Faith and Science

Preliminary Note

This blog post represents my thoughts and experiences, and I recognize that I lack much philosophical breadth and critical thinking training that would open further understanding to the topic. Because I love science and spirituality, I do find this particular subject very interesting and I have thought about it for many years. 

Introduction to the Age-Old Debate

"What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate, responding to Jesus Christ's testimony of self-proclaimed divinity. I'm not sure whether this question was cynical rhetoric or genuine curiosity, but if it was a genuine question, as it has been among many throughout history, it could be interpreted in a couple of ways: what is objective truth, or how does one know truth? Today I want to explore the latter inquiry: how do we know what is true? 

There are many responses to this question, with some extreme claims being that only religion tells us what is true, or only science tells us what is true. As it turns out, this exact question is the foundation of an entire branch of philosophy called epistemology, the study of how we know what we claim to know. It has been explored for millennia by some of the greatest thinkers in history. 

In academia today, it often seems that the question is whether religion or spirituality is ever a credible source of truth, and in my experience, many scholars see religion as an absurd or even shameful ideology. From a certain perspective, I see where they are coming from; history is replete with examples of dogmatic religionists, from churches forcing Galileo to recant his model of heliocentricity to the utter rejection of Darwin's theory of evolution. These scholars may also occasionally encounter those that comment things like "the universe couldn't have started as an explosion", or from my personal experience, "you really believe that we came from monkeys?". It must be very frustrating to spend years studying empirically supported physical and other sciences only to hear from religious believers that their models can't possibly be correct because an ancient book or an old man says so. 

I waste no energy to conjure evidence that scientific experiment is very good at building models of understanding and approaching truth through falsification, and there is no doubt that humankind has reaped wonderful rewards from its progress. However, science itself has limitations; it is evident that there exists dogmatism within the scientific community, particularly for those who subscribe to scientism. For example, in the novel Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, renowned anthropologist Yuval Harari writes about the early history of humankind but then suddenly begins a shifted monologue, saying "there are no gods in the universe outside of the common imagination of human beings . . .  religious myths are imagined fictions produced from collective imagination, not objective reality". Using the principles of science, how could Harari possibly know this? Did he come to this conclusion by studying the bones of these early humans? Here, Harari doesn't even use science methodology to make this claim. It seems that his statement is formed on the basis of conjecture or emotion. In any case, I reject the idea that one can truly know the metaphysical solely on the basis of science. Indeed, the word metaphysical means "beyond the physical". While science can certainly disprove some religious claims, I again impress that the scientific method is, ironically, incapable of omniscience. 

The best examples I know of this are Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. In 1931, the Austrian-American logician Kurt Gödel mathematically proved that within any consistent logical system (like mathematics used for science) there must exist truths that cannot be proven or disproven by their own axioms. In other words, it is impossible to find all truth using a logical system because the system's own rules get in the way. Perhaps a bit sadly, his findings shattered the ambitions of many mathematicians who thought everything in the universe could be described using mathematics. Some theoretical physicists cite these theorems to suggest that consciousness may not be purely computational, but I digress. Our best knowledge of science tells us that logic alone is incapable of capturing all truth. In layman's terms, science cannot prove everything.

Accordingly, I return to my thoughts on religion. Can theology prove all truth? I've already mentioned the dogmatism of the devout, so the natural conclusion would be that it historically has not, and therefore does not. Religion is imperfect because many of its constructs are intertwined with imperfect philosophies by imperfect men. However, I don't believe that this dismisses religion as an arbiter of truth. 

This leads us to faith. If science is a tool for the observable, faith is the tool for the unprovable.

On Faith

Why is faith a requirement of spirituality? I know that to the scientific community, religious faith seems ridiculous. If gods are real, why can't we observe them? Why do they not descend to the earth, appear to all mankind, and show themselves to us? For some time, this was a significant mental hurdle that I didn't know how to overcome, especially considering that God wants us to strictly obey a set of commandments. If He expects everyone to follow those commandments, then why not set the expectations more clearly? Why involve any level of ambiguity at all?

If God appeared in the sky every morning, faith would be replaced with compliance; perhaps more importantly, love would be replaced with . Elder Dale Renlund, a leader of my church, stated beautifully that "[God's] goal in parenting is not to have His children do what is right; it is to have His children choose to do what is right". 

To be continued!