The Culture Beat

My previous post about DNA and the Mormons reminded me of something I wrote a while back about the relationship between faith, reason and science. It’s a bit long but, with a view minor edits, I still think that it’s still worthwhile. (Oh, the vanity!)

Gods and Peanuts

Thirty-eight years ago, Arno Panzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Labs were trying to figure out the source of background noise that interfered with radio communications. What they discovered was nothing less than the origin of the universe. The interference was caused by a background signal that was uniform throughout the sky. That signal was radiation left over from the Big Bang. Since then, “most astrophysicists have accepted the notion that the universe began [in] . . . an unimaginably powerful event in which all the matter and energy in the cosmos expanded outward from a tiny speck within a fraction of a second.” The passing resemblance to the idea of creation ex nihilo, combined with the assumption that this event was unique, has prompted some folks to see the Big Bang Theory as a quasi-vindication of Christian ideas about creation.

As Lee Corso of ESPN’s “College Football Gameday” likes to say, “not so fast, my friend.” In 2002, Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton and Neil Turok of Cambridge published their own take on the Big Bang and the origins of the universe. While they agree with all but one second’s worth of the current understanding of the Big Bang, that one second makes all the difference. Using “string theory,” which posits a “multidimensional substructure of space and matter,” they postulate that ours is only the latest in series rationes of “bangs and expansions.” Matter and the visible universe are the product of the interplay between a membrane containing this visible universe and one containing a “dark matter” universe. (Approximately 90 percent of the matter in the universe, as determined by the rotation speed of the galaxies, is unaccounted for. This unaccounted-for matter is called “dark matter.”) Eventually the old universes expand themselves out of existence and a new expansion cycle begins.

This cyclical account of the origin of the universe bears more than a passing resemblance to what is depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat in Cambodia: two teams, the forces of light and darkness, playing tug-of-war with a serpent. The churning created by this interplay of forces is the source of life. In other words, if Steinhardt and Turok’s theory gains acceptance, you can expect a representative of the Nahasapeemapetilon Institute for The Defence of Hindu Worldview & Cricket Proliferation (Motto: Visualize Wicket Maidens) named Apu to cite their theories as a quasi-vindication of Hindu worldview, especially in fundraising letters.

This apparent reversal of fortune in the competition between worldviews is a reminder of how provisional scientific knowledge often is. Hypotheses that were regarded as good as proven, e.g., “classic” Big Bang, are often overturned, or least cast into doubt, within a few decades. For instance, the long-accepted explanation for hominid bi-pedalism ― in other words, why humans walk on two legs ― is known as the “out of the savannah” hypothesis. Changes in East Africa’s climate millions of years ago turned forests into grasslands. These environmental changes, to grossly oversimplify the matter, are what led our ancestors to walk upright. Then along came Orrorin Tugenensis, a six million-year-old hominid found in Kenya in December 2000. Not only did this hominid walk on two legs, he also lived at a time when East Africa was still forested.

In less than eighteen months, the “out of the savannah” theory went from most-favored-explanation status to being ― how shall I put it? ― a theory in crisis. Now, a credible rival theory states that proposes living in trees as the most likely explanation for bi-pedalism . (Observe the differences in the way that chimpanzees and orangutans walk on two legs and you’ll get the drift of that theory.) What’s even more interesting is the physical evidence that has prompted this potential, if you’ll forgive my language, paradigm shift: a collection of bones that could comfortably fit inside your cupped hands, or at least Shaq’s. The best evidence for bi-pedalism is the hip bone, but no such bone has ever been found for Orrorin. Bipedalism has been inferred from CAT scans of Orrorin’s femur. In other words, it doesn’t take much to rewrite conventional scientific wisdom.

That’s why citing any scientific fact more provisional than “water expands at four degrees Celsius” as evidence for the Christian faith is a dicey proposition. One day cosmology “proves” a Christian worldview, soon afterwards, it makes putting a shrine to an elephant god ― please don’t offer him a peanut! ― at the Kwik-E-Mart a reasonable act.

So what do we do? Retreating into the kind of obscurantism that imagines the deck of Noah’s Ark as resembling the set of “One Million Years B.C.,” minus Racquel Welch in the animal-skin bikini, isn’t the answer, just in case you were wondering. Nor should we regard the provisional quality of scientific knowledge I alluded to above as an excuse to disregard or dismiss this knowledge. We need to respect science, i.e., engaging science with an open mind, while recognizing the inherent limits of any appeal to science.

If you were to open tomorrow’s New York Times and find an op-ed, written by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, entitled “We Give Up. There is a Supreme Intelligence Behind it All!” where would that leave us? At about 600 B.C., when Parmenides wrote that “the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality” or “being.” This more closely resembles, superficially at least, the Buddhist idea of the Atman than it does the Christian idea of the God who is both pantokrator, creator of all things, and the loving abba.

The journey to that idea will last another 1,000 years ― until the fourth and fifth centuries when the synthesis of Hebrew and Greek thought was most profoundly expressed in the creeds of the Church ― and is paved by revelation. The kind of revelation that, now as then, offends contemporary sensibilities because of its impolitic and scandalous particularity. We know that “in the beginning. God created the Heavens and the earth” because, in raising Jesus from the dead, he fulfilled all that he had promised a particular people, and showed us that what he had spoken “to our forefathers in many and varied ways through the prophets,” including about the Who and why of creation, was true. We, or at least some of us, believe that the risen Lord gave us his Holy Church, which he guides and vouchsafes in the task of separating truth from falsehood, reality from idle speculation and error.

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how often you can hear the words “Christian worldview” and not hear the words “faith” or “revelation” in same day, never mind the same talk. I’m not advocating a distrust of reason, much less a flight from it. As St. Thomas wrote, there is no conflict between faith and reason. As his memorable formulation puts it, reason is the ancilla, the handmaiden, of faith. While the truth of the Christian faith “exceeds the capacity of human reason,” these truths don’t eliminate what reason teaches us; they perfect it. But as Thomas would tell us, reason can only tell us that there is a God. It’s grace and revelation that prompts us to worship him in the manner that Christians do. And we do well to remember that reason isn’t synonymous with the state of scientific knowledge at any given moment. On the contrary, much of what of what is often called “scientific fact” resembles what Thomas would’ve called “probable” or “sophistic” arguments (probabiles vel sophisticae).

Which brings me back to Steinhardt and Turok. Their announcement was the stuff of really neat NOVA episodes on PBS, but I wouldn’t make room for Ganesha on my mantle just yet. That’s because Christian faith is made from something more powerful and more mysterious than the dark matter at the heart of this latest explanation for what is seen and unseen: the indestructible life of the One through whom everything was made.