“The Heavens declare the glory of God, And the firmament His
handiwork”
(Psalm 19:1)
Hubble Space telescope
image of M101, a galaxy quite similar to our own Milky Way
I’ve been asked more than once why was I
writing this blog, or at the least, why was it organized in this fashion. Why
not two separate blogs – one for the stars, and the other for “everything
else”? I have a simple answer for that. It is the same answer that Saint Thomas
Aquinas gave to Siger of Brabant – there are not two truths, but one. There is
not “scientific truth” over here, and “spiritual truth” over there, but only
Truth. To fail to realize this leads to some pretty strange and logically
incoherent ideas. One of the worst, which I have encountered with wearisome
repetition over the years, is the notion of an alleged conflict between science
and religion. The weakness and insubstantiality of this concept is most easily
shown by the fact that those who most loudly trumpet its supposed existence
fixate on the statements and arguments of the most ignorant proponents of one
“side” or the other, while discounting as irrelevant outliers anything put
forward by the most learned and/or erudite persons. In this manner, the voice
of the Faithful is reduced to a caricature of Young Earth Creationists and
climate change deniers, whilst the representatives of the scientific community
are narrowly (and quite unfairly) defined by the brash and philosophically
illiterate New Atheists.
Yet the reality of the situation could
scarcely be more different than this all-too-popular misconception. For far
from being at odds with each other, science and religion are more like the
right and left wheels on a cart. Lose either side, and you’ll run straight into
a ditch. Religion without science is superstition. Science without religion can
all-too-easily lead to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Gulag. We desperately need
both, if we are to survive this
still-new century.
A corollary to the above faux conflict is
the idea of a “God of the Gaps”, which imagines a fantasy history of Early Man
in which primitive societies, beset with otherwise inexplicable natural
phenomena, explain them away by crediting (or blaming) a deity for everything
they cannot otherwise understand. But the inexorable advance of scientific
knowledge, according to this account, has bit by bit through the centuries
chipped away at what we don’t understand, thereby leaving God a narrower and
narrower space in which to operate. “Give us time,” goes this line of thought,
“and we’ll eventually have no need for God whatsoever.”
Again, the truth of the matter seems far
otherwise. What meager literary evidence we do have from earliest times, such
as the Theogony by Hesiod, the
Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, or
the Vedas of ancient India, suggests a quite different pattern. By all these
accounts, a recognition of the existence and immanence of God appears to have
come first. It was only afterwards that the workings of natural phenomena were
then ascribed to divine activity.
The very beginnings of science were
solidly and inextricably grounded in religious faith. It was necessary for the
realization that the universe was an orderly and comprehensible place (a notion
that grew directly out of theology and philosophy) to take firm root before
scientific inquiry was even possible. The world’s first professional scientists
were Babylonian astrologers who recognized clearly the reliability and
predictability of the Heavens through careful and systematic observation.
Throughout most of human history the deepening and expansion of empirical
knowledge of the physical world, far from being considered a threat to faith,
was thought to be its strong ally. Witness Saint Paul in his letter to the
Romans: “What can be known about God is plain, for ever since the creation of
the world his invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made.” What an awesome mandate! We are not only called to learn all
that can be known about the universe, but we are to place that knowledge at the
service of Truth.
No, in reality there is no “God of the
Gaps”, but rather a “God of the Filled-in Spaces”. The more we learn about the
universe, the more we see the astonishing detail and complexity of its
structure, the more we discover its remarkable adherence to regularity and law,
the more we appreciate its sheer scale… the more opportunity there is
to appreciate the Mind behind it all. The Heavens do indeed declare the Glory.
“I the Lord have not spoken from hiding, nor from a land of
darkness. And I have not said to the descendants of Jacob, “Seek me in an empty
waste or in chaos.” (Isaiah 45:19)
