By Vicki Gray

Ever wonder about the “Big Bang?”  What came before it and caused it?  And how it all ends?

Today there is within the scientific community a loud and angry group that would draw a curtain on the awe and wonder engendered by such questions.  In particular, they seek to cut off that avenue of speculation that leads to a search for God and often ends in organized religion.  Erstwhile Anglican and History of Science professor Richard Dawkins, for example, argues in The God Delusion (Houghton Miflin, 2007) that “religion is unalloyed nonsense” and “an overwhelmingly pernicious, even ‘very evil’ force in the world.”  Like similar recent efforts (e.g., Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation), Dawkins’ book is, according to a recent review in the New York Review of Books, an “extended polemic” which concludes that “the God Hypothesis…is close to being ‘ruled out by the laws of probability.”  His and Harris’ are, moreover, books that suffer from two very unscientific flaws.  First, they set up easy-to-trash straw men based on the most literalist of churches.  Second, and most importantly, they follow the scientific method only as far as it will take anyone - to a point short of the open-ended questions raised by modern cosmology – and, at the edge of that abyss, take an unwarranted leap to an un-provable conclusion that there is no God.

In doing so, they profoundly misunderstand the differences between science and faith and very unscientifically cut-short the search for Truth.  They take us only so far.  As Paul Tillich argues, “Every scientific truth is preliminary and subject to changes both in grasping reality and in expressing it adequately.  This element of uncertainty does not diminish the truth value of a tested and verified scientific assertion.  It only prevents scientific dogmatism and absolutism (Dynamics of Faith, Harper & Brothers, 1957).”  “Scientific truth and the truth of faith,” he adds, “do not belong to the same dimension of meaning.  Science has no right and no power to interfere with faith and faith has no power to interfere with science.”     

For the same reason I would not rely on the short-circuited argumentation of Dawkins and Harris against the existence of God, I personally cannot rely on the purely rational argumentation of Aquinas or C.S. Lewis for the existence of God.  In both instances, such argumentation takes one only so far and chickens out at the ultimate limits of reason – at that place of questioning uncertainty on the threshold of what Tillich calls our Ultimate Concern.  It is a scary, humbling place where we recognize that there is Something as yet still unknowable beyond our human ken.

For centuries, Christianity has, I suspect, sought to shield us from the heavy lifting at this intersection of science and religion.

Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, it is perhaps God’s serendipity that brings to us a growing number of spiritually-minded scientists who offer us new vistas on the harmony between science and religion and beg us to take the next step.   Let me highlight just two.  One is Howard Smith, an observant Jew who also happens to be a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  In Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah (New World Library, 2006), he draws on Jewish mysticism and the parallels he sees between the creation images of Genesis and the Big Bang theory to make the case for the underlying complementarity between modern science and ancient theology.

An even more powerful case for God is made in The Language of God (Free Press, 2006) by Francis S. Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.  As co-discoverer of the human genome map, he stood in the White House as President Clinton said “Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”  To that Collins, a rigorously trained scientist, replied, “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”

To those who might be taken aback by such religious references in the context of a scientific triumph, Collins later offered the following in his introduction to The Language of God : “In my view, there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul - and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.”

I have.  I pray you can also.