Science cannot be divorced from faith
For years, we've been bombarded by arguments over religion and evolution. And yet you say theology has not yet come to grips with Darwin. What are theologians missing?
Well, this has been one of the most dramatic events that theology -- at least in the West -- has ever had to face. The Darwinian story of evolution seems to give people a whole new creation story. You have to remember that our sense of ethics and the divine came into our religious awareness fixed to a static, vertical, hierarchical understanding of the universe. The fact that there's a special place for humans gave us the sense that we were cared for in a special way by divine providence. But if you suddenly switched to a universe that's 13.7 billion years old, and an evolutionary process that takes almost 4 billion years to lead to humans, then it's very difficult for many people to map this new horizontal, temporal, historical unfolding onto the static hierarchy, which was the backbone of spirituality for so many centuries.
So you're talking about more than just the story of Genesis in the Bible. This is a much bigger issue for modern theology.
The story of Genesis has been hyped as the only problem. I think the fundamental difficulty is the new evolutionary world in process -- that the world's unfinished and still being created is so different from the cosmology that was the backbone of traditional spirituality.
I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there's no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection -- this apparently random series of genetic mutations -- it would seem that there's no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.
Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there's life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that's not necessarily true.
Isn't there a simple response to the materialist argument? You can say "purpose" is simply not a scientific idea. Instead, it's an idea for theologians and philosophers to debate. Do you accept that distinction?
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I sure do. But that distinction is usually violated in scientific literature and in much discussion of evolution. From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.
Who are these scientists who extrapolate about purpose from science?
A good example is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. In his book "Dreams of a Final Theory," he asks, will we find God once science gets down to what he calls the fundamental levels of reality? It's almost as if he assumes that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like that. Similarly, Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.
But Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.
Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science. Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding.
What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.
Are you're saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?
The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call "scientific naturalism," that there's nothing beyond nature -- no transcendent dimension -- that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there's no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.
Do you accept Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" -- that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value?
I think he's too simplistic. I don't think we want to remain stuck in this standoff position. First of all, Gould defines religion as simply concern about values and meanings. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth.
By truth, are you talking about reality?
Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.
We can't get our minds around this transcendent reality because we're limited by our language and our brains?
We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don't accept Gould's complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It's an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin. In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein -- just as after Galileo and Copernicus -- we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.
Well, this has been one of the most dramatic events that theology -- at least in the West -- has ever had to face. The Darwinian story of evolution seems to give people a whole new creation story. You have to remember that our sense of ethics and the divine came into our religious awareness fixed to a static, vertical, hierarchical understanding of the universe. The fact that there's a special place for humans gave us the sense that we were cared for in a special way by divine providence. But if you suddenly switched to a universe that's 13.7 billion years old, and an evolutionary process that takes almost 4 billion years to lead to humans, then it's very difficult for many people to map this new horizontal, temporal, historical unfolding onto the static hierarchy, which was the backbone of spirituality for so many centuries.
So you're talking about more than just the story of Genesis in the Bible. This is a much bigger issue for modern theology.
The story of Genesis has been hyped as the only problem. I think the fundamental difficulty is the new evolutionary world in process -- that the world's unfinished and still being created is so different from the cosmology that was the backbone of traditional spirituality.
I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there's no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection -- this apparently random series of genetic mutations -- it would seem that there's no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.
Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there's life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that's not necessarily true.
Isn't there a simple response to the materialist argument? You can say "purpose" is simply not a scientific idea. Instead, it's an idea for theologians and philosophers to debate. Do you accept that distinction?
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I sure do. But that distinction is usually violated in scientific literature and in much discussion of evolution. From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things. And science has every right to be that way. But that principle of scientific Puritanism is often violated by scientists who think that by dint of their scientific expertise, they are able to comment on such things as purpose. I consider that to be a great violation.
Who are these scientists who extrapolate about purpose from science?
A good example is the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. In his book "Dreams of a Final Theory," he asks, will we find God once science gets down to what he calls the fundamental levels of reality? It's almost as if he assumes that science itself has the capacity and the power to comment on things like that. Similarly, Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.
But Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.
Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science. Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding.
What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.
Are you're saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?
The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call "scientific naturalism," that there's nothing beyond nature -- no transcendent dimension -- that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there's no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.
Do you accept Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" -- that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value?
I think he's too simplistic. I don't think we want to remain stuck in this standoff position. First of all, Gould defines religion as simply concern about values and meanings. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth.
By truth, are you talking about reality?
Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.
We can't get our minds around this transcendent reality because we're limited by our language and our brains?
We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don't accept Gould's complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It's an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin. In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein -- just as after Galileo and Copernicus -- we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.
posted by mandelia at 11:20 PM
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