Science and the Christian Faith
With due apology for harping on a final aspect of the epistemological string I have been twanging again and again: there is still an important consideration not to be passed over or brushed aside. Even if the genuineness of the geocentric theory were to be warranted by the facts, the Goulds and Asimovs of our age, I realize, would not be put out of countenance in the least. They might grant us the probable or apparent existence of a Something or Someone, an Intelligence acting in and through the Intelligent Universe.(129) Yet, trying to clinch my case by pointing a Hoyle, a Jastrow, and all their variegated compatriots to that analogy of Archdeacon Paley’s watchmaker will not make Christians of these sincere seekers for supra-sensible truth. They may well with the Athenians of St. Paul’s day become theists paying homage to an Unknown God, to a Maker, but nothing more – if even that much! For when said Archdeacon finds a watch on crossing a heath(l30), he may indeed infer that this object has been produced by a watchmaker, because he has seen, or has been told by trustworthy witnesses, that watchmakers design and fabricate such timepieces. However: analogies, I must agree with Hume, are not very compelling arguments. A watch is not exactly a Universe, and who has ever noticed a Creator creating Universes? Furthermore: whether the nowhere to be seen artisan who made the watch in case is a scoundrel or a saint – Paley cannot conclude that from his find. Only after using it for a few days he will be able to tell us whether the maker is an excellent craftsman or a clumsy niggler.
From the day of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum to Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and until the end of our time and age, these defects always did and always will greatly diminish the force of the argument from design as a tool in Christian apologetics, which above all has to account for the origin of evil – a task natural theology is unable convincingly to tackle. Grant the Omnipotent and Greatest of all Watchmakers high up there in the sky the creation of those constructs built of subatomic particles everywhere around us, together with our sensorial ability to transform these aggregates of quarks into collective representations, that is: into the things we see. Yet, looking at His handiworks here below, the secularists will say that in any case He has bungled the job. That this prima facie seems to be true, I do not, as already said, deny. Disastrous “Acts of God” in nature, terminal cancer wards in hospitals, devilish deeds, hatred, famines, poisonous snakes, malformed babies – what loving Great Father would subject His children to such calamities, which by definition He should be powerful enough to ward off? And even more to the point: consider the twentythousand plus Christian denominations, each of them claiming to be right with regard to the doctrines on which all the other ones are wrong. It appears that His Spirit is not even strong enough to keep His disciples in line. A real benevolent all-wise and all-powerful Divinity ought to do better!
Agreed – again at first sight, that is. But the first cue to a worthier and less hasty appraisal the atheists and questioning theists have in that “ought”.(131) For from where do we get, if not from a moral Maker, this standard that a priori enables us to be sure what “ought” and “ought not” to be the case? Around us and in us, our thoughts accusing or else excusing God and one another, and our own selves? Are there not even pains and deprivations we gladly suffer for a desirable purpose? What, as Thomas Hardy heard Nature ask, if “some high Plan betides, as yet not understood, of evil stormed by good?” What if He, Who knows the end from the beginning, needed the presently damaged Creation as a necessary prelude and probation for the Golden Age to come? What, as from Thomas Aquinas to our days many good and wise men have maintained, the world that now is must be the best possible way to achieve the best possible world into which we shall be resurrected by a God, Who is love? When Hardy, in the line following the one just quoted, deems us to be “the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides”, he is wrong. We are not expendable pawns in an unknowable Great Game, but precious in the sight of God.
Castles in Spain, dim-witted daydreams? I think not. However to expound the severe rationality of that “way”, as the Bible calls it, is to engage in a theodicy. And to repeat a remark already made: such a theodicy is a subject too high for a paper which, when all is said and done, merely pleads the desirability of a tentative this-worldly step aimed at underscoring the credibility of a Great Plan. That which may be known of God, His eternal power and Godhead, is manifest in us and understood by the things that are made. His Great Plan we have to believe until it shall be revealed at its completion.
So far as the philosophical and religious aspects of the issue are concerned, which – sound reason will acknowledge – cannot be solved by reason. On the other hand I ask the reader to realize: Christianity is not only what outsiders might well conclude it to be from observing the antics of the electronic soul-savers among my brethren in the faith.