A Thinking Reed

What does it mean to say that science and religion can’t contradict one another?

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Lee M.

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To say that religion and science can’t come into conflict should not, in my view, be taken to mean that there are “two truths” or that science deals with the world of “facts” while religion deals with “values” or “meaning.” Both purport to give us information about the world; that is, both make truth claims. The difference, I think, is that science limits its scope to the investigation of natural phenomena using a certain method and set of assumptions which, by definition exclude God and the supernatural.

Science investigates reality insofar as it is measurable, quantifiable, and subject to prediction (and ultimately control). Necessarily, then, it excludes from its purview anything not measurable, quantifiable, and subject to prediction. And surely that includes things like God, the soul, angels, demons, and any other supernatural entities that may or may not exist. Science, qua science, simply tells us nothing about whether these things exist, unless they have effects in the phenomenal world that are subject to its methods of investigation.

The problem arises, it seems to me, when this methodological limitation is taken to outline the limits of reality itself. Then you get scientism, which says that only that which science investigates is really real and that science, at least ideally, gives us an exhaustive account of reality. The method has become an epistemology and a metaphysics. On its own terms, though, science seems to be compatible with a variety of metaphysical outlooks. One can be a theist, a materialist, or a Berkeleyean idealist and still accept all the established findings of science. As Huston Smith, I think, once said, taking science to be an exhaustive account of reality is like mistaking an increasingly detailed map of Illinois for a map of the entire United States.

Which is not to say that there might not be interesting “border disputes” where it isn’t clear what the best method of investigation is. It has, for instance, long been supposed that there is something transcendent about the human mind, that it isn’t entirely enmeshed in the nexus of cause and effect that science studies. However, science has made some fairly impressive inroads into the study of the mind, though hardly to the same degree as in its study of the physical world. I doubt there is anyone who would argue that we are even close to offering an exhaustive scientific account of the mind. Notably, John Paul II, while accepting evolution in broad outline, still thought that direct divine intervention was necessary to account for the existence of the human soul. And atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has recently argued that rationality itself cannot be accounted for in purely naturalistic terms (in a way that harks back to C.S. Lewis’ “argument from reason.”). It seems the jury is still out on that one.

But God, at least as Christianity and other monotheistic faiths conceive of God, belongs to a different order of being altogether. He is not a phenomena among other phenomena that can be investigated with the methods of science. Or, to put it in the language of ontology, he is not a being among beings, but being-itself. The web of phenomena that science studies owes its existence to him. This suggests that, if we’re to know God at all, it will be by a very different means than the methods of science.

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5 responses to “What does it mean to say that science and religion can’t contradict one another?”

  1. Eric Lee

    He is not a phenomena among other phenomena that can be investigated with the methods of science. Or, to put it in the language of ontology, he is not a being among beings, but being-itself.

    You’re starting to sound like my pastor! I think what you’re describing is what they call “univocity of being.” I’m about to start reading Conor Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism which goes back to John Duns Scotus, Avicenna, Plotinus, and some other guys and traces those lines of thought to present day.

    So then we don’t know God through our “experience” and what can be measured and felt but instead through the Incarnation.

    This is sorta related: what did you think of that Hart article on John Paul II’s theology of the body? I just got around to reading it last night.

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  2. Kevin

    I’m not a big believer in Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping MAgisteria (NOMA). Carl Sagan put it rather bluntly when he said that the moment religion makes claims about physical reality, those claims fall under the purview of scientific scrutiny.

    The problem for believers is that, at some point, they WILL want to make claims that tie their faith to the physical realm– miraculous survival of a car crash, unexplained sighting or event, a certain belief about the balance of forces or the idea that good intentions always produce good results, etc.

    A claim like “prayer heals,” then, will be put into the crucible of methodological doubt and probably found wanting. I’m aware of studies at Duke that seemed to hint that the “prayer heals” claim has substance, but I’ve also heard of subsequent studies that undercut the claim. Personally, I find the claim as superstitious as “there are demons.”

    If science can plausibly suggest that physical reality (including the human mind) operates according to laws producing predictable behaviors in substances and organisms, it becomes much harder to go back to explaining events through the language of angels, demons, and nature-defying miracles.

    I agree that the scientist is guilty of scientism if he reduces reality to observable, quantifiable materiality. But given the immense and increasing amount of reality that falls under the umbrella of science, I also think the religious adherent needs to be aware of just how much intellectual (and maybe even spiritual) territory science occupies.

    If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend a book by a former prof of mine, John F. Haught (a process theologian), called Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation. If you do get the chance to read it (or if you’ve read it already), I’d be interested to have your opinion of the work. I ask a little forgiveness in advance: the book is a text designed for undergrads, but it’s still a very good, fair treatment of the major issues in the ongoing science/religion discussion.

    Kevin

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  3. Lee

    Thanks, Kevin – I’ll check it out.

    Regarding miracles and such, I think that by their very nature they slip through the cracks of the scientific method since they aren’t repeatable, “mechanical” kinds of events. It’s not as though if we could recreate the conditions of the wedding at Cana and the water didn’t become wine we would’ve “disproved” the miracle! If God intervenes in the phenomenal world (a claim that I take it you might contest), then he does it according to his own principles and purposes. Which is not to say that all reports of miracles should be taken as true, but if there are miracles, they are the kind of non-repeatable, uncontrollable events that fall outside of science’s purview. They aren’t outworkings of the laws of nature, but something “injected” into nature from “without.”

    Which is why I think those studies attempting to show that prayer does or doesn’t heal miss the point. Prayer isn’t like magic where if you recite the correct formula you get an automatic result. We can’t make God do something just be bringing about a specified set of circumstances.

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  4. Lee

    Oh, and Eric, I don’t know what I thought of the Hart article, exactly. On the one hand I’m with him in being resolutely opposed to the instrumental use of human life. But I do wish he had spent less time taking on the freaky transhumanist fringe and more time applying the principles of the “theology of the body” to those fuzzier areas where it’s less clear what the right thing to do is. Maybe it would help if I was more familiar with JPII’s writings on the matter.

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  5. Eric Lee

    Lee, I think I’m with you on the Hart article. I was mainly in agreement with it, but he was so condescending to those fringe transhumanist figures that I found myself in an odd mixture of laughter and disgust at the same time. I think he could have dealt more charitably with the figures while still taking their views to task.

    On a sidenote, an acquaintance/friend of mine has met Hart and he tells me that he speaks like he writes!

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