Time Immortal

Something for my misguided atheistic readers to consider.

During the year just past, much attention was paid to a spate of atheist tracts, notably Sam Harris‘ Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens‘ God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion. Less attention was paid to a spate of books by scientists who happen also to be believers - biologist Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution and Christian Faith, astronomer Owen Gingerich’s , and geneticist Francis Collins‘ The Language of God.

Though the media buzz has tended to focus on the science-vs.-religion angle, it is worth noting that only four of the aforementioned books are by scientists and three of those argue against such a conflict. That said, it is also worth noting that none of the books is by a theologian, and Dawkins’ book suffers - as does Hitchens’ - not only from a relentlessly hectoring tone, but also from a tenuous understanding of both Philosophy and Theology. (In fairness, Dawkins seems to have read the Bible pretty thoroughly and is openly appreciative of the Authorized Version’s glorious language and literary significance.)

Christoph Schönborn’s Chance or Purpose offers a look from the theologian’s side. Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, studied theology under Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Together, they edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Schönborn’s new book may be said to have evolved out of an article of his that appeared in the New York Times in July 2005 headlined “Finding God in Nature,” in which the cardinal seemed to place Catholic doctrine uncomfortably in alignment with intelligent design theory.

In his book, however, he goes out of his way repeatedly to differentiate between evolution as the best scientific explanation we have of how species come about and evolution as an ideology maintaining that natural selection has rendered all religious faith untenable.

In doing so, he says a number of quite interesting things, among them this: “. . . nowadays, whenever people talk about ‘design’ and a ‘designer,’ they automatically think of a ‘divine engineer,’ a kind of omniscient technician. . . . Here, in my view, lies the most profound cause of many misunderstandings - even on the part of the ‘intelligent design’ school in the U.S.A. God is no clockmaker; he is not a constructor of machines, but a Creator of natures.”

Schönborn does not regard “the methodical exclusion of divine involvement” - sometimes called “methodological atheism” - as amounting necessarily to a denial of God’s existence. It is, rather, “a straightforward method of science [which] cannot assume the existence of a ‘clockmaker’ who intervenes. [It] is looking for mechanisms and sets of conditions that can explain the way things happen.”

What the theologian’s perspective contributes most to this debate is that the term God, as theologians understand it, simply cannot be an object of scientific inquiry: God “is not just one cause among others. . . . He does not shape something that already exists. . . . [His] act of creation is not in time. . . .”

I think a lot of atheists make the — pardon me — dumb-ass mistake of assuming that the Universe is, for lack of a better term, a superset, with all things — including any notion of God they are willing to acknowledge — being subsets thereof. Everything has to be either empirically quantifiable or, at least, logically falsifiable according to the normal rules of the Universe and the workings of the human brain for it to exist, or for any discussion of its existence to have “meaning”.

Such an argumentative and analytical framework is unable to contemplate that the Universe itself might not be the superset, so to speak, but rather a large subset of something even bigger. The notion of a God that is external to nature, above creation, is an alien one, and dismissed out of hand anyhow because in such a case one could not hope to demonstrate God empirically or demonstrate that the idea of God can be adequately falsified.

Of course, it is incorrect for them to think that way — one needs not even launch into a convoluted example to demonstrate that. It’s easy to see how if we dismiss from consideration everything that cannot be revealed directly through the natural environment, we would of course fail to notice things external to that, and in fact cannot comment at all on whether or not such things exist.

More importantly, though, whether or not one believes in God is immaterial to one’s ability to conduct good science, and to accept the validity of scientific theory. It’s entirely possible for me, as a Christian, to accept the theory of evolution and the various evidences presented in support of it (and, in fact, I do accept it). It’s entirely possible for me to likewise believe that God is the author of all Creation. Like an artist and his brush, the two beliefs are not incompatible, but are actually compatible and to be expected. God is the artist behind Creation; evolution is the brush with which He painted mankind into being.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)