The Science of Theology

M. S. Sholar, Ph.D.

July 11, 2004

“I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired.  I study the Bible daily.”

“Atheism is so senseless.  When I look at the solar system I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light.  This did not happen by chance.”   Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

The mathematical and scientific discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton are astronomical.  Some of the most notable of his achievements include the invention of calculus, the discovery of the laws of motion and the law of gravitation, and the construction of the first reflecting telescope.  He also was a man known for his Christian faith.  He spent a great portion of his time studying the Bible with a special interest in prophecy.  At the time of his death, he left more than a million words of notes on the Bible.  Six years after his death, Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John was published.  Not only was Isaac a great scientist, but also a dedicated student of the Bible.                                                                            The Blue Letter Bible

It is a popular belief that scientists are not inclined to be religious.  Although there are notable exceptions of giants like Isaac Newton, there are in fact many competent scientists who have a strong faith in God and do not find this inconsistent with their scientific objectivity and honesty.  This essay is yet one more example amongst many from such scientists that shed some light on the compatibility between science and a belief in God.  Unlike mathematics, the science of probing religious beliefs is not exact.  There cannot be a logical proof of the existence of a God that created the universe and mankind, ruling over matter, time and space.  However, as man continues his path through evolving time, ever increasing the collection of observations and making and testing inferences, the logical case for God grows, even outside of the bounds of faith.

In this essay, a lower case “god” represents any being of supernatural powers or attributes, who is worshipped by some people.  The upper case God is the perfect, omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the object of faith in monotheistic religions.  Deity refers to a god or goddess.  However, deism means a belief founded solely upon the evidence of reason in the existence of God as creator of the universe, who after setting it in motion, abandoned it, assuming no control over life nor natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation (American Heritage Dictionary).  Care must be given in applying this description to people such as many of the Founding Fathers of America.  For though some, including the first several Presidents, may not have been Christians in the strictest sense, they did believe that the God of Abraham still controlled His dominion, thus they were more than deists.  The term theist, meaning having a belief in the existence of a god, especially belief in a personal God as creator and ruler of the world, may more appropriately fit this category of belief.  Theism is quite distinct from pantheism, which identifies a deity with various forces and workings of nature and can lead to a plurality of gods (all gods).

Although the God of Abraham relates to Judaism, Christianity and the descendents of Ishmael, the other monotheistic religion, Islam, worships a god that is not the God of Christianity and Judaism.  Thus for the purposes of this essay, God refers to the supernatural being worshipped by Jews and Christians.  The term atheist refers to someone who does not believe in the existence of a god and particularly God.  An agnostic doubts such existence.

In dealing with the juxtaposition of science and religion, people sort out into several camps.  It is important to understand from the start, the basic foundational position of an expositor in order to get through the maze of semantic pitfalls that abound.  Having implied my own position, I call attention to another category of scientist who insists that the fields of science and religion are incompatible.  To understand this position, one needs to delve into the implied meaning of science and religion in this context by such writers.  The perspective of science is one of reasonable processes whereas religion entails nothing more than blind and irrational faith.

Many writers who are religious scientists ignore the challenge of showing the compatibility and mutual support between scientific discoveries and biblical faith.  For example, many religious writers attack the big bang theory of universe origin, seemingly without recognizing that an omnipotent Creator could affect the universe (the creation process) in more fashions than we can possibly conceive, including one resembling the notion of a big bang.   St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out that God’s creation of the universe means that the universe depends on its existence on God’s free will, which could be the case even if the universe always was.  However, big bang points to a beginning, which is consistent with the basic notions of theism, not atheism.

Modern physics can be, and normally is, cast in the light of addressing a materialistic universe, devoid of the need for any reference to God.  Thus for purposes here, the term materialism will be used to describe the basis for most thinking in modern physics.  Materialism encompasses the ideas that man and all of nature are in place and behaving, completely absent of any God.  Thus a materialistic view is compatible with agnosticism and atheism.  It is simply efficient to sweep a lot of this up under the umbrella term, materialism, for our purposes here.  The materialist, for example, feels somewhat comfortable with the idea of a universe evolving from nothing or very compact elemental “stuff.”  The many patches of the theory of expansion, such as inflationary cosmology, required to maintain credibility, are somewhat of a thorn, but not nearly so much as it would be to believe in a supernatural creation event involving God.

Stephen Barr [Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Notre Dame Press, 2003] points out that there is an inappropriate linking between modern physics methodology and the concept of materialism.  The incredible behavior of physicists here is that this very connection is unsubstantiated, a shortcoming of the same type that is ironically attributed by atheistic scientists to religion.  This represents a faith by physicists that is not well recognized as having a vacuous lack of substantiation.  In the last century there were many developments in physics that essentially annihilate any connection to a materialistic view of the universe.  Most of these have not found prominence in public disclosures.  In the quote from Isaac Newton above, he shows recognition of one of the many aspects of the universe that makes the position of man special, namely our position relative to the sun.  There is a growing list of such features, including our solar system’s place in the galaxy, and the finely tuned constants of physics, that are measured more accurately today.  This anthropic principle is a collection of additions to Newton’s observation above.  Though not a proof of the existence of God by any means, it is part of the mounting evidence.  Recent discoveries further confound materialist’s ideas and confirm those of believers in God.

The materialistic view is characterized by random behaviors whereas even Einstein agreed that God does not play dice with the universe.  A central issue is whether or not the nature that we observe, including the cosmos, the solar system, earth, plants, animals and man, is a result of a design process.  Clearly the order of design is at the opposite end of the spectrum from randomness.  With such a distinction it should be easy for one to decide whether the beauty in nature was the result of some random selection process or whether it was designed by a supernatural being, with an infinite capacity for creating such beauty.

There is a circular argument in the materialist’s claim that to attack the viability of physics and mathematics to completely describe nature is “mystery-mongering,” according to Barr.  Materialists assume without justification that all rational explanation must come from mathematical equations and constructs, thus participating in a form of their own “mystery-mongering.” 

Another profound example of circularity focuses on the nature of ideas, being physically just neural impulse patterns in the brain.  There is serious question as to how one could possibly rank one idea as better or worse than another.  Thus the determination of truth and error (including the very premises of materialism) require a world of moral meaning, outside of the human brain.  This argument uses materialism (mere impulses confined to the brain) as a self-defeating mechanism.

The business of constructing a proof of God’s existence with our own limited innate abilities seems untenable.  If we rationalize that the only reason that the God of infinite power and wisdom would create us and all things is for His own glory, then there must be elements of faith and free will required, beyond raw analytical capability, in order for His exercise to be non-trivial.  Furthermore, such proofs, without themselves containing unproved propositions, have been shown to be impossible.  The mathematician, Kurt Goedel, rigorously proved his famous theorem stating that an axiomatic system must necessarily contain a proposition that cannot be proved and that any consistency proof for the system must use ideas and methods beyond those of the system itself.  Thus the system is consistent though incomplete, and if extended to completion, the new domain becomes inconsistent requiring in turn a higher-level proposition for correction.  We can of course extend our knowledge base to higher levels by a process of inductive reasoning, although there is here again no guarantee that all such extensions are true.  Since we are working from the finiteness of our own limitations, and working toward an infinite entity in God, then it is not reasonable to expect that we can affect such inductive reasoning nor that it will be accurate.  Thus logic, philosophy, mathematical rigor, and the best human efforts at reasoning are never going to be sufficient, leaving faith alone as the ultimate answer.

Rational scientists claim that the concept of God cannot be presented in any way as an understandable non-contradictory intellectual construction.  Abstract formulations of God are either contradictory or unintelligible as a matter of principle according to Leszek Kolakowski [God in a Godless Time, First Things, June/July 2003], because they can in no way be brought into contact with empirical reality.  This is another way of viewing the vacuous nature of the God question.

Most discourses by believers are of the nature of preaching to the choir.  In this arena, the God question is not meaningful, amongst those of unshakeable faith.  Neither is it meaningful for die-hard atheists who know that science has prevailed over God and any adherents to God are responding to superstition, ignorance or psychological pressures.

Most people are not hard over one way or the other.  Kolakowski makes a point that with the diminishing faith of believers, there is an interesting impact on non-believers, whose self-confidence from unbelief has been broken, the godless world of today being more in a state of chaos.  There are not many happy atheists out there.  Behind successes lurks the apocalyptic warning: “You maintain, ‘I am rich and well and lack nothing.’  But you do not know that, all the while, you are wretched and pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17).

There are two sources of secularization according to Kolakowski: (1) the progress of science in which God no longer has a place and (2) the inability of Christianity to overcome the great social problems that have followed from industrialization.  Taking the first source, we have already discussed the futility of including God in the progress of science from a materialist’s perspective.  Scientific research parted company from theology around the seventeenth century.  The thrust in these latter times has been to place natural phenomena under human control.  Here we must make an important distinction between science and scientific rationalism or scientism.  The latter is an arbitrary epistemological doctrine devised by philosophers to attempt undermining religious belief by using only scientific tools for obtaining knowledge of value.  Scientism is not science and not a logical consequence of science.  God is excluded from scientism for He is incompatible with the drive for man’s lordship over nature.

A serious mistake is made by the practice of scientific theology, which is not to be considered part of the science of theology from the title of this essay.   When belief competes with science, it is destined to become at best a pseudo-science that is easily disproved.  When people who think of themselves as cultured and rational see the display of belief being intertwined with profane knowledge, they invariably leave belief behind for those whom they consider to be superstitious.  Whereas the God based view of the world is clear sighted, scientific theology is superstition.  Atheism and scientism strengthen each other, though neither is a true science.  Thus with point number one above, it seems naïve to think that lack of scientific process in religion has been a major cause of lack of believers.