“The idea of a universal Mind, or Logos, would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of theory.”– Sir Arthur Eddington
Years ago, I taught a high school history of science course for a secular classical academy in Louisville. Although our textbook was not by a Christian publisher, it was quite good in acknowledging the convictions and perspectives of the various founders of modern science, many of whom were theists or even Catholics. Among other things, the textbook delved at length into the career and achievements of Father Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), the Belgian physicist and priest who first posited the Big Bang theory.
Hence I was especially surprised to read one student’s response to an essay exam question about Fr. Lemaitre: “Lemaitre started out as a Catholic priest,” wrote this student, “but later on he decided that Science gave better answers, and then went on to became a great scientist.”
I was so startled by this answer that I had to back and look through the book again. Had I missed something? While the assigned text had given no grounds whatsoever for such a remark, I was so taken aback by its breezy, self-assured tone that I considered doing some additional research into Lemaitre’s biography on my own. Did this student somehow know something about Lemaitre that I didn’t?
Instead, however, I merely underlined the remark and, upon returning the student’s exam to him, asking what his basis was for his remark. His expression could not have been more befuddled if I had told him that the world was flat: “You mean … he was a priest his whole life?” This was a diligent student, by the way, and I am sure he had done the reading; it simply hadn’t sunk in.
Such anecdotes swiftly debunk the assumption that only religious people are influenced by dogma. In spite of the plain text, which had explicitly related Fr. LeMaitre’s belief that faith and reason are compatible, this student took it as self-evident that a devout priest could not possibly cherish science, must less make a major contribution to it.
At the outset of his new book Science at the Doorstep to God, subtitled Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death, Father Robert Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D., addresses such erroneous modern dogma. Said dogma, notes Fr. Spitzer, owes more to the success of atheist propaganda than to the statements of actual scientists. For every Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins, there is a Copernicus or Sir Arthur Eddington.
And given that the claim at stake is whether real scientists can believe in God, it is not hitting below the belt to observe that the actual achievements of Sagan and Dawkins are decidedly modest in comparison to the aforementioned believers. The pious Copernicus (who may have been a priest, although that has been disputed) opened his discussion of The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) with a tribute to the pope, and it was the theist Eddington who first confirmed relativity theory by demonstrating the curvature of light by gravity.
Anticipating the contention that Copernicus, Eddington, and the many other theist-minded titans of the Scientific Revolution were merely expressing residual cultural conventions of their day, Fr. Spitzer point to a 2009 Pew Research survey indicating that a majority of scientists “profess belief in God or a spiritual reality,” as well as to the candidly expressed opinions of numerous 20th-century Nobel Prize winners who worked well into the past century.
“We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge,” insisted biochemist Christian Anfinsen, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in RNA; Nobel laureate co-inventors of the laser Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow more or less agreed. Lists of spiritual-minded scientists hardly constitutes a proof, of course, but they do make the reader wonder.
If the general public had not been so bombarded with the idea that science equals materialism, if people had been more aware that God was important not only to Sir Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal, but also to Townes and Schawlow, might prevailing attitudes toward religion today be somewhat warmer? Long before average American is mature enough to think about the question, he has been beaten over the head with the image of a cold-blooded man in a lab coat who disdains the human experience—from religion and philosophy to art and poetry to love itself. Granted that this dehumanizing image may have proven somewhat self-fulfilling in places such as Silicon Valley, at the very least it can be said to misrepresent science’s origins in classical Christian culture.
Besides clarifying the attitudes of scientists toward metaphysical questions, Fr. Spitzer addresses those questions himself by surveying topics such as scientism, proofs for the existence of God, current theories about the beginning of the universe, the multiverse concept, and the nature of the soul as illuminated by philosophy, neurobiology, and near-death experiences. The text avoids any polemical tone, instead relying upon straightforward lines of reasoning, like the following:
If science must be falsifiable, then scientism (the view that every truth claim must be subject to scientific validation) must be false. Think about it: If science is dependent on the principle of noncontradiction and mathematics, and if these two truths are not not falsifiable by observational data (which is needed to be scientific), then mathematics and noncontradiction cannot be scientifically validated. Thus, scientism rules out the truth of the preconditions for science itself–noncontradiction and mathematics.
As an astrophysicist and tutor from my graduate school days once told me and my fellow students, it was an act of faith for Copernicus to assume that the universe is rational.
Although the book is primarily a multifaceted work of scientific apologetics, Fr. Spitzer does sometimes engage in some speculation, for the intellectual pleasure of it, as when he looks at evidence for UFOs:
Many Christian churches and the Catholic Church make no declaration about alien visitations but remain open to whatever science might observe and validate. Scientists are divided about the reality of alien visitations, but most believe that there is not enough current evidence to validate them. If visitations are truly occurring, we would have to believe that these aliens are beneficent and moral, because with technology capable of rapid interstellar (and possibly intergalactic) travel, they would be “light years” ahead of us, meaning they could easily dominate the entire planet within a few minutes. Their restraint in doing this implies that they have a moral compass and a desire to allow less developed intelligent life forms to flourish.
This reflection may seem optimistic, yet it does highlight the shortcomings of generic sci-fi “space invasion” scenarios, as in the film Independence Day, the highest-grossing film of 1996. Such unimaginative scenarios gloss over the inconceivable powers any alien invaders would have in comparison to humanity. Were mankind to contend against beings capable of crossing the gulfs between stars, the result would look less like natives contending against colonial powers than like mortals contending against Olympian gods.
Even if there are no little green men out there, we may take it on faith that there are indeed extraterrestrials–and more things in heaven and earth than have been dreamt of by natural philosophy. And Fr. Spitzer is a sure guide, whose deep faith and love of science disarm the numerous the prevalent but tired secular dogmas.
Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death
By Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J
Ignatius Press, 2023
Paperback, 315 pages
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