I have heard it said that you should not care about what a man thinks about anything unless you first know what he thinks about everything. That is, a man’s general worldview affects everything about him, and is perhaps the most important thing about him to know. It is unfortunate, then, that too many of us spend so little time reflecting on how we view the stage upon which we find ourselves playing out this drama we call human history, and how much of our thinking on the subject we allow to be outsourced to the general cultural climate of our time.
That climate is, as it has always been, one of idolatry; it is only the specific idols of the era that change, and even those only so much. Two thousand years ago, Christ had warned us that we could not serve both God and Mammon—a Canaanite deity who, like his Classical equivalent Pluto, was appropriately the god of both the underworld and wealth—but we do try, do we not? Perhaps no culture has gone as far as ours has in its attempt to completely invert the message of Christ about riches and their danger into Gordon Gekko’s Gospel that “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” and the suggestion that financial success is a perfect barometer of one’s American piety.
But money is not the only god of our idolatry, and perhaps not even the most important, now that a taste of plague and its accompanying closings has shown us that an economy which cannot pause for a few months without risking total ruination is perhaps not the best way to organize a world (Let us hope, against all prior evidence to the contrary, that we take the lesson to heart). Science is also an idol for us, one that we both love and fear, as is appropriate for such a jealous deity. Today, anyone labeled a “scientist,” even if it is a science like evolutionary psychology with a specialty in memetic theory (indeed, we have gone so far down the rabbit hole that some of us are especially prone to listen to such people) is allowed to pontificate about practically any topic, and we are supposed to accord their pontifications a special weight and authority. Because science is speaking.
But the man of science is a poor philosopher, as one of their own—a minor figure by the name of Albert Einstein—once observed; and usually, he is an even worse theologian. Any serious consideration of the actual statements of the various men of popular science on record can give you example after example. Whether it be Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking, each is prone to make non-scientific claims about philosophy or religion that any adolescent who regularly attended Sunday school could see as faulty—if not for the aura of authority conferred by the moniker “scientist.”
But—and this is at least one of the points I wish to make here—that aura of authority is false. Being a scientist does not make one an expert on all things, and especially not on Everything. If someone is a scientist, that does not even necessarily qualify him to discuss every matter scientific, much less matters outside science. If you doubt this, just imagine asking Richard Dawkins to explain quantum physics to you. It would be no strike against him that his explanation would probably be no more informative than mine, since each of us would be speaking outside his special field. “Science” is a very broad umbrella term, covering a wide variety of different sciences—physical, biological, social, etc.—each of which has its own body of knowledge and theory; its own object of investigation and methods for investigating. Each field focuses on a very specific area, and it is this specialist focus—along with empirical techniques of verification, replication and corroboration—that empowers it to advance in knowledge so rapidly, making the sciences the envy of so many other fields, where new discoveries are not guaranteed to be a regular occurrence.
But all that specialization, though useful for rapidly expanding knowledge, is of limited help to those trying to build or preserve a society, a culture, a community. If you accord pontifical authority to men and women whose professional training is designed to give them tunnel vision, don’t be surprised if the world they describe to you sounds like a nasty, dirty, wet hole, full of the ends of worms and an oozy smell.
So, when Tyson, or Dawkins, or the late Dr. Hawking tell you that the cosmos is everything that was, is, or ever will be; that the universe is just chance and necessity operating with blind, pitiless indifference towards us humans; or that no god is needed to light the blue touch paper of Creation, do feel free to ignore them, because they are speaking of matters beyond their ken.
Let us listen to the scientists when they tell us what they have learned from their science of what the world is made of, or how its pieces interact. Let us thank them for the technology their science has enabled, which makes our lives immeasurably more comfortable than our ancestors’, if a bit too hurried at times. But when they speak of science disproving God, or purpose, or spirit, they confuse method with metaphysics. If you examine a vibrating string visually, you will detect no music, for to do that, you must not look, but listen. Science does not show us God, because it may look for tiny, vibrating strings, but it never listens for the still, small voice. That is not in its nature.
Which brings me to my point. If the man of science is a poor philosopher, he is a fortiori an even poorer theologian (unless, perhaps, he is also a theologian, professional or amateur; but even then, they remain separate roles). To complement and complete the physical picture of our world science gives us, we need a picture of the rest of Everything. And for that, we need the theologian, and Orthodoxy.
I will not mince words here. There is truth in science and there is truth in religion. For one, read Newton and Einstein; Plank and Schrodinger; read Hawking; read Isaac Asimov (one popular science writer who, though irreligious, never, so far as I know, spoke ill of religion as harshly as some of his fellows did. Even his friend Arthur C. Clarke, who thought religion a form of insanity, never spoke as did Dawkins and Hawking et alia). For the other, read Jeremiah and the other Hebrew prophets; Jesus and St. Paul; Athanasius, Basil the Great and the Gregories (Nyssa, Nazianzus, & Palamas). That will do to begin.
Of course, to deny that there is Christian truth outside of Orthodoxy in the strict sense would be most illogical; Western strands of the faith have given us great theologians, philosophers, and writers (I, for example, am a great fan of both Gilbert Keith Chesterton and William Lane Craig). And if anyone wishes to show us how to fill the gap left by the sciences with a vision taken from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion, I would be the first to wish to read such a thing. Truth is a unity, and any truth found anywhere must be compatible with all truth everywhere—I would accept that as an axiom. But if you would fully know the truth, why not begin with the one who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”—and then rose from the dead (among, perhaps, other reasons) to prove his point?
That, to be frank, is why I am writing here, on this site. It is because I believe that Christianity in general, and Orthodoxy in particular, ties it all together (if you feel the same of a different religious vision, by all means, let us all hear from you. Or contact me here. I would love to interact with someone else who cares as I do about such things). It is the thing that fills the gaps; not the gaps left by questions science has not yet answered, but gaps that science cannot and never will fill because of the type of questions it asks. And those gaps make up more of the Map of the Real than science—even in some hypothetical complete form—ever will.
Scientists, when they really get going—and by scientists, I usually mean physicists, who claim that their field studies the question “What is the nature of the Universe?” (where “Universe” seems for them to mean “reality itself”)—will tell you that science shows us the Mind of God. Ken Wilber once put this in perspective when he said, “maybe, but only when God is thinking about dirt.” As much value as I place on physics, and physicists (If God had granted me as much facility with maths as with words, I might have tried to be one of them), they still only deal with what Wilber calls “Flatland,” the horizontal realm of the physical universe, as opposed to the vertical dimension of the spiritual.
Huston Smith used a similar image, when he said that there were four religious personality types, who lived together in (or on) a house where each floor was a two-way mirror: transparent from above, reflective from below. The atheist lives on the ground floor and sees only the physical world. The next two floors are occupied by the theist and the monotheist, respectively. The theist lives in a world filled with spirits, while the monotheist, without necessarily denying the plurality of spirits, focuses instead on the Great Spirit which is above all, and is in a different logical category from everything else, as a figure is different from the paper it is drawn upon, or even the artist who draws it. On the roof dwells the mystic. From the roof he can perceive not only that the Great Spirit is, but that, in a way, nothing else is; we only exist—for in him we live and move and have our being.
From such a perspective, even the four-tiered Multiverse described by Max Tegmark in Our Mathematical Universe (a book I highly recommend) is contained within Wilber’s Flatland, or Smith’s ground floor. As grand as such an idea is, it still leaves out Wilber’s vertical dimension, Smith’s higher floors; it leaves out the last element in the statement in the Nicene Creed that the “One God, the Father Almighty” in whom we believe is “Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things [here it comes] visible and invisible.
That is where Orthodoxy comes in. It tells us about those things invisible of which science cannot speak (and so, by Wittgenstein’s dictum, it should be silent; but instead it too often shouts). This is not the place to go into specifics, for that would take us too long. For now, let us take away this image: the image of a world very large, not just in space and time (as science has shown us), but very large and rich in being and reality, both physical and spiritual. Science may never show us purpose or meaning, but that is because it is not equipped to detect them. They are part of the higher levels of the house, the realm above the Flatland of science’s marvelous, yet ultimately two-dimensional vision. We do ourselves a disservice when we let scientists convince us that what science cannot sense is unreal.
