Science and religion.
Faith versus certainty.
Gazing at the unveiled face of divinity.
Science and religion.
Since the Renaissance, science has driven back the bounds of religion.
Heaven was once thought to begin beyond the sphere of stars, just outside the orbit of Saturn. Modern telescopes have pushed the boundaries to the edge of the universe.
But theists no longer claim that God is just outside the last rim of the visible. God has moved to more secure accommodation - to an invisible fortress which shows not so much as a grain of mortar in the real world. Yet this is, paradoxically, His best defence. Because He cannot be inspected or measured His existence can never be disproved.
This immaterial God is quite safe against attack from science. Science can establish or disprove only testable statements and theories about the real world. It cannot endorse or discount any set of beliefs that are not testable.
In recent years scientists like Frank Tippler have begun to set themselves up as religious pundits and prophets, claiming that one scientific discovery after another "proves" the truth of God, the creation, immortality and so on. Their scientific credentials give them a spurious credibility. Of course they have a right to their beliefs and opinions. But they do not have the right to speak out on these matters in the name of science. By definition, nothing on earth or in the heavens - not even miraculous violations of natural law - can prove the existence of an immaterial entity. Even if the face of God appeared in the clouds to the whole world tomorrow, we still could not assume He was an immaterial entity.
Scientific pantheism is called scientific not because science endorses pantheism but because scientific pantheism adopts a scientific approach to Reality.
It cleaves to the Real. It sticks to the evidence. It prefers certainty over faith. It prefers simple hypotheses over complex ones, and refuses to multiply unnecessary entities. It accepts the findings of science, and accepts that Reality can often be uncomfortable.
Faith versus certainty.
Pantheism asserts that Reality - the visible, audible, touchable, tasteable world of nature and the universe - is divine. That is, it possesses most of the qualities that believers in God claim for God (see God and the cosmos) and therefore should be revered and celebrated.
These qualities include power, mystery, awe, creation, omnipresence. Nature and the universe possess these qualities indisputably and empirically, whereas transcendental gods are only known to possess them - or to exist at all - through faith, revelation, and personal imagination. Everyone has seen the divine cosmos and the sacred earth. But few people - even among believers - claim to have seen God.
In this sense pantheism is scientific, whereas theism operates in a way that is counter to scientific method. We are not talking here about the content of faith, the specific beliefs about God or supernatural human powers. Most of these are not testable at the present time, and so many scientists have little trouble adhering to them. We are talking about the very nature of faith as faith. Faith means accepting the unbelievable, unprovable or illogical on the basis of evidence that no scientist would accept in science, and no prudent person would accept as the basis of a contract
Gazing at the unveiled face of divinity.
If the Real is the divine, then just as theists try to know God better, pantheists should try to know Reality better by prolonged encounter and study.
For the pantheist science can be a deep expression of religion, as it was, for example, for Einstein. Of course this is possible for theists too. Kepler's belief that God designed the solar system on the basis of numerical harmonies led him to frame his laws of planetary orbits.
But the difference is this:
When theists look at a forest, or at a cell, or at a galaxy, they feel that they are contemplating the reflected glory of an invisible Creator, or they are staring at God's impenetrable veil.
When pantheists do so, they are directly witnessing the glory of divine Being. They are gazing on the unveiled face of divinity.
Copyright & copy: Paul Harrison 1996.
