it's a relatively recent conceit that somehow religion and science are at odds, but it's certainly gotten into the minds of our young people.
In the Chaldean culture of that time, there was a pretty advanced culture of stargazing, and it probably involved, by our standards, a combination of both astronomy and astrology. But wise people, using their analytical reason, would look up into the night sky, and they would measure and they'd calculate the movements of the planets, and the positions of the stars.
[This is] in a very scientific spirit, but also something else. They would have recognized in these beautiful intelligibilities a sign of the intelligence who put them into existence. They would have looked at the stars and planets, and they would have delighted in understanding them more fully, but behind it, they would also have been discerning the will and purpose of the divine.
I think if you had said to these Magi, "There's a conflict between religion and science." They wouldn't have known what you were talking about. If they had said, "Hey, there's a tension between what you're doing, looking up at the night sky, and what people of faith are doing," I think they would have just looked at you with puzzlement.
No, they saw both/and: looking analytically into the night sky also brought to mind the will and purposes of God.
And so, this beautiful image—and we've got it from a thousand Christmas cards, but hold that in your mind— of these wise men, astronomers, call them if you want scientists, who on the basis of their scientific investigation are now journeying to find this newborn King of the Jews.
At the end of their journey, they present him with their gifts. They opened the coffers of their wisdom and riches before him.
In other words, their science didn't lead them away from God and the things of God, but precisely toward God and the things of God.
We Christians understand why this is true, and I'm going to rely here on the great work of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, [who] said that in the Gospel of John, Jesus is referred to as the Logos.
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." And through that Logos, “all things came to be”.
I'm keeping it on purpose there in the original Greek, because I want to give this richer sense of what that word means. We say “Word”, in a fair enough translation. But think of Logos as the logic, the mind, the pattern—the intelligent pattern that was present to God from the beginning—and again, given God's simplicity [unity] was God from the beginning.
God is this primal patterning intelligence that lies behind all things. So nothing came to be, unless it was touched somehow by the Logos.
The world is not dumbly there for Christians—just there in a sort of chaotic, random manner. No, no; it's been spoken into being. Logos can mean tongue too.
When Aristotle referred to the human being as the zoon logikon, the rational animal, but what he meant was the animal with a tongue, and that knows how to use that tongue for language, for speech.
In the beginning was intelligent speech, and through that intelligent speech, all things came to be.
A further step in Barron's analysis of the supposed conflict between religion and science is this:
What do scientists look for? I mean every scientist up and down the ages, from the ancient philosophers and researchers, up through the modern scientists.
They're all looking in some way for Logos. They're looking for some patterned intelligibility in things. This or otherwise, science wouldn't get off the ground. If the world were simply a chaotic, random mess, science wouldn't work because there would be no objective intelligibility that corresponds to an inquiring intelligence.
Just think for a second, the way we name the sciences: psycho-logy, logos, the logos about the “psyche”, about the psyche. Physio-logy, the logos about the body. The sciences have that suffix of logos because they have to do with objective intelligibility.
"Where's that come from?" Barron asks. Further, does it strike you as a reasonable position if someone were to say that the world is a wild cosmic accident, but "every nook and cranny of the physical world is marked by patterned intelligibility"?
On the contrary. This very objective intelligibility, which is the ground for all science, leads one to acknowledge the existence of this Logos, which has spoken all things into being.
Now, go back to the Magi: good scientists looking up into the night sky, looking at the patterned intelligibilities in the stars and the planets. Where did it lead them? To a gross materialism? “That's all there is: just matter in motion.”
It's silliness; it's nonsense. They were quite right in intuiting that these patterned intelligibilities [would] lead them to the great intelligent Logos that has brought all things into being.
And so, beautifully, they go in search of this Word made flesh. What had they heard about in the ancient prophecies? That that Word, that Logos, the Creator God was becoming a king in the form of this little baby. Science led to faith; it was not repugnant to faith.
Where did I first learn science? And then philosophy, which I came to love? At Catholic schools, at Catholic University in Washington, at the Institut Catholique in Paris.
The Catholic faith at its best has never stood opposed to reason. No, no; it loves and embraces the sciences, loves and embraces philosophy, loves and embraces all expressions of rationality.
Where did I first study the great novelists and the poets, those who explore the objective intelligibilities within human experience, within the human mind? I learned all that in Catholic schools.
Very early on in the Christian tradition, there was a fellow named Tertullian—Church Father, great figure in many ways. But Tertullian said something and he expressed an attitude that the Church found repugnant.
Tertullian said, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" And what he meant was: What do the speculations of the philosophers of Athens have to do with the revelation given to the Jews?
Well, the Church repudiated that. The Church at its best, from the earliest days—think of Paul himself, all the way through Thomas Aquinas, and up to the present day—the Church at its best has said, "No, Athens and Jerusalem belong together." The questing mind of Athens should not be put to rest.
No, no; on the contrary. Allow all of that rich intellectual energy to express itself as fully as possible—because, because, it's always seeking some form of Logos and, therefore, ultimately is seeking the source of that objective intelligibility. It's seeking the source of all of that patterned intelligibility in the great intelligence of God.
Now, that's the Catholic tradition: faith and reason. John Paul II—one of his last encyclicals is called Fides et Ratio. That wonderful et: and... See, the Magi believed in reason, and faith; their reason brought them to faith.
Since it was the last Sunday of Christmastime when Barron drew into his analysis the shepherds that attended the infant Jesus.
In fact, shepherds were kind of seen as lowlifes. Their testimony wouldn't have been accepted in court; they weren't taken seriously. The angel appeared though to the shepherds. The simplest people come to Christ, and maybe they're the first ones really to hear the message [of God become man].
But now think of the Magi. Now [...] we're dealing with the cultural elite; we're dealing with the philosophers and scientists in one of the most advanced cultures of that time. Christ has come to them too. And in fact, their very work leads them to Christ.
You know, faith needs science to keep it from becoming superstitious. There's a danger of that. If you just block out reason, then faith can become superstitious. But the sciences need faith, so they don't become self-contained and self-referential.
Pope John Paul's document Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), which Barron refers to above, opens this way:
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
The document spells this out in more detail:
[The Church teaches ] that the truth attained by philosophy [meaning science] and the truth of Revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive: “There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known”.
It refers to the Book of Wisdom, missing from some Protestant Bibles:
There the sacred author speaks of God who reveals himself in nature. For the ancients, the study of the natural sciences coincided in large part with philosophical learning. Having affirmed that with their intelligence human beings can “know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements... the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts” (Wis 7:17, 19-20)—in a word, that he can philosophize—the sacred text takes a significant step forward.
Making his own the thought of Greek philosophy, to which he seems to refer in the context, the author affirms that, in reasoning about nature, the human being can rise to God: “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5). This is to recognize as a first stage of divine Revelation the marvellous “book of nature”, which, when read with the proper tools of human reason, can lead to knowledge of the Creator. If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as Creator of all, it is not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their sinfulness place an impediment in the way. (para.19)
In addition:
Seen in this light, reason is valued without being overvalued. The results of reasoning may in fact be true, but these results acquire their true meaning only if they are set within the larger horizon of faith: “All man's steps are ordered by the Lord: how then can man understand his own ways?” (Proverbs 20:24). For the Old Testament, then, faith liberates reason in so far as it allows reason to attain correctly what it seeks to know and to place it within the ultimate order of things, in which everything acquires true meaning.
In brief, human beings attain truth by way of reason because, enlightened by faith, they discover the deeper meaning of all things and most especially of their own existence. Rightly, therefore, the sacred author identifies [awe-inspired respect] of God as the beginning of true knowledge: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7; cf. Sirach 1:14). (20)
Finally, it is the Church that finds itself in the position of defending reason:
💢 Fides et Ratio can be accessed hereThere are signs of a widespread distrust of universal and absolute statements, especially among those who think that truth is born of consensus and not of a consonance between intellect and objective reality. In a world subdivided into so many specialized fields, it is not hard to see how difficult it can be to acknowledge the full and ultimate meaning of life which has traditionally been the goal of philosophy [including science]. Nonetheless, in the light of faith which finds in Jesus Christ this ultimate meaning, I cannot but encourage philosophers—be they Christian or not—to trust in the power of human reason and not to set themselves goals that are too modest in their philosophizing.
The lesson of [20th Century] history [...] shows that this is the path to follow: it is necessary not to abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it or the audacity to forge new paths in the search. It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason. (56)
* The Christ Connection: How the World Religions Prepared the Way for the Phenomenon of Jesus (2011)
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