The method of inquiry used in the natural sciences stands on the assumption that all things can be explained in natural terms without reference to supernatural factors. In other words, these sciences pursue their inquiry as if God did not exist. Science became science when it ceased to pose questions to which it was unable to provide answers.
My aim here is to address the claim that the Christian faith is irreconcilable with science. In the Middle Ages, no one thought about atheism or questioned the existence of God. We need only recall the great physicist Isaac Newton who, as late as the seventeenth century, stated that atheism—i.e. non-belief in God—was so preposterous a notion that to all intents and purposes it attracted no adherents. That is the way things were. Today atheism is one of world’s religions with its own congregation of adherents.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the development of better observation techniques such as the telescope enabled science to determine that the Sun was a star and that there existed billions of such stars. Our sun was but one star of a vast stellar system we call the Milky Way or Galaxy, which we know now to comprise around 300 billion stars. We see that the Sun and the entire Solar System including Earth is only a tiny fragment of this stellar system. To get a sense of the magnitude of this disk-shaped system, we might imagine reducing the distance between the Earth and the Sun (150 million kilometers) to one millimeter. On that scale, the diameter of the stellar system would be six thousand kilometers (i.e. more or less the distance between Central Europe and the United States). In the late nineteenth century science also claimed that this stellar system was suspended in an infinite void, which we call space. We supposed then that time was also infinite. Thus local changes occurred among the stars: some were created, while others disintegrated—but the universe remained infinite.
The sudden advance enjoyed by the natural sciences and the development of better techniques gave rise to a particular method of inquiring into nature. Since we could study only those magnitudes that we could measure and describe mathematically, we assumed as a matter of principle that we were interested only in material nature. This methodological assumption is sometimes called methodological naturalism. Naturalism assumes that only nature exists; that nothing exists apart from nature. Quite simply, science functions as if God did not exist. This is her methodological principle.
But the euphoria associated with the scientific and technological progress of the nineteenth century caused this principle to be applied beyond its intended purpose. Scientists began to apply this chosen methodology—useful as it was—to all of existence. They began to foster the illusion that only nature existed, that nothing existed apart from nature. This gave rise to what we call metaphysical or ontological naturalism: the supposition that nothing apart from nature exists. Such a supposition is no longer science, but an ideology. The ideology became the basis of atheism—i.e. the rejection of any reality beyond that of nature.
The sudden advance of science and technology in the late nineteenth century inclined a growing number of people, especially in scientific circles, to the belief that nature was self-sufficient. Consequently, there was no need to reckon with transcendent realities outside of nature. This ideology seized the minds of people from diverse fields. Darwinism reinforced this ideology. Darwinism held that man was a product of biological evolution—indeed, of the entire universe, but especially of biological evolution. From the standpoint of a naturalistic ideology, such a supposition was necessary, since if we assumed that nothing outside of nature existed, then of course man had to be a product of nature, and his consciousness had to be a product of nothing more than highly organized matter. In effect, the human mind was reduced to the level of mere brain activity. This is perhaps the main rationale feeding the current of thought which we call scientific materialism or, simply, scientific atheism.
However, the situation changed dramatically in the twentieth century. Further study of the cosmos led to the discovery of several striking facts. The universe was seen to be expanding; that is to say, there was a point in the past when the galaxies found themselves very close to each other. That point in time could be determined with a fair degree of accuracy: approximately fourteen billion years ago. This meant that light could not travel toward us from a distance in excess of fourteen billion light years. It became apparent that we could not observe increasingly greater distances in the universe ad infinitum. We could not probe ever deeper into the universe as it was thought in the nineteenth century. To get a sense of this, we might imagine scaling the diameter of our Galaxy down to 1 mm. The observable universe would then have a radius of around 140 meters. In effect, we find ourselves inside a sphere, and whatever lies outside of this sphere we are unable to observe. This then was the first problem: our scope of observation (i.e. the scope of our scientific inquiry) was limited—and this in both spatial and temporal terms. For, if we looked back 14 billion years, we would be going back to the moment when the universe was very hot (in excess of three thousand degrees), and whatever past the universe had then remains unobservable.
Moreover, it follows from the fact of the expanding universe that matter is being dispersed very rapidly—rapidly in cosmic terms—with the result that life will be unsustainable at some point in the distant future of the universe. It follows that human life will be unable to exist into eternity, but must have a limit. Even space travel will not save the situation, for the universe will be totally unsuitable for habitation. In 1917, drawing on his general theory of relativity, Einstein determined that we could only make sense of the universe as a closed system with a finite volume.
We can see then that the latest inquiries into the macro-cosmos have dealt a severe blow to the materialistic enthusiasm of the nineteenth century. Recent studies of the micro-cosmos have also thrown physicists into dismay, since these studies have yielded totally unexpected results. When we observe matter, we see that it consists of very small particles—of atoms and subatomic particles. It turns out that the laws governing these tiny particles—what we call quantum physics—are quite different from the physical laws governing large objects. Above all, it turns out that we cannot predict the phenomena that will occur. In general, we can only posit the probability of a given occurrence and have no certainty of its existence. Thus in quantum physics we do not see what Newton observed in the macro-cosmos. We can calculate the movements of planets thousands or millions of years back or forward in time, but in quantum physics we can only posit the probability of something happening to an object if we could observe it.
Quantum physics does not describe the shifting of objects in space and time, but rather the shifting of probabilities. The laws of quantum physics relate to the matter of chance and not to the objects themselves. As long as an object such as an atom or subatomic particle remains unobserved, it is only an assemblage of chances. No physical parameters can be ascribed to it. Physical parameters relate only to the process of measurement. This is an astounding fact, since it undermines the reality of matter’s existence.
It turns out then that every physical object can be identified with a finite body of information. An object may not exist and yet constitute a body of data. The question arises: how to explain this? What philosophy, what metaphysics is required to explain these quantum phenomena that we find so astounding? Scientific materialism, which prides itself so highly on being pure science, fails in the realm of quantum physics. It fails because matter can be reduced to a body of data, and when we do not observe it, we can ascribe nothing to it. Thus a new metaphysics is needed to explain the reality lying behind the laws of quantum physics.
Every inquirer into nature must accept the obvious truth that if one studies a facet of reality then it must be rational and capable of being understood, be it an atom, a massive system, or a living organism—in short, it must be a knowable object. The non-believing scientist believes that human reason arrives at a partial, interim knowledge, but that with the advance of science it will probe ever deeper into this reality, etc. etc. But this process of knowledge cannot continue ad infinitum, since there are limits we shall never transcend.
The believing scientist differs from the non-believing scientist in that he accepts the existence of a general, all-encompassing act of knowing and understanding. The believing scientist holds that there exists someone who comprehends all things—not that we are attaining by great effort to comprehend the discrete parts of nature, but that there exists an act of absolute understanding and knowing, which comprehends all things. We may identify this total act of understanding and knowing with God. It is God who knows all things. We may say that God commands a knowledge than which no greater knowledge can be imagined. Omniscience is the word we sometimes use to express this. Simply put, God is the One whose attribute is that He knows all things. It is precisely this attribute which traditional monotheism holds as one of the most fundamental of all things.
Now plain logic tells us that a self-contained idea is inaccessible to rational reasoning. We cannot comprehend such a thing. It follows that God who is Omniscience will remain a mystery that we will never come to understand through rational inquiry. God can reveal Himself to us, but without His help we can never understand Him through analysis based on rational premises.
Moreover, God is love. Our very existence attests to His creating us out of love. We are only a part of His omniscience—that part which He endowed with two important attributes: we are acting subjects and we have free will. God created us in order that we might enter into a relationship with Love—absolute Love, which is the Triune God. Without the assumption that God is tri-personal, our very existence, our very creation would make no sense; nor could we explain why we must have free will. If God created us out of love, then we must have the possibility of choice. Thus God had to create for us a domain of possible action, which enables us to declare ourselves for or against love. We experience this domain in our physical bodies, which have been situated in the universe.
Now bear in mind this: the universe had to have been created out of omniscience, since outside of omniscience nothing exists. Thus we can imagine our universe, which we perceive as a highly complex reality, as something that God generates in our minds by providing us with appropriate bits (quanta) of knowledge.
Pure speculation, one might say. But just such a metaphysics, ontology, or structure of reality squares with what quantum physics tells us. Why? Because if it is the case that the universe is only a collection of data and I do not inquire into a fact or carry out an observation, then all I have is an array of possibilities. Only when I inquire into a fact does God give us the answer. Of course, the answer came from God before all ages, for He is Omniscience Himself and has known what He will answer since eternity. Furthermore, if I have free will, I must have the possibility of action, i.e. I must always be able to choose from an array of possibilities. But quantum physics tells us that we can determine only the probability of what will happen. And so it is indeed. Until God makes the determination, matter remains in a state of suspension. We have only an array of possibilities. All this is in conformity with the mathematical formalism underlying quantum physics.
Consider also the consequences of such a metaphysical construct. If man did not exist, there would be no universe. But, as we stated earlier, the universe is fourteen billion years old. Here again quantum physics sheds light on the matter. As long as an object goes unobserved, it is only an array of possibilities. There is nothing we can ascribe to it. It follows then that the universe arose when the first man came into being. Out of an entire array of possible universes, one was created that could sustain the kind of man God determined to bring into existence. This too is borne out by study of the cosmos. The universe is so constructed that even the slightest change in its structure would render human life unsustainable. The fact that we can observe the universe’s past is only a projection of our imaginations based on the laws of physics governing the universe at the present moment.
Thus we have an entirely different way of looking at the theory of evolution. Of course, in studying fossils, we have a projection of moving back in time, but the real existence of the universe may be like the existence of man. The obvious conclusion is that an ideology based on Darwinism is untrue. Man is not a product of the universe. He is not merely a genetically modified animal who acquired consciousness by dint of his own efforts, etc. etc. From the standpoint of quantum physics, the situation is quite the reverse. We can say that the naturalistic approach is ill founded. From what we at present really know about the universe, a metaphysics based on the concept of a Triune Personal Omniscience is far superior to metaphysical naturalism, since it is capable of explaining more; and, furthermore, it is in perfect conformity with the teachings of the Catholic Church. There are no grounds for the claim that Christian beliefs are incompatible with science or that Christianity is a hidebound construct. From the standpoint of contemporary science, of this most refined contemporary branch of science, which deals with both the micro- and macro-world, the marginalization of Christianity from social life—Christophobia—is totally unjustified.