Faith in Science
Of the many possible views of religion, the most common in our post-industrial world is that it can hardly be given any scientific credit and, therefore, has nothing credible to tell us. This is particularly evident among the advocates of “anticlerical” ideologies who presume that anything that cannot be explained rationally through scientific analysis presents no logic and hence cannot appeal anymore to the intellect in the modern Western sense. Popular culture and mass media follow in the same footsteps by discounting faith and God almost to the vanishing point.
In light of this, what is there for today’s Christian, who worships God in the era of megapolitics and nanotechnology? Is there indeed a boundary that separates science from God? Or, for all it’s worth, are we comparing the comparable?
Despite our biological similarities to animals, the concept of God and Creator exists only within the realm of humankind, a uniquely human phenomenon. Existential analysis circumscribes it in terms of “man’s search for ultimate meaning.” Albert Einstein once formulated man’s religiosity as our having found an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” Once we have conceived of religion and God in this way, we are entering the area of spirituality rather that scientific rationale.
Faith, as well as conscience, inspiration and love are essentially intuitive, and operate at the intuitive level and cannot be comprehended in rational terms. This was something that was appreciated by the ancient Hebrews when they respectfully used the term Word as the beautiful symbol of the creative and unsurpassed invisible Force, God.
“There are many definitions of God,” wrote Mahatma Gandhi in his diaries, “for the visions of Him are innumerable. They are filling me with astonishment and awesome thrill and are dazzling me for some moment. But I worship God as the Truth only. I have not found Him yet, but I am searching for Him. In these searches I am prepared to make the most precious sacrifices. I will even give up my life, if need should be.”
Indeed, what logical analysis is needed to fully appreciate the grandeur of Bach’s music or Raphael’s masterpieces? “Intuition and inspiration,” as prominent Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky put it, “being the basis of the greatest scientific discoveries . . . cannot be brought forth, neither by scientific nor logical thought and are not connected in their genesis with the word or notion.” Likewise, René Descartes, speaking about the limits of a rational thought, observed: “Having done away with all the chains of syllogisms, one has to trust in intuition as the only way which is left to us.”
Of course, no-one today would agree to totally abandon logic and a rational approach in modern scientific research. Rather, it is the flexible combination of all three: empirical experience, logical thinking and intuition that opens up paradoxes and antinomies, opening the door to the Absolute.
Strange as it may seem, science itself is full of paradoxes, the theory of relativity, for example. No wonder Paul Dirac, a British scientist of the past century, said that quantum theory is mainly built on notions that “cannot be explained with the help of usual notions and even cannot be adequately explained with any words at all.”
In fact, science and religion have quite different goals; they cannot be judged as compatible or not. While science sets itself the goal of explaining the physical state of nature, faith deals with spirituality, transcendental personal experience, the “unexplained.” That didn’t hinder the founders of the sciences being openly religious personalities, Isaac Newton, Johan Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Michael Faraday, Pierre Curie and Ivan Mendeleev among them. Galileo was a faithful Catholic, who viewed the two this way: “God has dictated the Holy Scriptures to guide men’s spirit but proffered the unraveling of the Universe as a challenge to their intelligence”; and, “The Bible teaches us how to come up to Heaven, not how Heaven moves around.” In fact millennia before the second-century philosopher Ptolemy taught his geocentric view of the earth (flat earth, centre of the universe) that prevailed in Galileo’s time, Job recorded, “He suspends the earth over nothing” (Job 26:7), which viewed the earth from a different perspective.
Proponents of modern liberal atheistic thinking argue that there’s no room for God in today’s world, since the nature of the universe can be explained in purely scientific terms. But one accepts this at their peril, for 1800 years into Ptolemy’s future, the centre of the universe has shifted, and the “scientific” Ptolemaic system is considered now a quaint historical absurdity.
On the other hand, certain bastions of traditional religious dogma seem to be losing ground too. Thus, even the evolutionary world view that has become integral to modern science seems to be accepted by some theologians who attempt to view it as a scientific interpretation of Creation.
In either way, contrary to what many in both camps may think, science and religion do not face each other so much in antagonism, but rather as two sides of the same coin, each attempting to explain what belongs to their particular domain. It is likely they will be finding increasingly more similarities than differences in the future, and yet how this might happen remains to be seen.
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