We’ll continue our discussion of science because you seem to have such a deep interest in it. I’ve often said that students preparing to serve within the Church should have some exposure to science as this will broaden their horizons, and one cannot question that science plays an important part in the lives of many people.

The point that is often omitted is that the empirical sciences arose from the belief that this was an orderly cosmos overseen by God. Studying nature was seen as a way for man to deepen his knowledge about God’s work. The beauty and regularity of nature was seen as mirroring God’s trustworthiness. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the fall of man made many scientists wary of using man’s reason only to study nature and this gave an impetus for a greater concentration on using the empirical methods for studying nature. Experiments and not rational thinking, as was the legacy of Greece, were seen as the most reliable way to gain information about the world and its workings.

Experiments would result in the gathering of data but this data had to be placed within an overriding plan that would make ‘sense’ of the data. This theoretical model, or theory, served the purpose of fitting the observations into the ‘best fit’. This raises a very important point that needs to be corrected. Science does not prove anything because all of science is provisional in that as we progress, and new discoveries are made, old theories are modified or sometimes, even dropped. The word proof applies only to mathematical operations which are changeless and once proven stay in force forever. So when we say that science has proven something, we are not talking very precisely. And this also adds a word of caution for those who call on theology to tie its wagon to science. One will not gain any lasting or deep truth from science – knowledge in science is provisional and will most likely be replaced by some newer model. And as a scientific theory gets discredited so will the theological position that has tied itself to this theory. As an example, science is presently experiencing a major shift in its view of the world because quantum mechanics is so different from our perceptions and models in classical physics that our whole view of the universe and of reality is undergoing a revolutionary change.

The other point that I want to make is that scientific discoveries are not always made through a rigorous logical approach. Sometimes they come through what we may want to call, for want of a better term, intuition. A classic example of this comes from organic chemistry where towards the latter end of the nineteenth century there was a lot of discussion going on about the structure of a molecule called benzene, C6H6. The unusual feature of benzene is that it has a very high ratio of hydrogen atoms to carbon atoms and this made it difficult to describe the structure of benzene taking into account that carbon atoms must have four bonds associated with them. Interestingly as well, it was only linear structures that were being considered by scientists at that time and it didn’t even occur to them to consider cyclic structures. It was Kekulé (interestingly enough, an architect by training, who eventually won a Nobel prize in chemistry) who finally proposed a plausible structure for benzene which did involve a ringed structure. The unusual thing was his description, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his proposal, of how he came up with the structure. It came to him in a dream where a snake was latching onto its tail. Leaving aside Freud, this example shows how important discoveries are sometimes stumbled onto without a rigorous logical procedure.

Scientism is the view that the only real description we can have of reality is only through the methods of science. But to limit the description of reality to only the part that is in accord with rational thought is to severely curtail our view of reality. Reality is a much richer and more complex a substrate which requires much more than just a rational approach to it. Science and religion should work together in order to give a fuller and more comprehensive picture of the cosmos. They should be seen as giving us a ‘stereoscopic’ view of reality, one which offers greater depth.

Science describes the mechanism of how the world operates and it does this extremely well as we have seen in the successes that science has had in technology and in medicine, for example. There are those within the science community who would raise the following question: what can religion contribute to our understanding of reality? Allow me to list just a few.

The first thing that I can say is that science cannot give a basis as to why it is successful or works. Why is it that mathematics is so helpful and necessary in trying to understand the world? Faith offers an answer to this. Reality is intelligible and coherent because reality is created by a personal being who endows His intelligibility onto creation making it amenable to exploration by science and mathematics.

Faith gives something very necessary for mankind, something which science cannot offer and that is, meaning to the universe and to our lives. There is a purpose to our existence and we declare this through stories and through poetry but their foundation lies in the faith in God. Neither physics nor chemistry nor biology can give us meaning and in fact, meaning has been banished even from consideration by scientists.

Faith calls on us to be moral, to value others and to be self-sacrificial in struggling against our self-centredness and egotism. It was the atheistic societies – in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany – which claimed that only science can guide mankind, and this resulted in the vast numbers of murders and deaths and horrors in the twentieth century. Science stands mute before this carnage and cannot offer a comment because this question lies outside the realm of scientific exploration.

Out of the meaning that faith grants, arises hope in that our lives are not insignificant but do bear a goal towards which we are heading. This enables us to cope with difficulties in life, not using faith as an ephemeral crutch, but as the affirmation of the eventual goodness of the world and of life and of all creation.

Our faith calls on us to repent but this does not mean only that we stand before God and say that we are sorry, although this is indeed a good beginning for repentance. The Greek term for repentance is metanoia which literally means missing the mark. It calls for a transformation in us which is not primarily or exclusively a sense of regret but a renunciation of a narrow and limiting secular view of our lives, a view that is not large enough to encompass God’s mystery in our individual lives and in the life of the cosmos. To a large extent, this is a conversion experience through which we come to see the world in a very different and more meaningful light. As an illustration, Christianity tenaciously held onto the view that the world had a beginning and this was in the face of the fact that the best scientists and philosophers claimed that the world was eternal. Faith gave a more encompassing picture which we now realize is correct.

Faith offers us what I may call ‘the big picture’ which includes everything that there is. What is important to realize in this picture is that science forms an important and integral part of it. You see, faith can and should include science. As an illustration, one could consider childhood leukemia which in the past was like a death sentence with a mortality rate of over 95%. It was through science, and through human perseverance, that we discovered compounds in the plant, the Madagascar Periwinkle, that enabled us to cure 95% of those stricken with this disease. Prayer is important and necessary in times of need but we also need to co-operate with God who may answer our prayers through discoveries waiting to be made. Someone asked why God allows illnesses, and was answered by the observation that He also planted the cures for these illnesses and it is up to us to discover them.

But I’d like to get back to this idea of the ‘big picture’ and there is a rather interesting illustration of this in present day science. Scientists have been struggling to reconcile two important theories of science – the theory of gravitation and quantum theory. We do not need to get into the mathematics in this matter, because it is really very complicated, but there is a theory called the M-theory (superstrings) which has been put forward as a possible way to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. This M-theory is being very seriously considered by scientists because they see in it a way of getting the big picture whereby quantum and gravity can mathematically be combined. The beauty of this possibility is so strong, that M-theory has many adherents to it although there is not a single experimental piece of evidence to support it. You see, the allure of the possibility of this harmonious picture is so strong that it even overrides the importance of empirical evidence.

With this, I will end.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas