You still can’t get over the arguments I’ve given for there not being a conflict between science and religion. Maybe I can fill this out with a historical survey which may put things into perspective.

I would like to point out to you that in spite of China and India having advanced civilizations, science never took root there. And the reason for this is very simple. Their view of nature was that it did not conform itself to regular laws. Things happened haphazardly. It was with the Israelites that the orderliness of the cosmos was accepted and this was because the one who created the universe also created orderliness through Wisdom. Thus the basis for studying regularity and lawfulness of the world was there in the Judaic tradition and it gave a fertile soil for science to be born and to thrive and develop. This idea of orderliness within creation coming from God is so important that some rabbis would claim that Wisdom and the Torah existed before creation came into being.

Christianity has always been open to the possibilities offered by science. Thus, Grosseteste writing in the thirteenth century in his book De Luce suggests using light to learn more about matter and we in fact use this important concept in spectroscopy which opens up the door to study the vast expanses of the universe. Without spectroscopy our ability to study the cosmos would be zero. Just a simple illustration will show what I am talking about. Red light, for example has a certain wavelength. If the source of the light is moving away from us, then the red wavelength (in fact the wavelength of all colors) will become longer. This is the so-called Doppler effect and we have experienced this every time an ambulance with a siren passes us. We will note a drop in pitch which is really a lengthening in the wavelength. By looking at the light of stars, and they generate red light because they contain hydrogen gas (something which we determined again using spectroscopy), we see what is called the red line shift. The wavelength is longer than we would expect telling us that the universe is expanding.

Or consider the sister of Basil the Great, Macrina, on her death bed in the fourth century discussing the reality of the human mind by using the illustration of air in a jar submerged into water. You cannot see the air but it is there and she states that it takes human minds to perceive behind the veil of physical reality the underlying wisdom that governs the world. Already, here we have the rudiments of science. And if we think that people living in the past were totally credulous then a simple referral to the writings of Peter of Cromwell. writing in the thirteenth century, would show us that many people in the past were indeed skeptical about many things. Josephus, writing in the first century AD considers natural explanations about the Red Sea crossing in Exodus. Pi, the important mathematical ratio, is touched on in 1 Kings 7:23. People in the past were not as gullible or as ignorant as we sometimes imagine them to have been. The ancient Greeks knew that the world is spherical and even calculated its circumference to within several hundred kilometers to what it is. The flat earth belief is a nineteenth century American myth.

I just want to say a few words about equations and laws. Scientific laws are expressed mathematically in equations. But what is an equation? An equation is a statement about our reality which permits us to make calculations and predictions. Thus we can fire a rocket carrying a satellite and we can predict what force we need to exert on the rocket and what kind of orbit it will take on.

Every equation has two basic parts – usually two variables, things that change – and something that links these variables and it is called a constant. Thus, as an illustration we have Einstein’s famous equation: energy varies as mass or symbolically E varies as m. The energy and mass are variables but it is still not an equation It is the constant which allows the equation to arise and without the constant, there can be no statement of a scientific law through an equation: thus, E=mc2 . Another illustration would be if I push on a wagon, it will move with a certain speed. If I push harder, the wagon will move more rapidly. But in order to quantify this relationship between push and speed, we need to get a constant and develop an equation. I need to link mathematically my force of ‘push’ and speed through a constant and that is exactly what Newton did in one of his laws.

Nobody thought very much about this until 1974 when a physicist named Carter realized that there was something very peculiar about these constants, especially constants pertaining to laws describing the universe. He found that these constants could have values which were very, very sensitive to any change in the value of the constant. For example. one of these constants would not work if it was off by one part in 1050. These numbers are probably meaningless to you and so let me try to give you an idea what it means through an illustration. Suppose that you were to cover all of North America with dimes so that every piece of land and water were covered with ten cent pieces. And now you would pile dimes on all of these individual ten cent pieces until you reached the moon. Out of all of these coins, if one of these dimes were wrong (if it were an American dime, for example) the structure would collapse, it would be unstable.

There are many important constants which are crucial for describing the operations that take place in the universe or even in atoms. If the constants we are discussing were off by very tiny amounts, the universe could not and would not exist. And there are many more constants which are crucial for describing our universe and which are very sensitive to the values they make take on. This has come to be known as the Anthropic Principle and it seems to indicate that this whole cosmos is not a haphazard occurrence but something that exists within very, very narrow parameters. This has raised very serious questions for scientists trying to describe the universe through scientific laws. Why are these universal constants so precise and cannot tolerate much leeway in their values? One explanation is that they are so because there is a rational mind behind creation. Others do not like this explanation and have tried to explain this coincidence of sensitive constants (and keep in mind that this involves not only one constant but many in many equations) by other means and some of these attempts are really bizarre but this is not the place to consider them.

Much can be written about the fact that there is really no serious disagreement between science and faith. In fact there really can be none. You can pursue this topic in many available books but I would summarize what I have to say by the following. Discussion about God, or about the existence or non-existence of God are not part of science’s domain of study. As soon as someone says that science proves there is no God or even that there is a God, beware because this is a statement that cannot be made by science. Science is an important area and we will see in the future that there can be a very fruitful and necessary co-operation between science and theology.

To a large extent, the supposed conflict between science and religion is an invented disagreement. They really deal with two very different areas, both very important, but still different. There is an interesting statement made by a French writer Georges Braques. He discusses the relationship between art and science and addresses the argument that is often made that science deals with the real world and has much to contribute to our understanding of the world whereas art is just something that does not deal with the ‘important’ side of our world. Braques says that contrary to this misconception, art’s role in life is important because it is made to disturb. Science on the other hand reassures. There is only one thing valuable in art, the thing that you cannot explain. Science on the other hand, is our security blanket which gives us the illusion of explanation and this illusion is reinforced by the tremendous technological success of science. Let’s be frank. If one were to take away the technological aspects of science, its authority would dwindle very quickly.

Art and religion are important aspects of what it means to be human because they deal with the mystery that is our existence. The most satisfying and real answers to life’s serious questions come to us from art and religion. It is interesting what a disproportionate role poetry plays in holy scripture. And in a sense, this should not surprise us. Poetry is to faith as equations are to science. They are both compact distillations of the essences of reality.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas