As any of you who valiantly wade into my stuff will undoubtedly know, I’m pretty fascinated with the intersection of faith and science or, maybe put a little differently … culture that recognizes the supernatural and culture that doesn’t.
I think this goes a long way to helping bridge the gap between people of different beliefs and I’m a big fan of dialogue, especially when that dialogue challenges us to do two things: First, go more deeply into how and why we believe something and, second, to grow into better understandings of how and why others think differently.
Anyway, that’s me and I’m sort of going to continue with a thread from a recent series that I find helpful to explore as a believing Christian and, also, as a way of rationally communicating with others who hold alternative viewpoints.
Because, I think, some fascinating stuff is happening if we’re willing to pay a little attention. In fact, I believe it’s on a scale that can be called truly revolutionary in many respects. And, I don’t say that lightly.
I’ll begin with this very interesting phenomenon that is occurring right now in a place where science, philosophy and theology intersect. As I’m doing a great deal of reading, listening, and thinking about this, I can’t help but put on my cap as an historian to examine what’s really going on.
(Admittedly, I geek out when I see broad historical patterns emerge as if they are colorful waves on a 3D tapestry, linking complex features of the human condition and all that goes into that. And, we always need to contextualize our perceptions of things. The way we confront our circumstances and the realities of our existence are conditioned by all sorts of forces, many of which can be illuminated by a careful examination of various histories.)
This series will dive more deeply into the fundamental nature of our reality, specifically by further unpacking the notions of whether that reality is the product of chance or design. It is this quest that is producing some remarkable new findings.
I’m going to begin by painting with a really broad brushstroke here (almost to the point that it’s way over-simplified) and say that we can break history into three different historical epochs with implications for our topic. And those epochs are the pre-modern, modern and post-modern periods encompassing the last several thousand years. I’ll say again that this is way over-simplified, so please don’t quote me to any experts. 🙂
Anyway, I’ll suggest that the pre-modern epoch (at least in the west but I suppose it can be argued for the non-western world as well) could generally be characterized, for our purposes, by the dominant assumption that there was meaning and purpose to both the physical realms and our own individual realms as having come from a supernatural (outside of nature) entity. And, that such an entity was behind the creation of all things.
This dominant viewpoint in what we’ve come to call the West (which was founded upon Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian worldviews), began to give way to the reasoning of groups of scientists and philosophers principally in the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in the 20th century. In this time period (which we can begin referring to as the modern), we witnessed the flowering of systems such as industrialization, democracy, the rise of powerful nation-states and a shift to philosophical humanism that posits that mankind itself reigns supreme in all things and that we contain in ourselves the perfection of our condition. (If I haven’t yet been clear, this is a really big generalization but, while generalizations have trouble standing on their own without specificity, they can be useful for starting points.)
If one wants a picture of modernity, think of very organized systems such as assembly lines (including schools where students are placed in neat rows and columns in order to ingest the stuff whereby they will pop out the end fully formed). From such thinking came the great political and economic systems such as democratic-republics, capitalism and socialism, communism and fascism. The history of the 20thcentury is not a particularly appealing one, taken from a number of vantage points.
In the realm of science, biologist CharlesDarwin’s fundamental theory claimed that the origin of life and the development of species came from random chance, accompanied by spontaneous variations or mutations whereby certain traits were naturally selected to dominate. His theory quickly took center stage and has remained there, fairly successfully fighting off all others for the past one and a half centuries.
In this view, life began by chance (maybe a lightning bolt hit a non-living chemical soup of sorts and out popped the first cell). After that, nature guided a non-externally-guided process and we are who we are because of it. So, a non-rational force (nature) guided (an accepted function of reasoning) process.
(This way of thinking tangentially led to a thing called Social Darwinism which was not at all unlike Nietzsche’s view of a super race and which led to the push for eugenics… which advocates for selective human breeding and even the killing off of undesirable humans who possess the weaker traits. What this really meant is that humans could jump right in and help accelerate the process in order to more quickly reach our evolutionary potential. Of course, Nazism, with its accordant philosophies, experiments and abhorrent practices, is also a byproduct of this overarching worldview.)
In physics, there was a strong belief that the universe was infinite and had been around forever. There was no beginning and certainly no pre-beginning. A prevailing view of most theoretical physicists through the mid 20thcentury was that the universe was in a kind of steady state. (A theory that the great Albert Einstein even adopted but later admitted was a mistake). One way to characterize a tenet of this viewpoint is that time stretched out from and to eternity.
It is here that the wall between those who believed in God as the fundamental explanation for reality and those who believed in science as the fundamental explanation for reality was pretty rock solid. Quite high and thick.
The broad and very public scientific community that dominated the universities and science-oriented institutes and journals sent a clear message over the wall to the theists that the latter were adhering to what the scientists and associated philosophers described as god in the gaps.
This viewpoint held that, as science advanced, mysterious forces attributed to the powers of a supernatural being became consistently exposed as fully natural events now demonstrated through scientific experimentation and analysis. God, they explained, was like the tooth fairy, good for explaining something to an immature mind but, in the end, just wishful thinking or a kind of fairy tale. This following statement is characteristic.
“Because you are stuck in your archaic ways of thinking and don’t listen to science, you call something “supernatural” for stuff that can easily be explained by resorting to reason and science. You always fall back on the Bible (a grand mythology) for explanation when we’ve already figured stuff out. There is no creation moment or event. There is no overriding purpose other than that which is contained in the nature of particles and energy, as well as the forces which organize them (gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, etc..), chemistry and biology.”
And so, God began to rapidly fall out of favor. Churches closed all throughout Europe as millions abandoned what they were now convinced had no place in reality. God was dead or at least dying. Long live science and reason.
America is in that battle right now.
Here’s Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of a small group of very popular scientists who inundate public media in the U.S.
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
Or as the most famous popular astronomer of the past half century, Carl Sagan, forcefully said,
“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring.”
“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was or ever will be.”
However, the tectonic plates are beginning to shift again and it’s actually fascinating to observe!
Stay tuned.
bradlichtman 