We often hear of a conflict between religion
and science. Is there one? Certainly, some religious beliefs are scientifically
untenable: for example, that the world is six thousand years old. However, for
Jews and Christians not committed to a narrowly literalistic interpretation of
Scripture, that kind of direct and clear–cut contradiction between scientific
facts and religious doctrines does not exist.

What many take to be a conflict between
religion and science is really something else. It is a conflict between
religion and materialism. Materialism regards itself as scientific, and indeed
is often called “scientific materialism,” even by its opponents, but it has no
legitimate claim to be part of science. It is, rather, a school of philosophy,
one defined by the belief that nothing exists except matter, or, as Democritus
put it, “atoms and the void.”

However, there is more to materialism than this
cold ontological negation. For many, scientific materialism is not a bloodless
philosophy but a passionately held ideology. Indeed, it is the ideology of a
great part of the scientific world. Its adherents see science as having a
mission that goes beyond the mere investigation of nature or the discovery of
physical laws. That mission is to free mankind from superstition in all its
forms, and especially in the form of religious belief.

There are two grounds for the materialist’s
indictment of religion as superstition. First, religion is supernaturalist. It
teaches that there is a spiritual realm, and supposedly embraces mythological
explanations and magical practices. Second, religion is (in the materialist’s
eyes) irrationalist, because it is based on dogma, faith, and mystery. Science,
being based on the natural and the rational, is therefore held to be
fundamentally opposed to religion.

In other words, the scientific materialist
maintains that there is a conflict
between science and religion, and that it is intrinsic and a priori, in the
sense that it would exist even if science had not yet made any definite
discoveries about the world. This supposed opposition flows from what science
and religion are in themselves, from their basic views of reality. However, the
materialist claims more than this. He also says that many of the particular
discoveries of science have demolished the credibility of religion. He claims,
in other words, that there is also an a posteriori conflict between science and
religion. This claim is based on a tendentious reading of scientific history,
what I shall call the materialist’s “Story of Science.” According to this
story, the great discoveries since the time of Copernicus and Galileo have
disclosed a world that looks ever less like the picture religion painted of it,
and have forced religious believers to fight a centuries–long rearguard action
against the truth. Science has been the great debunker.

The claims of scientific materialism are hardly
new. Indeed, they have not changed substantially in over a hundred years. And
yet much else has changed in that time. We know much more than we did about the
origins of science; we know vastly more about nature. It is a good time,
therefore, to take a fresh look at the materialist ideology of science and its
story of science to see how well they have held up in the light of new
knowledge.

We begin with the issue of supernaturalism in
religion and its supposedly superstitious character. I think we would all agree
that most forms of belief in the supernatural are superstitious. However, we
must remind ourselves of a vital historical fact, which is that many of these
forms of supernaturalism were attacked, and at least partially overthrown, by
biblical religion long before the advent of modern science. The Book of Genesis
was itself in large part intended, scholars tell us, as a polemic against pagan
superstition. For example, whereas the sun and moon were the objects of worship
in pagan religion, the Book of Genesis taught that they were nothing but lamps
set in the heavens to give light to day and night: not gods, but mere things,
creatures of the one true God. Nor were animals and the forces of nature to be
bowed down to by man as in pagan religion; rather man, as a rational being made
in the image of God, was to exercise dominion over them.

It is true that the Bible is overwhelmingly
supernatural in its outlook and literary atmosphere. However, what is
critically important is that the Bible’s supernaturalism is concentrated in a
God who is outside of Nature, and radically distinguished from the world He has
made. Therefore the world of nature is no longer seen as populated by
capricious supernatural beings, by fates and furies, dryads and naiads, gods of
war or goddesses of sex and fertility. The natural world has been
“disenchanted.” But whereas many give credit to science for this, the
distinction belongs in the first instance to the monotheism of the Bible, which
by depersonalizing and desacralizing the natural world helped clear the ground
for the eventual emergence of modern science.

The Bible taught, then, that whatever reverence
it is proper to have for the sun, or the forces of nature, or living things is
due not to any divinity or spirituality that they possess, but to the fact that
they are the masterworks of God. The universe thus came to be seen as a great
work of engineering. We observe this in the Book of Proverbs, where the divine
Wisdom is portrayed as a master craftsman directing the work of creation. And
according to the rabbis of old the divine craftsman worked from a plan that was
none other than the Torah itself. As they put it, “the Holy One, blessed be He,
consulted the Torah when He created the world.” The Torah, then, was not merely
a Law written in a perishable book, or part of a covenant with the people of
Israel. It was an eternal Law in the mind of God which He imposed on the cosmos
itself. The Lord says through the prophet Jeremiah: “When I have no covenant
with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I
reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David.” Psalm 148 tells of
the sun, the moon, the stars, and the heavens obeying a divinely given “law,
that will not pass away.” This emphasis on the lawfulness of the cosmos is
found also in the earliest Christian writings. Minucius Felix in the second
century wrote:

If upon entering some home you
saw that everything there was well–tended, neat, and decorative, you would
believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much
superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see
providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a
Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and
the various parts of the whole world.

Note that these ancient texts do not point to
supernatural phenomena or to the miraculous as evidence of God’s existence.
Neither did St. Paul in the first chapter of Romans, where he discusses the
grounds of belief in God. Nor did St. Thomas Aquinas in his famous five–fold
proof. Belief in God is not founded upon supernatural manifestations but on the
natural order, on the orderliness of things. The role of the miraculous in
Judaism and Christianity is quite limited; it is to show God’s favor to His
people and testify to the authenticity of the oracles of divine revelation, not
to ground belief in the Creator.

There is something else that can be observed in
these ancient texts, I think, that has some relevance to the long–debated
question of Darwin and design. Many seem to have gotten the impression that the
old Argument from Design for the existence of God is primarily an argument from
biology. Richard Dawkins says, for instance, that it was the discovery by
Darwin that biological structure could arise without design that “made it possible
to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” However, most of the ancient Jewish
and Christian texts seem to emphasize the structure of the cosmos as a whole
more than the structure of living things. Jeremiah speaks of the covenant with
day and night, and the laws given to heaven and earth; the Psalmist of the law
obeyed by the sun, moon, stars, and heavens; and Minucius Felix of the
providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth.

It was in the heavens that the orderliness of
nature was most evident to ancient man. It was this celestial order, perhaps,
that first inspired in him feelings of religious awe. And it was the study of
this order that gave birth to modern science in the seventeenth century. It is
not altogether accidental, then, that it was an argument over the motions of
the heavenly bodies that occasioned the fateful collision between science and
religious authority that will forever be evoked by the name of Galileo. The
case of Galileo raises another important historical point about supernaturalism
and biblical religion.

Perhaps I can best introduce it with a personal
story. I was asked a few years ago to give the response at a conference of
scholars to a talk on the teaching of evolution in high schools. In my
presentation I quoted the following piece of antireligious propaganda from a
currently used high school biology textbook: “Every so often scientists stir up
controversy when they explain part of the world that was considered beyond
natural explanation—that is, belonging to the ‘supernatural.’” I disputed the
idea that such controversies arise “every so often,” as the textbook asserted.
I said that except for the battle over evolution I could think of no
significant controversy that fit this description. At that point, as I had
expected might happen, several members of the audience shouted out “Galileo!”
But they had no reason to, for (as I went on to observe) the Galileo affair was
most certainly not a debate about the supernatural. The geocentric theory that
the Church in effect endorsed was no more supernatural than the heliocentric
theory that it condemned. This was a clash between two perfectly naturalistic
theories of astronomy. It was the veracity of Scripture that the Church
authorities (mistakenly) saw themselves as upholding, not supernatural
explanations of planetary motion over natural ones. (It is true that the
inspiration of Scripture is supernatural, and that Galileo’s opponents thus
thought they had supernatural warrant for believing what they did. But one may believe
a natural fact on supernatural authority. I may believe that figs grow on trees
or that Pontius Pilate was procurator in Judea because the Bible says so,
without thinking that those facts are in any way supernatural in themselves.)

It was the same in physics: what Galileo and
Newton overthrew were the erroneous, but perfectly naturalistic, theories of
Aristotle. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century had to overcome
the naturalism of Aristotle, not the supernaturalism of Christianity. Christianity
had already embraced naturalism in science five hundred years earlier, when
Western Christians first encountered Greek science (or as it was called,
natural philosophy) through translations from Greek and Arabic texts. Under the
aegis of the Church, natural philosophy became a staple of medieval university
education and was even a prerequisite for the study of theology. So comfortable
were Christians with a naturalistic conception of the cosmos that it was a
cliché already in the twelfth century for theologians and other writers to
refer to the cosmos as a “machine.”

Now, while biblical religion has something to
say about the existence of a natural order (which is simply a corollary of its
teaching on God and creation), it has for the most part not regarded itself as
having much to say about the detailed workings of that natural order. The
materialist’s notion that religion is about providing mythological explanations
of nature in the absence of real scientific understanding—the “God of the gaps”
idea—is, as applied to biblical religion at any rate, itself a piece of
mythology. It is instructive to look, for instance, at the Roman Catechism, or
Catechism of the Council of Trent, published in 1566, exactly fifty years
before Galileo’s first run–in with the Roman authorities. It contains not a
word about botany, zoology, geology, or astronomy. Those were simply not
considered part of Christian doctrine. That was the general attitude of the
Catholic Church both before and after the Galileo affair, which can now be
recognized as an adventitious and unique event in the history of the Church’s
relationship with science. It was a bump—admittedly, a very bad bump—in what
has otherwise been a smooth road.

It is notable, in this regard, that the
Catholic Church never condemned, or even criticized or warned against, the
theory of evolution. Its first statement on that subject did not come until
1950, when Pius XII isolated two points concerning evolution as being of
doctrinal significance. Both concerned only human evolution. First, he said,
the original unity of the human race has to be upheld. And second, whereas the
human body might have evolved, the human spiritual soul, not being reducible to
matter, cannot be held to have evolved. It was specially created by God in the
first human beings as in all subsequent human beings. Here, in this one case,
we do see the Church upholding a form of supernaturalism. It is the one great
exception to the depersonalizing of nature by Judaism and Christianity. Man
himself must not be depersonalized or reduced to the merely natural in the
sense of the merely physical. I shall return to this all–important point.

I would like to interject here a comment about
what I regard as backsliding from the fundamental Jewish and Christian
perspective on nature by some recent theologies. On the one hand, we have some
process theologians blurring the distinction between God and the universe, and
treating the Godhead itself as part of the cosmic evolutionary process. On the
other hand, we have some critics of Darwinism not merely arguing the inadequacy
of that theory, but attacking the very idea of naturalism in biology, even when
it comes to plants and animals, as inherently unbiblical or irreligious.
Although these schools of thought are in some ways opposite, they are equally
guilty, it seems to me, of smuggling supernaturalism back where it does not
belong, and where neither science nor theology has ever needed it. Some anti–Darwinists
need to be reminded that there is a natural order that comes from God, and the
process theologians need to understand that God is the author of it, not a part
of it.

We turn now to the second reason that the
materialist indicts religion as superstitious, namely, its supposed
irrationalism. The materialist sees faith and dogma as simply a matter of
believing without reason. Religious mystery he imagines to be something dark
and off–limits, something we are not meant to understand, and indeed beyond all
understanding. All of this adds up, in his eyes, to an obscurantism that sets
itself against intellectual freedom and the search for truth.

In responding to these misconceptions, I would
like to begin with the notion of intellectual freedom. The great physicist
Richard Feynman once observed that the freedom of the scientist is quite
different from that of the artist or writer. The artist is free to imagine
anything he pleases. The imagination of the scientist, however, is chained to
experimental facts. The theories he dreams up must conform to what is already
known from observation, and must be abandoned, no matter how rationally
coherent, beautiful, or compelling they seem, if they are contradicted by new
experimental facts. To put it in religious language, the scientist is
answerable to a very stern and peremptory magisterium, the magisterium of
Nature herself.

There is a clear analogy between the
limitations on the scientist and those on the theologian. The scientist must
submit his mind to the data of experiment, the theologian must submit his to
the data of revelation. The word “data” means “the things that are given.” Both
the religious person and the scientist accept givens. The givens may perplex.
They may seem difficult to bring into harmony with each other or with what is
known on other grounds. They may throw all our theories into confusion. But
accepting the data must come before progress in understanding. That is why the
words of St. Augustine apply, in a way, to the scientist as much as to the
theologian: credo ut intelligam, “I
believe in order that I may understand.”

So we see in science something akin to
religious faith. The scientist has confidence in the intelligibility of the
world. He has questions about nature. And he expects—no, more than expects, he
is absolutely convinced—that these questions have intelligible answers. The
fact that he must seek those answers proves that they are not in sight. The
fact that he continues to seek them in spite of all difficulties testifies to
his unconquerable conviction that those answers, although not presently in
sight, do in fact exist. Truly, the scientist too walks by faith and not by
sight.

The scientist is convinced that there are
certain acts of insight, which he has not yet achieved, and which indeed no
human being may ever achieve, that would satisfy a rational mind on the
questions he has raised about nature. Faith in God is an extension of this
attitude. The believer in God is convinced that reality is intelligible, not
merely on this or that point, but through and through. There is some all–embracing
act of insight that would satisfy all questioning and leave no further
questions to be asked. Such an infinite and perfect act of insight is the state
of being of God, indeed for the Christian and Jew it is God. In the
words of the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan, God is the “unrestricted act of
understanding” that grasps all of reality, all of being.

The materialist imagines that a religious
mystery is something too dark to be seen. But, as G. K. Chesterton noted, it is
really something too bright to be seen, like the sun. As Scripture tells us,
God “dwells in unapproachable light.” The mystery is not impenetrable to
intellect or unintelligible in itself;
rather, it is not fully intelligible to
us. And reason itself tells us that there must be such mysteries. For the
nature of God is infinite, and therefore not proportionate to our finite minds.
The mysteries of the faith primarily concern the nature of God, or they concern
man in his relationship to God and as the image of God. They concern, that is,
what is infinite or touches upon the infinite. Consequently, religious mystery
hardly concerns, if it concerns at all, the matters studied by the physicist,
chemist, or botanist. The things they study are quite finite in their natures
and therefore quite proportionate to the human intellect. That is why there is
nothing in Jewish or Christian belief that implies or suggests any limit to
what human beings can understand about the structure of the physical world.
Although the writings of scientific materialists are filled with hostility
toward religious mystery, in fact religious mystery has never acted as a brake
upon scientific progress.

This brings us back to the question of
supernaturalism and its proper place. Supernaturalism is out of place in
physics, astronomy, chemistry, or botany. However, it is necessary in anything
that touches upon the nature of man, for man is made in the image of God. I
have noted that biblical religion opposed the supernaturalism of the ancient
pagan. In doing so, it clearly served the cause of reason. In our time,
biblical religion serves the cause of reason just as much by opposing the
absolute naturalism of the modern materialist. Where the ancient pagan went
wrong is in seeing the supernatural everywhere in the world around him. Where
the modern materialist goes wrong is in failing to see that which goes beyond
physical nature in himself. By extending naturalism even to his own mind and
soul, the materialist ends up sliding into his own morass of irrationalism and
superstition. How so?

In the first place, a purely materialistic
conception of man cannot account for the human power of reason itself. If we
are just “a pack of neurons,” in the words of Sir Francis Crick, if our mental
life is nothing but electrical impulses in our nervous system, then one cannot
explain the realm of abstract concepts, including those of theoretical science.
Nor can one explain the human mind’s openness to truth, which is the foundation
of all science. As Chesterton observed, the materialist cannot explain “why
anything should go right, even observation and deduction. Why good logic should
not be as misleading as bad logic, if they are both movements in the brain of a
bewildered ape.” Scientific materialism exalts human reason, but cannot account
for human reason.

Nor can materialism account for many other
aspects of the human mind, such as consciousness, free will, and the very
existence of a unitary self. In a purely material world such things cannot
exist. Matter cannot be free. Matter cannot have a self. The materialist is
thus driven to deny empirical facts—not the facts in front of his eyes, but, as
it were, the facts behind his eyes: facts about his own mental life. He calls
them illusions, or redefines them to be what they are not. In lowering himself
to the level of the animal or the machine, the materialist ultimately denies
his own status as a rational being, by reducing all his mental operations to
instinct and programming.

Thus, like the pagan of old, the materialist
ends up subjecting man to the subhuman. The pagan supernaturalist did so by
raising the merely material to the level of spirit or the divine. The
materialist does so by lowering what is truly spiritual or in the divine image
to the level of matter. The results are much the same. The pagan said that his
actions were controlled by the orbits of the planets and stars, the materialist
says they are controlled by the orbits of the electrons in his brain. The pagan
bowed down to animals or the likenesses of animals in worship, the materialist
avers that he himself is no more than an animal. The pagan spoke of fate, the
materialist speaks of physical determinism.

Pope John Paul II has said that divine
revelation reveals not only God to man but man to himself. It reveals to man
that he is made in the image of God and therefore endowed with the spiritual
powers of rational intellect and free will. Thus the supernaturalism of
religion with regard to man is not an attack upon human reason, but ultimately
the only basis upon which human reason can be adequately defended.

Up to this point I have been discussing the
materialist’s claim that religion and science are intrinsically opposed because
religion is incompatible with scientific naturalism and rationality. I now turn
to the materialist’s other claim, that the actual discoveries of science since
Copernicus have rendered the religious conception of the world incredible.

This is what I call the materialist’s Story of
Science. It pervades the atmosphere of the scientific world and of popular
writing on science. Let me now briefly outline that story. It has five major
themes.

The first theme is the overturning of the
religious cosmology—the Copernican theme. We now know that we do not live at
the center of a cozy little cosmos, but in what Bertrand Russell called a
“backwater” of a vast universe. The earth is a tiny planet, orbiting an
insignificant star, near the edge of an ordinary galaxy that contains a hundred
billion other stars, in a universe with more than a hundred billion other galaxies.

The second theme is the triumph of mechanism
over teleology. The biblical religions did have the concept of a natural order,
but they saw that order as embodying purpose. The arrangement of the world and
the processes of nature they saw as being directed toward beneficent ends. That
is why Christianity had little difficulty in accepting the naturalistic science
of Aristotle, which was based on final causes. However, the Scientific
Revolution occurred when it was realized that final causes could be dispensed
with altogether in physics and that phenomena could be adequately explained in
a completely mechanistic way in terms of preceding physical events. Even in
biology, apparent purpose is now thought to arise from the undirected mechanism
of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations. The materialist argues
that the disappearance of purpose from nature undercuts the idea that nature is
designed.

These first two themes blend together to give
the third theme of the story, what the late Stephen Jay Gould called the
“dethronement of man.” With the earth but an infinitesimal speck of flotsam in
the limitless ocean of space, and the human race but a chemical accident, we
can no longer believe ourselves to be the uniquely important beings for whom
the universe was created.

The fourth theme, which goes back to Newton, is
the discovery of physical determinism. The laws of nature were discovered to
form a closed and complete system of cause and effect. Every event could be
understood as arising inevitably from the past state of the universe in a way
that is precisely determined by the mathematical laws of physics. As Laplace
said in the eighteenth century, if the state of the world were completely known
at one time, its whole future development could in principle be calculated down
to the minutest detail. If this is true, it spells the death of the Jewish and
Christian doctrine of free will. For even if we had wills that were free, they
could have no effect upon the world of matter, including our bodily organs.
They could not affect, in particular, what we say or do.

This leads to the fifth and final theme of the
materialist’s story, the emergence of a completely mechanistic view of man
himself. Already in the seventeenth century the possibility was widely
discussed that animals could be understood as machines or automata. The more
radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, like La Mettrie and Baron d’Holbach,
extended this view to man. Now, with the processes of life understood in terms
of chemistry, and the brain understood to be a complex biochemical computer,
the triumph of this mechanistic view of man seems virtually complete.

The story that I have just outlined should
not be lightly dismissed. There are many people, not all of them hostile to
religion, who find this interpretation of scientific history not only plausible
but compelling. And it must be admitted that, in part, this is because much in
scientific history up through the nineteenth century lent itself to this
interpretation, or seemed to. And the startling developments in physics in the
twentieth century only reinforced this view of things. People saw dramatic
discoveries, like Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory, as
demonstrating once again that all traditional or familiar or intuitively
obvious notions are naive and fated to be cast aside. Science as debunker, it
seemed, was continuing on its relentless course.

However, this view of twentieth–century science
is misleading. It is true that science debunked many ideas in the twentieth
century, but what it chiefly debunked, I will now argue, was the materialist’s
old Story of Science. This was not fully appreciated, because people saw what
they expected to see. They extrapolated from the past story line. But the
discoveries of the twentieth century threw some twists into the plot. Those
twists have, in my view, invalidated, or at least called into serious question,
every lesson that the materialist wished us to draw from scientific history.

What are those twentieth–century plot twists?
There are, it so happens, five of them, which correspond rather closely to the
five themes of the materialist’s story of science.

We recall that the first theme of that story
was the Copernican one, the overthrow of the religious cosmology, and in
particular of the supposedly religious idea that man is at the center of the
universe. I say supposedly religious idea, because in historical fact the
notion that the universe has a center entered Western thought not from the
Bible, which knows no such idea, but from Ptolemy and Aristotle. However, there
was a question about the structure of the cosmos that historically really did
divide Jews and Christians from materialists and pagans. That question was not
about space and whether it has a center, it was about time and whether it had a
beginning.

The idea that the universe and time itself had
a beginning really did enter Western thought from the Bible, and indeed from
the opening words of the Bible. Virtually all the pagan philosophers of
antiquity, including Aristotle, and, according to most scholars, Plato, held
that time had no beginning. Modern materialists and atheists, for obvious
reasons, have generally followed the ancient pagan view.

For a very long time, all the indications from
science seemed to tell against the idea of a beginning. In Newtonian physics it
was natural to assume that both time and space were boundless and infinite in
extent. The simplest assumption was that time coordinates, like space
coordinates, extended from minus infinity to plus infinity. The discovery of
the law of conservation of energy gave further support to the idea of the
eternity of the world, for it said that energy could be neither created nor
destroyed. And chemists discovered that the quantity of matter, as measured by
its mass, is also unchanged in physical processes. Thus almost every scientific
indication at the beginning of the twentieth century was that space, time,
matter, and energy had always existed and always would. One more nail in the
coffin of religion, it would seem. But then came the first plot twist.

The first intimation that time could have had a
beginning came from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity—that is, his theory
of gravity. In the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and the
Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître (who was also a Catholic priest)
independently proposed mathematical models of the universe, based on Einstein’s
theory, in which the universe is expanding from some initial explosion, which
Lemaître called the “primeval atom,” and which is now called the “Big Bang.”
Observational evidence for this cosmic expansion was announced a few years
later, in 1929, by the American astronomers Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason.

The initial reaction of some scientists to the
idea of a beginning was extremely negative. The eminent German physicist Walter
Nernst declared, “To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the
very foundations of science.” As late as 1959, thirty years after the discovery
of the expansion of the universe, a survey of leading American astronomers and
physicists showed that most still believed that the universe had no beginning.
Not all, but certainly some, of the resistance to the idea of a beginning can
be attributed to materialist prejudice.

None of this is to say that the Big Bang proves
the biblical doctrine of creation, or even that it proves conclusively that
time had a beginning. It is possible that something existed before the Big
Bang, even though in the simplest and currently standard model of cosmology
nothing did. Nevertheless, it remains true that on the one question of
cosmology where Jewish and Christian doctrine really did have something to say
that conflicted with the expectations of materialists and atheists—the question
of a beginning—the evidence as it now stands seems strongly to favor the
religious conception.

The second theme of the materialist’s story
was the triumph of mechanism over teleology. Instead of seeing purpose in
nature, and thus a Person behind the purpose, science came to see only the
operation of impersonal laws. There was no need for a cosmic designer, for it
was the laws of physics that shaped and sculpted the world in which we live.
When Laplace was asked by Napoleon why God was never mentioned in his great
treatise on celestial mechanics, Laplace famously answered, “I had no need of
that hypothesis.” This revealed a shift in perspective. Whereas once the laws
of nature had been seen as pointing to a lawgiver, they were now seen by some
as constituting in themselves, and by themselves, a sufficient explanation of
reality. This brings us to the second plot twist in the story of science. In
the twentieth century another shift in perspective took place. One might call
it the aesthetic turn. This requires some explanation.

Physics begins with phenomena that can be
observed with the senses, perhaps aided by simple instruments, like telescopes.
It finds regularities in those phenomena and seeks mathematical rules that
accurately describe them. Physicists call such rules empirical formulas or
phenomenological laws. At a later stage, these rules are found to follow from
some deeper and more general laws, which usually require more abstract and
abstruse mathematics to express them. Underlying these, in turn, are found yet
more fundamental laws. As this deepening has occurred, two things have
happened. First, there has been an increasing unification of physics. Whereas,
in the early days of science, nature seemed to be a potpourri of many kinds of
phenomena with little apparent relation, such as heat, sound, magnetism, and
gravity, it later became clear that there were deep connections. This trend
toward unification greatly accelerated throughout the twentieth century, until
we now have begun to discern that the laws of physics make up a single
harmonious mathematical system.

Second, physicists began to look not only at
the surface physical effects, but increasingly at the form of the deep laws
that underlie them. They began to notice that those laws exhibit a great richness
and profundity of mathematical structure, and that they are, indeed, remarkably
beautiful and elegant from the mathematical point of view. As time went on, the
search for new theories became guided not only by detailed fitting of
experimental data, but by aesthetic criteria. A classic example of this was the
discovery of the Dirac Equation in 1928. Paul Dirac was looking for an equation
to describe electrons that was consistent with both relativity and quantum
theory. He hit upon a piece of mathematics that struck him as “pretty.” “[It]
was a pretty mathematical result,” he said. “I was quite excited over it. It
seemed that it must be of some importance.” This led him to the discovery that
has been justly described as among the highest achievements of twentieth–century
science.

The same quest for mathematical beauty
dominates the search for fundamental theories today. One of the leading
theoretical particle physicists in the world today, Edward Witten, trying to
explain to a skeptical science reporter why he believed in superstring theory
in spite of the dearth of experimental evidence for it, said, “I don’t think
I’ve succeeded in conveying to you its wonder, incredible consistency,
remarkable elegance, and beauty.”

All of this has changed the context in which we
think about design in nature. When the questions physicists asked were simply
about particular sensible phenomena, like stars, rainbows, or crystals, it may
have seemed out of place to talk about them, however beautiful they were, as
being fashioned by the hand of God. They could be accounted for satisfactorily
by the laws of physics. But now, when it is the laws of physics themselves that
are the object of curiosity and aesthetic appreciation, and when it has been
found that they form a single magnificent edifice of great subtlety, harmony,
and beauty, the question of a cosmic designer seems no longer irrelevant, but
inescapable.

In 1931, Hermann Weyl, one of the great
mathematicians and physicists of the twentieth century, gave a lecture at Yale
University in which he said the following:

Many people think that modern
science is far removed from God. I find, on the contrary, that it is much more
difficult today for the knowing person to approach God from history, from the
spiritual side of the world, and from morals; for there we encounter the
suffering and evil in the world, which it is difficult to bring into harmony
with an all–merciful and almighty God. In this domain we have evidently not yet
succeeded in raising the veil with which our human nature covers the essence of
things. But in our knowledge of physical nature we have penetrated so far that
we can obtain a vision of the flawless harmony which is in conformity with
sublime reason.

The third theme of the materialist’s story
was the “dethronement of man.” A classic statement of this view was given by
Steven Weinberg in his book The First
Three Minutes. He wrote:

It is almost irresistible for
humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that
human life is not just a farcical outcome of a chain of accidents, . . . but
that we were somehow built in from the beginning. . . . It is very hard for us
to realize that [the entire earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly
hostile universe. . . . The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it
also seems pointless.

Certainly, given the immensity of the universe
and the impact of Darwinian ideas, it is easy to understand why this sentiment
is widespread. However, in the last few decades there has been a development
that suggests a very different estimate of man’s place in the universe. This
plot twist was not a single discovery, but the noticing of many facts about the
laws of nature that all seem to point in the same direction. These facts are
sometimes called “anthropic coincidences.”

The term “anthropic coincidence” refers to some
feature of the laws of physics that seems to be just what is needed for life to
be able to evolve. In other words, it is a feature whose lack or minute
alteration would have rendered the universe sterile. Some of these features
have been known for a long time. For example, William Paley, already in 1802,
in his treatise Natural Theology,
pointed out that if the law of gravity had not been a so–called “inverse square
law” then the earth and the other planets would not be able to remain in stable
orbits around the sun. Perhaps the most famous anthropic coincidence was
discovered in the 1930s, when it was found that except for a certain very precise
relationship satisfied by the energy levels of the Carbon–12 nucleus, most of
the chemical elements in nature would have occurred in only very minute
quantities, greatly dimming the prospects of life.

Interest in and attention to anthropic
coincidences has greatly intensified since the work of the astrophysicist
Brandon Carter in the 1970s. Many such coincidences have now been identified.
The most natural interpretation of them is that we were indeed “built in from
the beginning,” in Steven Weinberg’s phrase, and that the universe, far from being
“overwhelmingly hostile” to us, as he asserted, is actually amazingly,
gratuitously hospitable.

Most scientists take a very jaundiced view of
the whole subject of anthropic coincidences. They have some respectable
reasons, but the major reason, in my experience, is a knee–jerk reaction
against anything that smells like religion or teleology. Moreover, those well–known
scientists who have shown interest in anthropic coincidences generally see them
as having an explanation that does not invoke purpose in nature. They appeal to
what is sometimes called the Weak Anthropic Principle. This is the idea that a
variety of different laws of physics apply in different regions of the
universe, or even in different universes, and that so many possible laws of physics
are sampled in this way that there is really no coincidence in the fact that in
some places the laws are “just right” for life. This is a very speculative
idea, and as an explanation of all the anthropic coincidences it faces
formidable difficulties. However, it cautions us that the anthropic
coincidences may not point unambiguously to cosmic purpose. Yet these
coincidences do completely vitiate the claim that science has shown life and
man to be mere accidents. If anything, the prima facie evidence is in favor of
the biblical idea that the universe was made with life and man in mind.

The fourth theme of the materialist’s story
was the determinism of physical law. Everything in the history of physics up
until the last century seemed to support this idea. All the laws
discovered—those of mechanics, gravity, and electromagnetism—were deterministic
in character. If anything seemed securely established it was physical
determinism. However, in the 1920s the ground rumbled under the feet of
physicists. Determinism was swept away in the quantum revolution. According to
the principles of quantum theory, even complete information about the state of
a physical system at one time does not determine its future behavior, except in
a probabilistic sense.

This was terribly shocking to physicists.
Indeed, one of the hallmarks of an exact science is its ability to predict
outcomes. So shocking was this twist in the plot that several of the makers of
the quantum revolution, including de Broglie and Schrödinger, were reluctant to
accept this aspect of it. Einstein was never reconciled to the loss of
determinism. “God,” he famously said, “does not play dice.” There have been
many attempts to restore determinism to physics by modifying, reformulating, or
reinterpreting quantum theory in some way. So far, however, it seems unlikely
that the old classical determinism will be restored.

There are many who argue, nonetheless, that the
indeterminacy of quantum theory does not create an opening or a space for free
will to operate. They argue that the basic building blocks of the human brain,
such as neurons, are too large for quantum indeterminacy to play a significant
role. At this point, who can say? So little is known about the brain. What we
can say is that there was for a long time a strong argument from the
fundamental character of physical law against the possibility of free will, and
this argument can no longer be so simply made. To quote Hermann Weyl again,
from the same 1931 lecture:

We may say that there exists a
world, causally closed and determined by precise laws, but . . . the new
insight which modern [quantum] physics affords . . . opens several ways of
reconciling personal freedom with natural law. It would be premature, however,
to propose a definite and complete solution of the problem. . . . We must await
the further development of science, perhaps for centuries, perhaps for
thousands of years, before we can design a true and detailed picture of the
interwoven texture of Matter, Life, and Soul. But the old classical determinism
of Hobbes and Laplace need not oppress us longer.

We return, now, to the final theme of the
materialist’s story, the mechanistic view of man himself. It is the final theme
in more ways than one. Here the scientist debunks himself. Here all the grand
intellectual adventure of science ends with the statement that there is no
intellectual adventure. For the mind of man has looked into itself and seen
nothing there except complex chemistry, nerve impulses, and synapses firing.
That, at least, is what the materialist tells us that science has seen.
However, the story is really not so simple. Here again the plot has twisted.
Two of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century cast considerable
doubt upon, and some would say refute, the contention that the mind of man can
be explained as a mere biochemical machine.

The first of these discoveries is quantum
theory. In the traditional interpretation of quantum theory—sometimes also
called the “Copenhagen,” “standard,” or “orthodox” interpretation—one must, to
avoid paradoxes or absurdities, posit the existence of so–called “observers”
who lie, at least in part, outside of the description of the world provided by
physics. That is, the mathematical formalism which quantum theory uses to make
predictions about the physical world cannot be stretched to cover completely
the person who is observing that world. What is it about the “observer” that
lies beyond physical description? Careful analysis suggests that it is some
aspect of his rational mind.

This has led some eminent physicists to say
that quantum theory is inconsistent with a materialistic view of the human
mind. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, stated flatly that
materialism is not “logically consistent with present quantum mechanics.” Sir
Rudolf Peierls, another leading twentieth–century physicist, said, on the basis
of quantum theory, “The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the
whole function of a human being . . . including its knowledge, and its
consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.”

Admittedly, this is a highly controversial
view. That is only to be expected, especially given the materialist prejudice
that affects a large part of the scientific community. Moreover, the
traditional interpretation of quantum theory has aspects that many find
disturbing or implausible. Some even think (wrongly, in my opinion) that the
role it assigns to observers leads to subjectivism or philosophical idealism.
Dissatisfaction with the traditional interpretation has led to various rival
interpretations and to attempts to modify quantum theory. However, these other
ideas are equally controversial. The controversy over quantum theory will not
be resolved any time soon, or perhaps ever. But, even if it is not, the fact
will remain that there is an argument against materialism that comes from
physics itself, an argument that has been advanced and defended by some leading
physicists and never refuted.

The second discovery that arguably points to
something nonmaterial in man is a revolutionary theorem in mathematical logic
proved in 1931 by the Austrian Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest mathematicians
of modern times. Gödel’s Theorem concerns the inherent limitations of what are
called “formal systems.” Formal systems are essentially systems of symbolic
manipulation. Since computers are basically just machines for doing such
symbolic manipulations, Gödel’s Theorem has great relevance to what computers
and computer programs can do. It was recognized fairly quickly that Gödel’s
Theorem might have something to say about whether the human mind is just a
computer—Gödel himself was firmly convinced that it is not. Indeed, he called
materialism “a prejudice of our time.” However, he never developed, at least in
print, the argument against materialism based on his own theorem. That was
first done by the Oxford philosopher John R. Lucas. In 1961, Lucas wrote,

Gödel’s theorem seems to me to
prove that Mechanism is false, that is, that minds cannot be explained as
machines. So has it seemed to many other people: almost every mathematical
logician I have put the matter to has confessed similar thoughts, but has felt
reluctant to commit himself definitely until he could see the whole argument
set out, with all objections fully stated and properly met. This I attempt to
do.

Both Gödel’s Theorem and Lucas’ argument are
extremely subtle, but we can state the gist of them as follows. Gödel’s Theorem
implies that a computer program can be outwitted by someone who understands how
it is put together. Lucas observed that if a man were himself a computer
program, then by knowing how his own program was
put together he could outwit himself, which is a contradiction. One may explain
the Lucas argument in another way. Gödel’s Theorem also showed that it is
beyond the power of any computer program that operates by logically consistent
rules to tell that it is doing so. However, a human being, Lucas noted,
can recognize his own consistency—at
least at times—and so must be more than a mere computer.

In recent years, the eminent mathematician and
mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose has taken up the Lucas argument,
further refined it, and answered criticisms that had been leveled at it by
mathematicians and philosophers. This has not quieted the criticism. However,
the Gödelian argument of Lucas and Penrose, though often attacked, has never
been refuted.

Where does this all leave us? After all the
twists and turns of scientific history we look around and find ourselves in
very familiar surroundings. We find ourselves in a universe that seems to have
had a beginning. We find it governed by laws that have a grandeur and sublimity
that bespeak design. We find many indications in those laws that we were built
in from the beginning. We find that physical determinism is wrong. And we find
that the deepest discoveries of modern physics and mathematics give hints, if
not proof, that the mind of man has something about it that lies beyond the
power of either physics or mathematics to describe.

Chesterton told the story of “an English
yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under
the impression that it was an island in the South Seas.” The explorer, he said,
“landed (armed to the teeth and speaking by signs) to plant the British flag on
that barbaric temple which turned out to be the pavilion at Brighton.” Having
braced himself to discover New South Wales, he realized, “with a gush of happy
tears, that it was really old South Wales.”

Science has taken us on just such an adventure.
Armed not with weapons but with telescopes and particle accelerators, and
speaking by the signs and symbols of recondite mathematics, it has brought us
to many strange shores and shown us alien and fantastic landscapes. But as we
scan the horizon, near the end of the voyage, we have begun to recognize first
one and then another of the old familiar landmarks and outlines of our
ancestral home. The search for truth always leads us, in the end, back to God.

---

Stephen M. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist
at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware. He is the
author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith
forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press. This essay was
originally presented in New York City on November 15, 2002 as the sixteenth
annual Erasmus Lecture of the Institute on Religion and Public Life.