These repeated bouts of sparring between the two Gozo heavyweights Joseph Caruana and Mgr Joseph Farrugia are ending in stalemate. A striking feature of the ‘debate’ is that both sides – even if in different ways – seem to have a restricted view of the range of human cerebral activity.
Caruana cannot deny that questions of identity and of rules governing human existence have always engaged the human mind. That is a piece of solid empirical evidence that needs investigation not dismissal by facile slogans like “faith trespasses natural world”.
On the other side, Farrugia, in trying to bring within the fence of science activities “stamp collecting” trivialises science. Caruana rightly castigates this but is inclined to rush at relativistic speed into pronouncements on the “laws of nature”.
Virgin birth (asexual reproduction) does occur in nature and bona fide scientists have even arranged a form of it in sheep (remember Dolly?). As for “rising from the dead”, the Lazarus case has good empirical evidence to back it up. Does that impress Caruana? Of course not.
By a logical somersault he has excluded a priori any empirical evidence for ‘miracles’. He dismisses another alleged rising from the dead as a tale of “fairies [it was angels actually] at the bottom of the garden”.
The methods of theologians and philosophers may not impress scientists but cannot be fairly dismissed as worthless
Farrugia cannot deny that the scientists he mentioned never claimed they arrived at a belief in the supernatural by the strict methods of empirical science. But he makes no mention of growing unease among scientists on the Caruana side of the river.
Recent work on the conditions in the early universe (Caruana’s stamping grounds, incidentally) is prompting a “resurrection” of an argument that was safely dead and buried: an evolution tailor-made for the eventual development of intelligent life.
Competent scientists calculate the probability that all these conditions, which include values of fundamental physical constants, came together by chance to be exceedingly small.
Other scientists, geneticists mainly, state that close study of DNA shows evidence of an ‘intelligence’ at work. Neither position constitutes a strict ‘proof’ of the existence of the supernatural, yet, both are plausible even to real scientists. Incidentally – Caruana please note – neither group makes the slightest mention of ‘miracles’. Not very surprising perhaps given that the ‘supernatural’ side, as said in the fable of the other Lazarus, sets no store by them either.
And then there are those scientists and non-scientists (cf. the philosopher Immanuel Kant filled with admiration for “the starry heavens without and the moral law within”) who are impressed by the observed fact that human beings seem to have a built-in moral law with obvious cultural variations but with a universal substrate.
That is not an approach that would appeal to Caruana but, then, Farrugia does not really mention this either. Perhaps he is unaware of a warning in the Book of Deuteronomy (10:11-14 seekers after “truth” should not look to the heavens or over the sundering seas to find it as “truth” resides close by, in their mouth and in their heart.
To conclude, we cannot argue that Homo Sapiens is subject to a deep-seated schizophrenia when it comes to examination of phenomena he is immersed in. Empirical science, concerned with the ‘natural’ on its own terms of reference, can neither prove nor disprove the existence ofthe ‘supernatural’.
The methods of theologians and philosophers may not impress scientists like Caruana but cannot be fairly dismissed as worthless.
So the two ‘tribes’ are either going to keep eternally sniping at each other or, if they reckon it is really worth the trouble, find the time and the effort to get down to a closer examination of their respective positions.
Edward Mallia is honorary chairman of Friends of the Earth (Malta).