to being grasped by God. For them, the powerful sense of being carried away by something of ultimate importance is evidence enough. To take them at their word, they have surrendered their lives and hearts to an irresistible presence and power that receives them into its compassionate embrace. It is not that they have comprehended the overwhelming divine mystery of beauty, goodness, and truth. Rather, they have been comprehended by it. They express their response to this experience in acts of worship, prayer, praise, and gratitude, as well as in distinctive ways of living and relating to the world. That this is not wishful thinking can be demonstrated if it turns out that our longing for the infinite is supportive of what I shall call “the desire to know,” the very heart of human rationality.
As Flanagan and Angier illustrate, however, the naturalist ideal is to bring the totality of being out into the clear light of daytime consciousness, so that there is nothing left for religions to talk about. If theology wants to be respected intellectually, so says the naturalist, it must also adduce the right kind of evidence, namely scientific. This does not necessarily mean that all naturalists demand that God show up among the objects available to empirical inquiry. But there must be visible and unambiguous tracks of divine reality in the natural world if scientifically educated people are to pay any attention to theology. If science comes across anything in nature that cannot be fully explained naturalistically, then there might be good reason to invoke the causal powers of a deity. Today, however, naturalists are eager to demonstrate that everything that formerly gave the appearance of being a trace of the divine can now be explained in natural terms. Not only the “apparent” design in living organisms but also the ethical and mystical inclinations of human beings can be “naturalized.” And if science can account sufficiently for even the holiest of phenomena, there is no need any more for theology.
The Outlines of a Response
The goal of scientific naturalism is to explain everything, insofar as it can be explained at all, in terms of natural processes. This would include the mind itself, which is part of nature. Human intelligence arose by way of a natural process that can be accurately laid out in Darwinian terms. But, as we shall see, the actual performance of human intellection (and later I shall include moral aspiration) is such that it will forever overflow the limits of naturalistic understanding, no matter how detailed scientific understanding becomes in the future. I shall propose that the concrete functioning of intelligence cannot, in principle, let alone in fact, be fully captured by the objectifying categories of any science. In other words, the natural sciences cannot account completely for what I shall be calling critical intelligence. If this claim turns out to be true, it will be necessary to go beyond naturalism in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of the universe.
In order to present my argument as clearly as I can, I shall be inviting you, the reader, to place yourself in the mindset of the naturalist, even if ordinarily you are not quite at home there. Then I shall ask you, if only as a thought experiment, to try to provide adequate justification on naturalist premises for your own mental functioning. I don’t believe you can do so in all honesty. As a naturalist, you already claim that your mind is fully part of nature. But your naturalistic worldview, as I hope I can lead you to acknowledge, is too restrictive to account fully for your own cognitional activity. And if your mind and your view of nature do not fit each other, then something has to give. My suggestion is not to abandon scientific explanations of mind but rather to accept them as intermediate rather than ultimate. By itself, science cannot justify the spontaneous trust you have placed in your own mind, even as you seek to arrive at scientific truth. To justify your implicit trust in the possibility of arriving at truth, you will need to look for a wider and deeper understanding of the universe, a more expansive worldview than naturalism has to offer. My proposal is that your own mind’s spontaneous and persistent trust in the possibility of reaching truth is itself a hint that the physical universe, at least as naturalism conceives it, is only a small fragment of all that is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.
65. Previously published in Haught, Is Nature Enough?, 21–31. Reprinted with permission.
66. Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, 14.
67. See Bowker, Is Anybody Out There?, 9-18 and 112-43.
68. Flanagan, Problem of the Soul, 319.
69. See Angier, “My God Problem,” 131–34.
8: Is Religion Opposed to Science?70
When we hear the words “science” and “religion” we immediately think of the stormy history of their relationship. But the chronicle of religion’s encounter with science is by no means only one of warfare. Here we shall examine four distinct ways in which science and religion may stand in relation to each other:
1. Conflict—the conviction that science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable;
2. Contrast—the claim that there can be no possibility of genuine conflict since religion and science are each responding to radically different questions;
3. Contact—an approach that goes beyond the standoff, in which science and religion simply agree not to be enemies, seeking a positive and fruitful correspondence between them;
4. Confirmation—a seldom articulated position that shows the ways in which, at a very deep level, religion supports and nourishes the entire scientific enterprise.
A grasp of these four approaches should help us make our way through the thicket of issues that make up the subject matter of this book. Let us now examine each of them more closely.
I. Conflict
Many scientific thinkers are quite certain that religion can never be reconciled with science. If you are a scientist, they say, it is hard to imagine how you could honestly also be religious, at least in the sense of believing in God. Their main reason for drawing this conclusion is that religion apparently cannot demonstrate the truth of its ideas in a straightforward way, whereas science can. Religion tries to sneak by without providing any concrete evidence of God’s existence. Science, on the other hand, is willing to test all of its hypotheses and theories against “experience.” Religion cannot do this in a way that is satisfying to an impartial witness. Thus, there is a “conflict” between the scientific and the religious ways of understanding.
Both historical and philosophical factors seem to substantiate such a grim verdict. Historically, we need only to recall the obvious examples: the Church’s persecution of Galileo in the seventeenth century and the widespread religious aversion to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the nineteenth and twentieth. The slow pace by which religious thought comes to terms with science, and the fact that many theists still have a distaste for it, suggest that religion will never get along with science. Since so many believers in God have resisted the findings of astronomy, physics, and biology, is it any wonder that religion comes across as inherently hostile to science?
More important than these historical considerations, however, are the imposing philosophical (specifically epistemological) obstacles that religion and theology present to scientific skeptics. The main problem here is that religious ideas seem to be experientially untestable. That is, they exempt themselves from the rigors of public examination, whereas science always submits its ideas to open experimentation. If empirical scrutiny shows a scientific hypothesis to be mistaken, then science willingly discards it and tries out alternatives, subjecting these also to the same rigorous process of inspection.
But can you do the same with religious teachings? Don’t they dodge all attempts to demonstrate their truth observationally? Don’t theists, for example, go on believing in God no matter what they observe in the world, including enormous suffering and evil? Doesn’t Judaism, for example, say of its Lord: “Even though He slay me, yet shall I trust in Him”? Isn’t the “religious hypothesis,”