Science and Religionby
George Crispin
John Polkinghorne tells us, in his insightful book Beyond Science, that empirical science cannot give us ultimate answers. To be intellectually coherent and satisfying, answers require theistic belief. The current generally accepted physical theory tells us the universe is still expanding from the force of the Big Bang, as the force of gravity tries to pull it together. If gravity wins, the Big Bang will end with the Big Crunch. If expansion prevails, galaxies will continue to fly apart, as individually they collapse into Black Holes. The time period is tens of billions of years. Our sun has been steady for 5 billion years and can be expected to last another 5 billion. Then with its hydrogen gone, it will expand into a red giant, larger than our orbit, before collapsing into a white dwarf. So what is going to happen to us? He says "it is time to consider the possibility that it is to God alone that the ultimate care of life belongs." As a believing Christian, he accepts that we matter to God forever, that the soul is the information-bearing pattern of the body, which will be dissolved at death when the body decays, to be remembered by God and recreated by Him in his ultimate act of resurrection. Because God cares for the universe it too, will have its resurrection. In fact the two resurrections are one. "It is a wonderful, deeply mysterious and exciting vision of hope." Since empirical science is restricted to being a quantitative account of matter and motion, it excludes questions of value and meaning. This is sound investigative strategy and it does not imply that value and meaning do not exist; it does mean that reality as a whole is not being examined. But while value is absent in the scientific report, it exists in the scientific method. Successful theories are always characterized by their being expressible in terms of "beautiful" mathematical equations. Therefore, beauty exists in empirical science because it has taught us so much, because it has led us to the conviction that these equations describe a true aspect of reality, and because it provides the experience of wonder at the deeply satisfying framework of what we learn. Science can describe vibrations and neural responses but not the "mysterious reality of music." It cannot tell us what we get from a painting or other work of art. Beauty remains mysterious but is very real. The physical world that scientists discover may just exist, may just be there, but it is in the understanding of it by man that its meaning, value and beauty lie. Something real is seen, an insight into the way things are. The same holds for our ethical intuitions. No matter what the cultural background or what the relativists claim, love is better than hate, truth is better than falsehood, and torturing children is wrong. Religious persecution of any kind is wrong. These are insights into the way things are. Questioning the belief that God exacts infinite punishment for finite sins is a moral advance. Any account of reality must see the real world as one of universal laws of physics, beauty and ethics. Value and beauty are everywhere. Behind the scientific order is the mind of the Creator; behind the beauty we see the Creator's joy in creation; behind our intuitions of morality is the discernment of the good and perfect will of the Creator. Polkinghorne answers many questions with his closing statement, I believe that the grandest unified theory, to use the scientist’s slang, the GUT, is provided by belief in God. May 17, 2005 George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama. Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com |