In his serene response to Mgr Joseph Farrugia, scientist and researcher Joseph Caruana rightly disassociates himself from a rather hospitable and inclusive idea of ‘science’ and favours the prestigious and more specific usage of the term.
Of course, we are familiar with a large number of prophets jumping on the bandwagon and speaking of ideologies which were ‘scientific’ – not just in the old sense of being methodical but in the new one of being grounded in the empirical and physical world. Herbert Spencer insisted that social Darwinism is scientific. So did Marx and Engels, notoriously enough.
At the same time, it would indeed be naive were one to declare that the scientific community today is itself unanimous in what it understood to be scientifically acceptable. Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Gould had said that “Dawkins [former Oxford chair for the public understanding of science] has recently raised my hackles with his claim that genes themselves are units of selection and that individuals merely their temporary receptacles”.
In any case, the proliferation of rival ‘scientific’ world views needed to be stopped. However, when Karl Popper’s guillotine came down we were not told what status such world views should deserve if they did not qualify to be numbered among the strictly scientific ones.
In any case, Caruana is certainly right to insist that theology should be carefully distinguished from the natural sciences because our age has radically redrawn the boundaries and established empirical verifiability as the sole criterion of that kind of knowledge. However, he also takes a clear stand when he says that scientists cannot accept “that there is no clash between science and faith”.
A question: is the claim that science and faith ‘clash’ with each other a statement of faith or of science?
This claim has been made by representatives of both sides of the debate.
We are all too familiar with religious fundamentalists who are unable to critically examine and rise above the literary genre, the anthropological set-up of religious claims and, inevitably, view the serenity of a number of scientifically-established facts as inimical to tenets of the faith. Such proponents of religion are unable to distinguish texts which are mythological from those that are more philosophical and, further still, from those with a more clinical and historically credible weight.
The insistence on a clash between science and faith need not be accepted as scientific
The inability to read biblical or religious claims critically, however, is also common among the scientific community. This is more worrying not because scientists ought to defend religious claims. As Caruana rightly observes, it is not the competence of science to tell us why there is a universe instead of nothing. The task of physics is to tell us how the universe came about – depending on which model you embrace – and of biology to offer a plausible explanation of the emergence of species.
Why there is anything at all is a question that the scientific community cannot contemplate and this not because of any intellectual deficiency, of course, but because that question belongs to an entirely different order of thought.
As Stephen Hawking says in his paper, Gödel and the End of Physics: “We are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead, we and our models are both part of the universe we are describing.”
The awareness of models or frameworks within which every scientific claim is rendered intelligible is an invitation to scientific humility and to an awareness of how limited and contextualised our concepts and claims to scientific knowledge inevitably are. So the insistence on a clash between science and faith need not be accepted as scientific for it lacks the matching evidence that would be required to establish that one is wrong and the other right on those same grounds set by the empirical standard.
It is unfortunate that most of us operate with naive and simplistic models of empiricism, which contrast painfully with the humility of the authentic scientist who probes into the natural world undogmatically. That, of course, will depend on which scientific model you subscribe to. For instance, Newton viewed the universe as a vast machine evolving or operating according to fixed laws, the laws of classical physics. Material particles and objects composed of them attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Please note that Newton himself believed even this scientific world view to be compatible with the claim that God providentially guides the world.
It is understandable that Caruana contrasts the claims of the Catholic faith – that God sometimes intervenes in an unexpected way – with the Newtonian view of the world. That would be a natural contrast to make. The irony lies in that the ‘new picture’ offered by current physics, which is founded on quantum mechanics, is designed to contrast with the deterministic picture of the Newtonian world. In current physics, we don’t get a prediction of a unique configuration for a system at t but only a distribution of probabilities across many possible outcomes. In a quantum mechanical layout, we are not, therefore, given a fixed configuration resulting from the initial conditions. Instead, we can think of a spectrum of probabilities and possible outcomes.
It is therefore plausible to suppose that a quantum-based view of the universe would be more, not less, compatible with divine intervention than with the deterministic and closed-system of laws defended by Newtonian physics. So if God existed, why couldn’t He choose to follow an alternative route to that customarily observed? Assuming that God existed, what would prevent miracles from happening if God wanted them to happen? Why should miracles – and exceptional occurrences – be dogmatically ruled out upfront by a scientific mind?
The consolation is that the Christ, raised from the dead, is supported by so much evidence that one need not appeal to myth or fantastical speculation. Not only would it have been safer for the apostles to go back to their previous life and just accept the massive disappointment of the death of Jesus but such an event would have been relegated to oblivion in the first place, one rather annoying case of religious fanaticism among many.
Who would have risked his life in the name of a fraud? Who would have believed the testimony of women in a notoriously misogynistic culture anyway?And, as N.T. Wright observes, the nature of the gospel narratives changes drastically when we read accounts of the resurrection.
One can feel right away that something unexpected, frightening even, happened and the gospel writers simply cannot pin down the causes and measure the consequences of such an unprecedented occurrence in a doctored way.
One cannot ignore the testimony of Paul, that sworn enemy of Christianity who was convinced that Christ was an impostor. You wouldn’t have convinced Saul about the truth of Christ by argument. It was that direct and personal encounter with the Risen Christ alone which could open his eyes to something hitherto unheard of. All this would have been speculation or fantasy had the very composition of the Gospels and the existence of the Church not been themselves available to rational scrutiny. They cannot, therefore, be merely ditched as fairy stories or hallucinations.
Of course, faith is still required in the face of evidence, whether historical, scientific or subjective. For, left to itself, evidence of brute facts is raw. It needs to be informed by the concepts we transport into the laboratory or through which we view the heavens in a telescope.
Please also note that our thoughts are spiritual and not empirically verifiable in the current scientific usage of the term. I cannot discover through a CT scan or MRI of your brain your intention to cancel a bank account tomorrow, your irritation at being ignored by your mother-in-law or your plan to go on a weekend break next August. Nor can I check out your memories of the past or your decision to break free from an addiction. Those are your thoughts.
They are spiritual as opposed to material and, no doubt about it, they are real.
Christopher Caruana teaches philosophy at the University of Malta and overseas.