Many people
find the intersection of science and religion highly problematic. The difficulty
harkens back to when everyone read Scripture in a pre-scientific, literal way
(except for those who read Scripture allegorically and even they presumed a
pre-scientific worldview). However, by the sixteenth century, that started to
change. For example, Galileo’s championing of Copernicus’ theory of a
heliocentric universe evoked strong ecclesial opposition. The Church, based on
its reading of Joshua 10, which says that God caused the sun to stand still for
a day so that the Israelites could take vengeance on the Amorites, taught that
the earth and not the sun is at the center of the universe. The sun standing
still in the sky makes sense only in a geocentric, not in a heliocentric,
universe. Not until the twentieth century did the Roman Catholic Church reverse
its rejection of a heliocentric universe.
Numerous,
apparent contradictions between scientific theory and a literal reading of
Scripture exist. Scientific data points towards the earth being millions of
years old. Yet the notable Anglican Irish divine, Archbishop Usher, in the
early seventeenth century calculated from Scriptural data that the earth is
less than five thousand years old. Moses struck the Nile River with a stick and
turned the Nile to blood, a chemical impossibility. Later, Moses struck a rock
with his stick and a stream flowed from the rock, a geological impossibility. When
John the Baptist baptized Jesus, Luke reports that the sky opened and a dove
descended upon Jesus, combining an astronomical impossibility (the sky cannot
open) with a biological impossibility (the upper atmosphere has insufficient
oxygen for a bird to breathe).
Explanations of
the intersection of science and religion fall within four broad categories. Agnostics,
those who neither believe nor disbelieve, do not constitute one of those
categories as they demur from describing the nexus. First, atheists, like
Richard Dawkins, argue that religion is myth and no deity exists. Religious
interpretations of life are not only unhelpful but at times actually
destructive. This position embodies much faith for it presumes, contrary to the
rules of logic, that one can prove a negative. Religion has caused much harm. That
tragic fact, per se, makes religious ideas neither true nor false.
Second,
fideists (or theists), including high profile contemporary creationists, argue
that religion is true and that the supernatural deity omnipotent. Fideists go
to unbelievable lengths to preserve their faith in a supernatural deity
consonant with a traditional reading of Scripture. True believes have told me,
for example, that God created dinosaur bones and the half-life of carbon to
test the faith of people. I suspect that fideists similarly dismiss DNA research
that links human origins to other primates. Perhaps more importantly, fideists
cannot explain why a supernatural, omnipotent God allows so much human
suffering. Why does God answer the prayers of the few and not of the many? Why
does God heal one of cancer and ignore the entreaties of dozens? Why does God
allow the Holocaust, mass starvation from famine, and epidemics that decimate
populations? Belief in miracles – supernatural interventions – makes God seem
capricious or weak. A God who allows so much suffering and evil seems anything
but good and loving.
Third,
compartmentalizers keep faith and science apart. Stephen Jay Gould described
this as the non-overlapping magisterial of science and religion. Most people
probably adopt this approach by default, finding that thinking too deeply about
either religion or science produces more headache than insight, more heartache
than comfort. Compartmentalization at its best constitutes a naïve view of
religion and at its worst represents problem avoidance. Religion in order to
give life meaning must address the totality of life. Certainly religion and
science answer different types of questions, science emphasizing what and how
while religion focuses on why. Yet a radically distorted understanding of
science invariably leads one to wrong whys, as evident in the creationism
movement that seeks to defend God's role in creation as inconsistent with
evolution. Deists, those who believe that God was the cosmos’ first cause or
prime mover and then has not intervened in the cosmos, constitute a distinct
subset of compartmentalizers.
Fourth and
finally, post-theists rely upon science and Scripture to push past the
idolatrous images of a theistic God to the God about whom humans can say
nothing. Nineteenth century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach argued that the God of
theism resulted from wishfully projecting an image of human perfection onto a
non-existent being. Ana-Marie Rizzuto and others, building on the work of
Sigmund Freud, have demonstrated that one’s image of God bears a striking
resemblance to one’s dominant parent. These are idols, not God. Post-theism,
rooted in the ancient via negative, finds modern spokespersons in Episcopal Bishop
John Spong, Church of England Bishop John A. T. Robinson, process theologians like
John Hick, and others. Nobody has yet articulated a metaphor or symbol for God
that has generated widespread acceptance. All insist that God is integral to
the warp and woof of the cosmos rather than a supernatural deity existing
outside the cosmos. All passionately believe in God, address the reality of
suffering unabated by supernatural intervention, and articulate an approach to
life and faith that seeks to build on insights from every field of knowledge.
Change is
endemic to the cosmos. Historically, religion has planted a standard, declared,
“Here I stand,” and refused to change. This produced a static body of religious
knowledge (theology). Defenders of static religious knowledge generally fail to
recognize the extent to which their theology incorporates anachronistic
elements of other disciplines. For example, Galileo’s ecclesial foes relied as
much upon Aristotelian astronomy as upon Scripture, a reliance that all took
for granted until someone called the science into question. Similarly, Charles
Darwin’s theory of evolution – for which more scientific data exists than
almost any other scientific theory – challenged a biology that presumed species
exist independently of one another and that species do not change over time.
I do not know
where post-theism will go or how I will articulate my faith in the future. I do
know that the time is well past when I could believe in a God who allows great evil
and who appears to intervene supernaturally on a seemingly sporadic basis. I
know that I cannot compartmentalize my faith from science or other fields of
knowledge. My faith must be sufficiently robust to engage life’s most
challenging issues informed by the best available insights from every
discipline. In other words, I cannot afford to bypass, ignore, or recklessly
proceed through the intersection of faith science if my faith is to be dynamic
and alive, pointing toward that reality which no words can describe. Any other
type of faith leaves me with a dead idol.
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