Religious Faith and the Challenge of Modern Science

By E. Christian Brugger

June 17, 2012Eleventh Sunday in

Ordinary TimeReadings: Ezekiel 17.22-24;

2 Corinthians 5.6-10; Mark 4.26-34

In the second reading for today, St. Paul states that we must “walk by faith and not by

sight.” On the basis of this walk, God will judge us. “Walk” here is a metaphor for our life of ac-tion. So faith, the Apostle teaches, should illuminate and guide our life of action.

Faith Is a Response – To What?Faith is derivative and respon-

sive. It is preceded by God’s activ-ity of revealing himself. So while we can talk about faith as some-thing we have and live by, the pri-mary reality is that to which our faith responds.

An extraordinary feature of Judaism and Christianity is their top-down origin. They begin with God’s own initiative. Divine rev-elation is God’s self-communica-tion to mankind by words and deeds, principally of Jesus Christ, although in a secondary way, through every biblical character from Adam to John the Baptist.

God reveals in order to estab-lish a covenant community with mankind. As an analogy, consider the way human relationships be-gin and deepen. Someone makes something known about himself – say, tells us his name. Since we are usually unable to verify empir-ically the truth of this communi-cation, accepting it requires faith. This acceptance or faith is neces-sary to begin a relationship and to deepen its intimacy over time.

Faith in God is similar. Aqui-nas says it involves two things (ST II-II, q.6, a.1c): first, God’s per-sonal communication. God makes something known; that something is what’s revealed – faith’s content. This content is delivered in its en-tirety by Jesus to the apostles. Sec-ond, faith involves the acceptance of God’s personal communication. We welcome his communication by assenting to the truths he speaks. This inaugurates a relationship of communion.

Faith as a GiftThe readings from Ezekiel

17 and Mark 4 teach us some-thing essential about faith. Using agrarian imagery, the scripture teaches that God both plants faith

and gives it growth. The growth of God’s kingdom on earth, which subsists in the faith of the body of Christ, is beyond human un-derstanding and control. Faith in God requires divine assistance.

So though it shares elements of our faith in other human beings, faith in God is not merely a human act, as the Pelagians held. Faith is also a gift. Vatican I teaches that faith is a “supernatural virtue” (Dei Filius, ch.3, n.2). And Aqui-nas writes: “since man, by assent-ing to matters of faith, is raised above his nature, this must needs accrue to him from some super-natural principle moving him in-wardly; and this is God” (ST II-II, q.6, a.1c). That principle is grace, which must “precede and assist” (Dei Verbum, n.5) our human act of faith.

But our human acts are also needed. We assent to the truths of faith and shape our actions and commitments around them. It is true that we cannot do this without divine assistance; but di-vine assistance, without our co-operation, will be ineffective. God requires from sinners the free acceptance of his self-communi-cation by an act of faith, thereby

Teaching the

FaithA Publication of the

Volume 1 • Number 2juNe 2012 elizabeth Shaw, editor

june 2012 t 1

Faith

making us cooperators in his re-deeming work.

Different Types of KnowingIn what way is modern science

a challenge to Christian faith? The challenge arises because faith and science entail different types of knowing. Faith requires assent to propositions that are not em-pirically verifiable, while scientific knowledge, by definition, is verifi-able. Both types of knowledge can correspond to objective realities and thus be true. But the truths of faith are about realities that cannot be directly observed, so we simply can’t approach them with an expectation that they will yield to empirical verification.

If one insists that any true knowledge must be empirically verifiable, one will deny that faith is a proper source of knowledge. The content of faith will be re-duced, as it is in almost all discus-sions of faith by critics of Christi-anity, to purely subjective belief.

But any person who denies the possibility of non-empirically veri-fiable knowledge is in a serious logical quandary. Why? Because the proposition that there is no non-empirically verifiable knowl-edge is itself not empirically veri-fiable! So one assents to it by an act of religious-like faith. Listen to the ‘faith’ expressed in the follow-ing statement by prominent athe-ist popularizer Daniel Dennett:

An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ul-timate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.

“Sure,” one might reply, “prove it.”

No Fundamental Conflict?Properly understood, the realms

of science and faith are comple-mentary. The truths of the visible

domain, knowable without faith, “testify to” the existence of a realm beyond themselves (Psalm 19.1-6). The truths of faith give meaning to the visible realm, especially to the realm of persons, by widening our understanding of its origin, nature, and destiny.

But to say there’s no funda-mental conflict between science and faith is bound to elicit some responses of disbelief: “Of course there is, and has been for centu-ries, ever since the ‘scientific revo-lution’ of the 16th and 17th centu-ries.” The Marxist scientist (and ex-Catholic) John Bernal famously wrote in 1937: the “scientific revo-lution . . . let scholars look at the world in a different light. Religion, superstition, and fear were re-placed by reason and knowledge.” So goes the familiar narrative of the rise of the modern sciences.

The narrative is unpersuasive for at least three reasons. First, some of the most important names in the so-called scientific revolu-tion (e.g., Giordano Bruno, Nico-laus Copernicus, Niels Stensen, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Gali-lei, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton) were men of faith and remained so till the end of their lives. The same is true of many great names in 19th- and 20th-cen-tury science (e.g., Gregor Mendel, Pierre Duhem, Georges Lemaître, Alistair Crombie, and Michael Po-lanyi).

Second, it ignores the great ad-vancement in scientific thinking during the Christian Middle Ages. For example, 6th-century Christian philosopher John Philoponus pro-posed an account of kinetic energy that helped overcome some of the intellectual stagnation caused by Aristotle’s long-held explanation of the motion of projectiles. Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253), some-times referred to as the founder of experimental science, emphasized the importance of mathematical precision and precise measure-

ments in the proposing and veri-fication of scientific theories. Pari-sian philosopher John Buridan (c. 1295-1356) proposed an explana-tion of motion that later (and with refinement) would be become New-ton’s First Law of Motion. Buri-dan’s student Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-1382) first performed calcu-lations involving probability. (He later became a bishop.) Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280) wrote over twenty books on scientific topics. And so on. Credible historians of science such as Alistair Crombie have denied that there was an in-tellectual or scientific “revolution” beginning in the 16th century, and asserted instead that there was much greater continuity between the scientific thinking of Middle Ages and the great developments of the Renaissance and early mod-ern periods.

Finally, as Oxford nuclear physicist Peter Hodgson explains, the flourishing of the scientific endeavor in the Christian West was no accident. Key theologi-cal beliefs accessible through the Christian sources of revelation liberated the human mind to look at the natural world in new ways. This included the belief that God is rational; and so his universe – the natural world, the subject mat-ter of the hard sciences – is orderly and knowable, open to the human mind. It also included the belief that God is free, and so his uni-verse, pace Aristotle, is not neces-sary and eternal, but contingent. Hodgson writes:

These beliefs are essential for science. This enables us to un-derstand why it was that sci-ence as we know it did not de-velop into a self-sustaining en-terprise in any of the great civ-ilizations of antiquity. Science achieved its first viable birth in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages, when for the first time there was a soci-

june 2012 t 2

ety dominated by Christian be-liefs, and the social structure that allowed the free discus-sion of novel ideas. If we think of science as a tree, religion is to be found among the roots, not among the fruits.

Reason Backs FaithWhy then is the popular nar-

rative so resilient? Scientists are continually engaged in the search for facts – truths – about the natu-ral world. They observe empirical phenomena, propose hypotheses, and then carefully test their hy-potheses through measurements and experiments. They discover firsthand how easy it is to take for granted ideas that turn out under deeper scrutiny to be mistaken. They learn to take nothing on trust, to question everything.

People of faith, then, should avoid asserting conclusions with-out giving reasons for those con-clusions. Many more reasons ex-ist for truths of faith and morals than believers often are aware of. For example, all the moral truths taught and defended by the Catho-lic Church are rationally defen-sible in their own right, without an appeal to the authority of God.

In conversations with those who reject or doubt God’s authority, believers should set forth the best rational arguments they can for the Church’s moral teaching. Give people reasons. Tell them why, not just what.

Similarly, although some of the truths of faith cannot be derived exclusively from naturally know-able premises, still many good reasons can be given on their be-half. For example, the doctrines of original sin, miracles, and life after death each are supported by observation, the testimony of trustworthy people, and the com-mon experiences and intuitions of peoples throughout history.

The scientific mind is some-times tempted to assert answers to transcendent and religious ques-tions – about the existence of God, the afterlife, the genesis of the universe, and so on. For example, this pseudo-scientific statement by the celebrated Cambridge theoreti-cal physicist Stephen Hawking in his 2010 book, The Grand Design: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Sponta-neous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.” Hawking seems to be as-serting a metaphysically ridicu-lous proposition: that nothing can be a cause of something. Fr. Rob-ert Spitzer, S.J. replies:

If you take nothing literally . . . then one cannot attribute anything to nothing. One can-not attribute characteristics, actions, powers and so forth to nothing. In this absence of ev-erything, one can only conclude that ‘only nothing can come from nothing.’

When a scientist leaves the realm of the observable and mea-surable, he leaves the realm of

science and enters the arena of philosophy and theology. The in-struments of the empirical meth-od will do him little good here. If he does not recognize this, he is likely to say foolish things, such as when atheist Richard Dawkins proposed that it is more plau-sible that an alien intelligence designed and created human life and then populated our planet with it than that God created life. (See Ben Stein’s interview with Dawkins in his entertaining film Expelled.)

Empiricist critics of Christi-anity pose a false set of alterna-tives. Since the scientific method cannot be used to arrive at reli-gious truth (or moral truth for that matter), we don’t need to choose between faith and sci-ence. Whoever wishes to weigh in on the basic questions of reli-gion will have to fall back upon non-empirically grounded propo-sitions (i.e., will need faith). The critical question is: whose account is most plausible?

About the AuthorE. Christian Brugger, D. Phil. holds the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Chair of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theo-logical Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

FOR FURTHER READINGPeter Hodgson, The Roots

of Science and Its Fruits (The Saint Austin Press, 2002).

Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Ox-ford, 2011).

Robert Spitzer, S.J., New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contem-porary Physics and Philosophy (Eerdmans, 2010).

june 2012 t 3

Teaching the

FaithA Publication of the

Volume 1 • Number 2juNe 2012 elizabeth Shaw, editor

Po box 495Notre Dame, IN 46556

NEXT ISSUE: August 2012 Defending Marriage

ISSN: 2166-1146

Faith and the Challenges of Science In Short . . .

• The truths of faith are about realities that we don’t directly observe, so we can’t approach them expecting they will yield to empirical verification.

• Scientists may assert answers to transcendent questions, but in these areas they, as scientists, have no spe-cial advantage or expertise.

• More reasons exist for truths of faith and morals than believers often are aware. All the moral truths taught by the Church are rationally defensible in their own right, without appealing to the authority of God.

• Science and faith are complementary. Historically, key theological beliefs accessible through Christian rev-elation liberated the human mind to look at the natural world in new ways.