Why Science Needs Faith

There is no shortage of good works examining the relationship between religion and science, particularly Christianity and science. Does the world need one more? The answer is yes based on the way Phillip Campbell approaches the topic. Typically, the relationship between Christianity and science is approached via two theses. One is the “warfare” thesis, advanced by the likes of Andrew Dickson White, who, in History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), argues that there is unremitting hostility between the two, and religion has retarded and continues to retard the development of science. The other is the “complementarity” thesis, advanced by the likes of Pope St. John Paul II and the writers of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, who hold that faith and science “cannot contradict each other.” The problem is that while the “complementarity” thesis is the correct one, the “warfare” thesis is the one that usually prevails. This is a particular problem in Catholic circles in the West, as incompatibility between Catholicism and science is frequently cited as a top reason that people, particularly young people, leave the faith.* Indeed, this sad fact motivated Campbell to write In Pursuit of Wisdom, an easy-to-read work directed at a popular audience, but one that is nevertheless carefully researched and written with academic rigor.

Campbell begins his examination with an observation that is sometimes considered controversial in the history of religion and science but really ought not to be: Not only are all religions not created equal, but Christianity is particularly suited to the development of science as we now understand it. The reasons for this begin with the creation account in Genesis, which is different from that of any other religion: The One God creates the world ex nihilo (rather than one or several gods creating the world out of some pre-existing substance); His creation is described as something real and good; and all the things He makes in the world have a particular kind. Advancing through the Bible, we find God associated with Wisdom, and thus rationality, so much so that by the New Testament the philosophical term Logos (from which we get words like logic) is used to describe the Incarnation. These and like conceptions of God and nature lead to an inevitable conclusion: “One can attain knowledge of God through the study of the world,” Campbell states. “Creation is an approach to God.” Christianity thus offers motives to investigate the natural world in a way other religions simply do not.

Events in early Christian history furthered this inclination to investigation. The Patristic era faced a difficult question: How much of the inherited knowledge of the non-Christian world in which the early Church was developing should be retained? The problem is captured in Tertullian’s famous rhetorical question, “What has Athens got to do with Jerusalem?” Fortunately, courtesy of the likes of Lactantius and Augustine, the prevailing answer turned out to be “Plenty,” as educated early Christians were expected to know not just pagan philosophy but also pagan “natural philosophy” (the term used for science until the 19th century). This may seem like a trivial point, but it is not. When Islam faced the same problem (“What has Athens got to do with Mecca?”), best symbolized by the conflict between the philosophers Averroes and Al-Ghazali, the answer that won out was “Nothing,” a position that hobbled scientific development in the Islamic world. As a result of all this, Campbell concludes, “The Catholic Church was probably the most rationalistic institution in the late Roman empire.”

Campbell’s second major point covers aspects of the Myth of the Middle Ages and can best be summarized as The Dark Ages Weren’t. Indeed, the very notion of a “middle age” — a period of regression between two enlightened eras — was a slander originated by Renaissance figure Petrarch, one that has surprising durability even today. The reality is considerably different. As regards technical and technological developments, the medievals made many significant advances the Greeks and Romans never did, both in overall fields (agriculture, metallurgy, mining, forging, etc.) and with specific inventions (waterwheels, spectacles, mechanical clocks, etc.). These developments were made in specific milieux (monasteries), a fact that demonstrates the strong link between the Catholic faith and scientific development.

As the Middle Ages wore on, the process of scientific inquiry was furthered by another Catholic institution: the university. Clerics associated with universities, such as Albertus Magnus, made important individual investigations, as well as important developments in theory, to the point that some scholars have dated the creation of the scientific method to the medieval Scholastics. Furthermore, while the questions of whether the Renaissance was as great a time of learning as thought, and whether its strong devotion to Greco-Roman sources impeded rather than advanced the process of scientific inquiry, remain open, the fact that a significant number of cleric-scientists were making discoveries during the Renaissance is undisputed. The Galileo controversy notwithstanding (a complicated affair, which Campbell discusses as well as one can in a short chapter), the tradition and discoveries of cleric-scientists, Protestant as well as Catholic, continued into the 18th century. Campbell notes that “the era from around 1550 to 1750 was a golden age of Catholic science,” with important discoveries made in the fields of astronomy, geology, crystallography, mining, and electricity. Throughout this era, cleric-scientists were not just able to make scientific discoveries but were encouraged to and rewarded for doing so.

How did we get from the great tradition of cleric-scientists to the “warfare thesis”? According to Campbell, the problem lies with aspects of the Enlightenment, which had many more deleterious effects than its members and supporters are willing to admit. Wittingly or unwittingly, René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) started an “anthropocentric revolution” in the field of philosophy, creating a man-focused approach to inquiry that often worked against the world-focused approach typical of natural philosophy. Moreover, for the next century and a half, many European intellectuals moved from radical humanism to religious skepticism to deism to full-blown atheism, with predictable results for the institution of the cleric-scientist. Although most Enlightenment philosophes were more like Voltaire than Benjamin Franklin (i.e., not doing any real scientific inquiry), they were successful in breaking the long European tradition of religiously minded scientific investigation. There were still religiously minded people, such as Isaac Newton, making important scientific discoveries, but as time went on, they became the minority. With regard to the field of science, the results of the Enlightenment have been decidedly mixed. The pace of scientific inquiry and discovery has increased exponentially, without question. But this increase has come at the cost of the fragmentation of scientific inquiry into myriad subdisciplines, making it difficult to make connections between various fields of science and impossible to have the kind of unified approach to the subject that existed in the days of the cleric-scientists. Though some have celebrated the severance of science and philosophy from religion as a liberation, others have lamented the existential despair that has resulted and consider it a curse.

The Catholic response to all this has been complicated. During the Enlightenment, the Church strongly condemned materialism and rationalism (as well as the secret societies like the Freemasons that sprouted up like fungi supporting them) but never the actual scientific investigations of the era, nor has she done so since. This is the stance she has maintained over the centuries, and it has not always been an easy one to maintain. Campbell’s treatment of the Church’s response to the “Darwinian dilemma” of the 19th century is a good example. The canard that the Church is “hostile to science” because she “rejected Darwin and evolution” is simply not true. Evolution as a theory predates Darwin — it goes back to the ancient Greeks; many Catholic thinkers proposed evolutionist-style theories long before Darwin — but what the Church objected to was the atheism and materialism behind Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the engine of evolutionary development, which is not the same thing as rejecting evolution, let alone science, outright. Perhaps a little chary since the Galileo affair, the Church has had to walk a fine line between encouraging scientific inquiry and maintaining the deposit of faith. The same Church that required the Oath Against Modernism in 1910 also established the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences in 1936.

Intriguingly, matters are perhaps a little easier with regard to the one scientific controversy of the 20th century Campbell covers in some detail: the question of physics and the origins of the universe. The controversy stemmed not from religiously minded figures rejecting scientific theories as such, but from the scientific establishment resisting theories and discoveries that flew in the face of “settled science.” One such theory belonged to E.T. Whittaker, whose work on entropy and the “heat death of the universe” challenged the widely accepted notion that the universe is infinite in size and duration. (Whittaker would later become a Catholic convert and apologist.) More significant was the work of Fr. Georges Lemaître, the Belgian physicist responsible for proving that galaxies (and thus the universe) are expanding, and are expanding from a common point, resulting in what has come to be known as the “Big Bang Theory” of the origin of the universe. Interestingly, Lemaître neither used nor liked the term, nor did he use it as a Christian apologetic tool or approve of anyone doing so, not even Pope Pius XII, who was unusually scientifically educated and a great supporter of Lemaître and his work. In any case, even in the 20th century the Church was host to another cleric-scientist, one whose discoveries would if not prove then at least support the Christian conception of creation ex nihilo.

The continued appearance of people like Fr. Lemaître, Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, and Fr. Robert Spitzer (to say nothing of religious sisters such as Miriam Stimson, whose work on spectroscopy of DNA made possible Watson and Crick’s “double helix” model, or Mary Kenneth Keller, who pioneered the computing language BASIC) demonstrates that the venerable Catholic tradition of the cleric-scientist has not vanished. As such, it should be clear that the problem these days is not a conflict between religion and science but between religion and scientism, the belief that science is the only way we can know anything. In this ideology, the “scientist” (a word first coined in 1833) becomes a kind of secular priest and arbiter of all truth, an arrogation the Church has long condemned (and still does). Under scientism, “science” tends to turn into something manipulative, more interested in controlling the universe than understanding it — an approach to the universe more characteristic of sorcery than science. Scientism is also problematic in that it does not understand or admit that there are natural limits to science. For example, science cannot in and of itself address the field of ethics, yet it must, to avoid confusing what we can do with what we should do, and to prevent science from visiting untold horrors upon humanity. One safeguard the Catholic Church can provide to prevent this is her too often ignored concept of human dignity. In the end, Campbell writes, “the Church in no way hinders science; rather, she acts as the conscience of science.”

Campbell concludes In Pursuit of Wisdom by noting that if faithful Catholics wish to demonstrate that there is no conflict between religion and science, they are obliged to be both serious about their faith and also literate about science, to know the history of the relation of religion and science and thereby set the record straight. A major part of being able to do this is not confusing scientism with science. Another is being aware that some topics (Darwin, the Galileo affair) are complicated, messy, and require some nuance to understand and explain. Overall, much of what Campbell provides is material well known to scholars of the history of science and religion. But in the wider culture that material is not well known, and Campbell is to be lauded for his efforts to make it so. In Pursuit of Wisdom is of value to any biology or physics student who is struggling with his faith, or anyone who wants an approachable but authoritative look at the way faith and science are, in fact, not only complementary, but how the latter is dependent on the former.

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*Curiously, I have encountered a number of unsubstantiated but persistent reports that the exact opposite is happening in China, where educated young people are concluding that science is impossible to understand without Christianity and are converting to Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, in not-insignificant numbers. If true, the trend is fascinating and might have some interesting results when “East” starts meeting “West” more openly and frequently.

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