Random thoughts about a not so random universe

Maybe it’s because I’m working on some writing about the relationship between science and religion, faith and reason in the modern culture and trying too hard. Surrounded by papers and books on these topics, I put on a Chicago Bulls game in the background just for escapism from Chicago politics and the bull(s) on so many blogs in the ‘comments’ section who do not recognize the decorum of civil debate on evolution and creation.

It’s a pleasant distraction, this game, until the commercial breaks come on with inane clips from sitcoms I’ve never seen and never will, the sum of which tells me that society is in free fall if that’s our family entertainment these days. Do people really talk to each other this way, I’m wondering….? It’s so degrading and insulting.

Okay, back to work. So my scan of current headlines recycles in the background, and I look it over for one more momentary distraction, when I see that First Things has this: Michael Novak on Science and Religion.

Maybe it’s because of all of the above, but this is one piece I can’t parse down. Read the whole thing. Novak’s acuity on this topic is admirable.

Snips? How about every paragraph? How about this:

At its root, the notion of one single Creator who knew what He was doing “before time was,” and then chose to do it at the time and in the way of His choosing, enabled some humans to know by anticipation that human inquiry is good. Human inquiry is noble, and just, and with high probability will be rewarded by trustworthy knowledge. If God is good (and the Torah taught us that He is), then it is good to labor diligently to deepen our knowledge of His entire created world, and all things in it.

This is not an either/or proposition. Novak nails it. He’s in the zone here.

This idea of a transcendent Creator assures us that in examining and experimenting with nature, we are violating no taboo, and not defiling God. It is through experimentation that we come to understand and to appreciate the work of His creative genius. By contrast, those peoples who identified their God with some creature within creation—the serpent, the jaguar, the rain—were afraid, lest by inquiry or experiment they might arouse His anger. It is by experiment that, today, many who do not believe in an intelligent Creator encounter the intelligibility that suffuses all things. Even unbelievers, by their actions if not their words, show their confidence in the unified intelligibility of all things. This confidence is the cultural patrimony bequeathed them by generations of believers.

This is only an introduction of Novak’s new book, No One Sees God. It is a must-read and will go to the top of my stack, as I work on projects combining science and religion.

Today, roughly half of all scientists are atheists. Yet, insofar as they are scientists, they share the same confidence that the sacrificing of one’s whole life to the pursuit of asking questions is a noble and worthy vocation. In this conviction, they act as if they believed in God.

(emphasis added)

Perhaps some of them see this old belief in a Creator as a scaffolding that was necessary for building up the edifice of science, but that we can now safely kick away.

(brilliant line)

But they would do well to recall that poignant passage in Nietzsche, in which Zarathustra hears that God is dead. Contemplating what the death of God means for the death of reason, Nietzsche writes, “Zarathustra wept.”

If God is dead, so is reason. The ultimate meaningless of everything is assured. Zarathustra wept.

Judging from these sitcom commercials, ultimate meaningless prevails.

But on the back jacket of this book lying next to me, Creation and Evolution, is a quote from Benedict that reassures.

Ultimately it comes down to the alternative: What came first? Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, strangely enough brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason. The latter, however, would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless. As Christians we…believe that at the beginning of everything is the eternal Word, with Reason and not Unreason.

Flipping the book back to the front, it begins with these words…

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.

— Sermon of Pope Benedict XVI at the Mass for the inauguration of his pontificate

Take heart.

Meanwhile, this has been one heck of a Bulls game.