The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)
Science and God’s Place in the Universe
We have reached the point where the material world is more real to us than any spiritual dimension, and the scientific worldview has come to dominate how we approach the world. In modern societies, even among those who are most religious, our assumption is that any new insights into the way the world works will come through the scientific process, not through supernatural revelation. We explain things that happen around us by using scientific, not religious, concepts. The sun doesn’t rise because some divine power is moving it, but because the sun comes into view as the earth spins on its axis. Whether or not God created the earth and the sun and sent one spinning in an orbit around the other isn’t very relevant to a perspective that describes the sunrise in terms that come from scientific observation instead of divine revelation. We know that the sun rises because of events that occurred billions of years ago, not because of anything that God is doing today.
Because of this, even religious people find it hard not be drawn into what’s called a deistic view of the universe, the belief that the universe was created by God at the dawn of time, wound up like a clock, and then left to run on its own with little or no further involvement by God. We don’t see God as an active force intimately involved in the second-by-second operation of the universe, necessary to its very functioning. Instead, we have demoted God to the role of creator emeritus. As much as we want to believe that our prayers can somehow change the course of events, we reluctantly accept that any divine intervention would be so extraordinary that it would be very much unexpected. And so we usually find ourselves reduced to using the term miraculous for events that are everyday occurrences, like the birth of a child or the flight of a bumblebee.
The crisis of faith that is shaking the modern world is not so much a failure of spirituality than it is a growing awareness that the picture of God that we were raised with no longer makes sense in a world that we see through filters colored by science. These filters keep us from seeing anything that we might have otherwise thought to be supernatural or even the ordinary result of God’s action. Instead, they let us see only the explanations that fit the scientific worldview, and so we no longer really expect God to disturb our everyday lives.
Even if we don’t reach the point where we deny or even just doubt the existence of God, we at least end up leading our lives pretty much the same way that agnostics do. Our faith in God has become both shallow and hollow, so that our belief in God no longer shapes our attitudes or actions except in special circumstances. When we pray, we don’t really expect our prayers to make any real difference, or maybe even worse, we learn to water down our prayers to make sure that we won’t be disappointed when God seems to ignore our expressed desires. Instead of praying for a change in our circumstances, we pray for the ability to accept them. We move through life thinking that nothing we do makes any difference to God, that nothing we do might affect how God deals with us or the world around us. Our belief in God has become not much more than a matter of intellectual assent instead of something that actually shapes how we behave or what we expect.
This declining power of religion has been noticed by certain elements that have a vested interest in how we may or may not be controlled by religion. The result is a rising tide of religious fundamentalism that tries to reverse this trend by attacking its root, the scientific worldview itself. Believers who are swept up by this fundamentalist tide are required to accept revelation from narrowly authorized sources as the only source of truth. Ultimately, fundamentalism’s limitations restrict its ability to spread its influence throughout the general population. More importantly, fundamentalism is regressive by its very nature, and the powerfully progressive forces at work in the scientific worldview remain overwhelmingly persuasive as science continues to improve its ability to make our lives longer and more comfortable, and to explain the universe around us.
Mainstream religion, then, finds itself caught between two irreconcilable forces: religious fundamentalism and scientific fundamentalism. It must find some way to integrate the spiritual zeal of religious fundamentalism with the progressive influence of science. As a crucial part of this process, mainstream religion must avoid the trap of allowing either set of fundamentalists to control the religious agenda. The recent fixation on Darwinian evolution and, by extension, the paleontology and geology that contradict the so-called young earth theories of creationism doesn’t confront the more basic challenge that physics poses to religious belief. Evolution is really just a side show, a mere byproduct of the way that physics has pushed God’s role in the universe to the margins of our lives and of our minds. It’s not biology or geology, but physics that has forced God off of the stage. As a result, we must be able to reconcile our belief in God with physics more than with any other area of science.
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