|
|
|
|
|
THE ULTIMATE QUESTION
A long time ago, the first intelligent humans opened their eyes and looked at the world which had given them birth. They did not understand what they saw; but, spurred on by an insatiable desire to learn, they discovered how to ask questions and search for answers. And every answer, they found, led to new and greater questions. But what was the ultimate question, namely the meaning of life? He who found the answer to that question would know everything that was ultimately worth knowing.
RELIGION
Great questions require great answers; and as the millennia passed, many people tried to answer the ultimate question. The best of these answers were eventually gathered together into what we now call "religion", from the Latin word "religare", which means "to bind together". The word religion thus meant "ultimate wisdom" or "cosmic knowledge" or something to that effect.
There are many different religions in the world, but most of them have three things in common. Firstly, there is a God, Who created the Universe at the beginning of time. Secondly, there is a moral code of behaviour, determined by God, which humans must obey. And thirdly, at the end of time, there is Salvation, that is, immortal life in perfect happiness, awaiting those who obey God's moral laws.
This is the religious answer to the ultimate question. And it is a very good answer. After all, every human being wants a long and happy life. We cannot live longer than immortality or be happier than perfect happiness. Religion offers us the best possible ultimate outcome for the Universe. And by requiring us to be moral in order to attain Salvation, religion also does its best to make earthly life as enjoyable and pleasant as possible. If every person treats others the way he wants others to treat him, all humans can live in the greatest possible earthly happiness while waiting for the only happiness that is greater still, namely Heavenly happiness.
But how does religion know that God and Salvation are real? Religion does not know. God and Salvation are only a hypothesis, a hope, a conjecture. They are not a proven fact. Theologians tell us that it is impossible for humans to reason logically from natural causes whether God and Salvation are real. The only way we can know it is if God Himself gives us a sign and reveals Himself to our eyes.
And according to religion, God has done precisely this. In Christianity, God revealed Himself in the Bible, a literary work supposedly of such genius that no mere human could have written it; and in the miracles, such as the burning bush and the parting of the sea and other events that go against the laws of nature: and, most importantly, in Jesus Christ, Who was really God come down to earth to personally promise us Salvation if we behave morally.
Some religious people also say that God reveals Himself in the world that He made. However, since theologians tell us that we cannot reason from natural causes whether God exists, we shall not accept the world as part of revelation. No, to us, revelation consists only in the three things we mentioned, namely, the Bible, the miracles, and Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately, there is now no way of proving whether revelation really happened. Jesus Christ may have been just an ordinary human being with delusions of grandeur, and the Bible may have been written by human beings. And as for the miracles, there is not a single case of a miracle that has been reliably verified. In the end, revelation proves nothing, and religious people have no recourse except to rely on faith if they want to believe in God and Salvation.
PHILOSOPHY
Religion, which began as a search for ultimate wisdom, soon became corrupted by false dogma and useless rituals enforced by authoritarian rulers. Many people grew dissatisfied with religion. This is how philosophy began. This word means "love of wisdom". Philosophy is essentially a search for answers to these questions: what is real, where is reality located, and how can we know the truth about it?
Let us consider the first question: what is real? Philosophers generally agree that reality is that which we perceive with our conscious minds. This includes both that which we see with our eyes, and that which we think with our power of reason. Thus, if we see a table, we know that that table is real. And when our reason tells us that someone skilled in woodwork must have made that table, again we know that this is real: there really must have been such a person. We may never have actually seen that person with our eyes, but through reason we perceive him in our minds, and know that he is just as real as the table.
Now for the second question: where is reality located? Outside our minds, or inside? Is the world located outside us and then enters our mind and leaves an impression there? Or is it located inside the mind and is then projected outward, giving us the illusion that there is a world outside us when in fact there is nothing? Either of these alternatives is possible, and in the end we have no conclusive proof either way.
This brings us to the third question, namely, how can we know the truth about reality? The answer to that depends on whether reality is located outside or inside the mind. If it is inside the mind, then our minds already contain all the truth, and we can find it there by introspection. Socrates, for example, believed that what we call learning is really a kind of remembering of information that we already possess but have temporarily forgotten. The ancient Greek philosophers had great admiration for logic and reason. They admired the purity and perfection of disembodied ideas, and considered external physical reality as crude and imperfect by comparison. And what was less perfect, they reasoned, must also be less real. Truth, therefore, could only be found in the world of ideas, by intellectual contemplation. Knowledge gained in this way is called rationalistic, or idealistic, or spiritual, knowledge. The Greek philosophers saw no need to perform scientific experiments to test their knowledge against physical reality. They believed that, if something made logical sense, that was enough to prove that it was true; and if physical reality seemed to disagree, then our eyes, or physical reality itself, were wrong.
But it was soon found that rational arguments could be constructed to support just about any point of view we liked. If we wanted to believe that God existed, we could prove logically that He did. And if we wanted to believe that God did not exist, we could find equally convincing logical proof that He did not. Now, it is basic common sense that truth is logically consistent with itself. It makes no sense to suppose that God both exists and does not exist at the same time.
For this reason, in the Middle Ages, people grew dissatisfied with the rationalistic approach to knowledge. Reality, they decided, did not dwell inside our minds. Instead, it was located outside us and then made an impression on the mind. To learn the truth, we had to explore the external world and learn from it. The mind was a "tabula rasa" or blank slate, ready to receive information from outside. Knowledge gained in this way is called empirical, or experiential, or physical knowledge. Physical reality may appear crude and imperfect, and yet, it cannot be denied that it is the most solid and tangible form of reality we know. And what appears most solid, it was reasoned, must surely be the most real.
The nature of empirical knowledge differs somewhat from the nature of idealistic knowledge. Idealistic knowledge has an appearance of certainty and finality about it. Two plus two is always exactly four, and never anything else. In contrast, knowledge gained by empirical means tends to be approximate and tentative. The more we learn about the world, the closer we come to knowing the whole truth about it. Now, in principle, it would be possible to explore the whole world down to the last atom, and so make our empirical knowledge complete and perfect. But in practice, this is impossible. The world is simply too large and too complicated. Empirical knowledge may approach the truth, but in practice it can never arrive there.
And yet, empirical knowledge has some distinct advantages over idealistic knowledge. Unlike the latter, empirical knowledge seemed to have a definite logical consistency about it. If the earth moves around the sun instead of the other way around, then all the evidence, once rightly understood, points to that truth, and none of it points the other way.
Knowledge gained by exploring the outside world also has another major advantage. It works in practical applications. As Francis Bacon said, knowledge is power. The more humans learn about the physical world, the more power they have to control and manipulate that world.
And that is how philosophy gave rise to modern science. The word science means "knowledge". People found that, if we assume that the world is located outside us and that we should learn from it, then the knowledge we gain, although only approximate, is more logically consistent, as well as more useful in practical applications. This suggests strongly that empirical knowledge is closer to the truth than idealistic knowledge. After all, if there is a reality, and if it is logically consistent, then we can be reasonably sure that our knowledge reflects that reality if it is logically consistent as well as useful in practical applications. Empirical knowledge, moreover, is the kind of knowledge that ordinary people use in every day life. Common sense tells us that the world is located outside us and then enters into our minds and leaves an impression there. Those who, like many of the ancient Greek philosophers, use flimsy evidence to make up ideas in their minds, and then think it must be true because it seems logical, are usually said to be out of touch with reality and to suffer from delusions. But those who avoid jumping to hasty conclusions, who carefully evaluate the evidence and learn by observation, and who always remember that their knowledge about the world is tentative and subject to change if new evidence comes to light, are commonly regarded as realistic and sensible people. They are also more successful in the things they do.
SCIENCE
Modern science uses the so-called scientific method of investigation, which consists in the following three steps:
(1) First we observe the world and gather accurate information about it.
(2) Then we construct logical hypotheses to explain our observations.
(3) Then we test our hypotheses by using them to make predictions, and testing these predictions in physical experiments.
In this method, our search for the truth begins and ends with reality. Scientists never imagine things and then assume it must be true because it seem logical. No, every theory must be tested against reality before it can be accepted as true. But even then, it is never accepted as the final truth. It is only accepted tentatively, pending further investigation. Every scientific theory can be changed if new evidence comes to light which that theory cannot explain. Of course, some older theories have withstood the test of time and have come to be regarded as "almost certainly true". This includes the atomic theory of matter, as well as the theory of evolution. In fact, scientists have become so confident about the truth of these theories that they are no longer referred to as theories, but as facts. They are so well supported by evidence that it would be extremely unreasonable to doubt them.
Then there are other, more recent theories that are seen as "probably true". The Big Bang theory is one example. Although well supported by evidence, it has not yet withstood scrutiny as long as the other theories we mentioned.
Some very recent theories, meanwhile, are considered highly speculative. This includes the theory of morphic resonance, or the theory of many universes.
And finally, there are those theories that have been proven definitely false, such as the theory of phlogiston, or that of the aether. Science has the peculiarity that although it cannot prove anything to be certainly true, it can prove things to be definitely false. Like Sherlock Holmes, science arrives at the truth slowly, by eliminating all false alternatives, until whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
By using the scientific method, scientists have accumulated a vast store of knowledge. This store of knowledge is the most accurate and reliable that humans have ever had. Scientific knowledge has proven its worth in practical applications. Through science, humans have gained far greater control over the world than what was possible through prayer and magic or through knowledge gained by introspection. Modern science has given us a technology such as the world has never seen before. Many of the machines that we regard as commonplace, like cars or computers or TV or moon rockets, would in pre-scientific days have been considered magical. And yet, we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is physically possible. There is no doubt that future scientists will be able to do things that to us humans living now would seem as incredible as a computer does to a stone age person.
THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY
As soon as scientists had gathered sufficient knowledge, they began to get an overall picture of what kind of Universe we live in. The Universe, it seems, consists of matter particles that move in space and time according to blind physical laws. Particles move around at random, colliding with each other and sometimes joining together into larger, composite particles. These composites then continue moving around and colliding with single particles as well as with other composites. The force of these collisions causes weak composite particles to be broken up into single particles again, and only those composites that are strong and flexible enough to withstand the knocks of life can survive. This is how the process of random mutation and natural selection works. Over millions of years, composite particles evolve towards greater size and complexity. Stars and galaxies are very large composite particles that survive by sheer physical strength, there being nothing else in the Universe large and heavy enough to smash them into pieces. Human beings, on the other hand, survive by being flexible and adaptable. What we lack in size and strength, we make up for with our ability to adjust to changing circumstances. And our intelligence is probably the most important survival tool that helps us do this. An intelligent brain is essentially a machine that constructs within itself a little replica of the Universe as seen by the organism in question. Then the organism uses that replica to plan its behaviour. We can experiment in our minds with various courses of action and predict their likely consequences before choosing the best one to put into practice.
At any one time, those processes that exist are those that have most successfully adapted to their surroundings. The Universe as a whole tends to settle into mutually interacting processes that support each other. Occasionally, a process comes into conflict with its surroundings. That process is then destroyed, and the whole system is upset. Waves of chaos and destruction then spread throughout the Universe, until things settle down again and the Universe finds a new balance.
When the Universe has settled into such a balance, it tends to resemble a vast machine, constructed of mutually interacting parts that seem almost to have been purposefully designed. For this reason, classical scientists have likened the Universe to a clockwork. And within this clockwork, we humans and all other processes are mere cogs and levers, each with a function to perform. But this great cosmic clockwork has no intelligent designer. It arose purely by chance, by the slow process of random mutation and natural selection.
SCIENCE MEETS RELIGION
The earliest scientists did not expect that there would be any conflict between science and religion. After all, the same God Who had written the Bible had also made the world, and God did not contradict Himself.
But as science advanced, contradictions soon appeared. Many cherished religious doctrines could not easily be reconciled with scientific knowledge. For example, scientists were unable to find any evidence that God, as defined by the Bible, existed. Instead, the world seemed to have been made by a dead, unconscious, physical First Cause which had no love for humans, or even any knowledge of their existence. Nor did this physical First Cause appear to impose any moral laws on the Universe. On the contrary, as seen by classical Darwinian science, survival is essentially selfish and immoral, or at best amoral, and altruism is equivalent to suicidal madness.
Neither was there any scientific evidence to support the idea of Salvation. According to the Big Bang theory, the entire physical Universe with all its processes is doomed to certain and inevitable destruction. We are nothing but fleeting shadows, here today and gone tomorrow; and once we are gone, there is no hope of resurrection. When we die, we stay dead forever. All our yearnings for immortality and higher good are ultimately futile. Scientists tell us that the Universe is without meaning. Nothing we can possibly do will have any lasting significance. All the good things we labour to build, all the fine ideas and the great monuments and machines and works of art, will come to nothing. They will cease to exist, and after they are gone, it will be as if they had never existed at all. Bertrand Russell wrote that "no force, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can presume an individual life beyond the grave...all the labours of the age, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the Solar System...the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a Universe in ruin".
In short, science had managed to demolish all three of the most important religious doctrines, namely the existence of God, the existence of moral laws, and the promise of Salvation.
Some people saw this as a good thing. They predicted that religion, along with all other forms of ignorance and superstition, would soon be forgotten, and scientific knowledge would rule human affairs forever, and lead to a new enlightened era of truth and reason.
However, it did not turn out that way. False scientific theories came and went, but religion, which had been thought to be the falsest of all, clung on with surprising tenacity and refused to die and be forgotten. Most ordinary people do not like the idea of a meaningless Universe. They want to believe in God and Salvation. And so, intelligent people realised that, instead of waiting for religion to die, which would never happen, we should instead try to reconcile it to science.
Attempts to reconcile science and religion tend to fall into two main categories: those which distort science to suit religion, and those which distort religion to suit science. Creationism exemplifies the first kind of reconciliation, while Secular Humanism and Process Theology exemplify the second.
Then there is also a third way to achieve peace between science and religion, not by reconciling them, but rather by separating them so far apart that no further conflict can take place.
Let us look briefly at all of these, beginning with Creationism.
CREATIONISM
Creationism, as we said, tries to achieve reconciliation by distorting science to suit religion. In Creationism, the Bible is taken as the ultimate standard of truth. Whatever the Bible says is correct, and if the scientific evidence appears to contradict the Bible, then our scientists have misinterpreted the scientific evidence. And the Creationists have kindly taken it upon themselves to correct science and show them where they have gone wrong.
In other words, Creationism is an attempt to produce an alternative body of scientific theory, one that explains the evidence of the senses in a way that agrees with a literal interpretation of the Bible. Creationists therefore also call themselves "Creation Scientists". They believe that Creationism is the science of tomorrow. They want to see the Bible introduced into high school science classes and treated as a scientific textbook; and not just as any ordinary scientific textbook, but as the ultimate scientific textbook, since it was written by God. Ordinary scientific texts only describe scientific knowledge as it is known to humans at the time of writing. But God is omniscient, and the Bible must therefore contain all the scientific knowledge that there is.
Let us look at some of the more important Creationist theories that supposedly reconcile the scientific evidence with the Bible.
Conventional science tells us that the Universe is about 10 billion years old. But the Bible disagrees. If all the ages of the patriarchs are added up, we find that God made the Universe about 6,000 years ago. Clearly, there is a big difference between 6,000 and 10 billion.
To support their case, scientists tell us that light travels at a speed of one light-year per year. And of the stars that we can see, the furthest are about 10 billion light-years away. If the Universe was made only 6,000 years ago, as stated in the Bible, the light from those far-away stars would not have had time to reach the earth yet. Since we can see those stars, the Universe must be 10 billion light years old.
Creationists reply to this that God must have created those far-away stars with long beams of light already attached to them. Indeed, if we read the first chapter of Genesis carefully, we find that God created light before He created stars (Genesis 1:3,14-18).
This explanation, however, goes against an important rule in science, namely "Occam's Razor". This rule says that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. We should always use the fewest possible new hypotheses to explain the known facts. The more new hypotheses we employ, the more fantastic, and therefore unlikely, our explanation will become. And the idea that God should have created long beams of light first, and the stars afterwards, certainly sounds fantastic and unlikely. Of course, God is omnipotent and undoubtedly capable of doing it if He wanted to. But He is also perfectly wise, and would surely not create the world by such a complicated, roundabout procedure when a much simpler way exists.
Creationists have also come up with another explanation of how the light from stars 10 billion lightyears away could have reached the earth in only 6,000 years. The speed of light, they say, was much faster in the beginning than it is now. But in this, Creationists only demonstrate their ignorance of basic physics. According to the theory of relativity, matter and energy are one and the same. The amount of energy contained in matter is equal to the mass times the square of the speed of light. Now, if the speed of light really was much greater in the past, then the energy in every piece of matter would also have been greater -- indeed, so great that matter would have been highly unstable. The whole Universe would have blown apart in a titanic explosion the instant that God put it together.
Let us leave the question of the age of the Universe and consider some other Creationist theories instead. According to the Bible, God created humans and animals from the beginning in their present form. But science tells us that all living things evolved from simpler predecessors. And to support the theory of evolution, scientists have unearthed a vast fossil record, consisting of bones of dinosaurs and other animals that lived millions of years ago, and are now extinct. How do Creationists explain away this fossil record?
According to Creationism, God made all the dinosaurs and trilobites and so on during the six days of creation 6,000 years ago. Then He put all these animals together with mammals and humans in the garden of Eden. Then, 2,000 years later, God sent the Great Flood, which killed all the dinosaurs and so on, and left only those animals that Noah managed to save on board his ark. All the fossils that scientists study today were thus, according to the Creationists, produced 4,000 years ago in the Great Flood.
Yes, but scientists object: fossils are always found in ordered strata, with simpler organisms lower down and more advanced ones higher up. This is strong evidence of evolution. If the fossils really were the remains of one single vast global natural disaster, they would not be found in ordered strata, but all mixed up together.
Creationists have come up with an explanation for this. The trilobites, being unable to run fast, were trapped at the bottom of the valleys by the rising floodwaters, while the dinosaurs were able to escape halfway up the hills before they were drowned. And humans, being the most agile of all, managed to run all the way to the top of the mountains. This "differential hydro-dynamic mobility", say the Creationists, explains how the fossils came to be arranged in ordered strata.
But here the Creationists are once again involving themselves in explanations that grow ever more complicated and implausible. Nor have Creationists been able to satisfactorily explain away the results of carbon dating, which shows that fossil dinosaurs are hundreds of millions of years old, and not 4,000.
All in all, whenever mainstream science and Creationism meet each other in debate, the Creationists are repeatedly made to look like fools in the eyes of the great majority of intelligent, informed, and impartial people. Nevertheless, the Creationists refuse to give up. They keep coming up with ever more implausible and ridiculous explanations. For example, there are some Creationists who believe that the earth is flat. Others tell us that Tyrannosaurus Rex ate grass, while still others assert that Satan plotted with King Nimrod on top of the tower of Babel to start the theory of evolution.
These so-called "scientific" theories sound silly indeed. And yet, to determine whether Creationism is true or not, it is not enough merely to point out the flaws in Creationist theories. After all, real science has its own history of silly theories that were later proved wrong. To be fair to Creationism, we should give it the same chance to grow to maturity that real science has had. Ultimately, the success or failure of Creationism will depend not on whether its theories sound sillier than those of mainstream science, but on whether its method of discovering the truth is better than that of mainstream science.
Mainstream science, as we saw, uses the so-called scientific method, which consists in three steps:
(1) Observe reality
(2) Pose hypotheses to explain observations
(3) Test hypotheses via experiments
Creationism, on the other hand, uses a different method:
(1) Read the Bible
(2) Observe reality
(3) If there are discrepancies between the Bible and reality, pose hypotheses to explain these discrepancies.
(4) Test these hypotheses by referring to the Bible
In other words, where real science begins and ends with physical reality, Creationism begins and ends with the Bible. It relies not on the scientific method, but rather, on religious revelation. It uses the same method to find the truth that scholars did during the Dark Ages. Far from being the science of tomorrow, it is not a science at all, but a religion. Indeed, it is the worst kind of religion, namely, the kind that we call "fundamentalist". Fundamentalists are incapable of any real scientific inquiry. Uncertainty and ambiguity frightens these people. They have no patience with a long drawn out search for the truth. Instead they take refuge in quick and simple solutions to complex questions. Fundamentalists are anti-intellectual, narrowminded bigots who are immune to reason. Once they have decided to believe in something, they stick to that belief no matter what.
Now, if Creationism was nothing more than an intellectual exercise, albeit a failed one, it would be a worthwhile thing to try. But Creationism is more than that. Barry Price, in his book "The Creation Science Controversy", warns that Creationism has an ugly side to it. If the more extreme factions of Creationism succeed in taking over the world, they are not likely to rule with Christian charity and tolerance. No, we will probably see an end to free speech and a return to the ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages. There will very likely be a renewal of the terrors of the Inquisition, in which anyone found practicing the scientific method will be tortured and killed.
Because of this anti-intellectual nature of Creationism, it is not only scientists that oppose it. The mainstream churches join forces with science against Creationism as well. Nevertheless, Creationism remains a danger, because it has enormous appeal among ordinary people who lack scientific understanding but who hunger for certainty and meaning in an uncertain and apparently meaningless world.
SECULAR HUMANISM
Creationism is an attempt to reconcile science and religion by distorting science to fit in with religion. Let us now consider those attempts at reconciliation which distort religion to suit science. One such attempt is known as Secular Humanism, or as it has also been called, the scientific religion. Here, science is assumed to be correct, and religious doctrines are reinterpreted in line with scientific knowledge. The physical First Cause of science which made the Universe is defined as God, and the scientific principle of "survival of the fittest" is the code of good and evil behaviour that God imposes on us. To be strong and fit is to be good, and to be weak and unfit is to be evil. According to this ethic, it is good to be selfish, and evil to be altruistic. Heaven, meanwhile, is defined as that state of perfect fit with the environment that organisms can achieve if they are good enough, while Hell is that state of unhappiness that unsuccessful, or evil, organisms suffer as a result of their failure to fit in.
This physical Heaven has one major drawback; there is no immortality in it. But, say the supporters of Secular Humanism, it does us no good to pine for the lost fairy-tales of the past. Instead, we should accept the will of our new scientific God, and be content with whatever happiness and longevity He does offer us.
That, in brief, is Secular Humanism. Let us now ask if it is a successful reconciliation of science and religion.
Perhaps there are some scientists who regard Secular Humanism as a successful reconciliation. After all, Secular Humanism is essentially science; it adheres to the scientific method and accepts everything that science says without distortion.
But to religious people, Secular Humanism is just as unsatisfactory as Creationism is to scientists. For a start, a dead, physical First Cause is no substitute for God, Who is supposed to be loving, wise, conscious, moral, and so on. And the idea that competitive selfishness is good, while altruistic love for others is evil, is offensive to our moral sensibilities. If God really thought that selfishness was the highest good, then He would have made us in such a way that we would admire and revere selfishness and regard altruism as low and despicable. But instead, the great majority of ordinary people, as well as practically all the prophets and sages throughout history, agree that altruism is good and selfishness is evil.
And finally, Secular Humanism says that if we are good, we will live on. But all processes are ultimately destined to die. Therefore, all processes are ultimately evil. And after all processes are gone, the Universe itself will follow them into destruction. In other words, evil is destined to win over good. All our struggles to survive and to be good are ultimately futile. Secular Humanism fails to offer us any real higher meaning. Calling the Universe God does not change the fact that, as seen by science, the Universe is essentially meaningless.
More, when Secular Humanism says that, to be happy, we must avoid thinking about the meaninglessness of life, this is hardly the mark of a progressive new philosophy that claims to be based on the liberating power of rational thought. Such intellectual taboos are more like a retreat into ignorance and darkness. Scientists may criticise Creationists for trying to thwart scientific reason, but when Secular Humanism discourages contemplation about higher meaning, it tries to thwart religious thought, and is guilty of exactly the same sin.
PROCESS THEOLOGY
Process Theology is a more sophisticated version of Secular Humanism. While Secular Humanism is based on classical Newtonian science, Process Theology bases itself on more recent scientific theories, such as relativity, quantum theory, chaos theory, and so on. Now, this more recent science is much more complex and abstract and diffuse than classical science. In classical science, the Universe is absolute and deterministic. That is, it operates like a vast machine that moves with perfect precision, and in which everything that happens or will happen can be predicted down to the last detail once we know the mathematical laws that govern the Universe. Classical science also sees the truth as absolute and final; that is, what is true remains so at all times and from all points of view. But modern science sees the truth as in some ways relative, that is, as depending on point of view. More, in modern science, the Universe operates within margins of probability. Nothing can be predicted exactly, only approximately. There is a slight element of indeterminacy in everything.
Philosophers, who had seen classical science as an impediment to reconciliation, welcomed this new modern science with open arms. Being more diffuse and mysterious, it was more amenable to compromise, and therefore easier to reconcile with religion. And so, Process Theology was born. In Process Theology, the Universe is no longer a great machine, but a living organism. Processes are no longer cogs and levers in a machine, but plants and animals in a great ecosystem that spans the Universe. Instead of being predictable, will-less robots, we and all other processes are wilful and unpredictable living things. Stars and planets are just as much alive as humans, and have a consciousness with thoughts and feelings, just as we do. Simple things like atoms or stones have simple thoughts and feelings, while humans have more complex thoughts and feelings. And the Universe as a whole is permeated by a great Universal Consciousness, which is the sum of all the lesser consciousnesses within it. This Universal Consciousness is defined as God.
Some people may think that it does not sound very scientific to compare the Universe to a living organism, or to say that planets and so on have thoughts and feelings. And yet, when we think about it, it is no less scientific to call the Universe a living organism than to call it a machine. Both are analogies that explain a basically incomprehensible Universe in terms that we can understand.
And so, Process Theology gives us a living Universe and a God Who has consciousness and feelings. It also gives us an ethical system which is moral and altruistic. Modern science has moved away from the old idea that survival is a war in which the selfish and strong survive while the weak and altruistic go under. Instead, survival is now seen by scientists as collective. The Universe is forever organising itself into ever more complex co-operative systems, and in these systems, survival is not so much a matter of destroying everything else before it destroys us, but rather, a matter of fitting in with the environment that supports us and doing our part to preserve it. He who thinks he can survive by destroying everything around him ultimately destroys himself, and only he who preserves the order and harmony of the Universe as a whole can survive in the long term.
And so, when humans do good, moral actions, they help the process of evolution go forward and make the Universe more ordered, more complex. And when they do evil, immoral actions, they make evolution go backward, and the Universe is reduced to chaos and disorder and simplicity.
Now, since the consciousness of God is built upon the complexity of the Universe, this is to say that when humans do good actions, the consciousness of God is increased, and when they do evil actions, the consciousness of God is diminished. This means that, in the beginning, when there were no processes, there was no God either. In Process Theology, God did not exactly create the Universe. Rather, He grew with it, and exists in a kind of symbiotic relationship with it. The Universe creates God just as much as God creates the Universe.
Traditional theology tells us that God is omnipotent. He existed prior to the Universe are rules it with irresistible power. But the God of Process Theology is gentle and yielding. He does not rule with coercive force. Rather, He beckons with persuasive love. When processes follow God, they build peace and harmony. But should any process refuse to follow God, then God is powerless to do anything about it. He is saddened when processes do evil, but He cannot stop them. He sympathises with innocent victims of evil, but He cannot help them.
The idea of a God Who is not omnipotent is not exactly in accord with traditional religious doctrine. And yet, religion can probably overlook this shortcoming if the new God of Process Theology can give us the one thing that really matters, that is, a real higher meaning in life, or in other words, Salvation.
But alas, here Process Theology fails. It offers no hope of immortal life in perfect happiness, no reason to hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil. No, in accord with science, Process Theology sees no other ultimate destiny besides the inevitable and inescapable death of all processes. Process Theology is just as devoid of meaning as Secular Humanism. The best that Process Theology can do is to express a forlorn hope that maybe, after all processes have been destroyed forever, some part of God may survive and somehow "remember" the good we did, and use that good for some higher purpose. But what that purpose is, Process Theology has no idea, nor is there any hope that any now existing processes will be resurrected to become part of that higher purpose. It seems that merely calling the Universe a living organism instead of a machine is not enough to give the Universe a real higher meaning. After all, in science, there is no fundamental difference between living organisms and machines. Both are processes within the same Universe, and both operate within the context of the same basic laws.
PEACE BY SEPARATION
We have seen that science and religion cannot be reconciled by distorting either world view to suit the other. And it should hardly surprise us that this is so. After all, to distort is not to reconcile. A true reconciliation is known by being acceptable to the majority of mainstream scientists and theologians simultaneously. And this is only possible if both world views remain essentially undistorted.
But, it seems, such a distortion-free reconciliation has eluded the world's greatest thinkers for several centuries now. Seeing that this is so, some people have concluded that perhaps science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable. If this is the case, then the best we can do to achieve peace between them is to separate them so far apart that no further conflict can take place.
Accordingly, these thinkers divide the Universe in two parts, one scientific and one religious. The scientific part is the visible world that we see with our eyes. It is a world of tangible, external things that we perceive via rational thought. The religious part of the Universe, meanwhile, is an invisible inner world of love and faith and mystery. Here, feelings and not rational thoughts rule. In this religious world, humans can find relief from the cold, empty meaninglessness of science, and experience the illusion that there is a God and a higher meaning in life. The fact that these things are only illusions should not bother us. After all, the religious side of human nature is one of feelings, not facts. It is only our rational, scientific nature that knows that God does not exist. But when we enter into the religious world, we should leave our scientific side behind, just as visitors to a Hindu temple must leave their shoes outside. If we take our scientific logic into the religious world, we will shatter the illusion and become depressed. And likewise, if we take religious faith into the scientific world, our rational thinking becomes confused and our machines will not work. The key to happiness, therefore, is to keep the scientific and religious aspects of the world separate, and not let them intrude into each other's domains.
This is how some thinkers try to achieve peace between science and religion. But is this really a good solution to the problem of science and religion? Or is it more akin to a kind of self-inflicted schizophrenia? This is a term that means "a splitting of the mind". In schizophrenic people, mind and emotion have become separated, so that the sufferer cannot think logically about his emotions, or react emotionally to his thoughts. And this is more or less exactly what the "peace through separation" advocates want. Normal, healthy human beings cannot go through life not thinking about what they believe in, or not believing in what they know to be true. As A. N. Whitehead said, we cannot tear apart minds and bodies. The Universe, like the human body, is an indivisible whole which cannot be divided without destroying it. Peace by separation, then, cannot be the key to a true reconciliation of science and religion.
CONCLUSION
We have looked at some of the most important attempts to reconcile science and religion. And as we have seen, all of them have failed. But these failures have taught us something. A true reconciliation of science and religion must not distort science, as Creationism does, because it will not be acceptable to scientists. Nor must it distort religion, as Secular Humanism and Process Theology do, because if it does, it will not be acceptable to theologians. No, a true reconciliation must accept both world views exactly as the are. That is, it must be based on the scientific method, and at the same time, it must promise real, literal immortal life in Heaven with God to all that ever lived and followed His moral laws. Nor can we divide the Universe in two separate parts. No, we must bring these two apparently irreconcilable opposites in contact with each other and unite them into a single harmonious whole with no internal conflicts.
But how is such a reconciliation possible? It is no wonder that the problem of reconciling science and religion has been called the greatest intellectual dilemma of the modern age. And yet, intuitively, we sense that the solution cannot be far away. If and when the key to reconciliation is eventually discovered, it will be characterised not by distortions and complex, implausible explanations; no, it will be known by that powerful, elegant simplicity which is the mark of true genius, the kind that causes people to exclaim: It is so obvious! Why didn't we think of it for ourselves?
|
|
|