In Search of Truth: Science and Religion

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Friday, May 5, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

The measure of god: Our century-long struggle to reconcile religion and science
Larry Witham
HarperSanFrancisco, 2005

“In a very deep sense, Science is not progressive. It is anchored in a few philosophical, nay metaphysical, propositions about the mind and the universe”

-Stanley Jacki

Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens, is standing before you. Plato and Aristotle are lost in conversation, and you’re afraid to intrude, so you remain a mere outsider, a commoner looking in to gain some understanding and meaning; Plato is pointing up and explaining his idyllic theory of the Forms to his astute, more practical student, Aristotle, who points downwards in an effort to replace his mentor’s Metaphysics with his own Physics.

The others are there too—Socrates, Heraclites, Parmenides, Zeno—but you can’t take your eyes off of those fingers that look like one string pulled tense in two opposite directions.

That is the elysian story of Western Civilization from its inception: a perpetual reconciliation of what is transcendent and divine with what is material and earthly, synthesizing both into one final Truth, with yes, a capital T. There are many ways to articulate this ongoing debate: Athens touching Jerusalem, Reason touching Faith, Real touching Ideal, Science touching Religion.

The late 19th century Scottish judge, Lord Adam Gifford, chose to focus on the last of these. In his will, Lord Gifford established and endowed a series of lectures that addressed the rational basis for belief in God; the lectures were to pertain to issues in Natural Theology, or commonly, the philosophy of God. These Gifford Lectures have, for over a century, brought the most prominent scholars in the fields of theology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, historical criticism, physics and biology to Scotland’s four most prominent universities (the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrew’s, and Aberdeen) in an effort to ease the accumulating tension between science and religion, materialism and God.

Since the end of the Victorian era, The Gifford Lectures have presented this enthralling story to the people that animate Western Civilization. Now, Larry Witham has delivered the drama to us in a four-act sequence. Witham, in his The Measure of God, presents a vivid and fascinating history of the Gifford Lectures. Witham describes the Giffords as a quest for truth: absolute truth exists, and religion, with its emphasis on absolute reality, helps humankind find it: science complicates matters.

According to the law of non-contradiction, a fact cannot be true in religion, while simultaneously untrue in science. As the history of the Gifford Lectures show, by denying the possibility of immaterial consciousness, by rejecting the conception of a mind distinct from matter and capable of creativity, and by removing the possibility for universal Truth, you in effect remove God from the twenty-five-hundred year old discussion.

The religious premise from which Witham works is Christianity. This may put a bitter taste in the mouth of a radical skeptic; but before that skeptic throws Witham’s work to the flames of sophistry and illusion, he must consider that in the same way that America is a nation founded and characterized, to this day, by Protestantism—from religious-ethic to work-ethic—the West has been essentially nurtured and, thus, defined by Christian metaphysics.

The first part of his book, Act One of the Gifford Lectures, is characterized by scientific materialism’s challenge to Christian metaphysics. Science, it seemed, would provide a complete physical explanation of the world, metaphysics seemed unnecessary at best, and incompetent at worst. Thus, Witham calls the first act in the Gifford drama, “the death of philosophy.” As one Gifford Lecturer remembers, at the dawn of the 20th century, “school boys decided not to have faith because Science, whatever that was, disproved Religion, whatever that was.”

The result was a philosophical reaction against scientific materialism, which was found in the German school of philosophical idealism championed by Immanuel Kant. Kant held that ultimate reality is not found in material objects; rather, it is found in the mind of Man. Kant held that men were inherently unable to know the essential nature of any object in-it-self, including God. The first principle of religious thought—God—therefore, must be taken on faith, while the second principle—ethics—can only be philosophically determined.

This method of thought moves us right into the second act of the Giffords where the material sciences aimed to replace traditional ideas with material ones. In a world still dominated by objectivism and rationalism, a qualitative predicate like “faith” was supercilious. Optimism over the boundlessness of science led man to look for and discover the truth in a very different way: by trying to quantify the qualitative. In this way, the second part of the Gifford legacy reviews the measure of God and religion.

Anthropology provided science with the ideal antithesis to faith and the other qualitative virtues; it used ancient artifacts and lore to explain the material origins of religion. Yet to say that religion has material origins is to imply that religious belief, like material objects, come to be, evolve and ultimately perish. This view denies the metaphysical truth of religion; equating religion with material science demeans the fundamental universality of Truth that the religious experience guarantees.

The pragmatists, led by William James and Charles Peirce, tried to save philosophy from the ideological abstractions of both Philosophical Idealism and Scientific Materialism. James’ project was to rescue man from the inherent nihilism of Anthropological materialism by asserting the existence of a stream of consciousness that defined man and his religious experience. Medical materialism could not explain the diversity of religious experience. In this way, James denied the mind had a purely material cause, and in fact demolished causality all-together, focusing instead on free-will and the consequences of a given choice.

Just when we thought that our own choices lead to causal consequences, quantum mechanics gave us Werner Heisenberg with his uncertainty principle. Though Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity were explanations of the extremities of the universe—subatomic particles and the space-time continuum on a cosmic level—they had a stunning impact on the commerce of ideas by refuting the conventional, causal wisdom of Sir Isaac Newton’s physics. Now, life was random, dubious, chaotic and due to chance. Apparently God does play dice, and the implications led to the third act in the Gifford Drama—to John Barth’s subjectivism, where proof of God is futile because “God is known by God, and by God alone.”

Putting a limit on human knowledge and reason was in part a relief and in part a great burden. By claiming that God transcended the limits of human epistemology, then the impetus of the theist to reconcile certain contradictions in God’s nature is removed. For instance, if God is all knowing, could he create a square circle? Could he move an

immovable object, if he is indeed all powerful? Do we have free-will if God is omniscient? The frustration of answering these questions fell to the wayside with subjectivism.

Yet with this epistemic divide between God and Man, men fell victim to Fear and Trembling, leading the way to existentialism—a philosophy for philosophers who were too busy writing dense books to look over their shoulder. Existentialism asks “who am I and what should I do in life?” Kierkegaard, a pious Christian, answers that man should deny himself the goods of this world and turn inward.

The narcissistic and godless Jean Paul Sartre, however, preached the easy way out: radically question, even more overthrow, universal principles and values because “existence preceded essence.” As Sartre’s nihilism slowly inched its way to the head of the class at college campuses, moral pluralism came quick on its heels. Here, the question was no longer what is True, but rather, is there Truth to begin with; does truth ontologically exist? Another words, I’m just going to quit playing and I’m taking the ball with me.

Today, we are in the fourth, and perhaps final, act of the Gifford Lectures. I say final because if the idea of Truth as such is not preserved, then the debate between theism and atheism ends. In fact, discourse on God and Science is an impossibility because the lecturer and the general public no longer assume the universality of truth. As Ralph McInerny, a Thomist scholar, says, once we establish Aristotle’s first principle—that men naturally disagree on first principles—then can natural theology become a possibility. A disagreement between the theist and atheist is possible, since one of them is right and the other is wrong.” Of course, to be right presupposes a conception of Truth, without which, debate—such as those made manifest in the Gifford Lectures—is impossible.

Skillfully, Witham gives a credibly impartial account of how the god question, faced with the challenge of science, has evolved over the past century. But the subtle reader can siphon through Witham’s historical accounts to surmise where the professor stands on the question: why there is something rather than nothing. The last chapter of his book offers the attentive reader a veiled proof for the existence of God—proof of God by aesthetic experience. Traditionally the argument goes something like this: The music of Johann Sebastian Bach exists. Therefore, God exists.

Another rendition is: The elegiac beauty with which Witham writes exists. Therefore, God exists.

In Search of Truth: Science and Religion

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