Science and Religion_A Very Short Introduction

by Thomas Dixon

  The theologians’ dilemma

  Pity the poor theologians! They are faced with a seemingly impossible dilemma when it comes to making sense of divine action in the world. If they affirm that God does act through miraculous interventions in nature, then they must explain why God acts on these occasions but not on numerous others; why miracles are so poorly attested; and how they are supposed to be compatible with our scientific understanding of the universe. On the other hand, if they deny that God acts through special miraculous interventions, then they are left with a faith which seems to be little more than Deism – the belief that God created the universe but is no longer active within it. If God is real, should we not expect to be able to discern at least some special divine acts? The theologian seems to have to choose between a capricious, wonder-working, tinkering God and an absent, uninterested, undetectable one. Neither sounds like a suitable object for love and worship.

  The job of the theologian is to try to articulate how God can act in and through nature while avoiding the two unattractive caricatures indicated above. Various distinctions have been employed to try to achieve this. One of these differentiates between the basic primary cause of all reality, which is God, and the secondary, natural causes employed to achieve divine purposes. Another distinguishes between God’s ‘general providence’ – the way that nature and history have been set up to unfold according to the divine will – and rare acts of ‘special providence’, or miracles, in which God’s power is more directly manifest. If those acts of special providence are restricted to a very small number – perhaps only those attested in scripture – or those associated with the lives of a very small number of important prophetic individuals – then God’s interventions in the world might seem less capricious. Among both Christians and Muslims there are those who believe that the age in which God revealed himself in miracles and revelations has now passed.

  As an example of the theologians’ dilemma, consider the case of Lourdes. Millions of pilgrims flock to this town in the foothills of the Pyrenees each year – to the place where Bernadette, an illiterate and asthmatic peasant girl, saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Thousands claim to have been miraculously cured of physical ailments after drinking or bathing in the water of the spring uncovered by Bernadette. The Church is well aware of the potential natural explanations for such cures. Diagnoses can be mistaken. Diseases can go into remission unexpectedly. Psychosomatic cures are not uncommon. For these reasons there is an elaborate series of investigations that must be carried out before an alleged cure is declared miraculous. A panel of doctors appointed by the Lourdes International Medical Committee is required to study and confirm the reliability both of the original diagnosis and of the evidence that the cure at Lourdes was sudden, complete, and lasting. Those very few cases of cure for which the doctors are absolutely convinced that there is no possible natural or medical explanation are then put forward to the Church authorities, who have the power to declare the cure a miraculous ‘sign of God’. Since 1858, the Church has declared only 67 miracles at Lourdes, out of the thousands of claimed cures. The most recent case added to the list was that of Anna Santaniello, who recovered suddenly from symptoms including severe asthma and acute arthritis during a visit to Lourdes in 1952. The Church had considered her case for 50 years before declaring it a miraculous cure.

  6. A 19th-century image showing pilgrims to Lourdes praying at the place where Bernadette had her vision of the Virgin Mary. The grotto houses a statue of Mary; the crutches of those who have been cured hang in front of it.

  The implementation of this cautious and highly selective process by which only a small proportion of claimed cures at Lourdes are declared miraculous is indicative of the need for the Church to retain credibility while also maintaining their traditional belief in special providence. Hasty claims of numerous spectacular miracles might give the impression of undue credulity or of an unacceptably meddlesome God. On the other hand, the hope that the supernatural can somehow break into the everyday lives of the faithful is a cornerstone of the Catholic faith, and the claim that it has done so lends support both to the doctrinal claims and to the worldly authority of the Catholic Church. The growth of Lourdes as a pilgrimage site in the 19th century was itself partly an expression of popular support for the Catholic Church in France at a time when it was confronted by many secularist and rationalist detractors.

  ‘As if God lived in the gaps?’

  Protestant theologians have traditionally been somewhat more suspicious than Catholics about miracles (other than those recorded in the Bible). At the time of the Reformation, Protestants used the Catholic cult of the saints, especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and belief in the miraculous powers of holy relics, to portray the Church of Rome as superstitious and idolatrous. In more recent times, evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Protestant worship have involved wonders and miracles such as healings and speaking in tongues. However, there has been a continuous tradition of Protestant thought asserting that the age of miracles has passed and that divine activity is to be perceived in nature and history as a whole rather than in special interventions.

  Two Protestant theologians illustrate this reinterpretation of the miraculous. The German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher went so far as to redefine ‘miracle’ as ‘merely the religious name for event’, rather than as a happening which violated the laws of nature. In other words, a miracle was in the eye of the believer. In a series of lectures delivered in Boston in 1893, almost a century later, the Scottish evangelical theologian Henry Drummond, engaging the question of the proper Christian attitude to the theory of evolution, told his audience that a miracle was ‘not something quick’. Rather, the whole, slow process of evolution was miraculous. Through that process God had produced not only the mountains and valleys, the sky and the sea, the flowers and the stars, but also ‘that which of all other things in the universe commends itself, with increasing sureness as time goes on, to the reason and to the heart of Humanity – Love. Love is the final result of Evolution.’ Drummond’s point was that it was this product – love – rather than the particular process, natural or supernatural, which was the real miracle.

  It was in this same lecture that Drummond introduced the idea of the ‘God of the gaps’. He spoke of those ‘reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps – gaps which they will fill up with God. As if God lived in the gaps?’ God, he said, should be sought in human knowledge, not in human ignorance. He pointed out that if God is only to be found in special and occasional acts, then he must be supposed to be absent from the world the majority of the time. He asked whether the nobler conception was of a God present in everything or one present in occasional miracles. Drummond concluded that ‘the idea of an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology’.

  The Medical Committee at Lourdes which finds signs of God only in those cases where a natural and scientific explanation is lacking, and proponents of ‘Intelligent Design’ who base their arguments for a designer on alleged inadequacies in evolutionary science, all seem guilty of advocating a God who resides only in gaps in current knowledge. As Drummond asked his audience, ‘Where shall we be when these gaps are filled up?’ On the other hand, what are we to make of Drummond’s immanent God, and of the God of those contemporary theologians who see divine activity in the emergent complexity of the natural world? If God is in all natural processes equally, and even in all human actions and historical events equally too, then how can it be claimed that God is good, rather than bad or indifferent, or that God takes any special interest in human lives?

  The whole history of modern science could be read as a parable designed to reinforce Drummond’s warning against placing God in the gaps in current knowledge of the natural world. Isaac Newton, to take one very famous example, when confronted with questions such as why the planets in our solar system re
mained in their orbits rather than gradually slowing down and being drawn towards the sun, or why the distant stars were not all drawn towards each other by gravity, was prepared to hypothesize that God must intervene from time to time in order to keep the stars and planets in their proper positions. Newton’s German rival and critic G. W. Leibniz attacked this hypothesis on theological grounds. Newton’s God, Leibniz wrote in a letter of 1715, lacking sufficient foresight to make a properly functioning universe at the first attempt, apparently needed ‘to wind up his watch from time to time’ and ‘to clean it now and then’ and ‘even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; who must consequently be so much the more unskilful a workman, as he is oftener obliged to mend his work and to set it right’. Leibniz preferred to see God’s involvement in the universe as one of perfect and complete foresight. As the theoretical and mathematical models of the solar system became even more accurate during the 18th and 19th centuries, there were increasing numbers who went even further. When asked by Napoleon about the place of God in his system, the French physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace allegedly replied that he ‘had no need for that hypothesis’.

  The histories of geology, natural history, and biology reveal a similar pattern of special divine actions (floods, volcanoes, and earthquakes; separate creations of the different species; intelligent design of each individual adaptation of creatures to their environments) gradually being pushed out of the scientific picture to be replaced by more gradual, uniform, and law-like natural processes. As we shall see in the next chapter, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published the year after Bernadette had her vision at Lourdes, made references to God, but only as the author of the laws of nature – those ‘secondary causes’ which seemed to be able to achieve the most wondrous results when impressed on matter, without any need for further interventions by the Creator.

  The laws of nature

  It was never the intention of the pioneers of modern science – men such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, or René Descartes – to undermine religious belief. Far from it. They envisaged nature as an orderly system of mechanical interactions governed by mathematical laws. And they hoped that people would see in this new vision the strongest possible evidence of divine power and intelligence. In 1630 Descartes wrote to the Catholic theologian Marin Mersenne: ‘God sets up mathematical laws in nature as a king sets up laws in his kingdom.’ Most early modern scientists also took it for granted that God, who was responsible for determining the regular way in which nature would normally operate, was also quite capable of suspending or altering that normal course of nature whenever he so chose. Nonetheless, the method they adopted was one that has favoured a view of God as designer and lawgiver rather than as interventionist wonder-worker. The collaborative enterprise inaugurated by these scientific pioneers has proceeded on the assumption that natural phenomena are indeed governed by strict laws, which can be given precise mathematical expression. A further assumption made by many is that these laws will ultimately be reduced to a single unified theory. Does the success of science in explaining nature in terms of such laws amount to proof that God cannot act in nature?

  Not necessarily. There are different ways of thinking about laws of nature. They need not be seen as entities or forces that somehow constrain all of reality. Instead, they can be interpreted in a more modest way as the best empirical generalizations we have so far arrived at to describe the behaviour of particular systems in particular contexts (often highly restricted experimental conditions that can be created only in laboratories). Nor are we obliged to believe that the laws of, say, physics are more ‘fundamental’ than the knowledge acquired through biology, sociology, or everyday experience. Although quantum theory provides exceedingly accurate empirical predictions when dealing with atomic and subatomic entities, it is not applicable to larger and more complex systems such as volcanoes, veils, or virgins, the behaviour of which can be more successfully explained by geology, materials science, and psychology, respectively. Furthermore, two of the most successful physical theories – general relativity and quantum mechanics – are both supposed to apply universally and yet are not compatible with each other. As the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has put it, what modern science seems to show is not that we live in a world governed by a single systematic set of natural laws that apply at all times and in all places, but rather that we live in a ‘dappled world’ in which pockets of order emerge, or can be made to emerge, using a patchwork of different scientific theories (from physics, to biology, to economics), none of which is applicable across all domains.

  Another assumption behind the claim, made by some polemical atheists, that modern science has shown that miracles are impossible is the belief that the natural world is deterministic – in other words, that if we had perfect knowledge of the current state of the material world and of the laws that governed it, then in effect we would also have perfect knowledge of the future of the world (and that future would be as fixed and unalterable as the past). Again, these are not things that can be proved by experience or by science (not least because there is no prospect of our ever reaching the position of omniscience required in order to test the hypothesis). Belief in determinism rests on a range of related assumptions about such basic concepts as matter, causation, and laws of nature. It is, however, as professional philosophers have repeatedly and frequently proved, in the nature of such basic concepts that they rapidly start to crumble when subjected to attempts at clear and uncontroversial definition.

  Quantum mechanics

  In addition to the considerable philosophical perplexities involved in articulating, let alone defending, any kind of determinism, an important scientific challenge to the doctrine arose in the early 20th century in the form of quantum mechanics. Quantum theory resulted from physicists’ attempts to understand the world of the very small – the behaviour of atomic and subatomic particles. Max Planck and Albert Einstein showed that light, then understood as an electromagnetic wave, also behaved as if it were made up of discrete particles, which came to be known as ‘photons’. The implications of the theories later developed in the 1920s by quantum pioneers such as Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg were wide-ranging, and their interpretation is still the subject of controversy. Einstein himself was unhappy with the probabilistic and indeterministic interpretations of quantum theory that came to predominate, saying that ‘God does not play dice with the universe’. Some philosophers and physicists still share Einstein’s unease. Having an instinctive preference for deterministic explanations, they hope to find a different interpretation of the laws of quantum physics.

  The main reason, then, that quantum theory is controversial is that it seems to overturn many of the basic assumptions of classical Newtonian mechanics. It suggests that physics can no longer be reduced to a series of deterministic interactions between solid particles of matter. According to quantum theory, entities such as photons and electrons are simultaneously both particles and waves. Whether they seem to behave like one or the other depends on how the experimental apparatus interacts with them. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle further dictates that the momentum or the position of a quantum entity can be known, but never both. Finally, the observer has a key role in quantum theory, not just as a passive recipient of data, but as an active contributor to it. Quantum systems are governed by probabilistic ‘wave functions’ which do not take on a determinate value until they are observed. The act of observation is said to lead to the ‘collapse of the wave function’ and to resolve the system into one determinate state or position rather than another. Prior to observation, the system is held to be a ‘cloud’ consisting of all the possible observable states, each with a different probability assigned to it.

  Even this brief and inexpert summary of some of the findings of quantum physics is hopefully enough to give a sense of how far we have come from the world of classical materialistic determinism. Quantum mechanics suggests that at the most basic level material reality is n
ot deterministic (nor does it even seem to be ‘material’). We are in a world of clouds, of wave functions, of probabilities – not the reassuringly picturable clockwork universe of the Enlightenment. Quantum theory also undermines the idea that the physical world exists objectively and independently of human observers, since it is the act of observation, or measurement, that collapses the wave function. The solid physical world of our everyday experience and of Newtonian physics in some sense comes into existence only by being measured.

  Quantum physics is an absolutely central part of modern science, and the fact that the picture of physical reality that it offers is so strange and indeterministic has unsurprisingly proved of great interest to philosophical and religious thinkers. The prospect of a new and more holistic philosophy of nature in which the observer is integrally involved and in which determinism is denied is one that appeals to proponents of many different world views, from traditional religions to more modern ‘New Age’ ideologies. Attempts by theologians to make use of quantum physics as a more permanent source of ‘gaps’ in which God might be able to act have had a mixed reception. Such attempts do not help to answer the sceptic’s question of why God would act on some occasions rather than others; nor do they satisfy those religious believers who hold that, as the author rather than the slave of the laws of nature, God can override or suspend them at will without needing to tinker with the states of quantum systems.

  The first cause

  But perhaps the fundamental laws of the physical universe themselves – rather than isolated suspensions, violations, or manipulations of those laws – provide the strongest evidence of divine purpose. This is to return to the simple idea suggested by many philosophers, theologians, and scientists through the ages that, although we might generally explain natural phenomena in terms of other secondary natural causes, we must, to avoid an endless regress, at some point posit a first cause, a ‘prime mover’, and that what we know of the world suggests that this prime mover is that same God whom many have encountered through sacred texts and religious experiences.