Science and Religion

It is often helpful to approach problems from different points of view. For example, study poetry as a means to approach the process of painting; explore creativity and innovation through their embodiment in business and managerial practice; or study the relationship of science and religion in order to offer insights into the relationship of art and religion. It is in this spirit that I read Michael Heller’s book, Creative Tension:  Essays on Science and Religion (Templeton, 2003).  A professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, Poland, adjunct member of the Vatican Observatory (he has a Ph.D. in cosmology), and an ordained Roman Catholic priest, Heller’s subtle and restrained prose offers a powerful alternative to common ways that science and religion are understood, especially in light of the debate around Intelligent Design. But it also offers guidance for working in and between art and religion.

First, Heller allows science to be science. The development of science is a remarkable human achievement that has over time enshrined rationality in a specific way. Through a particular methodology (naturalism), science explores the world of observable phenomena. Nowhere does Heller criticize the rationality of science, the scientific method, or imply that it is build upon Godless principles. Ignorance of what science is and does compromises theological and philosophical work. Heller’s argues that theologians and philosophers need a much more sophisticated understanding of modern scientific innovations.

Second, Heller allows the mystery and wonder of life to emerge from science itself. He quotes Einstein, “Why is the world so comprehensible?” For Einstein the world’s comprehensibility is a mystery that science cannot explain, only venerate. Using modern quantum mechanics as his primary model, Heller argues that as science progresses this wonder and mystery only increases. He thus allows the mystery of existence to emerge from the discoveries of science itself and be expressed in its own language. The primary source of wonder and mystery for physicists is what Wigner calls, “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” Mathematics is not simply some abstract theoretical model that bears no relationship to the material structure of the cosmos. Heller explains how the aesthetic elegance of mathematics finds its counterpart in the aesthetic elegance of the world, that mathematics actually reveals the mathematical structure of the world. And so mathematics in quantum mechanics, especially the development of noncommutative geometry (that is a geometry that utilizes a "pointless" space) turns the common notion of science on its head. Theory must often occur first, through the rough contours of mathematical models, before experimentation can even begin to support and refine it. Moreover, these abstract models of mathematics are the only way to see vast portions of the universe. Through the work of Schrüdinger, Heisenberg, and Einstein, modern quantum mechanics has revealed that over 97% of the cosmos is invisible.

Third, Heller resists the temptation to run too quickly to philosophy or theology in order to find a “God of the gaps” that fits in those mysterious spaces that science, at a particular moment, can’t seem to fill.  Heller calls this “deplorable” and the product of a “lack of imagination.” It gives science the idea that God is something that can be done away with when those gaps eventually get filled. And they often do get filled. Rushed short-term victories for religion (God in the gaps) turn out eventually to be a long-term defeat (no gaps no God/or a God only of the gaps).   

And lastly, science has definite limits. It cannot justify its own rationality. It is contingent upon a more comprehensive rationality. In other words the scientific method relies on rationality, it cannot prove it through the scientific process. Therefore, science does indeed have “gaps.” Heller suggests there are only three. But they are whoppers. The first is the “ontological gap,” that is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Second is the “epistemological gap,” that is, “Why is the world comprehensible?” And finally, the “axiological gap,” that is, why is there meaning and value in all that exists?  Science cannot answer these questions, yet they are posed time and time again as scientists delve deeper into the world.  And this is where philosophy and theology of science is needed. For Heller, sciences does not merely encounter these "gaps" at the edges of exploration; they saturate the entire scientific project.

Here are a few lessons we who are interested in the relationship of art and religion can take from Heller’s observations. First, allow art to be art. Heller does not apologize for the fact that science is a human invention and evolved over time to develop a particular kind of rationality. Artistic practice must be allowed to develop in this “secular” manner as well, as the evolution of a particular kind of aesthetic practice. Does the desire to pin a “religious” tag on various artists or works of art smack of a “God of the gaps” strategy that ultimately marginalizes God and religious belief? Does the urge to lurch perhaps too quickly to theological meaning in works of art amount to a “lack of imagination?”

By allowing art to be art it enables religious questions to emerge from artistic practice itself. The result could be a clearer demarcation of what art is and what it is not; what it can do, and what it cannot. As a critic and curator, I need to be more mindful of allowing the artists themselves and their work to pose, in their own diverse aesthetic languages, the questions of the Eternal Mystery before I rush to baptize them theologically.

Is it possible that most Christian worldview talk, which provides the dominant framework for Christian participation in modern and contemporary art, is still dominated by a scientific image of the world that has yet to assimilate the mysteries of modern quantum mechanics, such as its vast invisibility, its revelation only through mathematical theory, the curving of time/space? And if it is the case that the scientific world image is one defined by Newton and not Schrüdinger, how might a new world image develop the notion of worldview in a more robust and useful way?

How does typical Christian worldview thinking about art, which emphasizes the materiality of creation, of what is seen as a “celebration of the creation,” account for the vast majority of this created cosmos to be invisible and “seen” and “touched” only through abstract mathematical models? Abstract painting and conceptual art, so despised by evangelical and Reformed worldview art writers, don’t seem so nihilistic, anti-creational, and anti-humanistic when viewed within the modern scientific world image of modern quantum mechanics.

This reminds me of the theology of the icon, in which what is “seen” is only a window through which a deeper spiritual reality is experienced. Is it possible that it is the icon that offers such a robust, “modern” world image of the cosmos? I also think about Fr. Pavel Florensky, the Russian theologian, art historian, priest, and martyr, who offered this enigmatic, yet perhaps quite "quantum" proof for the existence of God. “There exists the icon of the Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefore God exits.”

Did I mention that Florensky was first and foremost a brilliant mathematician? 

Comments

[Bruce herman]

Dan - I continue to enjoy the clarity and vitality of your thinking and your prose -- and in particular appreciate your reticence to bruise contemporary art with the rough handling of ham-fisted religious interpretation. I've encountered quite a lot of this sort of thing in some circles, and I don't respect it at all -- as you say, let the art be what it is, and don't torture it. It is amazing how easy it is to confirm our prejudices and how much care and effort actually go into receiving what is there -- not what we project onto it. George Steiner said (paraphrased) that it takes "uncanny abstention" to read the world as it is and not as it has been previously encoded for us. I think there is a corollary in "reading" art. It take a certain epistemic humility to resist baptizing our prejudices and exerting the subtle violence of heavy-handed interpretation. Thanks for the light touch you use.