By Robert Royal
Surveys of young people show that many lose their faith because they believe science has refuted religion. Among many other factors, this error is a major challenge for the Church, one that does not receive nearly the attention it deserves. I thought of this when my old friend Phil Lawler and I were exchanging emails a few weeks ago (always enlightening) and discovered that we both maintain a kind of parallel interest in trying to understand quantum theory.
He does so to keep up, as much as a non-specialist can, with a significant intellectual advance of our time (as the now-beatified Fulton Sheen did). I do it, I think, because a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I entered college as a physics major. Years later, I discovered with relief that the young Socrates had also studied physics because, like me, he wanted to know the nature of things.
Well, the mathematics (which I had always been good at) began to seem increasingly fictional to me. I now know that they are not. But that kind of mathematics requires another gear in the head, and I didn’t have it. So, like the mature Socrates, I took other paths to truth, though I still follow, as an amateur, quantum mechanics and other scientific advances.
I “follow the science,” but not in the sense in which that expression is used today. In its classical formulation, science is a “value-free” pursuit, magnificent for discovering truths about energy and matter, and about the space-time continuum in which we live. And all the more valuable the more it adheres to its proper domain, that of the value-free. But this raises a question: how is it that otherwise intelligent people write on social media or put up yard signs that say “Follow the science,” as if science could tell us how to live?
It is clearly a tactic that invokes the prestige of modern science to pressure us: to accept things like abortion (even though the science of embryology shows that there is a living human being, with unique DNA, from the moment of conception); to minimize the differences between men and women, which are many and demonstrable far beyond the XX/XY chromosomal binary. “THE Science,” it seems, should also lead us to consider homosexuality, “trans” people, non-traditional families, etc., as “normal,” despite social science surveys showing their correlation with unhappiness and various psychological and social disorders.
There are sciences that guide life (theology, philosophy, ethics), but, followed properly, they lead in very different directions. Curiously, there are hundreds of very good books, old and new, and websites that clarify the crucial distinction between the natural sciences and the sciences that constitute wisdom. But with little effect.
Which is remarkable, given that it is precisely the failure to make this distinction that prevents many people, especially the young, from understanding that following only the physical sciences has led precisely to the sense of aimlessness and meaninglessness that surrounds us today. As the American physicist Steven Weinberg wrote in his influential book The First Three Minutes of the Universe: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
That is partly true, but tragically false.
It is partly true from the perspective of value-free science, from which ends and meaning were excluded by method. But it is tragically, catastrophically false as the only credible explanation not only of human life, but of the order, truth, and beauty of the universe itself.
Phil Lawler remarked in our exchange that he does not fully understand quantum theory. (Even scientists say they don’t; Richard Feynman, with notable charm). But that theory has convinced Phil that science can recognize that there are realities we do not see, and that in principle we cannot see. Just think of the experience of people who have “died” and returned with astonishing and similar accounts.
After our email exchange, I had what the French call l’esprit d’escalier, that is, something occurred to me that I should have said. Non-believers often claim that there is no evidence in our world that God exists. But that only reflects their cultural poverty: the entire Christian tradition affirms that, of course, God does not exist in this world like a star or a pagan deity. He is the Creator, outside the universe, and therefore cannot be “observed” within it.
But one more step is needed (I apologize to professional theologians, philosophers, and scientists for attempting to describe here in a simple way what they treat much better within their own disciplines).
My high school physics teacher, Daniel Kennedy, gave me an idea that has stayed with me ever since, even regarding other topics. I asked him how light can be both particle and wave, which seems impossible. He replied: “Well, you can’t imagine it, but the equations work.” Just like the quantum calculations that make possible all kinds of devices we use every day.
And here is where following science proves useful in a curious way. You also cannot imagine God. Technically, I mean. He is obviously not an old man with a beard sitting on a cloud, as some artists have depicted Him.
You cannot imagine Him because images are within time and space. St. Augustine explained this more than 1,500 years ago in the last three books of the Confessions. An example: if you draw a circle and call it the universe, and place God at a point outside, that “outside” is still in the drawing on the same plane as the inside. But God, Heaven, the entire supernatural realm is not a “place” as we know it. It belongs to a different (supernatural) order that we cannot see, but which we know in part by reflecting on its effects and, with greater certainty, by Revelation.
And here is another analogy taken from “string theory,” another scientific advance according to which (as I understand it) certain invisible subatomic realities give rise to our world by vibrating and producing something like a musical note, like that of a vibrating string. This resonates with me especially because I believe that Tolkien’s account of Creation in The Silmarillion, in which Eru Ilúvatar sings the world into existence, is the best analogy ever made of Genesis.
Quantum mechanics, string theory, Tolkien, God. Follow the science.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.