Christmas and science

And the angel said to her: 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God." (Lk 1:35)

Is this another intervention of God in the history of the world and of mankind, like that of the divine creation, the call of Abraham and Yahweh's appearance to Moses at Mount Sinai? But why does God, as an extraneous agent, come between us to modify the course of our events, when, scientifically speaking, the history of the world is, in itself, a coherent development governed by the law of cause and effect? Do not also such frequent divine interventions make the creator God a ruler of all things, something perhaps hard to accept?

But in the first place, since we are referring to God as creator of the universe, can the biblical statement about such a divine creation be scientifically verified? Of course not! One should not look for a scientific confirmation of biblical statements - this would amount to a partisan religious attitude and see in the dazzling light of the Big Bang, the light of the biblical first day of Genesis. However, even natural scientists can adopt a biased way of thinking by denying, with every scientific advance they make, the probability of any transcendent reality behind the factual visible appearances.

Here religion finds itself, as it were, in a pit against science: "In the beginning was God" versus "In the beginning was hydrogen". Besides, natural science today claims to be able to reconstruct not only the point of time of the origin of the world which occurred some 13 billion years ago but also its vast history in its decisive phases, that is to say, its beginning, development and end. But theology too has its own reconstruction of the beginning, history and end of man, hence of a creator, immanent and finisher God.

What is curious in this contest between science and religion is the that it wasn't a scientist but a much misunderstood Belgian priest and professor in Louvain, Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), who developed the model of an expanding universe and put forward the Big Bang hypothesis which nowadays is accepted as the standard model of the origin of the universe. It was also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit philosopher and palaeontologist, best known for his evolutionary theory, who envisaged the process of human convergence as tending to a final state, which he called Point Omega.

Following the right method used by scientists of cause and effect, the question which should be asked is: "What came before the Big Bang?" Why something and not nothing? Are such rational questions to be dismissed as pointless as most natural scientists often do? Of course, a scientist as a scientist, doesn't go beyond his scientific methods, and therefore such philosophical questions (what was before his hydrogen?) don't interest him. But a scientist is also a rational human being, and as such, should not dismiss these questions as nonsense.

The two biblical accounts of creation do not produce scientific facts about the origin of the world and man - they only explain them. These two planes of sacred scripture and science should be clearly separated. If the former wants to conclude from reasoning a cause for the primordial fireball or hydrogen atoms, this inference does not contradict our scientific knowledge. It just answers the question: "why is there something and not nothing at the very beginning" - a cause outside this three-dimensional world of ours.

The two biblical narratives are witness to the authenticity of faith, a firm belief without rational proof, but which natural science can neither confirm nor refute: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth... Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." For those who believe therefore the whole universe and man owe their existence to God alone and to no other cause. No, man is not abandoned to nothingness. He is not hurled from nothing to nothing. His life is meaningful and valuable.

Of course, man is not forced into this biblical belief. He is absolutely free to decide for or against. But once he has decided for this belief, he becomes spiritually attune to God's interventions in the history of the world, for God did not create man and afterwards left him on his own.

God is immanent, permanently pervading the universe through his interventions, which can happen even on an individual level. Should the believer therefore be so gullible and accept miracle stories telles quelles, as they appear, especially in the Old Testament? Should he believe all this? Are they not violations of the laws of nature?

In biblical language a 'miracle' (a sign, a marvel) did not mean a violation of the laws of nature because the authors who wrote the Old Testament knew nothing of these laws in the modern sense, but attributed natural happenings to the power of God.

Miracle stories are not always meant to be straightforward records of historical events, but often provoked admiring faith in God who has done great things to man. To the Jews, Yahweh was their God of Liberation from their bondage in Egypt. They expressed their admiration for his power by their stories of the signs (miracles) of the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea.

Is man therefore a marionette, a string puppet in God's hands? Does not believing in God and His interventions mean remaining infantile all one's life - as Freud expressed it? Is not faith, after all, an illusion, a projection - as Feuerbach put it?

No, believing in God means affirming in reasonable trust that man is meaningful and not like the mythological Sisyphus who was condemned all his life to roll a large stone to the top of the hill from which it always rolled down again - as Jean Paul Sartre expressed it in his influential existentialist philosophy after the Second World War. Sartre's man possesses a terrifying freedom of choice, and in this respect he is condemned to 'create himself', to create his own morality without God.

Notwithstanding our deep commitment to God we, like Moses, would like to see God face to face especially when our life seems to be so confused and chaotic. But it is always in retrospect, that we can perceive the upper side of the carpet. Like Moses we do not see God from the front, but we do not need such an impossible vision. We rely on his revealed promises to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and around 2,000 years ago to Jesus of Nazareth, his only begotten Son.

We celebrate Christmas as the annual festival of Christ's birth, because Christ is central to our Christian message. We not only believe but hold very dear these biblical interventions of God as active partners in this divine history of our liberation. Non-believers are absolutely free to differ. God forces nobody.