Guest column

The competition

Between science and religion

"We are stardust."

This is sometimes said of human beings. It is true. It follows from the Big Bang theory, first proposed 90 years ago by the Belgian mathematical physicist Georges Lemaître. He called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom."

From a tiny, intensely hot, dense moment of conception, the universe explosively expanded. As it stretched, it cooled. In the beginning, there was hydrogen and helium. Then, after 100 million years, there were stars. In the bellies of the stars were thermonuclear reactions through which other molecules were forged, including carbon and other basic elements of life. No stars: no life, no us.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by friendly astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, was the highbrow television highlight of the year. Scientifically, I found the series informative and visually compelling. Its depiction of the evolution of the eyeball, for example, was vivid and convincing.

Religiously, alas, the series was subtly but sharply opinionated and tendentiously simplistic.

These flaws mostly surfaced in the Cosmos cartoon history of the rise of modern science. Too often, the story-line seemed couched to reinforce the all too popular perception that science and religion are inherently in conflict, so that, as science advances, religion must inevitably decline. That mischievous idea dates back to Auguste Comte (1798-1857). It would hold true only if science and religion offered competing explanations for the same facts. In general, however, they do not.

Consider the evolution of the eyeball. Charles Darwin showed how eyes could organically evolve through time. It is true that his theory overthrew the notion that something as marvelous as eyesight could only come about by miraculous design. It is not true that his natural explanation replaced God.

Long before Darwin, Thomas Aquinas understood that natural events usually do have natural causes. (Aquinas believed there have been some miraculous exceptions, and I do, too.) But where the cause is natural, and the explanation scientific, that does not remove God from the picture because, according to Aquinas, even where God is not evident as a doer in the world (as with miracles), God remains present and actively involved as the doer of the world: the Creator.

For an analogy, consider Harry Potter. What caused Harry to be born? He had parents: Lily and James. In one sense, they were the cause of Harry's birth, which would have had an entirely natural explanation running back down his ancestral line, through the dawn of evolution, to the formation of the stars. (Harry Potter, too, is stardust.)

In an altogether different sense, of course, the cause of Harry's birth was J.K. Rowling, who conceived of the boy wizard and gave him life between the covers of her books. She was Harry Potter's doer, down to stardust, among all other doings in his world. For Aquinas, as the world of Harry Potter is to J.K. Rowling, so is our cosmos to its author, God.

Apparently Neil deGrasse Tyson disagrees.

"The cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be," he solemnly declares, opening the series. These are loaded words: In scripture God is named the one "who is and was and ever shall be." For Professor Tyson, the cosmos rhetorically replaces God. This suggests that through physics we can probe the depths of ultimate reality. Beyond the cosmos there is nothing further to explore.

Does science warrant such a suggestion? No. Rather than astrophysical, Professor Tyson's claim is metaphysical in scope. Strange that a series celebrating science would open by announcing someone's metaphysical opinion.

I hold a different opinion--a religious belief that, once we've fully understood the cosmos, we will have scarcely scratched the surface of all that is and was and shall be. This faith can, and must, swallow sound science whole. Many great scientists have shared it. One of the greatest of these was Georges Lemaître: Belgian mathematician, Big Bang theorist, and Catholic priest.

Christoph Keller III, interim dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, holds a doctorate in theology with a focus on religion and science. Contact him at [email protected].

Editorial on 08/10/2014

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