Science is real,” declared The Sign, which for a time seemed to glare at me from almost every house in the neighborhood. I’ve always hated yard signs, but that one redefined “obnoxious.”
Like every claim on The Sign, this one was both obvious and, in another way, false. Of course science is a real thing. No one doubts that scientific inquiry has value, enabling mankind to learn important truths about the natural world. It doesn’t follow that scientists are always reliable, that they can’t be biased, or that authorities wearing the mantle of “science” should be treated as authoritative on all subjects.
It feels as though the acolytes of science will never let go of their petty grudges. But perhaps that’s not true. After reading Spencer Klavan’s new book, “Light of the Mind, Light of the World,” you may find yourself thinking over the many strange turns that science and religion have taken over the centuries in their dance with one another. It could be that a new era of friendship is just around the corner.
Science and religion are not truly enemies, but there can be tensions between them. We could see apparent areas of tension between science and faith as exciting opportunities to increase our understanding on both fronts. Sadly, those conversations haven’t always been so friendly.
Individual scientists can, of course, be people of sincere faith, but across the modern era, the scientific establishment has played a large role in developing and mainstreaming a reductive materialism that is deeply incompatible with Christianity (and most other faiths).
Science and faith once allies
Klavan tells the story of how this came to pass. The ancient Greeks – Plato and Aristotle – laid a foundation for recognizing the reality of matter without reducing everything to it. In later centuries, Christians too believed that man was a rational creature, and because they saw the natural world as God’s creation, it was reasonable to expect that it would be “permeable” by human reason. That formed a foundation for natural science in the West.
It’s uplifting to look back on this history. From a very early point, science and religion were allies and, in a sense, cousins. So what happened? How did the quest to explore creation lead to the rejection of creation itself?
Human beings may have fallen prey to their own success. From the Enlightenment, natural science became a spectacular success story, from which flowed a wealth of material benefits.
It was remarkable, transformative, overwhelming and ultimately dehumanizing.
But here in the 21st century, the scientific framework of philosophical materialists is remarkably dated. Apologists like Richard Dawkins still see the material world through the lens of Newtonian physics. They want to reduce human beings to mere matter, meat machines, clunky bits of stuff moving around bumping into each other. Science has moved well beyond that now.
The scientific developments of the 19th and 20th centuries dramatically transformed the way scientists think about the material world. Albert Einstein’s breakthroughs changed the way we think about the relationship of matter, energy and time. Then came the quantum revolution, and everything we thought we knew about mind and matter just exploded.
It was a bedrock assumption of the old system that a thing had to be in a given place at a particular time. It was assumed that a thing that moved from point A to point B must pass through all the space in between. But it turns out that atoms are nothing whatsoever like billiard balls, and in exploring the subatomic realm, physicists stumbled into a startling discovery.
There appear to be things at this level that behave as material objects are “supposed” to behave only when we’re looking at them.
“Quantum equations don’t describe the outlines of a world we can see and touch: they describe the limits where things cease to become tangible or visible,” writes Klavan. “The world beyond those limits is not made of solid objects.”
Exciting times for theists
Some might be tempted to dismiss the quantum revolution, treating the subatomic world as a phantom or fantasy. But we know things about it, and have used quantum mechanics to accomplish remarkable things. Clearly it is real. The only reasonable thing to do is to readjust our paradigms again, accepting that the old way of thinking about mind and matter was inadequate.
For a theist, that might be exciting. Once again, we uncover whole new layers of creation, wonderful and strange (and extremely useful). Once again, it turns out that our rational minds have remarkable capacities that enable us to fathom the mystery. Thanks be to God!
For the materialist, the situation is much grimmer. He was very attached to his chunks of stuff.
As one would expect, many scientific materialists have tried to save their metaphysically impoverished faith by coming up with clumsy fixes. They talk about “multiverse theory” or “supervenience.” Some people are willing to say or believe almost anything rather than crack the door to the possibility that a Creator might actually be the simplest explanation for what we see around us every day.
Science is indeed real, and no one who loves God should be distressed by the study of His creation. Indeed, we should overflow with gratitude for galaxies of wonders, stretching unfathomable distances in every direction and yet also waiting to be uncovered in a realm too small to be seen. We have truly been blessed. At the same time, we have seen how scientific successes can beget both pride and grave philosophical error. It’s time to work on healing that damage. “Light of the Mind, Light of the World” gives some clues as to how it might be done.
Rachel Lu is a contributing writer at America magazine and National Review. She is a former Peace Corps volunteer, holds a doctorate in philosophy from Cornell University, and currently works as an associate editor at Law & Liberty. This is condensed from an article published at wordonfire.org.