thesis statement using science to understand god

Should believers use science to make the case for God?

Responding to Eric Metaxas's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal concerning the scientific evidence suggesting a creator, Francis Beckwith writes at The Catholic Thing that Metaxas "confuses a question of natural science with a question of natural theology."

Beckwith asks:

Is the rational basis for believing in His existence really dependent on the deliverances of modern science? Should one calibrate the depth of one’s faith on the basis of what researchers tell us about the plausibility of the “God hypothesis” in recent issues of the leading peer-reviewed science journals? The answer to all three question is no, since God is not a scientific hypothesis. For this reason, it is equally true that advances in our scientific knowledge cannot in principle count against the existence of God.

Professor Beckwith invites the reader to "suppose in a few years scientists tell us, after further research, new discoveries, and confirmed theories, that the arising of life in the universe is not that improbable after all. What then happens to Metaxas’ God? He is now superfluous, and Metaxas would have to concede that theists are once again irrational, as they apparently were when the (temporarily obsolete) God hypothesis was down for the count the last time science threw its best punch."

I understand what Prof. Beckwith is saying, and I am grateful he has made this important distinction. I think most would agree, in the words of the title of his post, that "God is not a scientific hypothesis." However, I'm not sure Metaxas goes as far as Beckwith thinks he does.

I don't read Metaxas as arguing that God's existence is "dependent on the deliverances of modern science" (Beckwith's words) or as urging people to calibrate their faith based on current data in astronomy and astrophysics. Rather, I understand Metaxas to be advancing a more limited claim (and a claim, to be fair, which has been around for some time): the claim that the case for God's existence is helped in big ways by what we know about the origin of organic life and the origin of the universe. That's it. I don't read Metaxas as staking God's existence on that data, such that if the data were disproved or radically altered, Metaxas would be without an argument for God.

Robert Spitzer, S.J., in his New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy , drawing upon basically the same data as Metaxas, makes a similar point. After reviewing the research and breakthroughs that show how unlikely it is that a universe like ours—i.e., one hospitable to human life—should have come about, Spitzer notes that the "enormity of the differential between non-anthropic and anthropic values of our universe's constants may be likened to a monkey typing out Hamlet (without any recourse to the play) by random tapping on the keys of a typewriter. Needless to say, it requires belief to explain this occurrence by pure chance." He goes on:

If one were to come into a room where such a monkey had been typing randomly for a month, and were to discover twelve sheets of perfect Shakespearean prose, one could reasonably and responsibly believe that someone intelligent (and possessing a fine knowledge of Shakespeare) had snuck into the room and helped the monkey. Alternatively, one might believe that the monkey had a random stroke of luck that allowed a conspiracy of coincidences unimaginably remote to occur by pure chance. In one case, one believes in an intellect that one did not see. In the other case, one believes that an unbelievably improbable occurrence took place by pure chance.

Either way, Spitzer notes, someone has to make a choice: Either one believes that there is intention—mind—behind the creation of the text, or there is not. The analogy makes it clear. For Spitizer, "it would seem that the immensity of the difference between anthropic and non-anthropic values of our universal constants provides reasonable and responsible rationale, for belief in supernatural design."

Metaxas framed it similarly: "Doesn't assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?"

In other words: What is a more reasonable belief? Belief in pure chance, or belief in a Creator? I think Metaxas is basically saying what Fr. Spitzer and others have said: given the information we now have, it seems that God, and not chance, is the more sound explanation.

Read Prof. Beckwith's column in full here .

John Fitzgerald 9 years 4 months ago I think it's the case that, given enough time and monkeys one will eventually type out Hamlet. Is there a statistical argument to the contrary?

JR Cosgrove 9 years 4 months ago Yes, it would take an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of monkeys to even get a few verses of Hamlet let alone the whole play. This is the ruse that atheist play, namely that it just takes enough random events to get anything when the opposite is true. The numbers are staggering to just get simple things. See the short video above on the fine tuning of the universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpIiIaC4kRA

John Fitzgerald 9 years 4 months ago Thanks for the video. I'll watch it. Regarding your point that science can't explain certain things, I think you need to add the word "now" or "yet." There will be advances in our understanding.

your point that science can't explain certain things, I think you need to add the word "now" or "yet."

Roberto Blum 9 years 4 months ago maybe you haven't read "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter" by Terrence Deacon. In this book you get a probable and rational naturalistic hypothesis to explain the emergence of complexity (CAD) and information in matter, meaning life and mind as epiphenomena. How can you afirm that " I never met an honest atheist. They must distort to justify their beliefs." I suppose you are able to read others' minds which of course is something only God can do. Well, maybe you too can. Congratulations.

Roberto Blum 9 years 4 months ago Even if the monkeys used a simple typewriter, in an infinite time span, of course they would be able to write Hamlet and all of Shakespeare's works. However, evolution is not just monkeys and typewriters. Evolution builds upon random changes (which the monkeys typing would produce) producing diversity and kept or destroyed by their responses to the challenges of its environment. For example, suppose a monkey typed randomly "a", "c", "t", which is not improbable at all, the word ACT remains and then it might by the same random process type "I". There you have "ACT I". Upon this, then randomly it might appear by the same process the next line "SCENE 1" until the whole Hamlet is written. Of course a simple typewriter would not be able to choose which of the written lines to conserve and which to discard, but if you have a simple english language text processing program, the monkey would be able to write all of Shakespeare's works in a limited -- not infinite -- time span. Of course it might be asked who produced the english text processing program. But the basic rules of this specific universe in which we live are much more simpler than the rules of the english language. It seems that we have, not an infinite number of universes, but rather a large, very large number of them, for example some have calculated that the number is 10 elevated to the 500th power. If this is even aproximately true, it is not beyond reason to admit the random appearance of our universe with the basic rules that permit and promote the evolution of everything slowly building upon the previous and simpler phenomena, first light, then atoms, atoms clouds, galaxies, stars, planets, life and conscious intelligence all of which are of course informatic phenomena. Before Descartes opened the door to rationalism, it was easy to accept that the Cosmos (order) itself was proclaiming the "glory of God," but once we accepted the kingdom of reason and of its daughter, "science," God's glory is no longer evident to humankind. Now we are commited to understand the world in a rational-scientific frame of mind which does not require belief in any deity. Atheism is the default position of the modern mind. So where is the "niche" for faith? I believe this is the most important question that a catholic has to address for himself and the Church for the whole human race. Maybe we have to analyze what do we mean by faith. Is it just a belief, meaning an intellectual assent of some proposition, or is it more a vital committment to the building of the Kingdom, here and now? If faith in God is just the intellectual assent to the proposition "God exists," then it has no sustainable ground, but if faith is a vital commitment to the building of the kindom of peace and justice here and now as Jesus proclaimed, we catholics can live assured that our lives have a meaning, a trascendental meaning.

Even if the monkeys used a simple typewriter, in an infinite time span, of course they would be able to write Hamlet and all of Shakespeare's works

Evolution builds upon random changes (which the monkeys typing would produce) producing diversity and kept or destroyed by their responses to the challenges of its environment.

The answer to all three question is no, since God is not a scientific hypothesis. For this reason, it is equally true that advances in our scientific knowledge cannot in principle count against the existence of God.

The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork, day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. No utterance at all, no speech, not a sound to be heard, but from the entire earth the design stands out, this message reaches the whole world.

origin of the universe origin of life origin of advance life forms or macro evolution origin of consciousness

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Considering as Scripture says, "No one has ever seen God," I think it useful to make expeditious use of any means to try to pick up his "beeping" so to speak, including the scientifically rooted case whatever it may be, since as the Omnipotent "Handler" of whatever that "Is", not only are the "sounds of God" everywhere saying, "Let us make ...", but also "Divine Fingerprints" - sounds and prints swirling about including those detected through microphones, microscopes and telescopes of Faith, yes, the reasonableness of Faith, providing ""evidence" as Scripture says, "of things not seen."

Bruce -- thank you, well said. "Telescopes of faith": I like that phrase.

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Thanks, Matt. The Invisible God has placed innumerable "telescopes of Faith" and "Reason' in human hands expediting the use of his favorite game, "Hide and Seek" the game that children play, focusing on his Word, "Unless you become as little children ..." wherein he hides as we seek, or we hide as he seeks. Examples abound on spiritual and material levels. Again, Thanks and Happy New Year!

Roberto Blum 9 years 4 months ago Has Occam's razor become dull and obsolete? Which is the simpler explanation for the existence of our universe, God or Chance? If we answer God, we have to ask who made God? and so on ad infinitum. Chance on the contrary is the end of the road.

William Rydberg 9 years 4 months ago I suggest that the Catholic seeker first refresh themselves on a basic Catechetic. Here is a link its free and the subject of the talks is [Science & Religion: Compatible or Combative?]: http://www.instituteofcatholicculture.org/science-religion-at-war-the-gift-of-faith-the-birth-of-science/ Enjoy!

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 4 months ago new

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 4 months ago New Matt, concerning your question: “In other words: What is a more reasonable belief? Belief in pure chance, or belief in a Creator?” The answer is not an either or proposition, it is both: chance and Creator. I find Marie George’s explanation very interesting and convincing: “The fact that random processes can result in living things arising from non-living things presupposes the existence of not just any sort of matter, but one which has the potency to be formed into living things. Further, not just any sort of agents will do, but there must be ones apt to impart the appropriate forms to the appropriate matter. In addition, in order for the supposedly randomly formed living things to survive and reproduce, there must be a habitat favorable to them, and the possibility of its development also needs explanation. Just as it is luck that one gets a royal flush, but not that one can get it - the deck is designed that way, so too it may be luck that this or that organism appear, but it cannot be luck that it is able to appear. And this is true even if there are many universes. For even if the combination of factors which gives our universe its life-bearing potential have been 'dealt' into it alone, and not to any others, these factors still must have a specific design if they are to make life possible. If there are no queens and kings, having five billion cards games going instead of just one still won't get one any closer to drawing a royal flush.” http://www.unav.es/cryf/paley.html In addition, I find Fr. Spitzer’s Shakespeare analogy persuasive. Nevertheless, there is another Shakespeare analogy that it is even more convincing and goes deeper, the analogy that physicist Stephen Barr proposes: “A helpful analogy compares God to the author of a play. The playwright is the cause of the entire play in all its aspects”he pens its every character, event, and word. Call this “vertical causality.” But it is also true that within the play, one thing causes another. Call this “horizontal causality.” The two causalities are not in competition. Consider this question: In Hamlet , did Polonius die because he was stabbed through a curtain or because Shakespeare wrote the play that way? The question is silly, of course, for the answer is both . The stabbing is the cause within the play, while Shakespeare is the cause of the play and all that happens in it. Similarly, there are causes within nature, which are studied by scientists and others, while God is the cause of nature. Theology traditionally refers to “primary” and “secondary” causality rather than vertical and horizontal causality. We see, then, how idle it is to ask whether some species of beetle exists because it evolved or because God created it. The species of beetle evolved because God wrote the script that way. And, indeed, each individual beetle only exists because God wrote it in as one of the dramatis personae . The Book of Wisdom declares that God “reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things.” His providence is not just some general oversight of the world, leaving the details to be worked out by someone else. Rather, he is the direct cause of every detail of the universe, just as Shakespeare wrote every syllable of Hamlet . God orders all things, whether the falling of a sparrow or the hairs of your head, which are numbered. This is the doctrine of “particular providence,” taught by both Catholic and Calvinist.” http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/12/chance-by-design

I find Marie George’s explanation very interesting and convincing: “The fact that random processes can result in living things arising from non-living things presupposes the existence of not just any sort of matter, but one which has the potency to be formed into living things.

Namely that chance events led to life and evolution.

Well, the response to the column was overwhelming. The piece really went viral and garnered more “likes” on Facebook than any article the Wall Street Journal has ever published--over 350,000 as I read this now! I find that amazing and more than a little humbling.

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 4 months ago I think that you, Mr. Cosgrove, Eric Metaxas and I would agree with the author of the Book of Wisdom (Ws 13:1-9) in the Bible: Foolish by nature were all who were in ignorance of God, and who from the good things seen did not succeed in knowing the one who is,* and from studying the works did not discern the artisan;a 2Instead either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circuit of the stars, or the mighty water, or the luminaries of heaven, the governors* of the world, they considered gods.b 3Now if out of joy in their beauty they thought them gods, let them know how far more excellent is the Lord than these; for the original source of beauty fashioned them.c 4Or if they were struck by their might and energy, let them realize from these things how much more powerful is the one who made them.d 5For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen. 6But yet, for these the blame is less;* For they have gone astray perhaps, though they seek God and wish to find him. 7For they search busily among his works, but are distracted by what they see, because the things seen are fair. 8But again, not even these are pardonable. 9For if they so far succeeded in knowledge that they could speculate about the world, how did they not more quickly find its Lord? The message of this text is clear: “from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.” I am sure Metaxas, you and I fully agree with the author of the Book of Wisdom and with St. Paul: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” (Rm 1: 19-20) Also, it seems clear that both St. Paul and the author of the Book of Wisdom are not engaging in science but are doing philosophy, metaphysics. Where I disagree with you and Metaxas is that you seem to be saying that there are certain phenomena that can only be explained as miracles. Yes, the anthropic coincidences and the fine tuning of the universe are sources of amazement to me, and signposts or footprints of the Creator. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to call them miracles. Would it be reasonable to resort to a direct divine intervention every time that we run up against the limits of what natural science can explain at this moment in time? You seem to be suggesting that the Creator is somehow competing with the powers of nature and with science (with all due respect, this is, perhaps, the same position that some of the new atheists, like Dawkins, are taking). On the contrary, the more science explains and discovers the laws of nature and its powers, the more glory to the Creator. Science will never be able to eliminate the question of why the universe is orderly and lawful but it has shown us more and more how deep that order and lawfulness is. Other questions that science will never be able to eliminate or to answer are: Why is there something rather than nothing? ; Why is the universe intelligible? (No intelligibility=no science); Why be moral? , etc. Yes, I believe in miracles, but miracles would make no sense unless there is a ‘natural order’ to begin with. At the same time, I think that ordinarily God acts through nature, this was also the view of theologians like Francisco Suarez and St. Thomas Aquinas. Therefore, I hesitate before easily jumping to call anything that is happening in the ‘natural order’ a miracle. All of these doesn’t mean that the choice we face is either “pure chance” or a Creator but between “pure chance” on the one hand and “Creator + chance” on the other hand. It is evident that “chance” or “randomness” have and important role to play in our physical universe. I think that Prof. George (a philosopher with a graduate degree in biology) eloquently makes the connection by expressing the following philosophical comment: “Just as it is luck that one gets a royal flush, but not that one can get it - the deck is designed that way, so too it may be luck that this or that organism appear, but it cannot be luck that it is able to appear. And this is true even if there are many universes. For even if the combination of factors which gives our universe its life-bearing potential have been 'dealt' into it alone, and not to any others, these factors still must have a specific design if they are to make life possible. If there are no queens and kings, having five billion cards games going instead of just one still won't get one any closer to drawing a royal flush.” Now, I am sure that Eric Metaxas and you are saddened to see, every so often, how brilliant scientific minds have been unable to distinguish between science and scientism and have fallen into the trap of using their scientific knowledge as a weapon for the promotion of an ideological agenda masquerading as science. It is important to remember that science does not make assertions about ultimate questions, it only provides what physicist John Polkinghorne calls “boundary questions,” but these are philosophical in nature. Hence, I would like to share with you an excellent quote from Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion by Karl Giberson and Mariano Artigas, that clearly explains the difference between science and scientism: “There is a world of difference between the ‘methodological naturalism’ used in the sciences (seeking natural explanations) and an ‘ontological naturalism’ that denies the reality of anything outside the reach of science. While methodological naturalism has no problems, except for creationists and the advocates of Intelligent Design, scientific naturalism is self-defeating. The claim that nothing exists aside from what can be studied by the scientific method is a philosophical position. If you want to determine what science is and how far its reach extends, you must place yourself outside science, taking a philosophical perspective. But if there is no territory outside science, how are we going to stand there?” p.234 http://www.amazon.com/Oracles-Science-Celebrity-Scientists-Religion/dp/0... This is how Dr. Francis Collins, who was Head of the Genome project explains scientism: “Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview provides another way of finding truth. Scientists who deny this would be well advised to consider the limits of their own tools, as nicely represented in a parable told by the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He described a man who set about to study deep-see life using a net that had a mesh size of three inches. After catching many wild and wonderful creatures from the depths, the man concluded that there are no deep-see fish that are smaller than three inches in length! If we are using the scientific net to catch our particular version of truth, we should not be surprised that it does not catch the evidence of spirit.” (p.229) In conclusion, God, as theologians, philosophers, and people of faith understand Him, cannot be an object of scientific inquiry. The scientific method can neither exclude nor include God. If we want to make a judgment about the existence of God, we have to go beyond science [even if the data of science is our starting point] and become philosophers. I finish with another quote of Dr. Collins: “Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible. So let us together seek to reclaim the solid ground of an intellectually and spiritually satisfying synthesis of all great truths. That ancient motherland of reason and worship was never in danger of crumbling. It never will be. It beckons all sincere seekers of truth to come and take up residence there.” (p.234) http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/141654...

I think that ordinarily God acts through nature

Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about nature and the universe.

1. The statement of the problem or the background and how one plans to investigate it. 2. A statement of the methodology one uses to investigate a problem. 3. The results of the investigation in terms of data collected which often includes some type of mathematical or statistical analysis. 4. The conclusions or implications of the research which is often a subjective appraisal of the results and the possible need for further investigation.

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 4 months ago Mr. Cosgrove, thank you for your comments and for your corrections, I would like to share with you an address delivered by the late Spanish physicist and philosopher of science Mariano Artigas at the University of Chicago in which he proposes philosophy as a bridge between science and religion. Here is the link http://www.unav.es/cryf/themindofuniverse.html The ideas of this article were fully developed in a book, "The Mind of The Universe" http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Universe-Understanding-Science-Religion/dp/1890151327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421680844&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Mind+of+the+Universe

JR Cosgrove 9 years 4 months ago Mr. Bermudez, Thank you for the link. I have read it. Dr. Artigas makes the same mistake that Dr. George and Barr make. He begs the question. He assumes as proven what has to be proved. There is no evidence of self organization in nature outside what is provided by the four basic forces. There may be other forces we do not know about such as what causes charge and spin of sub atomic particles, what causes the fouir forces to reach out to other particles and interact with them such as how does gravity and magnetism actually work. These might be discerned in the future to provide insight as to why particles behave as they do. There is a lot to learn. However, there is no evidence of any self organization taking place in the formation of life and the information processing that takes place within life. All that has been found argues against such a process taking place and it being mathematically impossible unless it was directed by an intelligence. My experience with watching these debates is that for some they desperately want a God of a certain form and then assume that this God exists and then adjust their science to that pre-conception. I have no problem with such a God but apparently He did not behave as these philosophers want Him to have behaved. The world we see that He created is much different from the one desired by these philosophers. Because of this we have these arguments over just what God has done. Artigas's article is long and apparently is a summary of his book. But the weakness of his approach is that he assumes something to be true which is most likely impossible in the universe that God created. Just as an addition, Artigas thinks that Intelligent Design is valid but claims it is not scientific. I find this baffling for two reasons, his conception of ID fits my conception of science and secondly, it implies intervention is likely and his thesis of self organization is invalid and needs help.

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 3 months ago Reply Mr. Cosgrove, I am glad that Eric Metaxas article has been successful in generating so many positive responses and, I would not have any problem with the following statement of clarification to his critics: “The scientific findings I cited aren’t “proof” that compel belief in God’s existence but “signs” pointing to that possibility and inviting you to follow them to see where they might lead.” All of this proves that people are sick and tired of the myth that scientific materialism or naturalism is the default philosophy of science. That science and religion or that science and faith are in conflict is also a myth, the only true conflict is precisely between religion and scientific materialism. God as Logos, as Reason itself can never be in conflict with science, because He made it all possible. Nevertheless, we should not fall into the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Yes, God is the “Author of Nature” but He is not competing with His creation nor with science, we should not be looking for him only in the gaps of our knowledge of nature or in the gaps of our scientific understanding of the world. The idea that change and accident play a role in nature was taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas in Book 3 chapter 74 of his Summa Contra Gentiles. Here is the link: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles3a.htm#74 There are many examples of self-organization in nature. One good example is: when a liquid crystallizes, the atoms go from moving aimlessly to having an orderly pattern. They spontaneously arrange themselves in evenly spaced rows and columns. I think that when Artigas, Barr and George mention God, they are talking about the One that said to Moses: “I AM WHO AM,” Ipsum Esse Subsistens, according to St. Thomas Aquinas. Francis J. Beckwith explains this very clearly in his article: “God – as understood by the Catholic Church and by most other theistic traditions – is not a being in the universe, a superior agent whose existence we postulate in order to explain some natural phenomenon, but rather, Being Itself, that which all contingent reality depends for its existence.” Finally, I agree with you about Fr. Joseph Koterski, S.J., he is a great teacher, his course on The Ethics of Aristotle is one of the best.

Nevertheless, we should not fall into the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Yes, God is the “Author of Nature” but He is not competing with His creation nor with science, we should not be looking for him only in the gaps of our knowledge of nature or in the gaps of our scientific understanding of the world.

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. ("I had no need of that hypothesis.") Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, Ah! c'est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses. ("Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.")

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 3 months ago New Mr. Cosgrove, let’s agree to disagree about ID; nevertheless, there is something that I would like to clarify. The fact that God acts ordinarily through the laws of nature, through secondary causes is in no way contradictory to the view that He can and sometimes does act outside the course of nature. In addition, God is continuously involved with His creation, He is continuously sustaining it because God is Being Itself and nothing would be able to exist without His acting. In other words, God keeps in being everything that is. Good bye, it has been a pleasure to have a conversation with you.

Thanks for drawing attention to this.

John Barbieri 9 years 4 months ago If someone can offer definitive proof of the existence of G_D or even of the origin of life, great universities and cities will surely be named to honor that person who will rank as one of humanities greatest benefactors. Until that time, we can only speculate. Such speculation -- no matter how well intentioned -- should not be confused with actual knowledge. If and until such knowledge ever becomes available, we can "behold the marvel in the night sky" and look at the cell in wonder!.

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Hi, Mr.Barbieri, "Behold the marvel in the night sky" (and} "look at the cell in wonder!" a pretty good definition of human nature searching for the "Invisible One" Whom "No one has ever seen" ... "wonder and awe" the "Awesome One" who makes us wonder, who makes us wonder,why should we wonder at all, innately I would say showing the need or at least the desire not just to know, but to BELIEVE in the Unknowable One! This touches the very essence of the "I Am Who I Am!" Look there and see the One "No one has ever seen" gasping and grasping gratifying mystery!

John Barbieri 9 years 4 months ago Thank you for your kind words, Mr. Snowden. If memory serves me correctly, Abraham Joshua Heschel once prayed: "I did not ask You for success, but rather for a sense of wonder! And You heard my prayer!"

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Hi Mr. Barbieri, You've got it! In that "sense of wonder" as Heschel said, the Invisible One is found and with eyes wide open and mouth hanging loose we say "Wow!" another word for the unsayable - G - D!

Charles Erlinger 9 years 4 months ago The expression "faith in chance" seems very problematic to me. I can understand "faith in God" to mean confidence in the truth of God's revealed promise to us humans, but putting "faith in chance" in an either/or position of comparison and contrast as though the two expressions were cognitive equivalents, as is often done in these kinds of discussions, just seems inappropriate. Chance, as we know, is a mathematical construct, and a short-hand way of referring to the otherwise unknown cause of physical phenomena. There are many observed phenomena for which we have no known efficient causality. These phenomena are described in probabilistic terms for purposes of establishing an expectation of their occurrence, not for establishing the physical cause of their occurrence.

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Hi Mr. Cosgrove, Acknowledging myself to be a person who knows a little about many things, but not very much about anything, but grateful for truth wherever that light shines. I must admit I do tend to think that ordinarily God does act through the nature of whatever is,whether supernatural, or natural. it's all about life - about growth, preservation, productivity. healing, supernaturally stimulated through the agency of Divine Grace, naturally through material agency fingerprinted graciously by Divine touch of what may be called "naturally stimulated Divine Grace" linked to Augustine's assertion that, "Everything is Grace." However it happens, all healing radiates from God, supernatural or natural. God only, the source, according to Divine determination. Too simple?

JR Cosgrove 9 years 4 months ago Mr. Snowden, I think you do not understand by what I mean by nature or what the others mean when they invoke it. It means that God had no part in what happens or happened in the past except for three events. Any involvement by God was at the time of the Big Bang (first event) and then he went on vacation and only reemerged for the conception (2nd event) and resurrection of Jesus (3rd event). No works of the Holy Spirit, no speaking in tongues, no answers to prayers, no transubstantiation, no burning bush or appearances to any saint (such as to Paul on the way to Damascus) or by the Blessed Mother, no miraculous cures, no miracles period etc. and definitely no Grace. This is the implication of ascribing to nature all that we see when God created the universe in event #1 of his three interventions.

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Hi Mr. Cosgrove, It seems to me incredible that anyone should link God's activity in nature to just the three events you mentioned. Why just three, not one hundred three or an incalcuable number, the latter most probable it seems to me? God knows the infinite number of gains of sand that ever were, are now, or ever will be, the same for every leaf on every tree that ever was, are now, or ever will be. God personally knows and sustains all natural movement through the ministry of agencies, evolution the prime agent- mover, having given nature the ability to structure and restructure itself, with God as the "wind" in the sails of nature giving it forward thrust, verifying it seems to me Chardin's insight that, "God makes things make themselves!" God is ever totally involved in the works of his hands, naturally and supernaturally Maybe you'll say, "He still doesn't get it!" Well, conversation is like viewing life through a Spectrum with many colors emanating therefrom, each color different, yet possessing intrinsic and intimate relationships one to the others..At least so it seems to me.

JR Cosgrove 9 years 4 months ago Mr. Snowden, What I believe and what I am pointing to that others are claiming are very different. I believe God is continuously involved in the guidance of our world and certainly not just three times. But others who claim to be Christians claim this limited involvement. I disagree with them and one reason I do is that the science does not support such a view and not because it is unacceptable to me. This OP is about science and its ability to shed some light on God and His nature. Obviously, I think it does. But I happen to believe that while it does, it is only to a limited extent. We still need revelation to understand Him even more but even that is extremely limited. Others are arguing very strongly that science has no part in validating God or His nature. Let the reader decide. I maintain that those who espouse this second point of view which I don't agree with, always distort what science has discovered or is capable of discovering. In other words their point of view on science is determined by their world view and not by the science itself. Why would they do this? And this includes a lot of Catholics. As I said I have been watching this debate for about 20 years and pretty much know most of the players in it though there is always something new to learn. Science is amazing but it has huge holes and the biggest holes have to do with life. And these holes seem to get bigger not smaller as we learn more.

Bruce Snowden 9 years 4 months ago Hi Mr. Cosgrove, O,K,, "What I believe and what I am pointing to that others are claiming are very different," And, "We still need Revelation to understand ...". I get it. Thanks for sharing Faith and Reason with me. Respectfully, accept as concluded my conversation on the topic, even though I have more to say of what I dimly see, "like men walking around as if they were trees!" Or is it the other way around? But enough said.

Thank you to readers for these informed and illuminating comments. I'm learning a lot by just following the discussions.

JR Cosgrove 9 years 3 months ago Since this OP is up again, it will be up for a couple days so that sustaining it on the list for a few more hours is not affected by other comments, I will point to an assessment of the issue by a Catholic who writes frequently on this topic. The ID movement of which Metaxas approves is very much a movement supported by many Catholics. It is portrayed in the popular press as another version of Young Earth Creationism (YEC) in order to discredit it but nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, YEC's are major supporters of ID but many of the driving elements of ID are Catholic who do not support their religious or scientific beliefs. One such person is Vincent Torley who is an Australian living in Japan. Dr. Torley writes frequently on ID issues with a Catholic slant. Here is a short podcast about the Metaxas article and whether God is subject to an examination by science. http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/entry/2015-02-02T17_33_36-08_00 This podcast is produced by the Discovery Institute which is a major proponent of Intelligent Design and which has several Catholics as members. Students at Catholic colleges and high schools should be exposed to these issues as well as their teachers.

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 3 months ago New I would like to reflect on the following quote from the article: ‘For Spitizer, "it would seem that the immensity of the difference between anthropic and non-anthropic values of our universal constants provides reasonable and responsible rationale, for belief in supernatural design."’ Is Fr. Robert Spitzer S.J., a professional philosopher with an impressive knowledge of physics, reaching a scientific conclusion? I don’t think so, I think he is reaching a philosophical conclusion. I don’t know what Fr. Spitzer thinks about the ID movement. Perhaps Sean Salai S.J. could interview him and ask the question. I don’t think that the majority of believers who are critical of the ID movement are philosophers nor theologians but scientists, some notable examples are: biologist Kenneth Miller (Catholic), and physicists Stephen Barr (Catholic) and John Polkinghorne (Anglican). For them the ID movement is not science but natural theology or philosophical theology. Therefore, the crucial question is: Is the ID movement science (in the way that the term has been used since the XVII century)? Or is it reasonable philosophy? For the debate between Stephen Barr and Michael Behe, here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEY1wKODR0 Prof. Kenneth Miller's Laetare Medal Speech at Notre Dame Commencement 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FE6uOqN2OA Also, Prof. Miller and The Faith of Science http://americamagazine.org/content/ignatian-educator/dr-kenneth-miller-and-faith-science For John Polkinghorne’s views, here is the link http://biologos.org/blog/john-polkinghorne-on-natural-theology-part-i

Is Fr. Robert Spitzer S.J., a professional philosopher with an impressive knowledge of physics, reaching a scientific conclusion? I don’t think so, I think he is reaching a philosophical conclusion.

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 3 months ago New Mark Shea is a popular Catholic writer and speaker who has studied a lot of philosophy and theology. In addition, he has the gift of explaining difficult things in a clear and accessible way. In two of his articles, he has explained why many Catholic philosophers, theologians and scientists while accepting the Argument from Design are critical of the ID movement. 1) Intelligent Design vs. the Argument from Design http://www.ncregister.com/blog/mark-shea/intelligent-design-vs.-the-argument-from-design 2) Evolution as Evidence from the Argument from Design http://www.ncregister.com/blog/mark-shea/evolution-as-evidence-for-the-argument-from-design

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 3 months ago New Before we ask the question: “Should believers use science to make the case for God?” There is a prior question that we have to answer: “Who God is and who God isn’t?” It seems clear to me that God, as theologians, philosophers, and people of faith understand Him, cannot be an object of scientific inquiry. The scientific method can neither exclude nor include God. If we want to make a judgment about the existence of God, we have to go beyond science [even if the data of science is our starting point] and become philosophers. This is precisely what Fr. Robert Barron has explained in a clear and succinct way in some of his YouTube videos. 1) Who God is and who God isn’t? http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/who-god-is-and-who-god-isnt/289/ 2) Thomas Aquinas and The Argument From Motion http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/thomas-aquinas-and-the-argument-from-motion/4534/ 3) Scientism and God’s Existence http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/scientism-and-gods-existence/255/ 4) Atheism and Philosophy http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/atheism-and-philosophy/4611/

Egberto Bermudez 9 years 3 months ago Comment

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The Bible and Science: The Relationship between Science and Christianity

The relationship between the Bible and science has been debated for decades. Science has emerged as a multifaceted discipline focused on the natural world, viewed as a growing body of facts and a path to understanding. While the Bible has been considered authoritative, knowledge generated by science has been so reliable in different things, including attempts to prove Christian beliefs. Sceptical controversies persist over encroachment of one domain into the territory of another. The purpose of this paper was to examine the relationship between the Bible and Science based on ideas from scientists, philosophers, historians and theologians. The paper found the existence of a super intelligent designer as a common idea, with a confrontation on timeliness, creation story and divine action. While Christians appeal to factual statements when science, with its lack of moral judgment, cannot prove the Bible, the conclusion qualified the Bible as authoritative for faith and life.

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Grosvenor House Publishing Co.

This book seeks to counter the widespread belief that the findings of modern science are in direct conflict with the Bible. It begins by exploring the origin, depth and integrity of the Biblical narrative by describing recent studies including gematria, equidistant letter spacing and use of numbers that endorse a Divine origin. The many aspects of the fine tuning of the Earth and Universe enabling humankind to survive and flourish are summarised, and the supreme perfections of design in humanity, in nature, and the Universe are described. The two major conflicts between the Biblical narrative and Science as viewed by the secular world, namely the Evolution versus Creation debate and the old or young age of the Earth and Universe, are then analysed in detail. It is argued that modern knowledge of the complexity of living things and the evidence from genetics endorse the case for Special Creation. The book explains how understanding of the succession of events that followed the Big Bang and recognition of the influence of General Relativity collectively bring together Biblical and Scientific understandings of time. A timescale is then resolved which matches cosmic and geologic histories according to the successive events recorded by the Six Days of Genesis. The Biblical narrative is described in the context of God creating an environment ideal for life by moving into His creation in six steps, successively transforming chaos into order as required by the Laws of Physics, and as time has contracted and space has expanded. Finally, recent evidence for Noah's flood, together with its special redemptive signature, are described pointing to the date predicted by the Genesis chronology. The book aims to affirm the faith of the Christian, especially the new believer by showing that the supposed conflict between Science and Bible, so avidly presented by the secular world, is an illusion. Whilst providing a valuable resource for Christians to counter the widespread attacks on their faith, the book also seeks to challenge non-believers who are willing to acknowledge the likelihood of Intelligent Design but have hitherto been unwilling to investigate the verifiable claims of the Bible due to the prevailing view that they are in conflict with Science - a view that this book argues is not the case.

Science & Philosophy

placide mutabazi

The relationship between the Bible and science has been debated for decades. While science has emerged as a multifaceted discipline focused on the natural world, it has been viewed as a growing body of facts or knowledge (Philip & Cherian, 2017); and a path to understanding (Yates, et al., 2015). As scientists test ideas, emerging disciplines such as palaeoanthropology, geology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology have attempted to prove Christian beliefs based on the Biblical account. Although the Bible was considered authoritative, the knowledge generated by science has been so powerful and reliable in different things. While some people might use science to prove their own opinions, bringing an encroachment on the territory of religion, which theologians do not qualify as a scientific field. This paper has collected and analysed ideas from different scientists, philosophers, historians and theologians to examine the relationship between the Bible and Science, and the extent to ...

Grosvenor House Publishing

This book seeks to counter the widespread belief that the findings of modern science are in direct conflict with the Bible. It begins by exploring the origin, depth and integrity of the Biblical narrative by describing recent studies including gematria, equidistant letter spacing and use of numbers that endorse a Divine origin. The many aspects of the fine tuning of the Earth and Universe enabling humankind to survive and flourish are summarised, and the supreme perfections of design in humanity, in nature, and the Universe are described. The two major conflicts between the Biblical narrative and Science as viewed by the secular world, namely the Evolution versus Creation debate and the old or young age of the Earth and Universe, are then analysed in detail. It is argued that modern knowledge of the complexity of living things and the evidence from genetics endorse the case for Special Creation. The book explains how an understanding of the succession of events that followed the Big Bang and recognition of the influence of General Relativity collectively bring together Biblical and Scientific understandings of time. A timescale is then resolved which matches cosmic and geologic histories according to the successive events recorded by the Six Days of Genesis. The Biblical narrative is described in the context of God creating an environment ideal for life by moving into His creation in six steps, successively transforming chaos into order as required by the Laws of Physics, and as time has contracted and space has expanded. Finally, recent evidence for Noah's flood, together with its special redemptive signature, are described pointing to the date predicted by the Genesis chronology. The book aims to affirm the faith of the Christian, especially the new believer by showing that the supposed conflict between Science and Bible, so avidly presented by the secular world, is an illusion. Whilst providing a valuable resource for Christians to counter the widespread attacks on their faith, the book also seeks to challenge non-believers who are willing to acknowledge the likelihood of Intelligent Design but have hitherto been unwilling to investigate the verifiable claims of the Bible due to the prevailing view that they are in conflict with Science - a view that this book argues is not the case.

Ken Caviness

Science and Religion are often viewed as conflicting, even irreconcilable. In this article, the inconsistencies and incompleteness of both atheistic science and irrational religion are considered, including: • an exploration of the “science vs. religion” dichotomy and why eliminating either results in an incomplete worldview; • consideration of the generally unstated underlying assumptions of the materialistic worldview; • the limits of reason, logic and science and the inconsistency of attempts to use science to disprove the existence of the supernatural; • the failure of atheistic materialism to adequately explain the universe; and • the importance and strengths of correct science within its limits of usefulness—why science must not be avoided by Christians. Far from being incompatible with science, the Christian worldview gives meaning and consistency to science that is otherwise lacking.

Jonathan Jong

This paper, presented to a popular audience, argues that much of the alleged conflict between science and religion is predicated on doctrines of God, creation, and divine action that are alien to catholic Christianity, as represented by Thomas Aquinas and his modern interpreters.

Christianity and science have a long and deep relationship which, in recent decades, has generated stimulating dialogue among scientists, theologians, philosophers, and historians [...]

Eric George

Christianity and Science – A False Contradiction A false contradiction, is a supposed contradiction between two views, which is actually wrong. That is, the supposition that the contradiction exists, is mistaken. I hold that this is the case with the idea that Christianity and science are in contradiction with one another. In this essay, it will be attempted to be shown that Christianity and Science are not in contradiction with one another, and in fact, Christian faith encourages and nurtures a reverence for science and scientific knowledge. In order to develop and establish this point of order, this essay will be laid out in the follow manner. First, a brief defining of what " Christianity " and " science " means within the confines of this essay in order to have some definitions to work with. Secondly, an historic look at the beginnings of modern science will be surveyed, showing that science as we know it today, was actually birthed in and developed from a Christian conceptual environment and why such scientists at the time, were both committed to scientific discovery and knowledge and also devout Christians. Thirdly, where this supposed contradiction arose in the light of Christian fundamentalism reactionary against attacks on Christianity during the 19 th century, will be looked at. Fourthly, where actual contentions arise between the two will be shown to be a discussion which is internal to Christian views on the matter and do not constitute a direct contradiction between Christianity and science. A conclusion will then at last be established.

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Moral Arguments for the Existence of God

Moral arguments for God’s existence form a diverse family of arguments that reason from some feature of morality or the moral life to the existence of God, usually understood as a morally good creator of the universe. Moral arguments are both important and interesting. They are interesting because evaluating their soundness requires attention to practically every important philosophical issue dealt with in metaethics. They are important because of their prominence in popular apologetic arguments for religious belief. Evidence for this can be found in the amazing popularity of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952), which is almost certainly the best-selling book of apologetics in the twentieth century, and which begins with a moral argument for God’s existence. Many ordinary people regard religion as in some way providing a basis or foundation for morality. This fact might seem to favor religious arguments for morality rather than moral arguments for religious belief, but if someone believes that morality is in some way “objective” or “real,” and that this moral reality requires explanation, moral arguments for God’s reality naturally suggest themselves. The apparent connection between morality and religion appears to many people to support the claim that moral truths require a religious foundation, or can best be explained by God’s existence, or some qualities or actions of God.

After some general comments about theistic arguments and a brief history of moral arguments, this essay will discuss several different forms of the moral argument. A major distinction is that between moral arguments that are theoretical in nature and practical or pragmatic arguments. The former are best thought of as arguments that begin with alleged moral facts and argue that God is necessary to explain those facts, or at least that God provides a better explanation of them than secular accounts can offer. The latter typically begin with claims about some good or end that morality requires and argue that this end is not attainable unless God exists. Whether this distinction is hard and fast will be one of the questions to be discussed, as some argue that practical arguments by themselves cannot be the basis of rational belief. To meet such concerns practical arguments may have to include a theoretical dimension as well.

1. The Goals of Theistic Arguments

2. history of moral arguments for god’s existence, 3. theoretical moral arguments for god’s existence and divine command theories of moral obligation, 4. arguments from moral knowledge or awareness, 5. arguments from human dignity or worth, 6. practical moral arguments for belief in god, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Before attempting to explain and assess moral arguments for the existence of God, it would be helpful to have some perspective on the goals of arguments for God’s existence. (We shall generically term arguments for God’s existence “theistic arguments.”) Of course views about this are diverse, but most contemporary proponents of such arguments do not see theistic arguments as attempted “proofs,” in the sense that they are supposed to provide valid arguments with premises that no reasonable person could deny. Such a standard of achievement would clearly be setting the bar for success very high, and proponents of theistic arguments rightly note that philosophical arguments for interesting conclusions in any field outside of formal logic hardly ever reach such a standard.

More reasonable questions to ask about theistic arguments would seem to be the following: Are there valid arguments for the conclusion that God exists that have premises that are known or reasonably believed by some people? Are the premises of such arguments more reasonable than their denials, at least for some reasonable people? Arguments that meet these standards could have value in making belief in God reasonable for some people, or even giving some people knowledge of God’s existence, even if it turns out that some of the premises of the arguments can be reasonably denied by other people, and thus that the arguments fail as proofs.

A major issue that cannot be settled here concerns the question of where the burden of proof lies with respect to theistic arguments. Many secular philosophers follow Antony Flew (1976) in holding that there is a “presumption of atheism.” On this view, believing in God is like believing in the Loch Ness Monster or leprechauns, something that reasonable people do not do without sufficient evidence. If such evidence is lacking, the proper stance is atheism rather than agnosticism.

This “presumption of atheism” has been challenged in a number of ways. Alvin Plantinga (2000) has argued that reasonable belief in God does not have to be based on propositional evidence, but can be “properly basic.” On this view, reasonable belief in God can be the outcome of a basic faculty (called the sensus divinitatis by theologian John Calvin) and thus needs no support from arguments at all. In response some would argue that even if theistic belief is not grounded in propositional evidence, it still might require non-propositional evidence (such as experience), so it is not clear that Plantinga’s view by itself removes the burden of proof challenge.

A second way to challenge the presumption of atheism is to question an implicit assumption made by those who defend such a presumption, which is that belief in God is epistemologically more risky than unbelief. The assumption might be defended in the following way: One might think that theists and atheists share a belief in many entities: atoms, middle-sized physical objects, animals, and stars, for example. Someone, however, who believes in leprechauns or sea monsters in addition to these commonly accepted objects thereby incurs a burden of proof. Such a person believes in “one additional thing” and thus seems to incur additional epistemological risk. One might think that belief in God is relevantly like belief in a leprechaun or sea monster, and thus that the theist also bears an additional burden of proof. Without good evidence in favor of belief in God the safe option is to refrain from belief.

However, the theist may hold that this account does not accurately represent the situation. Instead, the theist may argue that the debate between atheism and theism is not simply an argument about whether “one more thing” exists in the world. In fact, God is not to be understood as an entity in the world at all; any such entity would by definition not be God. The debate is rather a debate about the character of the universe. The theist believes that every object in the natural world exists because God creates and conserves that object; every finite thing has the character of being dependent on God. The atheist denies this and affirms that the basic entities in the natural world have the character of existing “on their own.”

If this is the right way to think about the debate, then it is not obvious that atheism is safer than theism. The debate is not about the existence of one object, but the character of the universe as a whole. Both parties are making claims about the character of everything in the natural world, and both claims seem risky. This point is especially important in dealing with moral arguments for theism, since one of the questions raised by such arguments is the adequacy of a naturalistic worldview in explaining morality. Such accounts need to explain without watering the categories of morality down or otherwise domesticating them and thereby depriving them of their most interesting features. Evidentialists may properly ask about the evidence for theism, but it also seems proper to ask about the evidence for atheism if the atheist is committed to a rival metaphysic such as naturalism.

Something that resembles a moral argument for God’s existence, or at least an argument from value, can be found in the fourth of Thomas Aquinas’s “Five Ways” (Aquinas 1265–1274, I, 1, 3). Aquinas there begins with the claim that among beings who possess such qualities as “good, true, and noble” there are gradations. Presumably he means that some things that are good are better than other good things; perhaps some noble people are nobler than others who are noble. In effect Aquinas is claiming that when we “grade” things in this way we are, at least implicitly, comparing them to some absolute standard. Aquinas believes this standard cannot be merely “ideal” or “hypothetical,” and thus this gradation is only possible if there is some being which has this quality to a “maximum” extent: “so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. Ii.” Aquinas goes on to affirm that this being which provides the standard is also the cause or explanation of the existence of these qualities, and such a cause must be God. Obviously, this argument draws deeply on Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions that are no longer widely held by philosophers. For the argument to be plausible today, such assumptions would have to be defended, or else the argument reformulated in a way that frees it from its original metaphysical home.

Probably the most influential versions of the moral argument for belief in God can be traced to Kant (1788 [1956]), who famously argued that the theoretical arguments for God’s existence were unsuccessful, but presented a rational argument for belief in God as a “postulate of practical reason.” Kant held that a rational, moral being must necessarily will “the highest good,” which consists of a world in which people are both morally good and happy, and in which moral virtue is the condition for happiness. The latter condition implies that this end must be sought solely by moral action. However, Kant held that a person cannot rationally will such an end without believing that moral actions can successfully achieve such an end, and this requires a belief that the causal structure of nature is conducive to the achievement of this end by moral means. This is equivalent to belief in God, a moral being who is ultimately responsible for the character of the natural world. Kant’s arguments will be discussed later in this article.

Kant-inspired arguments were prominent in the nineteenth century, and continued to be important right up to the middle of the twentieth century. Such arguments can be found, for example, in W. R. Sorley (1918), Hastings Rashdall (1920), and A. E. Taylor (1945/1930). Although Henry Sidgwick was not himself a proponent of a moral argument for God’s existence, some have argued that his thought presents the materials for such an argument (see Walls and Baggett 2011). In the nineteenth century John Henry Newman (1870) also made good use of a moral argument in his case for belief in God, developing what could be called an argument from conscience.

Besides those luminaries from the history of the moral argument, several other figures made contributions of various sorts to the discussion, including Arthur Balfour (1915), Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (1920), Clement Webb (2012), W. G. de Burgh (1938), W. R. Matthews (1921), Austin Farrer (2012), and H. P. Owen (1965). A chronicle of much of this history was published by Walls and Baggett (2019). Recovering such history is a helpful antidote to the ahistorical character of much contemporary analytic philosophy.

In recent philosophy there has been a revival of divine command metaethical theories, which has in turn led to new versions of the moral argument found in such thinkers as Robert Adams (1987), John Hare (1996), and C. Stephen Evans (2010). Work on divine command theory, both in favor and against, has experienced a recent resurgence of interest. This work has encompassed both motivations for and formulations of divine command theory, as well as extensive discussion of both old and new objections to it.

However, it is important to see that there are versions of the moral argument for God’s existence that are completely independent of such a divine command theory, and this possibility can be seen in arguments developed by Angus Ritchie (2012) and Mark Linville (2009). Perhaps the most extensive and developed account of a moral argument for God’s existence in recent philosophy is found in David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls (2016). This book examines a comprehensive cumulative form of moral argument and extensively explores underlying issues. It goes without saying that these renewed arguments have engendered new criticisms as well. Theoretical moral arguments for God’s existence can be understood as variations on the following template:

There are objective moral facts.
God provides the best explanation of the existence of objective moral facts.
Therefore, (probably) God exists.

As we shall see, there are a variety of features of morality that can be appealed to in the first steps of the arguments, as well as a variety of ways in which God might be thought to provide an explanation of those features in the second steps. The use of the somewhat vague phrase “objective moral facts” is intended to allow for this variety in Premise 1. The similarly vague notion of God providing the best explanation of such facts allows for the variety of ways moral features may depend on God—divine commands one salient option among them. Both types of premises are obviously open to challenge. For example, the first premise of such an argument can be challenged by popular metaethical views that see morality as “subjective,” or “expressive,” rather than something that consists of objective facts. Moral skeptics and “error theorists” also challenge the first premise. The second premise can be challenged on the basis of rival explanations of the features of morality, explanations that do not require God. Arguments about the second premise then may require comparison between theistic explanations of morality and these rival views, with an attentive eye on the relevant evidence in need of explanation.

It is easy to see then that the proponent of a moral argument has a complex task: She must defend the reality and objectivity of the feature of morality appealed to, but also defend the claim that this feature can be best explained by God. The second part of the task may require not only demonstrating the strengths of a theistic explanation, but pointing out weaknesses in rival secular explanations as well. Both parts of the task are essential, but it is worth noting that the two components cannot be accomplished simultaneously. The theist must defend the reality of morality against subjectivists, constructivists, and “moral nihilists.” Assuming that this task has been carried out, the theist must then try to show that morality thus understood requires or at least is most plausibly understood by a theistic explanation.

It is interesting to observe, however, that with respect to both parts of the task, the theist may enlist non-theists as allies. The theist may well make common cause with ethical naturalists as well as ethical non-naturalists in defending moral realism against “projective” theories such as expressivism. However, the theist may also enlist the support of error theorists such as J. L. Mackie (1977), and moral nihilists such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1887) in arguing that God is necessary for objective morality. Nietzsche, for example, explicitly holds that God does not exist, but also claims that God’s non-existence undermines the reality of traditional western morality. The fact that theists can enlist such unlikely allies does not mean the moral argument for God’s existence is sound, but it does suggest that the argument is not obviously question-begging, since both premises are sometimes accepted by (different) non-believers.

One easily understandable version of a theistic moral argument relies on an analogy between human laws promulgated by nation-states and moral laws. Sovereign states enact laws that make certain acts forbidden or required. If I am a U. S. citizen, and I earn more than a small amount of money I am obligated to file an income tax return each year. I am also forbidden, because of the laws that hold in the United States, to discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, age, or race. Many people believe that there are moral laws that bind individuals in the same way that political laws do. I am obligated by a moral principle not to lie to others, and I am similarly obligated to keep promises that I have made. (Both legal and moral laws may be understood as holding prima facie , so that in some situations a person must violate one law in order to obey a more important one.)

We know how human laws come into existence. They are enacted by legislatures (or absolute monarchs in some countries) who have the authority to pass such laws. How then should the existence of moral laws be explained? It seems plausible to many to hold that they must be similarly grounded in some appropriate authority, and the or best candidate to fulfill this role is God. Some philosophers have dismissed an argument of this type as “crude,” presumably because its force is so obvious that no special philosophical training is necessary to understand it and see its appeal. The fact that one can understand the argument without much in the way of philosophical skill is not necessarily a defect, however. If one supposes that there is a God, and that God wants humans to know him and relate to him, one would expect God to make his reality known to humans in very obvious ways (See Evans 2010). After all, critics of theistic belief, such as J. L. Schellenberg (1993), have argued that the fact that God’s reality is not obvious to those who would like to believe in God is a grave problem. If an awareness of moral obligations is in fact an awareness of God’s commands or divine laws, then the ordinary person who is aware of moral obligations does have a kind of awareness of God. Of course such a person might be aware of God’s laws without realizing that they are God’s laws; she might be aware of God’s commands without being aware of them under that description. The religious apologist might view such a person as already having a kind of de re awareness of God, because a moral obligation is simply an expression of God’s will (or God’s command or motivation, preference or desire).

How can such an awareness be converted into full-fledged belief in God? One way of doing this would be to help the person gain the skills needed to recognize moral laws as what they are, as divine commands or divine laws. If moral laws are experienced, then moral experience could be viewed as a kind of religious experience or at least a proto-religious experience. Perhaps someone who has experience of God in this way does not need a moral argument (or any kind of argument) to have a reasonable belief in God. This may be one instance of the kind of case that Alvin Plantinga (2000) and the “Reformed epistemologists” have in mind when they claim that belief in God can be “properly basic.” It is worth noting then that there could be such a thing as knowledge of God that is rooted in moral experience without that knowledge being the result of a moral argument .

Even if that is the case, however, a moral argument could still play a valuable role. Such an argument might be one way of helping an individual understand that moral obligations are in fact divine commands or laws. Even if it were true that some ordinary people might know that God exists without argument, an argument could be helpful in defending the claim that this is the case. A person might conceivably need an argument for the second-level claim that the person knows God without argument.

In any case a divine command metaethical theory provides the material for such an argument. The revival of divine command theories (DCT) of moral obligation is due mainly to the work of Philip Quinn (1979/1978) and Robert Adams (1999). Adams’ version of a DCT has been particularly influential and is well-suited for the defense of the claim that moral knowledge can provide knowledge of God. Adams’ version of a DCT is an account of moral obligations and it must be distinguished from more general “voluntarist” views of ethics that try to treat other moral properties (such as the good) as dependent on God’s will. As explained below, by limiting the theory to obligations, Adams avoids the standard “ Euthyphro ” objection, which claims that divine command views reduce ethics to arbitrariness.

Adams’ account of moral obligations as divine commands rests on a more general social theory of obligations. There are of course many types of obligations: legal obligations, financial obligations, obligations of etiquette, and obligations that hold in virtue of belonging to some club or association, to name just a few. Clearly these obligations are distinct from moral obligations, since in some cases moral obligations can conflict with these other kinds. What is distinctive about obligations in general? They are not reducible simply to normative claims about what a person has a good reason to do.

J. S. Mill (1874, 164–165) argued that we can explain normative principles without making any reference to God. He contends that the “feeling of obligation” stems from “something that the internal conscience bears witness to in its own nature,” and thus the moral law, unlike human laws, “does not originate in the will of a legislator or legislature external to the mind.” Doubtless Mill had in mind here such normative logical principles as “it is wrong to believe both p and not-p at the same time.” Mill argues that such normative principles hold without any requirement for an “authority” to be their ground, and he thinks this is plausible for the case of moral principles as well. Mill’s view is plausible at least for some normative principles, though some theists have argued that metaphysical naturalists have difficulty in explaining any kind of normativity (see Devine 1989, 88–89). However, even if Mill is correct about normativity in general, it does not follow that his view is correct for moral obligations, which have a special character. An obligation has a special kind of force; we should care about complying with it, and violations of obligations appropriately incur blame (Adams 1999, 235). If I make a logical mistake, I may feel silly or stupid or embarrassed, but I have no reason to feel guilty, unless the mistake reflects some carelessness on my part that itself constitutes a violation of a moral obligation. Adams argues that “facts of obligation are constituted by broadly social requirements.” (ibid, 233) For example, the social role of parenting is partly constituted by the obligations one assumes by becoming a parent, and the social role of citizen is partly constituted by the obligations to obey the laws of the country in which one is a citizen.

All obligations are then constituted by social requirements, according to Adams. However, not all obligations constituted by social requirements are moral obligations. What social relation could be the basis of moral obligations? Adams argues that not just any human social relation will possess the requisite authority: “A morally valid obligation obviously will not be constituted by just any demand sponsored by a system of social relationships that one in fact values. Some such demands have no moral force, and some social systems are downright evil.” (ibid, 242) If a good and loving God exists and has created all humans, then the social relation humans have to God has the right features to explain moral obligations. For if moral obligations stem from God’s requirements, they will be objective, but they will also be motivating, since a relation to God would clearly be a great good that humans would have reason to value. Since a proper relation to God is arguably more important than any other social relation, we can also understand why moral obligations trump other kinds of obligations. On this view we can also explain why moral obligations have a transcendent character, which is important because “a genuinely moral conception of obligation must have resources for moral criticism of social systems and their demands.” (ibid, 242–243)

Notice that the DCT Adams defends in his later work is ontological rather than semantic: it is a claim that moral obligations are in fact identical with divine commands, not a claim that “moral obligations” has the same meaning as “divine commands.” On his account, applying the work of direct reference theorists like Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke to the arena of ethics, the meaning of “moral obligation” is fixed by the role this concept plays in our language. That role includes such facts as these: Moral obligations must be motivating and objective. They also must provide a basis for critical evaluation of other types of obligations, and they must be such that someone who violates a moral obligation is appropriately subject to blame. Adams argues that it is divine commands that best satisfy these desiderata. God’s existence thus provides the best explanation of moral obligations. If moral obligations are identical with divine commands (or perhaps if they are grounded in or caused to exist by divine commands) an argument for God’s existence from such obligations can easily be constructed:

There are objective moral obligations.
If there are objective moral obligations, there is a God who explains these obligations.
There is a God.

This argument is stated in a deductive form, but it can easily be reworded as a probabilistic “argument to the best explanation,” as follows:

God provides the best explanation of the existence of moral obligations.
Probably, God exists.

Obviously, those who do not find a DCT convincing will not think this argument from moral obligation has force. However, Adams anticipates and gives a forceful answer to one common criticism of a DCT. It is often argued that a DCT must fail because of a dilemma parallel to one derived from Plato’s Euthyphro . The dilemma for a DCT can be derived from the following question: Assuming that God commands what is right, does he command what is right because it is right (assuming that “right” here means “morally required” and not just “morally permissible.”)? If the proponent of a DCT answers affirmatively, then it appears the quality of rightness must hold antecedently to and thus independently of God’s commands. If, however, the proponent denies that God commands what is right because it is right, then God’s commands appear arbitrary. Adams’ version of a DCT evades this dilemma by invoking the good/right distinction and holding that God is essentially good and that his commands are necessarily aimed at the good. This allows Adams to claim that God’s commands make actions obligatory (or forbidden), while denying that the commands are arbitrary in any problematic sense.

Although Adams’ version of a DCT successfully meets this “ Euthyphro ” objection, there are other powerful criticisms that have been mounted against this metaethical theory in the literature. These objections can be found in the writings of Wes Morriston (2009, 2016), Erik Wielenberg (2005, especially part 3, 2014, and chapter 2, 2020), Oppy (2014, especially ch. 3), and Nicholas Wolterstorff (2007), among others. Besides arbitrariness, objections raised against DCT include autonomy objections, a variety of epistemic objections, a psychopathy objection, supervenience objections, prior obligations objection, and other Euthyphro objections, which include grounding, vacuity, and counterpossible objections.

Wielenberg explicitly defends as an alternative to divine command metaethics a view he calls “godless normative realism.” This is essentially the view that moral truths are basic or fundamental in character, not derived from natural facts or any more fundamental metaphysical facts. It thus seems similar to the view often called “ethical non-naturalism.” This view certainly provides a significant alternative to divine command metaethics. However, it is worth noting that some of the criticisms that metaphysical naturalists have against theistic metaethics may apply to Wielenberg’s view as well. Specifically, philosophers such as J. L. Mackie (1977) find non-natural ethical qualities of any kind “queer” since they are so unlike the realities discovered by science. The “brute moral facts” posited by Wielenberg as necessary truths seem vulnerable to this same criticism. In fact, the criticism may be sharper against Wielenberg’s view than against theistic views, since ethical truths may appear less odd in a universe that is ultimately grounded in a person. Responses to the objections of Wielenberg, Morriston, and others have also been given (see Evans 2013, Baggett and Walls, 2011, 2016, Flannagan, 2017, 2021a, 2021, Pruss, 2009, Davis and Franks, 2015). Clearly the version of a moral argument for God’s existence that rests on divine command theory will only be judged powerful by those who find a DCT plausible, and that will certainly be a minority of philosophers. (Although it is worth noting that no single metaethical theory seems to enjoy widespread support among philosophers, so a DCT is not alone in being a minority view.) Nevertheless, those who do find a DCT powerful will also see moral obligations as providing strong evidence for God’s reality.

A variety of arguments have been developed that God is necessary to explain human awareness of moral truth (or moral knowledge, if one believes that this moral awareness amounts to knowledge). Richard Swinburne (2004, 218), for example, argues that there is no “great probability that moral awareness will occur in a Godless universe.” On Swinburne’s view, moral truths are either necessary truths or contingent truths that are grounded in necessary truths. For example, it is obviously contingent that “It is wrong to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima,” since it is contingent that there exists a city such as Hiroshima. But one might hold that this proposition is true (assuming it is) because of some other truth such as “It is wrong intentionally to kill innocent humans” which does hold universally and is necessarily true. Swinburne does not think that an argument to God’s existence from moral facts as such is powerful, increasing the likelihood of theism only a little. However, the fact that we humans are aware of moral facts is itself surprising and calls for an explanation.

It may be true that creatures who belong to groups that behave altruistically will have some survival advantage over groups that lack such a trait. However, moral beliefs are not required in order to produce such behavior, since it is clear that “there are many species of animals that are naturally inclined to help others of their species, and yet do not have moral beliefs.” (Swinburne 2004, 217) If God exists, he has “significant reason to bring about conscious beings with moral awareness,” since his intended purpose for humans includes making it possible for them freely to choose good over evil, since this will make it possible for them to develop a relation to God. Swinburne does not think that this argument provides very strong evidence for God’s existence by itself, but rather that it provides some inductive support for belief in God. It is one of several phenomena which seem more probable in a theistic universe than in a godless universe. As we consider more and more such phenomena, it will be increasingly improbable that “they will all occur.” (ibid, 218) All of these inductive arguments together may then provide substantial support for theistic belief, even if no one of them by itself would be sufficient for rational belief by demonstrating that theism is likely true.

Swinburne’s version of the argument is quite brief and undeveloped, but some claims that could be used to support a more developed version of the argument (one that will be described below) can be found in a well-known and much cited article by Sharon Street (2006). Street’s argument, as the title implies, is in no way intended to support a moral argument for theism. To the contrary, her purpose is to defend anti-realist metaethical theories against realist theories that view moral truth as “stance-independent” of human attitudes and emotions. Street presents the moral realist with a dilemma posed by the question as to how our human evaluative beliefs are related to human evolution. It is clear, she believes, that evolution has strongly shaped our evaluative attitudes. The question concerns how those attitudes are related to the objective evaluative truths accepted by the realist. If the realist holds that there is no relation between such truths and our evaluative attitudes, then this implies that “most of our evaluative judgments are off track due to the distorting influence of Darwinian processes.” The other alternative for the realist is to claim that there is a relationship, and thus that is not an accident or miracle that our evaluative beliefs track the objective truths. However, this view, Street claims, is scientifically implausible. Street argues therefore that an evolutionary story about how we came to make the moral judgments we make undermines confidence in the objective truth of those judgments. Street’s argument is of course controversial and thinkers such as Erik Wielenberg (2014) have argued against evolutionary debunking arguments. Still, many regard such arguments as problematic for those who want to defend moral realism, particularly when developed as a “global” argument (Kahane, 2010).

Street’s argument has also been challenged by such critics as Russ Shafer-Landau (2012). However, her argument, and similar arguments, have been acknowledged by some moral realists, such as David Enoch (2011) and Erik Wielenberg (2014) to pose a significant problem for their view. Enoch, for example, even though he offers a response to Street’s argument, evidently has some worries about the strength of his reply. Wielenberg, to avoid the criticism that in a non-theistic universe it would be extremely lucky if evolution selected for belief in objectively true moral values, proposes that the natural laws that produce this result may be metaphysically necessary, and thus there is no element of luck. However, many philosophers will see this view of natural laws as paying a heavy price to avoid theism. It might appear that Street is arguing straightforwardly that evolutionary theory makes it improbable that humans would have objective moral knowledge. However, it is not evolution by itself that predicts the improbability of objective moral knowledge, but the conjunction of evolution and metaphysical naturalism. A good deal of the force of Street’s argument stems from the assumption that naturalism is true, and therefore that the evolutionary process is one that is unguided. Since it is not evolution by itself that poses a challenge to moral realism but the conjunction of evolution and metaphysical naturalism, then rejecting naturalism provides one way for the moral realist to solve the problem. It does appear that in a naturalistic universe we would expect a process of Darwinian evolution to select for a propensity for moral judgments that track survival and not objective moral truths. Mark Linville (2009, 391–446) has developed a detailed argument for the claim that it is difficult for metaphysical naturalists to develop a plausible evolutionary story as to how our moral judgments could have epistemological warrant. However, if we suppose that the evolutionary process has been guided by God, who has as one of his goals the creation of morally significant human creatures capable of enjoying a relation with God, then it would not seem at all accidental or even unlikely that God would ensure that humans have value beliefs that are largely correct.

Some philosophers believe that the randomness of Darwinian natural selection rules out the possibility of any kind of divine guidance being exercised through such a process. Some thinkers, including both some atheists and some proponents of what is called “creation science,” believe that evolution and God are rivals, mutually exclusive hypotheses about the origins of the natural world. What can be explained scientifically needs no religious explanation. However, this is far from obviously true; in fact, if theism is true it is clearly false. From a theistic perspective to think that God and science provide competing explanations fails to grasp the relationship between God and the natural world by conceiving of God as one more cause within that natural world. If God exists at all, God is not an entity within the natural world, but the creator of that natural world, with all of its causal processes. If God exists, God is the reason why there is a natural world and the reason for the existence of the causal processes of the natural world. In principle, therefore, a natural explanation can never preclude a theistic explanation. Any argument that natural explanations preclude or are in tension with theistic explanations will in fact be theological in character, since they will be grounded in assumptions about the kind of world God would create.

But what about the randomness that is a crucial part of the Darwinian story? The atheist might claim that because evolutionary theory posits that the process by which plants and animals have evolved is one that involves random genetic mutations, it cannot be guided, and thus God cannot have used evolutionary means to achieve his ends. However, this argument fails. It depends on an equivocation in what is meant by “random.” When scientists claim that genetic mutations are random, they do not mean that they are uncaused, or even that they are unpredictable from the point of view of biochemistry, but only that the mutations do not happen in response to the adaptational needs of the organism. It is entirely possible for a natural process to include randomness in that sense, even if the whole natural order is itself created and sustained by God. The sense of “randomness” required for evolutionary theory does not imply that the evolutionary process must be unguided. A God who is responsible for the laws of nature and the initial conditions that shape the evolutionary process could certainly ensure that the process achieved certain ends.

Like the other moral arguments for God’s existence, the argument from moral knowledge can easily be stated in a propositional form, and I believe Swinburne is right to hold that the argument is best construed as a probabilistic argument that appeals to God as providing a better explanation of moral knowledge than is possible in a naturalistic universe.

Humans possess objective moral knowledge.
Probably, if God does not exist, humans would not possess objective moral knowledge.

There is a kind of argument from moral knowledge also implicit in Angus Ritchie’s book From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments (2012). Ritchie presses a kind of dilemma on non-theistic accounts of morality. Subjectivist theories such as expressivism can certainly make sense of the fact that we make the ethical judgments we do, but they empty morality of its objective authority. Objectivist theories that take morality seriously, however, have difficulty explaining our capacity to make true moral judgments, unless the process by which humans came to hold these capacities is one that is controlled by a being such as God.

The moral argument from knowledge will not be convincing to anyone who is committed to any form of expressivism or other non-objective metaethical theory, and clearly many philosophers find such views attractive. And there will surely be many philosophers who will judge that if moral objectivism implies theism or requires theism to be plausible, this is a reductio of objectivist views. Furthermore, non-theistic moral philosophers, whether naturalists or non-naturalists, have stories to tell about how moral knowledge might be possible. Nevertheless, there are real questions about the plausibility of these stories, and thus, some of those convinced that moral realism is true may judge that moral knowledge provides some support for theistic belief.

Many philosophers find Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy still offers a fruitful approach to ethics. Of the various forms of the “categorical imperative” that Kant offers, the formula that regards human beings as “ends in themselves” is especially attractive: “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant 1785 [1964], 96). Many contemporary moral philosophers influenced by Kant, such as Christine Korsgaard (1996), see Kant as offering a “constructivist” metaethical position. Constructivism is supposed to offer a “third way” between moral realism and subjectivist views of morality. Like subjectivists, constructivists want to see morality as a human creation. However, like moral realists constructivists want to see moral questions as having objective answers. Constructivism is an attempt to develop an objective morality that is free of the metaphysical commitments of moral realism.

It is, however, controversial whether Kant himself was a constructivist in this sense. One reason to question whether this is the right way to read Kant follows from the fact that Kant himself did not see morality as free from metaphysical commitments. For example, Kant thought that it would be impossible for someone who believed that mechanistic determinism was the literal truth about himself to believe that he was a moral agent, since morality requires an autonomy that is incompatible with determinism. To see myself as a creature who has the kind of value Kant calls “dignity” I must not see myself merely as a machine-like product of the physical environment. Hence Kant thought that it was crucial for morality that his Critical Philosophy had shown that the deterministic perspective on humans is simply part of the “phenomenal world” that is the object of scientific knowledge, not the “noumenal reality” that it would be if some kind of scientific realism were the true metaphysical view. When we do science we see ourselves as determined, but science tells us only how the world appears, not how it really is. Recognizing this fact suggests that when Kant posits that humans have this intrinsic value he calls dignity, he is not “constructing” the value humans have, but recognizing the value beings of a certain kind must have. Humans can only have this kind of value if they are a particular kind of creature. Whether Kant himself was a moral realist or not, there are certainly elements in his philosophy that push in a realist direction.

If the claim that human persons have a kind of intrinsic dignity or worth is a true objective principle and if it provides a key foundational principle of morality, it is well worth asking what kinds of metaphysical implications the claim might have. This is the question that Mark Linville (2009, 417–446) pursues in the second moral argument he develops. Linville begins by noting that one could hardly hold that “human persons have intrinsic dignity” could be true if human persons do not exist. Clearly, some metaphysical positions do include a denial of the existence of human persons, such as forms of Absolute Monism which hold that only one Absolute Reality exists. However, it also seems to be the case that some forms of Scientific Naturalism are committed to the denial of “ persons as substantive selves that essentially possess a first-person point of view” (See Dennett 2006, 107). Daniel Dennett, for example, holds that persons will not be part of the ultimately true scientific account of things. Dennett holds that to think of humans as persons is simply to adopt a certain “stance” toward them that he calls the “intentional stance,” but it is clear that the kind of picture of humans we get when we think of them in this way does not correspond with their intrinsic metaphysical properties. It is not clear how systems towards which we adopt an “intentional stance” could be truly autonomous and thus have the kind of value Kant believes human persons have.

The argument from human dignity could be put into propositional form as follows:

Human persons have a special kind of intrinsic value that we call dignity.
The only (or best) explanation of the fact that humans possess dignity is that they are created by a supremely good God in God’s own image.
Probably there is a supremely good God.

A naturalist may want to challenge premise (2) by finding some other strategy to explain human dignity. Michael Martin (2002), for example, has tried to suggest that moral judgments can be analyzed as the feelings of approval or disapproval of a perfectly impartial and informed observer. Linville (2009) objects that it is not clear how the feelings of such an observer could constitute the intrinsic worth of a person, since one would think that intrinsic properties would be non-relational and mind-independent. In any case, Linville notes that a “Euthyphro” problem lurks for such an ideal observer theory, since one would think that such an observer would judge a person to be intrinsically valuable because the person has intrinsic value.

Another strategy that is pursued by constructivists such as Korsgaard is to link the value ascribed to humans to the capacity for rational reflection. The idea is that insofar as I am committed to rational reflection, I must value myself as having this capacity, and consistently value others who have it as well. A similar strategy is found in Wielenberg’s form of ethical non-naturalism, since Wielenberg argues that it is necessarily true that any being with certain reflective capacities will have moral rights (Wielenberg, 2014, chapter 4). It is far from clear that human rationality provides an adequate ground for moral rights, however. Many people believe that young infants and people suffering from dementia still have this intrinsic dignity, but in both cases there is no capacity for rational reflection.

Some support for this criticism of the attempt to see reason as the basis of the value of humans can be found in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent work on justice (2007, especially Ch. 8). Wolterstorff in this work defends the claim that there are natural human rights, and that violating such rights is one way of acting unjustly towards a person. Why do humans have such rights? Wolterstorff says these rights are grounded in the basic worth or dignity that humans possess. When I seek to torture or kill an innocent human I am failing to respect this worth. If one asks why we should think humans possess such worth, Wolterstorff argues that the belief that humans have this quality was not only historically produced by Jewish and Christian conceptions of the human person, but even now cannot be defended apart from such a conception. In particular, he argues that attempts to argue that our worth stems from some excellence we possess such as reason will not explain the worth of infants or those with severe brain injuries or dementia.

Does a theistic worldview fare better in explaining the special value of human dignity? In a theistic universe God is himself seen as the supreme good. Indeed, theistic Platonists usually identify God with the Good. If God is himself a person, then this seems to be a commitment to the idea that personhood itself is something that must be intrinsically good. If human persons are made in God’s image, as both Judaism and Christianity affirm, then it would seem to follow that humans do have a kind of intrinsic value, just by way of being the kind of creatures they are.

This argument will of course be found unconvincing to many. Some will deny premise (1), either because they reject moral realism as a metaethical stance, or because they reject the normative claim that humans have any kind of special value or dignity. (Maybe they will even think that such a claim is a form of “speciesism.”). Others will find premise (2) suspect. They may be inclined to agree that human persons have a special dignity, but hold that the source of that dignity can be found in such human qualities as rationality. With respect to the status of infants and those suffering from dementia, the critic might bite the bullet and just accept the fact that human dignity does not extend to them, or else argue that the fact that infants and those suffering mental breakdown are part of a species whose members typically possess rationality merits them a special respect, even if they lack this quality as individuals. Others will find premise (2) doubtful because they find the theistic explanation of dignity unclear. Another alternative is to seek a Constructivist account of dignity, perhaps regarding the special status of humans as something we humans decide to extend to each other. Perhaps the strongest non-theistic alternative would be some form of ethical non-naturalism, in which one simply affirms that the claim that persons have a special dignity is an a priori truth requiring no explanation. In effect this is a decision for a non-theistic form of Platonism.

The proponent of the argument may well agree that claims about the special status of humans are true a priori , and thus also opt for some form of Platonism. However, the proponent of the argument will point out that some necessary truths can be explained by other necessary truths. The theist believes that these truths about the special status of humans tell us something about the kind of universe humans find themselves in. To say that humans are created by God is to say that personhood is not an ephemeral or accidental feature of the universe, because at bottom reality itself is personal (Mavrodes 1986).

As already noted, the most famous and perhaps most influential version of a moral argument for belief in God is found in Immanuel Kant (1788). Kant himself insisted that his argument was not a theoretical argument, but an argument grounded in practical reason. The conclusion of the argument is not “God exists” or “God probably exists” but “I (as a rational, moral agent) ought to believe that God exists.” We shall, however, see that there are some reasons to doubt that practical arguments can be neatly separated from theoretical arguments.

Kant’s version of the argument can be stated in different ways, but perhaps the following captures one plausible interpretation of the argument. Morality is grounded in pure practical reason, and the moral agent must act on the basis of maxims that can be rationally endorsed as universal principles. Moral actions are thus not determined by results or consequences but by the maxims on which they are based. However, all actions, including moral actions, necessarily aim at ends. Kant argues that the end that moral actions aim at is the “highest good,” which is a world in which both moral virtue and happiness are maximized, with happiness contingent on virtue. For Kant “ought implies can,” and so if I have an obligation to seek the highest good, then I must believe that it is possible to achieve such an end. However, I must seek the highest good only by acting in accordance with morality; no shortcuts to happiness are permissible. This seems to require that I believe that acting in accordance with morality will be causally efficacious in achieving the highest good. However, it is reasonable to believe that moral actions will be causally efficacious in this way only if the laws of causality are set up in such a way that these laws are conducive to the efficacy of moral action. Certainly both parts of the highest good seem difficult to achieve. We humans have weaknesses in our character that appear difficult if not impossible to overcome by our own efforts. Furthermore, as creatures we have subjective needs that must be satisfied if we are happy, but we have little empirical reason to think that these needs will be satisfied by moral actions even if we succeeded in becoming virtuous. If a person believes that the natural world is simply a non-moral machine with no moral purposiveness then that person would have no reason to believe that moral action could succeed because there is no a priori reason to think moral action will achieve the highest good and little empirical reason to believe this either. Kant thus concludes that a moral agent must “postulate” the existence of God as a rational presupposition of the moral life.

One problem with this argument is that many will deny that morality requires us to seek the highest good in Kant’s sense. Even if the Kantian highest good seems reasonable as an ideal, some will object that we have no obligation to achieve such a state, but merely to work towards realizing the closest approximation to such a state that is possible (See Adams 1987, 152). Without divine assistance, perhaps perfect virtue is unachievable, but in that case we cannot be obliged to realize such a state if there is no God. Perhaps we cannot hope that happiness will be properly proportioned to virtue in the actual world if God does not exist, but then our obligation can only be to realize as much happiness as can be attained through moral means. Kant would doubtless reject this criticism, since on his view the ends of morality are given directly to pure practical reason a priori , and we are not at liberty to adjust those ends on the basis of empirical beliefs. However, few contemporary philosophers would share Kant’s confident view of reason here, and thus to many the criticism has force. Even Kant admits at one point that full-fledged belief in God is not rationally necessary, since one could conceivably seek the highest good if one merely believes that God’s existence is possible (Kant, 1781–1787, 651).

Another way of interpreting Kant’s argument puts more stress on the connection between an individual’s desire for happiness and the obligation to do what is morally right. Morality requires me to sacrifice my personal happiness if that is necessary to do what is right. Yet it is a psychological fact that humans necessarily desire their own happiness. In such a state it looks as if human moral agents will be torn by what Henry Sidgwick called the “dualism of the practical reason” (1884, 401). Reason both requires humans to seek their own happiness and to sacrifice it. Sidgwick himself noted that only if there is a God can we hope that this dualism will be resolved, so that those who seek to act morally will in the long run also be acting so as to advance their own happiness and well-being. (Interestingly, Sidgwick himself does not endorse this argument, but he clearly sees this problem as part of the appeal of theism.) A contemporary argument similar to this one has been developed by C. Stephen Layman (2002).

The critic of this form of the Kantian argument may reply that Kantian morality sees duty as something that must be done regardless of the consequences, and thus a truly moral person cannot make his or her commitment to morality contingent on the achievement of happiness. From a Kantian point of view, this reply seems right; Kant unequivocally affirms that moral actions must be done for the sake of duty and not from any desire for personal reward. Nevertheless, especially for any philosopher willing to endorse any form of eudaimonism, seeing myself as inevitably sacrificing what I cannot help but desire for the sake of duty does seem problematic. As John Hare affirms, “If we are to endorse wholeheartedly the long-term shape of our lives, we have to see this shape as consistent with our happiness” (1996, 88).

The critic may reply to this by simply accepting the lamentable fact that there is something tragic or even absurd about the human condition. The world may not be the world we wish it was, but that does not give us any reason to believe it is different from what it is. If there is a tension between the demands of morality and self-interest, then this may simply be a brute fact that must be faced.

This reply raises an issue for all forms of practical or pragmatic arguments for belief. Many philosophers insist that rational belief must be grounded solely in theoretical evidence. The fact that it would be better for me to believe p does not in itself give me any reason to believe p. This criticism is aimed not merely at Kant, but at other practical moral arguments. For example, Robert Adams argues that if humans believe there is no moral order to the universe, then they will become demoralized in their pursuit of morality, which is morally undesirable (1987, 151). The atheist might concede that atheism is (somewhat) demoralizing, but deny that this provides any reason to believe there is a moral order to the universe. Similarly, Linda Zagzebski (1987) argues that morality will not be a rational enterprise unless good actions increase the amount of good in the world. However, given that moral actions often involve the sacrifice of happiness, there is no reason to believe moral action will increase the good unless there is a power transcendent of human activity working on the side of the good. Here the atheist may claim that moral action does increase the good because such actions always increase good character. However, even if that reply fails the atheist may again simply admit that there may be something tragic or absurd about the human condition, and the fact that we may wish things were different is not a reason to believe that they are. So the problem must be faced: Are practical arguments merely rationalized wish-fulfillment?

The theist might respond to this kind of worry in several ways. The first thing to be said is that the fact that a naturalistic view of the universe implies that the universe must be tragic or absurd, if correct, would itself be an important and interesting conclusion. However, apart from this, it makes a great deal of difference how one construes what we might call the background epistemic situation. If one believes that our theoretical evidence favors atheism, then it seems plausible to hold that one ought to maintain a naturalistic view, even if it is practically undesirable that the world have such a character. In that case a practical argument for religious belief could be judged a form of wish-fulfillment. However, this does not seem to be the way those who support such a practical argument see the situation. Kant affirms that the limits of reason established in The Critique of Pure Reason would silence all objections to morality and religion “in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors.” (1781, 1787, 30. See also 530–531) In fact, the situation actually favors theism, since Kant holds that theoretical reason sees value in the concept of God as a regulative ideal, even though God’s existence cannot be theoretically affirmed as knowledge. If we appeal to God’s will to explain what happens in the natural order, we undermine both science and religion, since in that case we would no longer seek empirical evidence for causality and we would make God into a finite object in the natural world (1781, 1787, 562–563). However, as a regulative ideal, the concept of God is one that theoretical reason finds useful: “The assumption of a supreme intelligence, as the one and only cause of the universe, though in the idea alone, can therefore always benefit reason and can never injure it” (1781, 1787, 560). There is a sense in which theoretical reason itself inclines towards affirmation of God, because it must assume that reality is rationally knowable: “If one wishes to achieve systematic knowledge of the world, he ought to regard it as if it were created by a supreme reason.” (Kant 1786, 298) Although theoretical reason cannot affirm the existence of God, it finds it useful to think of the natural world as having the kinds of characteristics it would have if God did exist. Thus, if rational grounds for belief in God come from practical reason, theoretical reason will raise no objections.

For Kant the argument from practical reason for belief in God is not a form of wish-fulfillment because its ground is not an arbitrary desire or wish but “a real need associated with reason” (Kant, 1786, 296). Human beings are not purely theoretical spectators of the universe, but agents. It is not always rational or even possible to refrain from action, and yet action presupposes beliefs about the way things are (For a good interpretation and defense of this view of Kant on the relation between action and belief, see Wood 1970, 17–25). Thus, in some cases suspension of judgment is not possible. The critic may object that a person may act as if p were true without believing p. However, it is not clear that this advice to distinguish action on the basis of p and belief that p can always be followed. For one thing, it seems empirically the case that one way of acquiring belief that p is simply to begin to act as if p were true. Hence, to begin to act as if p were true is at least to embark upon a course of action that makes belief in p more likely. Second, there may well be a sense of “belief” in which “acting as if p were true” is sufficient to constitute belief. This is obviously the case on pragmatist accounts of belief. But even those who reject a general pragmatic account of belief may well find something like this appealing with respect to religious belief. Many religious believers hold that the best way to measure a person’s religious faith is in terms of the person’s actions. Thus, a person who is willing to act on the basis of a religious conception, especially if those actions are risky or costly, is truly a religious believer, even if that person is filled with doubt and anxiety. Such a person might well be construed as more truly a believer than a person who smugly “assents” to religious doctrines but is unwilling to act on them.

Perhaps the right way to think of practical moral arguments is not to see them as justifying belief without evidence, but as shifting the amount of evidence seen as necessary. This is the lesson some would draw from the phenomenon of “pragmatic encroachment” that has been much discussed in recent epistemology. Here is an example of pragmatic encroachment:

You: I am about to replace the ceiling fan in the kitchen. Spouse: Did you turn off the main electrical power to the house? You: Yes. Spouse: If you forgot you could electrocute yourself. You: I better go back and check. (See McBrayer 2014, Rizzieri 2013).

A plausible interpretation of this scenario is that ordinarily claims such as the one I made, based on memory, are justified, and count as knowledge. However, in this situation, the stakes are raised because my life is at risk, and my knowledge is lost because the pragmatic situation has “encroached” on the normal truth-oriented conditions for knowledge. Pragmatic encroachment is controversial and the idea of such encroachment is rejected by some epistemologists. However, defenders hold that it is reasonable to consider the pragmatic stakes in considering evidence for a belief that underlies significant action (see Fantl and McGrath 2007). If this is correct, then it seems reasonable to consider the pragmatic situation in determining how much evidence is sufficient to justify religious beliefs. In theory the adjustment could go in either direction, depending on what costs are associated with a mistake and on which side those costs lie.

In any case it is not clear that practical moral arguments can always be clearly distinguished from theoretical moral arguments. The reason this is so is that in many cases the practical situation described seems itself to be or involve a kind of evidence for the truth of the belief being justified. Take, for example, Kant’s classic argument. One thing Kant’s argument does is call to our attention that it would be enormously odd to believe that human beings are moral creatures subject to an objective moral law, but also to believe that the universe that humans inhabit is indifferent to morality. In other words, the existence of human persons understood as moral beings can itself be understood as a piece of evidence about the character of the universe humans find themselves in. Peter Byrne (2013, 1998) has criticized practical arguments on the grounds that they presuppose something like the following proposition: “The world is likely to be organized so as to meet our deepest human needs.” Byrne objects that this premise is likely to be false if there is no God and thus arguments that assume it appear circular. However, it is not clear that only those who already believe in God will find this premise attractive. The reason for this is that humans are themselves part of the natural universe, and it seems a desirable feature of a metaphysical view that it explain (rather than explain away) features of human existence that seem real and important.

It seems likely therefore that any appeal to a practical argument will include some theoretical component as well, even if that component is not always made explicit. Nevertheless, this does not mean that practical arguments do not have some important and distinctive features. For Kant it was important that religious beliefs stem from practical reason. For if religious belief were grounded solely in theoretical reason, then such belief would have to conform to “extrinsic and arbitrary legislation.” (Kant 1790, 131) Kant thinks such a religion would be one grounded in “fear and submission,” and thus it is good that religious belief is motivated mainly by a free moral act by which the “final end of our being” is presented to us. (1790, 159) For any practical argument makes religious belief existential; the issue is not merely what I believe to be true about the universe but how I shall live my life in that universe.

It seems clear that no version of the moral argument constitutes a “proof” of God’s existence. Each version contains premises that many reasonable thinkers reject. However, this does not mean the arguments have no force. One might think of each version of the argument as attempting to spell out the “cost” of rejecting the conclusion. Some philosophers will certainly be willing to pay the cost, and indeed have independent reasons for doing so. However, it would certainly be interesting and important if one became convinced that atheism required one to reject moral realism altogether, or to embrace an implausible account of how moral knowledge is acquired. For those who think that some version or versions of the arguments have force, the cumulative case for theistic belief may be raised by such arguments.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Byrne, Peter, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/moral-arguments-god/ >. [This was the previous entry on moral arguments for the existence of God in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]
Divine Command Theory , entry by Michael Austin, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Trent Dougherty and Mark Linville for reading a draft of this essay and making many useful suggestions. Matthew Wilson also deserves thanks for tracking many bibliographical references and page numbers.

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Deepening Faith Through Science: A School Leader’s Guide

Faith Stults March 3, 2022 Faith and Science , The CACE Roundtable 2 Comments

Over the course of this Faith & Science series , we’ve explored how to address important but delicate questions of science and faith in the classroom. Christy Hemphill shared with us how important it is to introduce students to potentially challenging topics like evolution, climate change, and bioethics within the supportive setting of a Christian school. April Maskiewicz Cordero offered three simple guidelines to promote mutual respect and gracious dialogue when discussing controversial topics in the classroom. Sarah Bodbyl Roels reminded us that so many of our students’ perceived conflicts between science and faith grow out of misconceptions about the nature of science, misconceptions we can help correct. Finally, we learned from Mark Witwer that teaching science Christianly is not just about what we teach but also how we teach it.

In this final piece, we are exploring how school leaders can make their schools a safe and spiritually supportive place for engaging questions of science and faith.

Why Engage Science & Faith Questions?

You might be wondering, “In a time of polarization and conflict in our countries and even our churches, is it even worth focusing on these controversial topics in our classrooms?” Having been both a student and a teacher at Christian K-12 schools, I can confidently say, “Yes, it is absolutely worth it.” Diving into these waters can help us achieve the following:

Build a Strong Faith Foundation. Whether in college or beyond, students will encounter the science behind evolution, the age of the Earth, and climate change. These topics raise challenging questions that can undermine some students’ faith. Our goal as Christian educators is to prepare them to engage thoughtfully and faithfully with such questions. Let’s do just that by addressing science and faith topics while our students are still in our classrooms!
Bring More Christian Voices to STEM Fields. Every year there are Christian students with deep interest and aptitude in STEM areas who decide not to pursue these paths because they have been told that science is fundamentally in conflict with their faith. By addressing and hopefully removing the tension from studying science, we will encourage more Christian students to pursue careers in STEM. In this arena, they can be ambassadors for Christ, serve their neighbors, and deepen their understanding of God and his world.
Instill Christian Virtues. Today more than ever before, we want to produce students who can embody the Christian values of gracious dialogue, intellectual humility, and love for those who have views different than our own. These skills take practice to develop, and science classes provide a great context for these rehearsals. Teachers can model these skills and attitudes by creating a classroom environment where students feel safe, respected, and affirmed as they offer opposing viewpoints, confront their doubts and fears, and work toward deeper understanding together.

Your Role as a School Leader

The exciting yet challenging work of guiding students through science and faith discussions is done primarily by teachers in the classroom. But teachers can be truly successful only if they have the full support of their administration. So what does it look like for school leaders to help create and support this kind of teaching at their school?

First, the administration and faculty need to be unified in their approach to addressing these hard questions. That does not mean everyone needs to agree on what the answers to the hard questions are. But it does mean that everyone needs to agree on the foundational Christian truths they are affirming and on the educational goals established.

One move in this direction is to develop a school-wide science and learning statement explaining how potentially contentious science topics will be addressed in the classroom. This statement does not include position statements or any “right answers” to contested science and faith questions. Instead, the statement articulates the consistent approach your school and teachers will take when discussing controversial topics and the end goals for your students. Alignment and consistency are key. The last thing you want is for students to be told different, conflicting things about what the “correct Christian view” is from one class to the next. It is good for students to understand that committed Christians may hold different views on some of these topics.

Once you and your faculty are on the same page about your school’s approach, communicate proactively with parents . Parents care deeply about what their children are being taught in school–as they should! The last thing you want is for a parent to feel as if their child is being taught something behind their back. So proactively communicate the approach your school is taking to these questions no matter what course or teacher a student has. Then be willing to listen well and engage in gracious discussions about any questions or concerns parents have.

From here, your primary role as an educational leader will be to wholeheartedly support the faculty as they implement this approach. Teachers are the ones on the front lines of walking students through these delicate, sometimes uncomfortable, and occasional divisive conversations. They need you to have their back. Here are a few ways you can offer needed support:

Consistently communicate and implement the school’s science and learning statement. You can share and discuss your school-wide statement at Open House, Back to School Night, and parent meetings. You can require teachers of relevant courses to include the statement in their syllabi and in online resources. The best way to resolve conflict, after all, is to keep it from developing in the first place.
Make space in course scope & sequences for challenging topics. I know that syllabi are already packed and there is never enough instructional time to cover all the desired content. But as Christian educators, what higher priority is there than content that is both conceptually key to a discipline (like evolution) and has the ability to strengthen a students’ faith for years to come?
Handle parent questions and concerns yourself. There will inevitably be parents with questions and concerns, but you can take a big burden off your teachers’ shoulders by encouraging them to send parents with concerns about the approach directly to you. If this is a school-wide policy, it is ultimately your job to answer for it, not the teachers’.
Affirm to your teachers that their work is important and worthwhile. Let your teachers know that you recognize the difficulty of their task. Affirm to them that teaching these engagement skills is important and valuable for their students. A little recognition goes a long way in encouraging teachers to keep showing up and leaning in to their calling each and every day.

A Valuable Curriculum Resource

Stepping into topics like evolution, climate change, and bioethics can be a daunting task for even the most experienced teachers. So another great way that you can support teachers is to provide them with the Integrate faith and science curriculum from BioLogos .

Integrate was designed specifically for Christian teachers to supplement their current science textbooks with thoughtfully developed science and faith activities and discussions. The flexible, modular units bring Christ-centered faith, rigorous science, and gracious dialogue to your students as they explore the theological and ethical questions raised by modern science. The high school curriculum also helps students to actively cultivate Christian virtues such as humility, wisdom, and wonder. To learn more, check out https://biologos.org/integrate or send us an email at integrate@biologos. org .

The world needs Christians to restore a right relationship between faith and science. We as Christian educators can be part of this process. May you and your students grow in your understanding of God as Creator and Sustainer, your wonder at the beauty and sophistication of the natural world, and your confidence that all truth is God’s truth.

Faith Stults is Program Manager at BioLogos where she supports K12 educators through resource recommendations and training opportunities. After majoring in Astronomy and Religion at Whitman College, she worked as the Project Coordinator for the AAAS’s program on the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. Faith researched science education at Christian high schools as part of her MS in Science Education at Stanford University, then spent seven years teaching high school physics and astronomy at Valley Christian High School in San Jose, California. Faith recently added an MS in Astronomy from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

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2 Comments on “Deepening Faith Through Science: A School Leader’s Guide”

Biologos are focused on theistic evolution – that is confusing for those who adhere to creation science. A model Christian school would equip students with all three models within a framework of debate to allow them to come to their own conclusions.

Hi Steve, I couldn’t agree more that we should expose students to the variety of Christian perspectives on origins and equip them to come to their own conclusions! While you are correct that BioLogos as an organization promotes an evolutionary creation perspective, our primary hope with this curriculum is for students to understand that science and faith do not have to be in conflict with each other and that there can be multiple different views held among faithful, Bible-believing Christians.

We even had two educators who affirm Young Earth Creationism pilot the curriculum, and they felt that their views were fairly portrayed and that the curriculum was a valuable resource to help their students to understand the range of Christian views. The 15-unit curriculum also addresses a wide range of science and faith issues beyond origins, including creation care, DNA technologies, science as a Christian vocation, and much more.

You can read more of what one of the YEC educators had to say about the curriculum here: https://biologos.org/articles/pursuing-knowledge-in-unexpected-places-using-integrate-as-a-young-earth-homeschool-family

Journal of Unification Studies

Volume XIX - (2018)

Integration of science and religion: a hermeneutic approach.

Noda, Keisuke

Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 19, 2018 - Pages 101-132

Note: This article is based on the author's work Multi-Dimensional Hermeneutics for the Integration Science and Religion .

This article takes a hermeneutic approach in articulating a thesis for the unity of science and religion. It examines interpretive frameworks in Unificationism and how it shapes our understanding of religion, science, and their integration. Since the concept of truth is a critical factor in one’s interpretive framework, the article touches upon concepts of truth and as it presents a multi-dimensional hermeneutics as a framework for the idea of the “unity” of science and religion in Unificationism.

Three Views of the Relationship between Science and Religion

As the term “Unificationism” indicates, unification is the key characterizing idea of the Unification Principle (UP), and the unity of religion and science is one of the central theses of the UP. Exposition of the Divine Principle explains that one of the missions of the “new truth” that is UP is the unity of science and religion: “The new truth should be able to unify knowledge by reconciling the internal truth pursued by religion and the external truth perused by science.” [1]

In the philosophy of religion, the relationship between science and religion is one of the central issues. There are three views of their relationship: 1) conflict, 2) independence, and 3) integration.

1. Conflict

The first view sees the relationship between science and religion as one of conflict. This view is exemplified by the dispute between the Ptolemaic geocentric view of the cosmos that at one time was endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church, and the Copernican heliocentric view. It led to the house arrest of Galileo, who held the heliocentric view, by church authorities. Another example is the dispute between those who believe in Darwinian evolution and those who believe in creationism. In the United States, the dispute took the form of court cases over what teachers can teach at public schools. [2]

Why and how does conflict arise between science and religion? The conflict model frames them as two opposite views of reality, one held by scriptural literalists the other by scientific materialists, both who proffer “factual” descriptions of the world. The scriptural literalists interpret biblical narratives as descriptions of literal, historical facts. Scientific materialists see science as the sole source of knowledge about the reality of the world and view religion as having nothing to do with the factual reality.

The dispute exists often on two levels: first, over which discipline or knowledge is qualified to describe the factual reality of the world; second, over what are the “facts.” Scriptural literalists argue for the supremacy of divine authority, while scientific materialists argue for the supremacy of scientific knowledge. Based on their view on the authority of knowledge, scriptural literalists accept all biblical narratives including miracles as factual events. Scientific materialists reject divine authority and miracles, and argue for the authority of the sciences and hold those findings as facts.

Here, there are two problems. First, there is no such thing as pure, un-interpreted fact. From phenomena, we choose and select some of them as facts and link them in a certain order or pattern. Human perception, cognition, and understanding are only possible based on the process of selecting and choosing certain phenomena as facts. In this process of cognition and comprehension, certain selection criteria are at work in human mind. Without a cognitive mechanism for categorizing perception and understanding, we cannot discern certain phenomena as facts.

Both biblical literalists and scientific materialists fail to recognize this hermeneutic dimension in human understanding. The biggest problem is their naïve dogmatism, which fails to account for some critical reflection to recognize the presence of a hermeneutic dimension. Such blindness is an impediment to the advancement of knowledge.

The real disputes are: 1) what constitutes an authority of knowledge, and 2) what are facts. These disputes are neither religious nor scientific, but rather they are a question of one’s philosophical position. This conflict between science and religion can thus be a starting point for reflection and critical examination of one’s philosophical assumptions.

2. Independence

The second view holds that science and religion are totally independent forms of knowledge. Protestant neo-orthodoxy and logical positivism are two examples of this view of science and religion.

Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a Protestant neo-orthodox theologian. Barth argues that: religion and science are two distinct, disparate, and dissimilar types of knowledge; their aims, methods, and the origin of authority are totally distinct. He separates God and human knowledge about God: God is transcendent and unknowable, and we come to know God to the extent God discloses Himself through revelation.

Logical Positivism, which is rooted in Wittengstein’s method of linguistic analysis, was one of the most influential movements in the philosophy of science in early twentieth century. They divided knowledge into three kinds: 1) knowledge that is verifiable by empirical science; 2) formal knowledge, such as logic and mathematics; 3) the rest of know ledge, including religion, ethics, literature, etc. Logical positivists argue: A statement is cognitively meaningful as far as it is verifiable by empirical sciences; verifiability is the criterion by which to assess whether a statement is cognitively meaningful; statements in religion, ethics, and literature are cognitively meaningless, since although they may have poetic or emotional value, their truth or falsity is not verifiable by empirical sciences.

Logical positivism lost its popularity in the late 20th century for several reasons, which I will explain later. Nevertheless, the view of science and religion as two disparate, totally separate “language-games” remains influential in the philosophy of science. Under this view, religious language provides moral recommendations for a particular way of life, and scientific language provides prediction and control over natural phenomena; their purposes and functions are disparate and there is no interaction between science and religion; finally, there is no mechanism to translate one into the other and no common denominator. What issues are present in the view of science and religion as independent of one another? Each discipline has its relative autonomy. Each has its methods of validating knowledge. Although there are disputes over what counts as valid methods and forms of knowledge, each discipline has relative autonomy and its own integrity.

The human being, however, is a unified phenomenon. Each discipline is a specific way to abstract a certain aspect of phenomena and simplify it based on conceptual tools/schema from each discipline. But once it is so simplified, human beings fit it into a unified narrative. In other words, while each discipline yields knowledge based in its specific way to interpret phenomena and its particular perspective, human beings seek to understand how one type of knowledge informs another type of knowledge. This tendency for the integration of knowledge is intrinsic to human beings.

It is a mistake to think that knowledge from one specific discipline can present the whole reality of phenomena. Reality is a complex, synthetic unity. Each discipline is an abstraction or a one-sided view of the world from a specific perspective; and to depict the reality of the world it is necessary to find the relationships among multiple disciplines. By discovering how one discipline informs other types of knowledge, we can come closer to the reality of the world. Such endeavors toward the discovery of the complex reality of the world is the hermeneutic of hermeneutics, that is, the interpretation of interpretation.

3. Integration

The third view sees the relationship between science and religion in integral way. This model is an attempt to integrate above mentioned two views, the conflict view and independence view. Like the independence view, it recognizes that religion and science have different approaches and different types of knowledge. It also recognizes conflicts between them and tries to resolve them. In other words, this approach is an attempt to present a consistent and coherent explanation that can resolve the conflicts based on the differences between science and religion.

In a sense, philosophy is historically an endeavor to find a way to integrate all knowledge. The metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and medieval thinkers, epistemology in modern philosophy, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, and deconstructionism are attempts to find the best approach to capture the complex reality of the world. While each discipline is an attempt to find specific knowledge, philosophy is an attempt to discover meta-knowledge—the knowledge underneath all knowledge. For this reason, when we inquire into the integration of knowledge, we are, one way or another, led to a philosophical field as we critically examine each discipline and seek to integrate knowledge.

Natural Theology and Process Theology

In the integration of religion and science, there are two major approaches in theology: natural theology, and developmental-type theologies such as process theology. This typology is not a sharp distinction but simply a general tendency: the former is more traditional and the latter is innovative.

Natural theology is distinguished from revealed theology. While revealed theology takes the primary source of knowledge from what is understood as revelation—primarily Scripture, natural theology is the attempt to justify beliefs by using reason and experience. Many pay attention to the development of science and try to incorporate scientific knowledge in an approach to theology. For example, Richard Swinburne, a contemporary theologian, uses probability theory to support the argument from design for the Creator God. [3] One of the platforms of natural theology is the Gifford Lectureships, established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887) to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God.” [4] Natural theologians try to show how sciences can support their beliefs.

A common criticism of natural theology is that its use of science is selective or partial; natural theologians pick and select unfairly those scientific findings that can support their claims and ignore the rest. Such critiques lead us to the question of what we understand by scientific knowledge. This leads us to the whole question of what science is, including a cluster of questions including what we mean by verification, falsification, observation, proof, and more.

New theologies, notably process theology, take a different approach to knowledge. Process philosophy was developed by Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a philosopher and mathematician, and his line of thought was developed into process theology by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) and John B. Cobb (1925~). [5] They identified the issue not as one of compatibility between scientific findings and faith, but as a problem with the assumptions, concepts, and frameworks of thought upon which both science and religion operate.

Whitehead presented a philosophical framework within which we can see both faith and science under a new light. The scope of his critique includes the concept of being (applicable to both God and the world), time, and truth. In other words, he argues that conflicts between science and religion are not resolvable on the level of claims or findings in religion and science; integration is possible only when we go deeper into philosophical assumptions and frameworks. An exposition of his innovative approach and a comparative study with Unificationism deserves a separate and thorough discussion on another occasion.

There are other attempts to explore an integral approach by taking contemporary developments in science as the basis to explore approaches to religion. For example, contemporary physics presents a number of challenges to the concepts of time, space, and the reality of being that require interpretation. Some theorists try to establish a model that can integrate science and religion/spirituality. Such attempts are based on redefining and broadening the concept of religion by going beyond doctrines of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and many try to integrate an Eastern religious dimension.

Steps toward Integration

Unificationism seeks an integrated model. Within the framework of Unifica tionism, some may pursue a natural theology model by finding supportive claims in science to justify religious beliefs. However, this model cannot avoid the charge of an unfair selection of convenient “findings” to justify certain beliefs. It may have some appeal to those who already share the same belief, however it does not have much appeal beyond certain faith communities. For Unificationism which boldly claims the unity of science and religion, this model is not sufficient. To carry out the task of integration, a more fundamental approach is necessary. To find a better approach for integration, we would like to delve into the issue a little further. We will consider how conflicts between science and religion emerge, and in particular two questions: 1) What kinds of issues do science and religion conflict about? and 2) Where do those conflicts come from? For the first question, religion and science differ over the factual reality of the world. Further questions arise in answering the second question: what are the mechanisms, authorities, and methods to gain knowledge about the factual reality of the world? Some believers may hold the absolute authority of God and supremacy of faith over reason in determining the factual reality of the world. Opponents may reject these theses and recognize science as the sole, legitimate form of knowledge for understanding reality.

The whole issue raises a cluster of questions concerning the bodies of knowledge called religion and science: What do we mean by facts? What exactly do we mean by proof, evidence, and verification? How do theories and assumptions, and observations and experiments work together?

So far, we assumed that we understand what we mean by science and what we mean by religion. When we step back and reflect on science and religion at a fundamental level, we encounter basic questions about what science is and what religion is. For example, what are the defining charac ter istics of science and religion? What makes a body of knowledge science or religion? The issue is a hermeneutic task: how to interpret science, religion, and their relationship. Further, what are the steps we need to take in order to explore an integrated approach, particularly from a Unificationist perspective?

We will take the following four steps. First, we will examine the distinct approaches to truth in science and religion, presented by the UP as two approaches to truth. Second, we will examine the characteristics of science by briefly tracing the development of the philosophy of science. Third, we will turn our attention to religion and critically examine our approach to it, and in particular our interpretive frameworks for it. Fourth, we will try to articulate what we mean by the integration of science and religion in the UP.

This examination will present multiple perspectives through which to interpret religion and science. Although the UP makes certain claims, how to interpret them is an open question. There are in fact multiple ways to interpret the UP.

The path we explore here is merely one possible path among many. No view, in principle, can be an infinite, exhaustive perspective. Even if one particular perspective may proffer a holistic picture, it is still a partial and limited view. Every view is limited by its angle of analysis and horizon and context of interpretation. One may take a different path, for instance that of another discipline such as psychology or sociology. For example, Carl Jung presented how religions are tied to the unconscious realm of the human psyche in his psychology; his “analytic psychology” displays his unique integral approach to religion and science. In philosophy, one may take a linguistic analysis approach.

What I present here is a hermeneutic approach which focuses on “interpretation.” It holds that a change in the framework of interpretation may lead to the discovery of new ways to interpret science and religion, and even open new possibilities for understanding the UP.

The Unification Principle and Theories of Truth

In philosophy here are four major theories of truth: 1) correspondence theory of truth; 2) coherence theory of truth; 3) pragmatic theory of truth; 4) existential/experiential theory of truth. Each theory captures a specific aspect of the complex and diverse phenomena of truth. If UP can bring about the unity or integration of science and religion, one must determine whether UP can integrate various theories of truth.

We can view science and religion or each discipline as a specific way to discover and present truth. The idea of the unity of science and religion necessarily entails the unity of truth; as we need to clarify what we mean by unity, we need to investigate what we mean by the unity of truth. The following analysis, though far from complete, will show how the UP relates to major theories of truth and what the unity of truth means in the UP, as a step towards envisioning UP’s integration of science and religion.

1. The Correspondence Theory of Truth and the Concept of Resemblance in the UP

The correspondence theory of truth defines truth as the correspondence or agreement between ideas and reality. Yet, problems arise when we try to get to the true reality. There are two problems. First, how do we know that the knowledge we have is the final, true reality? The quest for the final thing-in-itself leads to infinite regress. As Kant noted, the thing-in-itself is more like a regulative idea than constitutive idea. Second, human understanding is necessarily perspectival. Conceptual frameworks, the concepts we use for our understanding, contribute to what we see. There is no such thing as pure, perspective-free comprehension. [6] Even in seemingly interpretation-free mystical experiences in religious practices, one frames the experience within a limited narrative and conceptual scheme available to the person at that time.

The problem of the correspondence theory of truth lies in the idea of perfection or complete finality. Problems arise when we interpret corres pondence as an exact or perfect match with the definitive, true reality. Here, the UP presents the concept of resemblance. [7] Wittgenstein illustrated his approach with the concept of “game.” [8] You cannot define game by something that is common to all games, because there is no essential feature common to all. Games are more or less similar and they partially overlap, like family members. Wittgenstein called this a “family resemblance”:

Although ideas, statements, and realities are not the same, UP speaks of correspondence among them with the concept of resemblance. It is not an exact, perfect match, but denotes a degree of approximation or similarity. The concept of resemblance links ideas, linguistic representations, and reality, not as an exact, perfect match but with a degree of approximation.

Yet rejecting a perfect-match interpretation of resemblance does not lead to relativism. We can determine the validity of a resemblance by the degree of correspondence. While we can affirm some as highly probable and others as not, there is no claim of finality or infallibility in our knowledge of reality.

UP classifies degrees of resemblance into three levels: symbolic, image, and substance. [10] When we interpret correspondence in terms of resemblance, we can talk about the degree of correspondence. No matter how accurate the description may be, language is not reality, but rather a symbolic representation. In other words, turning reality into symbols and images is an of interpretation.

2. The Coherence Theory of Truth and UP

The coherence theory of truth defines truth as coherence and consistency among the claims, statements, beliefs, observations, experiences, other constitutive components of a theory. This criterion is used for a wide range of theories in various disciplines. It is hard to “make sense” if a theory is incoherent, inconsistent, and full of contradictions.

Problems arise, however, when attempting to compare and assess equally coherent, yet mutually incompatible, competing theories. Even if the assumptions are absurd and false, you can still develop a theory with certain degree of coherence and consistency.

The Divine Principle tries to give a more coherent and consistent interpretation of biblical passages than traditional Christian views. The underlying appeal of its interpretation is its coherence.

Coherence as a measure of truth is probably the most universal quality that any theory, whether religious or scientific, needs to have. This is likely due to the nature of human understanding. In order to understand the myriad things in front of us, we try to select and put them together so as to make a coherent body of knowledge or a coherent narrative. Human understanding requires this synthesis, and the guiding idea underneath all synthesis is the quest for coherence and consistency.

Just as correspondence should be understood as an approximation, the coherence of any theory should be understood as a matter of degree. Every theory has ambiguity, contradiction, and inconsistency; no theory is perfectly coherent and consistent. This also applies to the UP.

Since the UP strives for the unity of science and religion, giving a coherent account to diverse claims and findings is an enormous task. Religions, both in theory and practice, have mutually exclusive and contradictory claims and beliefs. The idea of the unity of religions is a nearly incomprehensible idea if we consider mutually exclusive, logically incompatible claims among them. In each field of science, there are likewise contradictory claims and approaches.

Without having some degree of coherence and consistency, no plausible theory is possible. The UP certainly gives a coherent and consistent account at some level, although it also has contradictions and ambiguities.

The UP holds the unity of knowledge as its ideal. At this stage, it is best to interpret the idea of unity in the UP as a process of collaboration and a quest for cross-disciplinary knowledge that can reveal the interconnectedness of otherwise disparate bodies of knowledge. Thus, the real unity and integration of science and religion is an ongoing task mandated by the UP rather than its achievement.

3. Values and the Pragmatic Theory of Truth

The pragmatic or practical theory of truth defines truth in terms of its practical effects. No matter how logical and coherent a belief system is, and how extraordinary the revelation on which it is based, it is utterly meaning less if it has no positive effects on people and the world. It is natural that any knowledge claim will be assessed within the context of its life-world.

Why do we seek truth? We can classify our activities, both cognitive and practical, into two areas: facts and values. The former is our attempt to find facts and operating principles with accuracy and certainty. The whole of such activities is tied to the latter: values. The motive and purpose, be it implicit or explicit, of our quest for truth is tied to realizing values.

From the perspective of human activities, truth can be considered with respect to motives, purposes, and outcomes. We can consider the activities connected to realizing truth from a value perspective. The pragmatic theory of truth takes this approach.

We can broadly see the natural, social, and human sciences as inquiries into factual truth and principles governing reality. We can also interpret religion as an inquiry into values and their realization in unique forms. The UP’s vision for the unity of science and religion is to bridge and integrate facts and values. When we interpret science and religion as two major endeavors to find and realize truth, the pragmatic or practical assessment of such endeavors is an appropriate approach to truth.

4. The Existential Theory of Truth and the UP Concept of Embodiment of Truth

The concept of being in the UP points to an existential concept of truth. The UP conceptualizes each being as an “Individual Embodiment of Truth.” [12] This concept suggests two points: first, each being is a manifestation of truth; second, truth is individuated in each being and each being is seen as an individual manifestation of truth.

We tend to conceive truth as an object of knowledge. We posit truth as some kind of existence, which we strive to discover or hold. Under this concept, the self and truth somehow exist separately. It implies that you can exist without truth, and that truth as a kind of object you can have or lose.

The concept of the embodiment of truth is a perspective that sees each being as the embodiment or manifestation of truth. Manifestation can take place in varying degrees, which the UP categorizes into three stages: symbolic, image, and substance. Accordingly we can express truth on three levels: first, as linguistic, logical, and mathematical symbolism; second, through imagery such as art, music, poetry; and third, as a substantial being itself. While science, art, and religion approach truth in different ways, they also cross over. Religion often pursues embodiment of truth on the level of substance.

Integral Approach to Truth in Unificationism

Each view of truth has its advantages and disadvantages. What is the best approach, and why should we take such an approach? In the face of various concepts of truth, we are perplexed to settle on just one. It seems best to understand truth as a manifestation of some transcendental dimension. What distinguishes truth from all other kinds of understanding is its compelling power. No matter how much human manipulation is involved, truth appears as that which compels acceptance. For this reason, we describe our truth-experience as a discovery, enlightenment, or realization. Truth manifests itself not from our will or imagination but as something beyond. People may interpret this transcendence by ascribing it to God, a natural principle, structure of thought, or structure of being.

Truth manifests in various phases. When you posit reality as an object, you capture truth as the correspondence of ideas, statements and claims with an object or state of affairs. When you try to comprehend something, some coherence or consistency appears and makes the issue at hand meaningful and comprehensible. You may also have transformative experience through some teachings. This transformation takes place not by your will but by that which transcends your action and will. When we face some practical effects, we are compelled to recognize the pragmatic value of a given event.

Thus, phenomena of truth appear in multiple spheres: the objective sphere (correspondence theory of truth), sphere of human understanding (coherence theory of truth), sphere of transformative experience (transformative experience or embodiment of truth), and social, cultural spheres (pragmatic theory of truth). Each theory of truth seems to be a conceptualization of the phenomena of truth.

In reality, truth appears as a totality, and we capture its phenomena through various perspectives. We can approach the phenomena of truth from an objective perspective, the mechanism of human understanding, a transformative experience, and a social value perspective. Because such divisions are built into the way our language is structured, we can approach the whole analysis from the perspective of language. From a philosophical perspective, the basic categories of thinking (being, knowing, valuing, acting, and others) design our thought in such a way as to guide our comprehension. According to the type of inquiry and one’s approach, a certain type of truth is highlighted.

What is the UP’s perspective? I argue for a multi-dimensional approach. In order to capture the phenomena of truth in its full scope, we can examine it in terms of the multiple criteria presented in those theories of truth. The judgement of truth is a synthetic act that balances the plausibility of claims in multiple spheres. As I discussed, no single theory of truth is perfect or complete. By considering each claim through multiple spheres, we can make the best judgement of truth. Among the claims there may be contradictions, inconsistencies, lack of evidence, and other flaws. Since the UP strives for the unity of knowledge, it is best to take a multi-dimensional approach by striving for a synthesis of these phenomena of truth.

This integral approach is built with two components: an integral concept of truth and a multidimensional approach to disciplines. When one develops a theory, be it in science or religion, one holds a certain concept of truth in the background of theorizing. How one’s concept of truth affect the theory varies from one theorist to another. For example, Freud developed his psychoanalytic theory as a causal deterministic theory, as if symptoms are causally determined by early childhood experiences in relation to sexual desires. An objectivist concept of truth seems to be driving his theoretical construct. The majority of post-Fredudian psychoanalysts, on the other hand, take pragmatic approaches. They see mental illness as a symptom caused or affected by multiple factors and apply various methods according to what works best for the patient. They abondoned the strong objectivist model that Freud had and adopted pragmatic approaches. They agree that mental illness is too complex to be laid a single determinant. Nevertheless, the analyst’s concept of truth is still reflected in his or her theory.

It is one of the tasks of Unification Hermeneutics to study how one’s concept of truth and associated ontological stance are reflected in one’s theory. Analysis of one’s concept of truth is a good tool to understand why and how one constructed a theory as one did. By discerning the theorist’s concept of truth, we can distill useful findings about the theory. For example, post-Freudian psychoanalists adopted useful insights from Freud’s theory even while they abondoned his narrow deterministic objectivism.

When we take multidimensional approach to religion and science, it is necessary to asess the various onotological assumptions behind each theory. The concept of truth is one of key assumptions a theorist holds. In order to make a multidimensional interpretation possible, analysis of concepts of truth is a necessary step.

Philosophical Characteristics of Scientific Knowledge

The UP views science and religion as two primary approaches to truth, and presents the vision of the unity of science and religion. Prior to the question of the meaning of unity, first we need to clarify what science and religion are. One of the critical tasks in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion is defining science and religion, respectively. I will explore the characteristics of science and religion to the extent that it contributes to the clarification of what we mean by their unity in the UP.

1. Logical Positivism: The Verifiability Thesis

Defining science is already a big task. We can approach science from multiple perspectives: as a body of knowledge, a methodology, a unique language-game, and a social activity. Similarly, we can see religion as a body of knowledge, a methodology, a unique language-game, and a social activity.

In the recent history of the philosophy of science, logical positivists first characterized scientific knowledge from the perspective of the nature of knowledge. They presented verifiability as the criteria of meaningfulness of claims or statements. They advocated verifiability thesis: that statements are cognitively meaningful only when they are empirically verifiable.

Following David Hume’s division of knowledge, they divided knowledge into three categories: 1) formal knowledge such as logic and mathematics; 2) knowledge verifiable by empirical sciences; 3) the rest of knowledge including ethics, religion, literatures, and others. Validity of formal knowledge (logic and mathematics) is presupposed. Their issue was to distinguish cognitively meaningful knowledge (categories 1 and 2) from the rest (category 3).

If we can determine whether a claim is true or false, it is cognitively meaningful. The key is whether we have a way to determine whether a claim is true or false. Consider the statement, “the Moon is an astronomical object that orbits Earth.” We can determine the truth-value (true/false) of the claim with observations.

Next, consider the statement, “the Moon is lonely.” The statement may have poetic meaning and value, but it is cognitively indeterminate. Logical positivists argue that this statement is cognitively meaningless because we have no way to determine the truth-value or truth/falsity of the statement.

Next, they extended this criterion to ethics and religion. According to this criterion, statements and claims in ethics and religion are cognitively meaningless because we cannot determine truth/falsity using empirical science. For example, “stealing is bad” is considered an expression of preference of the claimant and cognitively meaningless. Thus while religious statements have poetic value and meaning, since they are neither true nor false they are considered to have no cognitive meaning.

Logical positivists sought for the unity of sciences based on their view of physics as the most reliable and solid science. They tried to establish a translation mechanism from other “fuzzier” sciences to the language of physics. By unity, they meant a translation of claims/statements of each scientific discipline to the language of physics, “universal slang.” This attempt apparently failed. I will point out two major problems of logical positivism and two major thinkers who changed the course of the history of philosophy of science, Popper and Kuhn.

Problem 1: Theory-Observation Circularity

What is verification? A simplified version of the verification process is this: first, you have a thesis; second, experiences, observations or experiments can tell you if the thesis is true or false by providing data to verify your proposed thesis. Verification is the affirmation of a proposed thesis or claim with empirical evidence.

In order for the theory-observation mechanism to work, observations and empirical data must be independent from the theory. If the empirical data is not independent of theory, it cannot be used as the criteria to determine whether the theory is true or false. In other words, observational language must be neutral to or independent of theoretical language.

However, in science, is there such a thing as pure observational data apart from a scientific theory? For example, volts or grams are meaningful only within electromagnetic theory or gravitational theory. All such data is theory-loaded. Theory and observation form a circularity; they form a kind of hermeneutic mechanism of a part-whole. Just as the meaning of a part emerges through its relationships with the whole and its context, the meaning of empirical data emerges from the context of a given theory.

Problem 2: The Fallacy of Induction

Induction is a type of inference to derive a general statement from a number of particular instances or observations. It is one of popular methods known from antiquity. Closer examination, however, reveals complex relations between logical universality and empricical particularity.

If one interprets a level of “generality” as strict universality, one encounters a problem. Empirical observations can never generate a universal statement. No matter how many experiences you may have, you will never get to a universal statement. For example, consider the statement “all swans are white.” No matter how many swans you may observed, there only needs to be one counter-example to destroy the thesis. No experience-based thesis can exclude this possibility. In fact, there are black swans.

Observations and experiences can increase the probability but, in principle, the thesis is always open to falsification. For this reason, David Hume characterized induction as a habit or custom of thought rather than a strict scientific methodology. Karl Popper called induction “myth” [13] and rejected its validity.

Furthermore, even the verifiability thesis (a statement is cognitively meaningful only when it is verifiable by emprical observations) is itself a meta-philsophical assumption rather than empirically verifiable statement. Logical positivism cannot establish its own thesis without allowing some non-empirical assumptions. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, scientific theories are built on hypotheses scientists gained from intuition, inspiration, imagination, and other sources beyond empirical data.

2. Scientific Knowledge Is Not Interpretation-free Knowledge

Is scientific knowledge interpretaton-free knowledge or is it a type of interpretive knowledge? Logical positivists firmly held the former view, presenting scientific knowledge as solid, verified, and therefore true knowledge, in contrast to knowledge in religion, ethics, literature, and others. Because logical positivists held an objectivist view of truth and took science as such knowledge, they categorised the rest of knowledge as “subjective” interpreted knowledge.

From a historical perspective, the notion that scientific knowledge is interpretation-free, neutral and objective was first envisioned by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. In trying to liberate knowledge from authority, prejudice, and tradition, those thinkers envisioned modern science as the path to such prejudice-free, interpretation-free knowledge. Thus, Logical Positivism was the culmination of ideals of the Enlightenment. [14]

However, as Thomas Kuhn and post-Kuhnian philosophers of science point out, there is no such thing as interpretation-free, pure objective knowledge. Every type of knowledge is loaded with theoretical and non-theoretical assumptions in the background of its theory. In this sense, each and every scientific theory is a form of hermeneutic theory.

Karl Popper: Falsifiability, Open Attitude, and Critical Rationality

Karl Popper (1902-1944) was one of the best known critics of Logical Positivism. He disagrees with the proposition of logical positivists, who saw the problem as finding the criteria for assessing the meaningfulness of statements or claims in order to resolve problems that they saw as generated by the misuse of language. In the preface to 1955 English edition of Logic of Scientific Discovery , he clarified his disagreement with the basic stance of such “language analysists,” including logical positivists:

Further, while logical positivists presented science as a body of proven knowledge, Popper presented science differently. First, he presented scientific knowledge as a tentative knowledge open to falsification. Second, the scientific attitude is an open to testing and refutation, and to accepting a better theory if there is any. In Logic of Scientific Discovery , Popper defines the scientific attitude as openness to falsification and accepting a better theory.

Behind his falsification thesis, we need to recognize his perspective on science. He rejected the view of scientific progress as a cumulative linear process of confirmed knowledge. In reality, when a theory is challenged it often adds ad hoc hypotheses to save the theory. It is rather an open attitude that submits a theory to refutation that makes the stance scientific. In essence all knowledge is provisional, and the key to development is a series of trial and error “conjectures and refutations.” [17]

Based on his criteria of science, Popper examined Marxism and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Adler. All of them claim to be scientific theories; their very credibility is based on their theories being science. Nevertheless, Popper found these theories can evade any falsification by adding additional ad hoc hypotheses; they are not refutable, not because they are true, but because they are not in principle falsifiable. They are, Popper argues, pseudo-science and dogma.

Consider what is viewed as a non-scientific theory, such as astrology. Its predictions can never be refutable because you can always interpret events in such a way to confirm the prediction. The same is true for religion. Suppose one day you receive God’s blessing from a minister, but right after leaving church you get into a serious car accident. When you go back to the minister and complain, the minister says, “You could have died, but you did not because of God’s protection.” One of the reasons why so many mutually exclusive religious belief systems exist is the lack of a falsification mechanism. We will discuss more about religion in the next section.

Popper does not deny the role of an irrational element in scientific discovery:

Thomas Kuhn: The Social-Historical Dimension of Science

The second critic of logical positivism was Thomas Kuhn. He is known for his term, “paradigm,” which has become common vocabulary. While logical positivists presented science as objective, universal knowledge free from social, historical factors, Kuhn clarified the presence of social, historical dimensions in science. Kuhn was a historian of science. He found that the process of the development of science is a two-stage process: puzzle-solving under a leading paradigm and then the radical shit of that paradigm, which he called a “scientific revolution.”

In each science, how do we legitimize certain procedures, protocols, methods, and other components of science? Scientific communities define the criteria of acceptable procedures, methods, and other components based on a leading “disciplinary matrix” (Kuhn used this term for “paradigm” in his later works). A scientific theory develops by puzzle solving until it encounters a series of anomalies, at which point a new theory emerges to solve those anomalies. Although some scientists try to save the old theory by modifying it, they eventually recognize a new theory as a better alternative. Kuhn called this radical shift of paradigm or disciplinary matrix as a scientific revolution.

A good example is the shift from Newtonian Physics to the Einsteinian Theory of Relativity. Each theory is built on different concepts of time and space, mathematics, and other assumptions. These two theories are incom mensurable. Hence, the shift from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s theory is a radical shift, comparable to a religious conversion.

Kuhn also asserted that science itself is influenced by the society in which it develops. What counts as science or scientific is determined by the scientific community in each period of history. Although science strives for an a-historical, universal knowledge, it has sociological and historical dimensions.

Furthermore, as data is theory-loaded, what counts as evidence, confirmation, verification, falsification, and the methods and procedures is determined by scientific communities.

Fuzziness of Scientific Knowledge

Some may assume scientific knowledge is solid, definitive, valid, interpretation-free objective knowledge, in contrast to other kinds of knowledge such as religious knowledge. For this reason, many use scientific proofs or evidence as the way to validate “fuzzy” knowledge. Scientific knowledge is certainly less fuzzy than knowledge in the humanities. Nevertheless, scientific knowledge has fuzzy elements, such as social, historical dimensions (Kuhn), presumptiveness (Popper), and an interpretive dimension (theory-data circularity and others).

The degree of fuzziness varies from discipline to discipline. As Popper pointed out, psychoanalytic theories have a larger area of fuzziness than physics. In Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psycho therapy , [20] Jerome Frank argues that there are common factors that make psychoanalysis, rhetoric, religion, and any other healing practices work. He lists four common factors that make healing possible:

1) An emotionally charged, confiding relationship with a helping person;

2) A healing setting such as doctor’s office, a sacred place in religion or a contemporary room setting for inspirational seminars;

3) A rationale, conceptual scheme, or myth that provides a plausible explanation for the person’s symptoms and prescribes a ritual or procedure for resolving them; and

4) A ritual or procedure that requires the active participation of both patient and therapist and that is believed by both to be the means of restoring the patient’s health.

The proponents of a particular psychoanalytic theory argue based on their exclusive effects on patients and use the results of healing as scientific evidence. As psychiatrists know, their real effects are quite limited. Frank compared various psychanalytic theories and their effects. He found the above four factors to be critical to a theory’s success. He argued that as far as those factors are present, any psychotherapeutic theory more less yields the same results; he found no significant difference in effectiveness. Frank extended his argument to religions as well; as far as it has above elements, it will be effective.

Frank’s studies have extensive implications. We often ascribe the effects on patients as the evidence for the truth of a belief system or healing method. He rejects this thesis and holds that the effects are rather dependent on the match between the patient and what the healer provides and on the above factors. For example, if the patient has a religious orientation, religiously-oriented psychotherapy such as Jungian or Viktor Frankl’s theory work better; if the patient abhors religion, behaviorist or Freudian approaches may work better. There are all kinds of healing seminars by religious and non-religious inspirational speakers. They can be equally effective if above conditions are met. This is an example of the effectiveness of rhetoric. For those who believe in business principles, having seminars at big corporations add authority and credibility to inspirational speakers. A presentation’s effectiveness, Frank argues, is not because its content is true.

Theories in economics and other social sciences are built on varieties of assumptions and “fuzzy” interpretations. Even in quantum mechanics there are multiple interpretations regarding elementary particles. In a broad sense, each theory is a hermeneutic device constructed by a creative human mind.

From natural sciences to social sciences, there are degrees and types of “fuzziness.” Science as a knowledge seems to be built by two orientations: objectivity and constructiveness. As Popper noted, science is a presumptive knowledge that develops by “conjectures and refutations.”

As an attitude, the scientific attitude is open to falsification and critical self-examination. As we can see in the examples of Marxism and Freudianism, scientific theories can turn into pseudo-scientific dogmas and ideologies.

How do we interpret the concept of the unity of science and religion in the UP? We will come back to this question after we examine what is religion.

Philosophical Characteristics of Religious Knowledge

Defining religion is already a tremendous task. There are so many forms and types in religion. It is best to consider religion, for now, as a type of discourse built on a certain belief system that pertain to values. We can categorize certain types of discourse as religion by “family resemblance.”

1. Religion and Spirituality

Exposition of the Divine Principle is the primary text of Unificationism. The UP is presented within the context of Judeo-Christian traditions. The text is organized and constructed by giving unique interpretations of biblical narratives; this positions Unificationism within the genealogy of Judeo-Christian traditions. Also, it characterizes itself as the completion of the purposes of Christianity. As Christian beliefs comprise the framework of interpretation in the UP, this framework limits the horizon and perspective of inter pretation. Although the UP envisions the integration of eastern and western traditions, the framework of interpretation already limits its approach.

From the middle of the 20th century, there has been growing interest in spirituality. Some pursued paths for spirituality without commitment to religious doctrines and affiliations. Some discovered their paths in Eastern religious traditions, mysticism, Native American spirituality, and other non-Christian traditions.

The UP envisions the unity of religions. Although it still remains to clarify what that unity means, we need to have a broader framework of interpretation to find religious and spiritual dimensions in the UP beyond the Judeo-Christian sphere. By taking a broader philosophical perspective, we can critically examine the Christian-based claims and explore the possibility of concepts and ideas in UP that are consistent with non-Christian religions and spirituality.

Religions certainly include a wide range of phenomena that include both non-religious and religious spirituality. For example, Judeo-Christian traditions depict God as a personal Creator God, a projection of humans as an anthropomorphic Being. Eastern religions such as Taoism, Hiduism, and Christian mysticism depict Ultimate Reality as indescribable and beyond conceptualization. The phenomenal world exists as diversity that we can differentiate by conceptualization, but the undifferentiated oneness of the Ultimate Reality is beyond conceptualization. Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), a mystic German monk, argued that God is not a being to which our categories of thought and language can be applied; we must empty the self to have direct union with God. Both Eastern religious traditions and Western mysticism present existential or experiential paths to God or the Ultimate Reality.

Both Exposition and Unification Thought present God as a kind of composite being consisting of various conceptual components. Two questions arise: 1) Is God an object of conceptualization? and 2) Is such a conceptual approach, which objectifies God, an appropriate path to God?

Individuals who claimed to have experienced God commonly express God as utterly indescribable, overwhelming beyond any conceptualization and expression by language. Even those who claimed to have a near-death experience and encounter with God commonly point out the trans-conceptual, trans-linguistic nature of their experiences with God.

The UP does not present such aspects of God and experiential paths to God, at least in its ontology. In Unification Thought texts such as New Essentials of Unification Thought , the late Dr. Sang Hun Lee briefly touched on this issue in the “Unity in Structure of the Original Image.” Nevertheless, there is no systematic exposition in UP of an experiential dimension, that integrates such human experience with the divine with a description of who God is.

If the UP envisions the unity of religions, it must explore such dimen sions of God and paths to God. Otherwise, entire religious fields including Eastern religious traditions and Western mystical traditions will remain unexplored. In order to accomplish this task, the UP may have to take a non-Christian or trans-Christian framework of interpretation. The UP as a philosophical endeavor may have to take up this task.

2. Objectivism and Constructivism: Biblical Narratives

The UP is built on the assumption of the truthfulness of biblical narratives. Starting from the Garden of Eden narrative, the UP presents itself as the interpretation of bible narratives. Are those stories descriptions of facts?

There are two interpretations, objectivism and constructivism. Objectivists believe that biblical narratives are descriptions of historical facts that literally happened. Constructivists believe that those narratives are symbolic expressions of some kind of truth about life but not descriptions of real events; biblical narratives are constructed in order to convey some other kinds of truth or knowledge.

There are variations within both positions. Among objectivists, some believe in every biblical narrative as literal fact, including all kinds of miracles and unlikely events. Others interpret biblical narratives by adjusting their comprehension so as to make them reasonable in light of their understanding of scientific knowledge. The issues that are subject to dispute include the creation of the world, the virgin conception of Jesus by Mary, Jesus walking on water, resurrection of the dead, Moses parting the sea, and others. UP interpret some stories as literal facts and some as symbolic. [21] The UP generally has an objectivist orientation, yet it gives its own interpretation on the ground of reasonableness and basic scientific knowledge.

Constructivists hold that biblical narratives are not description of historical facts; they are constructed by human beings to depict some kinds of truth or knowledge. For example, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), a well-known American mythologist, holds that mythologies are not descriptions of historical facts but symbolic or literary expressions of facts in the human subconscious mind. Campbell refers to Carl Jung’s (1875–1961) of consciousness-based understanding of religion. Jung holds that the individ ual’s sub-conscious is rooted in a universal or “collective unconscious”; religions of the world are social, cultural, symbolic, artistic, and narrative expressions in this collective consciousness. In Jung’s cosmology, individual consciousness is like the tip of an iceberg and all individuals’ sub-consciousness are linked together through a collective consciousness. Campbell found the origin of common theses in mythology in the collective consciousness as explained by Jung.

It must be noted that Jung is not saying all religious narratives and works are mere constructions of human imaginations, as pure materialists do. Materialists (they are objectivists who believe in the material as the sole objective reality) deny the existence of any spiritual or religious principle in the universe. Religious objectivists argue the origin of religion from the objective existence of religious principles. Jung does not argue that the origin of religion from such objective principles. He argues rather that the origin of religion is the “collective unconsciousness.” Jung believes in the existence of such spiritual principles as synchronicity (unusual coincidence of events). He views religion primarily as social, cultural constructions out of the collective unconsciousness. Is Jung religious? Yes, he is, but not in the same way as religious objectivists are. In this sense, his approach to religion is constructivist.

Campbell also takes a constructivist approach to religion. He ascribes the origin of myth to: 1) unconscious, psychological roots; 2) social values originating from personal experiences and dreams translated into social, communal narratives and rituals; and 3) personal values that reflect the transformative, therapeutic functions of myth. He further points out that myths were born in order to transcend death: “This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology” [23] Such transcendence is needed to assure the continutity of society in spite of individual death: “two fundamental realizations – of the inevitability of individual death and the endurance of the social order – have been combined symbolically and constitute the nuclear structuring force of the rites and, thereby, the society” [24] Finally, he notes that our understanding of the nature and universe at a point of time in history shapes specific forms of myth and writes: “the modes of nature-knowledge that in the course of the millennia have shaped and reshaped man’s image of his world.” [25]

Campbell views religion as “canonized myth,” and biblical narratives not as literal facts but symbolic, poetic reflections of the mystical facts hidden in the human mind, which Jung depicted. He denies that biblical narratives are historical facts:

What is the UP’s position? It has certainly an objectivist orientation. Does it totally reject constructivism? How does one interpret the UP?

One thing UP has to deal with is the claim of supremacy that is common to it and all religious groups. Scientific communities do not necessarily share the same understanding, but they do have some loosely common under standing in spite of conflict and opposition. Religious communities are split into denominations, religious traditions, sects, and groups. The biggest problem is that each group often claims its supremacy and authority over others and there is no common criteria to measure their claims.

Campbell points out that religious narratives are in fact constructed in order to portray believers as special or chosen. Mythical narratives in each religion and its culture depict its unique and superior relationship with the divine.

Such claims of supremacy are often tied with an objectivist view. Why does each group need an objectivist claim? By tying their tribal or sectarian or group claims to objectivity, they can universalize their claim as an undisputed truth beyond tribal limitation. With an exclusive superiority claim and mentality, religious and denominational conflicts follow.

Religion has multiple aspects: a belief system, texts, rituals, organizations, institutions, communities, and others. To understand religion as a whole, we need to analyze it from multiple perspectives such as archeology, sociology, psychology, organizational theory, economics, natural sciences, and others. Although my focus is a belief system, an analysis of those components of Unificationism from those disciplines will be fruitful.

Unificationist Perspective on the Unity of Religion and Science

Internal-external truth in the up.

The UP characterizes itself as the “new truth” that “should unify knowledge by reconciling the internal truth pursued by religion and the external truth pursued by science.” [28] What do internal truth and external truth mean and how are they distinguished from one another? Furthermore, how does this internal-external distinction of truth in UP relate to standard theories of truth?

There are many ways to distinguish science and religion. The internal-external distinction in the concept of truth in UP, however, seems to be pararell to the distinction of “ought” and “is,” that is, the prescriptive and the descriptive. There are various forms and types of religions. Nevertheless, truth in religion demands or prescribes what one ought to do or ought to be. Religious narratives, rituals, and practices convey direct or indirect messages of truth that tell human beings how they should live. Truth in science, however, tends to be descriptive. Truth in science conveys descriptive reality of the world.

These two elements, the prescriptive and the descriptive, exist both in religion and science. Nevertheless, prescriptive aspect is central to truth in religion, whereas descriptive aspect of truth is central to science. We can also characterize this distinction in terms of values and facts.

Be it science or religion, we have another kind of question: how do we know something is true? what are the criteria we use when we judge something is true or false? The four theories of truth described above—correspondence, coherence, pragmatic and existential—seem to answer these questions. They are the criteria we use when we make judgements about whether something is true or false.

One can see the distinction between internal and external truth as an ontological issue, whereas the standard four theories of truth, broadly construed, are an epistemological issue. We can approach the question of the internal-external distinction of truth from the types of questions that science and religion generally deals with.

Science generally deals with factual questions about the human mind, social behaviors, and natural phenomena. It deals with reality within the boundary of procedures, methods, and practices defined by scientific communities in each discipline. And yet, we saw that the use of scientific procedures and methods alone does not make for science. Deceptions and pseudo-science use those methods but do not stay within acceptable boundaries of a discipline. Acceptable standards change over the development of science, set and deter mined by scientific communities. Every scientific theory has its assumptions, and they may have philosophical positions as well.

Moreover, in spite of radical differences and disputes among scholars, what counts as scientific is determined by communities of scientists. We cannot ignore social, historical dimensions for what counts as science or scientific. Moreover, as was discussed, scientific theories have “fuzziness,” an indeterminable space subject to interpretation.

The strict distinction between internal and external truth also breaks down with respect to religion, when we look at it more closely. Human beings have many questions in life: why was I born; what is the meaning of my life; or, how should I live? Those questions about value and meaning are tied to some factual questions: is there afterlife; what does the afterlife look like; does God exist? Religions give varying answers to those factual questions.

Consider the question, does God exist? Science neither proves nor disproves God’s existence. Why does the question matter? If God’s existence has no effect on the meaning of life, this question is probably not critical. The existence of God is critical precisely because it affects the interpretive framework of life individually or collectively. Descriptions of truth in religion ultimately prescribe how one should live and act. Descriptions often imply prescriptions.

For all these reasons, we can find an internal aspect in external truth and an internal aspect in external truth. This points to their integration in the UP.

What does the Unity of Science and Religion Mean?

What does the UP means by the unity of science and religion? The UP envisions integration of science and religion. We can see what integration means in three areas: knowledge, attitude of inquiry, and social activities. For the topic of religion and science, many discuss the first area. Nevertheless, the second and the third are equally important.

1. Knowledge: Interdisciplinary and Multi-disciplinary Approach

As the development of knowledge today is led by the development of science, many use science as the basis to establish the credibility of one’s belief. The use of science to support one’s claims or beliefs is common regardless of one’s beliefs, be atheism, monotheism, or another set of beliefs. Although no scientific theory is perfect, each theory has a certain degree of certainty or probable truthfulness. Scientific knowledge must pass through the intersubjective critical rationality of a scientific community.

I posit that the unity of knowledge is not a conflation or mixture of science and one’s belief stance. This attitude generates all kinds of pseudo-science and ideology-led speculative theory. Certainly, the unity of science and religion can include the study of science to support one’s religious beliefs. I argue, however, that we must be cautious of the conflation of beliefs, be it religious or anti-religious, and science.

A cautious stance does not rule out exploration of creative endeavors to develop a new integral approach based on the knowledge of science and religion. For example, logotherapy, developed by Viktor Frankl, is a psychotherapy based on the psycho-somatic-spiritual triadic understanding of human beings. He views the spiritual dimension as the key to turn a person’s “existential vacuum” (feelings of the meaninglessness of life) to meaningfulness. [29]

There are mutually exclusive and logically contradictory claims within the same discipline and among multiple disciplines. Even basic assumptions and approaches can be radically different and conflicting. A multi-dimensional hermeneutic approach does not or is not expected to resolve such conflicts by giving a verdict or a final decision. Rather, such an approach functions as a mediator by liberating each discipline from dogmatism and providing a platform for mutual understanding.

The idea of unity or integration may be realized first on an attitudinal level. From this attitude of mutual understanding, we can pursue a framework of thinking that can see phenomena from another level not previously imagined. The multi-dimensional approach is best understood as a platform for cooperation and mutual understanding to pursue a better model to explain given phenomena. An open question is whether any concepts found in the UP can provide such a model.

2. Attitude: Balancing Critical Rationality and Religious Faith

What is a scientific attitude? It is an attitude of critical rationality. It is opposite from dogmatism, claims of infallibility, and even radical forms of fideism. Even if you claim that God is infallible, your knowledge about God is fallible. Fideism is a position that claims the supremacy of faith and, in its radical form, it does not allow for any space for rational self-examination.

The unity of religion and science in the UP can be interpreted as a balanced attitude of faith and reason. Faith is neither blind obedience to authority nor uncritical dogmatic self-assertion. The UP defines both science and religion as endeavors to seek truth; even revelations require interpretation. Your horizon of interpretation and perspective limits what you see or how you see knowledge that is revealed.

Critical and reflective attitude can lead to the examination of one’s concept of truth. If the UP envisions an integral approach, it should take an open attitude to various approaches to truth as well. As I discussed, truth can be approached in terms of correspondence, coherence, practical effects, and existential transformation. No single approach is perfect and each one has its advantages and disadvantages. I argue that we should take a multi-dimensional approach to the concept of truth as well. By looking at the phenomena of truth from multiple angles, we can find the most plausible account. On some issues, we may find that there is a single acceptable claim. On other issues, we may hold onto more than one claim, even if they are mutually exclusive, until we come to a consensus. If there is no consensus, then the issue would remain open.

3. Social Activities: Collaboration between Religion and Science

The unity of science and religion can be interpreted as collaboration among activities. In medical facilities, for example, patients seek help from medical doctors. When patients suffer from terminal illness or are in the last stages of life due to aging, they often face the question of the meaning of life and death. In order to cope with such needs, hospitals in the US provide chap lains. In prisons, inmates need not only well-maintained physical facilities but also inmates need help in reflecting on their lives and finding a new path after prison. To meet such needs, prisons in the US provide chaplains. The US military provides chaplains both for soldiers in active duty and for those who returned from an assignment. Some colleges also provide chaplains. Questions regarding value and meaning are an inextricable part of life. Hospital chaplaincy is one of many ways to integrate religion and science in the social services.

In the Unification movement we can see activities such as the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS), [30] Universal Peace Federation (UPF), [31] and others as the implementation of the unity of religion and science in the UP.

Hermeneutics of Hermeneutics

What kind of knowledge is the UP? Is it religious knowledge or scientific knowledge? Is it a philosophical knowledge that critically examines science and religion and explores their possible integration?

I view each theory, be scientific or religious, as an interpretive theory. If we hold this perspective, we can see the UP as an interpretive theory of interpretations, that is, hermeneutic of hermeneutics.

UP probably has two tasks: 1) to serve as a platform for collaboration between religion and science, the UP works as a theoretical and practical umbrella for religious and scientific collaboration; 2) the UP is directly engaged in theories in science and religion; this engagement, at the same time, provides an opportunity to re-interpret the UP.

For the latter, we may need to free the UP from its current biblical context of interpretation in Exposition , and explore other interpretive frameworks, and further to take a critical stance to identify and examine the basic presuppositions of the UP.

For any theory to be plausible, it needs to meet certain conditions. Those conditions are spelled out as various aspects of truth: 1) correspondence of ideas/theses/claims and reality/state-of-affairs—this is a perpetual quest without an end; 2) coherence and consistency within claims and theses in a theory and with other established theories and findings; 3) practical effects on individuals and on society; and 4) existential effects, such as the transformative effects on the person. These components are applicable to the UP. The plausibility of the UP will emerge if the interpretation of the UP and the UP’s interpretation of various theories and practices meet those criteria. Exploration and creative engagement with other theories and practices is necessary to make the UP socially accountable and to develop its potential.

Scientific disciplines have inherent mechanisms of self-critique and openness to new theories. It relativizes itself and keeps an open stance. Religion, on the other hand, tends to hold to the absoluteness of its truth and is not open to revision or change. I believe UP needs to overcome this tendency to fixedness in religion, if it is to meet the challenge of integrating religion and science.

In this regard, we reviewed various philosophical positions from which to interpret religion, such as objectivism, constructionism, pragmatism, and so on. The purpose of such an attempt was to liberate religion from dogmatism and to make an introduction to a multi-layered approach. Such an attempt is, however, not the end but the beginning of a path to unification. The UP itself needs to explore new interpretive frameworks to interpret the UP itself by taking into account studies in human, social, and natural sciences. Theists including Unificationists tend to reject non-theistic accounts of religion due to their philosophical positions. The multi-dimensional approach rejects this narrow or dogmatic approach and is open to studies based on non-theistic assumptions. By identifying the layers of philosophical assumptions, we can analyze the merits of each study, layer by layer. Even if the theory itself is integrally tied to philosophical assumptions and positions, we can separate a body of knowledge into its layers by applying multiple perspectives. Multi-dimensional hermeneutics is an attempt at interpretation through a series of separation and integration. [32]

[1] Sun Myung Moon, Exposition of the Divine Principle (New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 2006), p. 7.

[2] Some well-known court cases include the Scopes Monkey Trial (The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes) in 1925, Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968, and McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education in 1981. Although the disputes in these cases have taken various forms, they are essentially derived from a conflict between creationism and the theory of evolution. The disputes were also intertwined with two interpretations of the Bible according to Christian fundamentalism and Christian modernism; Christian fundamentalism held to a literal interpretation of the Bible while Christian modernism offered a flexible interpretation of the Bible so as to make it compatible with evolution.

[3] Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God , rev. ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)

[4] Gifford Lectures Organization site. https://www.giffordlectures.org/. Accessed December 2, 2017

[5] John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976).

[6] Edmund Husserl tried to develop phenomenology as an interpretation-free, presupposition-free philosophical methodology. Zen Enlightenment is often conceived as the direct experience of Buddhist truth without conceptual biases. Nevertheless, discourse is not possible without the use of some kind of conceptualization. One may use “negation” to describe extra-conceptual state of affairs, such as the unlimited or infinite. One may also use analogy or poetic expression to describe extraordinary experiences.

[7] Exposition of Divine Principle , Creation 3.2 “Good Object Partners for the Joy of God,” pp. 33-36

[8] See Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition (New York: Prentice Hall, 1958), sections 66-71

[9] Ibid., Section 67, p. 32e

[10] In Exposition of Divine Principle , the concept of resemblance is applied between God and the world. See Creation 1.2 “The Relationship between God and the Universe,” pp. 19-21

[11] On embodiment of truth, see Keisuke Noda, “Understanding the Word as the Process of Embodiment,” Journal of Unification Studies 1 (1997): 55-70. www.journals.uts.edu/volume-i-1997/6-understanding-the-word-as-the-process-of-embodiment

[12] Exposition of Divine Principle , pp. 19-21

[13] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 53

[14] For extensive analysis of objectivity and hermeneutic dimension of scientific knowledge, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics , and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

[15] Karl Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2005), p. xiix

[16] Ibid, p. 20

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid, p. 22. Here, “inter-subjectively tested” means a series of testing by scientific communities

[19] Ibid, pp. 8-9

[20] Jerome D. Frank, and Julia B. Frank. Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

[21] For example, in the Garden of Eden narrative, the UP interprets the serpent, the tree of life, and the tree of good and evil as Lucifer (archangel), perfected man, and perfected woman. See Exposition of the Divine Principle , Chapter 2 “Human Fall,” pp. 53-67

[22] Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 210

[23] Ibid, p. 22

[24] Ibid, pp. 22-23

[25] Ibid, p. 24

[26] Ibid, p. 12

[27] Ibid, p. 10

[28] Exposition of the Divine Principle , p. 7

[29] Viktor Frankl presents his existential analysis in depth in The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (London: Souvenir Press, 2014).

[30] See the history of ICUS. http://icus.org/. Accessed 01/16/2018

[31] See Universal Peace Federation site. http://www.upf.org/. Accessed 01/16/2018

[32] The UP conceptualizes this process as Origin-Division-Union Action. See New Essentials of Unification Thought (Tokyo: Unification Thought Institute, 2006), pp. 84-85

The Harmonious Counterpoint of Science and Biblical Faith

Moments of dissonance between science and our faith are opportunities for us to learn humility and seek a deeper truth.

What should we do when we read a verse in the Bible that seems to disagree with some finding of science? When I worked with other astronomers at universities, their typical answer was to reject the Bible, because the conflict showed that Christianity was irrelevant and outdated. But in the evangelical church where I grew up, our typical answer was to reject the scientific finding, because the conflict showed that the science and scientists were atheistic. Is there another way?

At BioLogos, we do not throw out the Bible or science. Rather, we see faith as founded in the Bible, God’s authoritative Word. And at the same time, we see science as the study of creation, God’s amazing world. Here’s how we describe it in our mission statement:

BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith , as we present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation.

We reject the idea that science and faith are at war or that scripture and nature are in some fundamental conflict. In fact, God’s Word and God’s World cannot conflict because both are of God. Then we go a step further, inviting people to see that science and biblical faith can interact in a positive, fruitful relationship. The most frequent word we use for that relationship is “harmony.”

The problem is that many people hear “harmony” as a complete absence of conflict and tension. To them, our mission statement sounds like a claim that all is sweetness and light between science and faith. Historian Peter Harrison calls this an “unquestioning harmony.” But it’s not that simple—conflict happens at times. Conflict shows up from scientific discoveries, such as when Galileo discovered that the earth moves through space , in contrast to a literal reading of Psalm 104:5: “He set the earth on its foundations, it can never be moved.” Conflict shows up when Christians argue for the existence of God and the need for Christ’s salvation, in contrast to claims that science is the only source of knowledge or technology can solve all our problems. The science/faith relationship is not a simple absence of tension.

To other people, “harmony” can sound like two things that have merged together so much that they are no longer distinct. And clearly, science and biblical faith are very different things. You wouldn’t look in the Bible to learn how photosynthesis works, and you wouldn’t do a physics experiment to determine the meaning of life. Biblical faith is much larger: about our place in the cosmic story , our relationship with God, and the ultimate destiny of ourselves and the world. In fact, as a Christian astronomer, it is my faith in God, rooted in the Bible, that motivates my scientific work and gives me confidence that God’s creation is understandable. But biblical faith, without the tools of science, can’t tell me the rate at which the universe is expanding! Scientists and theologians ask different kinds of questions and have different ways of working out the answers. Yet science and theology are not independent and unrelated. On many questions, it is essential that we consider both, such as when we ponder the first humans or the uses of genetic engineering .

“Harmony” is a word that can actually help us better understand the complexities of studying nature and scripture side by side. I’m a musician, so to me, the word “harmony” does not mean that things are in complete agreement or merging together (musicians use the word “unison” for that). Rather, “harmony” refers to two or more different musical notes sounding at the same time. The notes retain their distinct identity (both can still be heard), yet they come together to make something richer and more pleasing than either note alone. This meaning of “harmony” is similar to some other metaphors for the relationship between science and biblical faith: two books , two wings , or two maps . In each of these metaphors, we see two distinct things that each give a partial perspective but together tell a fuller story.

Even more than “harmony,” the musical concept of “counterpoint” is a beautiful metaphor. As a classical pianist, I love piano compositions that use counterpoint. When I was a kid, I played simple pieces and major chords (feel free to picture a cute 4-year-old climbing up on the piano bench for her first recital). But over the years I learned to play more complex pieces, like the counterpoint works of J.S. Bach. In these pieces, two or more independent melodies are played at once. The two strands interleave with each other, sounding at the same time yet complementing each other. While each tells its own story, they come together in a beautiful sequence. Sometimes both melodies are going strong, sometimes they echo and repeat each other, sometimes one supports the other or stays silent to let the other speak.

And at times the two melodies will directly clash in dissonance. (Watch the beginning of the video to hear an example.)

My piano teachers taught me that a beautiful chord was often preceded by a dissonant clash. Dissonances sound harsh by themselves, but without them, the music would sound boring and trite. If a musician rushes past the dissonance, the final resolution is not as beautiful. Instead, I learned to pause on the dissonant notes, to carefully place the notes in the context of the surrounding chords. The dissonance and consonance together formed more beautiful music than either alone.

How do we dwell in the moments of dissonance between science and biblical faith? Let us not rush past conflicts and pretend nothing is wrong. When dissonance arises in music, we don’t just throw out the dissonant notes. Similarly, if a scientific claim seems to conflict with a Bible verse, we don’t give up on biblical authority and ignore the verse. Neither do we forget that nature is God’s creation and ignore what God reveals there. Rather, the tensions are the places where we invest extra attention, in truth-seeking and humility. We dig deeper. We can

Listen more closely. Do we fully understand each melody, on its own terms? Are scientists still debating some aspects of a scientific model ? Are theologians discussing multiple ways to understand a particular doctrine ?)
Check the alignment. Are the two melodies meant to come together in this way, at this time? Is the Bible speaking about the same event or physical objects as the science? Are the two actually addressing different questions?
Consider the balance. Should one melody be quieter than the other at this point? Is the scientific evidence inconclusive, such as in the question of first life ? Is the biblical interpretation disputed?

By digging deeper into such moments of tension, we actually learn more. These dissonances prompt us to think creatively about new questions and to pursue a more vigorous search for truth. And that leads us to scientific models or theological insights we would not otherwise have had. Ultimately, we discover a more beautiful piece of music.

Science and biblical faith are not in unison, but something better: a harmonious counterpoint. Each is an independent melody that can be heard on its own terms, yet also supports, echoes, and interweaves with the other. We should not ignore or rush past the moments of dissonance, but dwell there awhile to come to a better understanding of how they fit into the whole. The harmonious counterpoint of science and biblical faith gives us a beautiful, thought-provoking, full-orbed understanding of nature and of Scripture. We discover God’s word and God’s world, in harmony.

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3 Ways We See God When We Study Science

Do you think faith and science are at odds? Do you worry that giving credence to scientists will undermine your faith or the faith of others?

While debates between theologians and scientists can be valuable, they have often been vitriolic. Some scientists find no value in spiritual pursuits, and some religious followers distrust input from the scientific community.

However, as Dr. Francis Collins points out, faith and science are asking — and answering — different questions. No wonder the debate has seemed futile at times. Dr. Collins, who led the National Institutes of Health for 12 years, says that faith deals with questions of why and science deals with questions of how.

That said, questions of why and how don’t always have to live in separate quarters. They can mingle and join, similarly, perhaps, to the way the respiratory system and the cardiovascular system interact on a continuous basis. Each can empower and inspire the other.

Believing in God as the Creator of the universe helps us understand why we are here, why the universe is as it is, and what our role is to play here. Loving the God who created our world can lead us to awe and wonder, generating curiosity about how the world works. Science can empower that curiosity to help us understand God and his creation better, and to help us participate in the health and well-being of that creation—both humankind and the natural world.

I invite you to consider ways that we can learn about God our Creator through the lens of science.

1. The Power of Observation

Science is rooted in observation. Intricate tools — like microscopes, telescopes, and spectrometers — have been developed to aid observation. In spite of their high-tech tools and years of effort, scientists will often conclude their reports by saying “more research is needed.” Another way of saying this is “we need to watch longer, to look more closely, in order to understand better.”

Scripture instructs us to carefully observe the world around us to learn about God. Job was good at this. He used his observations of the natural world to keep his experiences in perspective. In Job 12:7-10 , he observes animals to better understand God’s wisdom. In Job 37:14-16 , he urges his listeners to consider the weather to better understand God’s power. And the well-known Psalm 19:1-4 invites us to listen to the “speech” from the heavens and the skies — we can experience God and know him more by observing what he has made.

Scientists insist on careful observation. They invest years and all the funding they can find to watch their object of study and record what they see. While some believers are professional scientists, any of us can take inspiration from both Scripture and the science community to look more closely at how the natural and human worlds work and how we can help address some of the problems we may see there.

2. Delight in Repetition

Our observations of nature — even a brief gaze at a leafy tree — will teach us that God uses repetition in his handiwork. As G. K. Chesterton famously pointed out, the natural world is so full of repetition (monotony) that we have to think it might tell us something about God’s personality:

“Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately but has never got tired of making them” ( Orthodoxy , p. 108–109 ).

Do you see that Chesterton is answering the question why ? Perhaps God repeats himself in every sunrise and sunset, in every daisy, because he delights in repetition.

What would science say about how ? From a science perspective, humankind has learned that the rising and setting of the sun is the visual effect of the earth turning around on its axis — it’s not the sun playing peekaboo. Understanding how this works enables us to make the most of that repetition; we can predict with some accuracy how this revolution of the earth will affect light and dark, warmth and coolness, weather and climate. Scientists delight in the power of observing how the universe works and in the challenge of understanding something so vast.

When it comes to our lives with God, it can be very helpful to realize that God delights in repetition and that he uses it to bring stability and well-being to our lives and our environment.

Can you find some of God’s delight in the sameness of your day-to-day activities? Or perhaps you need to remember his way of using repetition when you feel you’re learning the same life lesson for the millionth time. And see if you can remember this the next time your child wants to read that same book again. God uses — and delights — in repetition.

3. Reporting

Remember writing lab reports in school? Depending on your personality — and that of your science teacher — memories of lab reports might make you cringe. Or perhaps they bring back the satisfaction of completing forms with concrete, objective information. The objectivity in reporting is key to useful science.

Scientists report their work in order to make it usable to others. Until they have reported their observations, no one else can repeat, and thereby verify, the steps that led to those observations. (There’s repetition playing an important role again.) But when even a small discovery is verified, it can be built upon to create new understanding and solutions.

Scripture is full of calls to share what we’ve seen and heard in our experience with God. For example, in Psalm 108:3 , David says,

“I will praise you, Lord, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples. For great is your love, higher than the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies.”

The field of theology (a word that means “the study of God”) has developed standards for sharing observations about God that are, in important ways, based on methods for sharing scientific observations.

Invited to Delight

All this time we’ve been talking about scientists, and a little about theologians. For most of us, talking about these professions brings up images of super smart experts with very serious faces, saying very significant things. But I suppose God sees a different side of them.

Recently, I heard a radio news piece featuring an entomologist (an insect scientist), talking about the next brood of cicadas expected to hatch in our city. After he shared an astonishing wealth of observations about the way cicadas are made and their repetitious behavior, the host asked him how he got started in this profession. With a laugh, he described himself as “that kid” who was always catching bugs and showing them to his mom. Although he is now a dignified scientist, in his heart, he is not so far removed from that little child who delighted in what he found and in the chance to show his mom something cool.

I imagine that, from God’s perspective, even the most sophisticated scientific or theological observations sound elementary. I imagine him seated in his chair, grinning with enjoyment as we use our best vocabulary to describe what we’ve seen and heard. We are, after all, children of God, made in his image, and invited to observe, delight in, and report on the world around us.

The conflict thesis between science and Christianity: it makes for a good story

David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu: Of popes and unicorns: science, Christianity, and how the conflict thesis fooled the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 280 pp, 25.99 £ HB

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Published: 13 September 2022
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Draper, J.W. 1875. History of the conflict between religion and science . London: King & Co.

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CAREER FEATURE
20 May 2024

How religious scientists balance work and faith

Anne Marie Conlon

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Anurag Chaurasia holds up a tube of water from the holy river Ganga

In Varanasi, India, biotechnologist Anurag Chaurasia collects water samples from the River Ganges, which is sacred to Hindus. Credit: Shri Kashi Vishwanath Baba

For the past 20 years, Elaine Howard Ecklund has studied scientists’ attitudes towards religion. What she’s found, through more than 40,000 surveys and nearly 2,500 confidential interviews, is that there are more religious scientists than many people would expect. In one study, at least 30% of respondents declared a religious affiliation ( E. H. Ecklund et al. Socius https://doi.org/mvrv; 2016 ).This study surveyed scientists from eight countries and regions, including the United Kingdom, India, Hong Kong, Turkey and the United States. Globally, around 85% of the population identifies as religious (see go.nature.com/3yatbk5 ). Ecklund’s research has also found that scientists are not always open about their faith at work or in education settings. “I think there is the perception sometimes that other scientists won’t take you seriously if you talk about your faith,” says Ecklund, a sociologist based at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Confidentiality, says Ecklund, allowed the scientists she surveyed to be more open about their faith than they might otherwise have been. “They were almost waiting to talk about it,” she says. “They feel like there’s so much silence within the scientific community about religion — it felt somewhat of a relief to talk about their own approach to religion in a safe environment.”

Ecklund has also found that many scientists are quite open to their colleagues’ beliefs. “Atheist scientists are much less negative about religion than we might be led to believe by the loudest voices, which we often think are the most numerous ones. And that’s often not the case,” she says. For example, her 2016 study found that in the United States, two-thirds of scientists do not view the science–religion relationship as one of conflict.

Serving science and the Church as the Pope’s astronomer

Ecklund has found that attitudes to faith in the workplace vary by country. For example, she says, “Indian scientists assume that there’ll be more discussion of religion within scientific contexts. So, there’s sometimes blessings over experiments. There is an assumption that staff in a lab will want to have time off for spiritual and religious holidays.”

Nature spoke to five religious scientists about how they navigate faith at work. Their experiences differ, but none felt a conflict between their beliefs and their science. Although none had experienced any direct discrimination on the basis of their religion, some did admit to being less open about their faith in particular professional contexts.

Many say that science and religion work in harmony as ways of understanding the world. Anurag Chaurasia, a biotechnologist with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in Varanasi, recalls how, as a graduate student, he and his classmates would follow the guiding principles of the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita to help them find direction. When experiments went awry, for example, their professor would instruct them: “Read the first message of this book, ‘Do your duty without being attached to the fruits of your action; do your duty selflessly.’” This guidance, says Chaurasia, taught him and his colleagues perseverance and how to handle failure. Bhagavad Gita principles also shaped group yoga sessions to aid relaxation and support good mental health, and brought them together as a team.

Re-examination

Mikaela Lee, a technical instructor in biomedical sciences at Solent University in Southampton, UK, says that her strong Christian faith informs her world view. “The way I approach science, personally, is as a way to glorify God and find out more about his creation,” she adds.

Raised in California as an evangelical Christian, Lee experienced how a more conservative set of beliefs can be in conflict with science. “I grew up believing in creationism, that God created the world. Evolution was kind of like a dirty word in my church,” she says. “But I also believed that we, as human beings, had almost an obligation to study the natural world and discover things about it, especially for medical research. And as I got older, I decided that you couldn’t take bits and pieces: you either had to accept all of the science or none of it.” This led her to adjust her religious beliefs to accommodate scientific evidence.

“The evidence that I saw was quite convincing. When we studied evolution in school, it kind of clicked in my brain. And it doesn’t just make sense. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. That was the tipping point for me.” Lee found herself re-examining many of the conservative beliefs that she’d been taught growing up. After moving to the United Kingdom for university in 2018, she joined the more liberal United Reformed Church, which, she says, has many scientist members.

Portrait of Benjamin Grandey at his desk

Climate scientist Benjamin Grandey has been able to have conversations about his religious faith at work thanks to an open workplace culture. Credit: Benjamin Stephen Grandey

For climate scientist Benjamin Grandey, who is based in Singapore, his Christian faith informs his science: “My theology helps me to appreciate the value of why science works, because I believe in a God who has made a very ordered Universe, and that he has given us, as human beings, the ability to understand a lot about that Universe.” For example, Grandey points out that mathematics, a human construct, is “so good at providing tools to describe physical phenomena in the world beyond our minds”.

Assumed atheism

Sociologist Christopher Scheitle surveyed more than 1,300 graduate students about their experiences and their attitudes to religion. He found that many religious people studying science struggle to be open about their faith, reporting a culture of ‘assumed atheism’ that often led them to conceal their religion for fear of being judged or discriminated against (see go.nature.com/4brey69 ). “I remember having several conversations with students who were very thoughtful about hiding the fact that they were religious,” says Scheitle, who is based at West Virginia University in Morgantown. One said that she purposely avoided revealing her religious beliefs until she had established herself as a scientist. “Her fear was that if people knew early in the programme, she would immediately be labelled as ‘not a serious scientist’.”

Religion and science can have a true dialogue

Their fears were understandable, because the culture of assumed atheism meant that other students and professors felt they could speak dismissively about religion, Scheitle says. “Among students who are more religious, it is a fairly common experience that they hear offhand negative or stereotypical comments about religion or religious people,” he adds, either in the classroom or in the laboratory or departmental offices.

As Scheitle notes in his 2023 book The Faithful Scientist , when people conceal a part of their identity, it can be isolating. “Research has found that this concealment itself often ends up being harmful to their own psychological well-being and to their sense of connection to others,” he writes.

Some graduate students that Scheitle spoke to have established their own communities, who meet for prayer and discussions on faith. Those who were open about their faith admitted having awkward interactions with their non-religious peers. “You can tell [that some co-workers] get uncomfortable, and they change the subject,” said one chemistry student. “It’s not something that’s deterred me from being who I am, but I hate the awkward interactions.”

Suzanne Kalka is open about her Pentecostal faith and has worked with organizations that promote harmony between science and religion in her role as a science educator based in Manchester, UK. One of these organizations is God and the Big Bang , which runs school workshops to encourage students to discuss the compatibility of science and faith. But in her previous career as a science teacher, Kalka says that she felt less free to discuss her religion. She taught mainly in secular schools, and, especially in her early career, felt a need to prove herself, deciding not to put her role at risk by singling herself out through her religious beliefs. “It’s tough, because you’re living two lives — you don’t want to risk your scientific credibility by being openly religious. I didn’t wear any kind of outward signs of any religious belief. I lived a very compartmentalized life. I wanted to be seen to be a very competent teacher of science.”

People of faith are allies to stall climate change

Towards the end of her teaching career, Kalka decided that she wanted to be more forthright about her faith. She took a role in a Church of England school and found that she could be more open. “But even there,” she added, “it was a minority of science teachers who had any religious belief at all, and it was never discussed.”

Kalka thinks that science teachers who are religious still find it difficult to be open about their beliefs. Her advice to them is to offer examples of famous scientists who combined a life of faith with their scientific achievements. She cites data showing that 75% of scientists who won a Nobel prize between 1901 and 2000 were of Judaeo-Christian faith (B. A. Shalev 100 Years of Nobel Prizes ; 2002).

An accepting culture

Faadiel Essop says that growing up in apartheid South Africa made him think more broadly about things. In the 1990s, his country rejected its history of government-sanctioned racial segregation, and he thinks that this has led to a more sensitive, tolerant society, in which he feels able to express his Muslim faith and identity. “There’s a lot of space for you to express yourself in general in society.”

A medical physiologist at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, South Africa, and the director of the university’s Centre for Cardio-metabolic Research in Africa, Essop says there’s a strong culture of acceptance and a willingness to make accommodations for religious practices, both at Stellenbosch and across Africa more generally. Essop travels across the continent regularly for scientific meetings and says that he’s seen both Muslims and Christians being “quite comfortable to express their religion”.

Faadiel Essop says there’s a culture of openness in discussions of faith in South Africa. Credit: Wilma Stassen

Closer to home, his university colleagues are sure to provide him with halal foods (those permitted by Islamic law) at meetings or events, and the teaching schedule leaves gaps on Fridays for congregational prayers. This year, the head of his department came to speak to him before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to discuss the daily fasts that he would be undertaking. “There is that empathy. It’s not necessary, but it’s nice. It shows that he’s got an interest, and I can explain what I do.”

An open workplace culture has also helped Grandey to be comfortable discussing his faith at work. The climate physicist moved to Singapore after growing up and completing his studies in the United Kingdom. He has found that office environments that are culturally diverse, in which people are open to discussing their personal lives, leave room for conversations about faith, too.

“In my last workplace, the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, it was very international, very diverse. I remember enjoying many stimulating conversations with colleagues from other Asian countries who had not had much exposure to Christianity. They were very open to learning about what I believed as a Christian, and sharing about their own beliefs, too,” says Grandey, who is now a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University.

Risks of ruling out religion

Essop sees the often-strict divide between science and religion, especially in places where he’s lived and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a barrier to the free exploration of ideas. Discussing evolution and the origins of life, for example, in such environments could lead to stilted conversation.

“That’s where religion has been sidelined in a way, because the two, work and religion, are viewed as separate domains. Personally, I think they’re an integrated whole.”

From her studies, Ecklund thinks that accepting the existence of religion in a scientific context can help to encourage diversity. “Our studies show that people may be kept out of science to some extent because they’re religious, either that they don’t ever go into science, because they think religious people can’t be scientists, or that they feel like they have to hide that they’re religious.”

Close-up of Elaine Howard Ecklund speaking at a conference

Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund studies scientists’ attitudes towards religion. Credit: Michael Stravato

Women and people of colour — groups that the scientific community strives to attract and retain — are more likely to identify as religious. “By raising suspicion about religious people, we, as scientists, may be inadvertently keeping racial and ethnic minorities and women out of science,” she says.

Essop has devised a graduate teaching module on the philosophy of science and “influences that can shape science”. He encourages other educators and researchers to fold spiritual and philosophical elements into academic discussions, because he thinks an approach to science that considers other belief systems will nurture more-inclusive attitudes in his students.

“We’ve got to look at more-holistic training,” he says, and at other systems – such as Indigenous knowledge, which has inspired “an awakening” of interest around the world. “We’re looking at science a bit differently — that it’s not just an absolute thing, but instead we consider many facets.”

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First published Thu Jun 12, 2014; substantive revision Tue Oct 4, 2022. Moral arguments for God's existence form a diverse family of arguments that reason from some feature of morality or the moral life to the existence of God, usually understood as a morally good creator of the universe. Moral arguments are both important and interesting.
A Historical Analysis of the Relationship of Faith and Science and its
Part of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, and the Science and Mathematics Education Commons This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies Collection at ScholarWorks.
Deepening Faith Through Science: A School Leader's Guide
This statement does not include position statements or any "right answers" to contested science and faith questions. Instead, the statement articulates the consistent approach your school and teachers will take when discussing controversial topics and the end goals for your students. Alignment and consistency are key.
Developing a Thesis Statement
A thesis statement . . . Makes an argumentative assertion about a topic; it states the conclusions that you have reached about your topic. Makes a promise to the reader about the scope, purpose, and direction of your paper. Is focused and specific enough to be "proven" within the boundaries of your paper. Is generally located near the end ...
Integration of Science and Religion: A Hermeneutic Approach
This article takes a hermeneutic approach in articulating a thesis for the unity of science and religion. It examines interpretive frameworks in Unificationism and how it shapes our understanding of religion, science, and their integration. Since the concept of truth is a critical factor in one's interpretive framework, the article touches ...
The Harmonious Counterpoint of Science and Biblical Faith
Here's how we describe it in our mission statement: BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith, as we present an evolutionary understanding of God's creation. We reject the idea that science and faith are at war or that scripture and nature are in some fundamental conflict.
What Does the Bible Say about Science, and Are They in Conflict?
Science is a gift from God Who is the Source of all good things ( James 1:17 ). The fact that we can use our intellect to explore the physical world and make discoveries that improve our living conditions is not only wonderful; it's also biblical! As referenced before, God encouraged science from the beginning.
Belief, Knowledge and Faith: A Logical Modal Theory
The concept of God is studied using the ontological argument of Anselm of Canterbury that proves God's existence using a syllogism based on ontology. Unlike metaphysical arguments that demonstrate the existence of God through the study of being and its attributes, the ontological argument aims to reach this same goal based on a concept of God by means of the idea of an entity "greater than ...
PT1B Reading Comprehension Strategies
Reading Comprehension using science to understand god (science and religion) source: science to understand 123helpme.com. 06 jul 2016 in this day, there. Skip to document. University; High School; Books; ... Thesis Statement. Summary _____ _____ English. Philippines. Company. About us; Ask AI; Studocu World University Ranking 2023; E-Learning ...
3 Ways We See God When We Study Science
Scripture instructs us to carefully observe the world around us to learn about God. Job was good at this. He used his observations of the natural world to keep his experiences in perspective. In Job 12:7-10, he observes animals to better understand God's wisdom.In Job 37:14-16, he urges his listeners to consider the weather to better understand God's power.
The conflict thesis between science and Christianity: it makes for a
The "conflict thesis" between science and religion advanced in these tomes is captured by Draper's words as follows: "The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from ...
How religious scientists balance work and faith
Researchers find ways to interweave faith and science, from discussing Ramadan fasts with colleagues to applying religious parables to lab work.
Using Science to Understand God.pdf
View Using Science to Understand God.pdf from ENG 111 at Our Lady of Fatima University, Quezon City. ACTIVITY 2 Week 2 Day 2 Using Science to Understand God THESIS STATEMENT We must take into account
Week 2 Day 2 Activity Using Science to Understand God ...
Thesis Statement Using science to understand God will lead us to unlock the secrets of the natural world around us through science that are being led by God. "Religion without science is lame, but science without religion is blind." By considering each other's beliefs we can make this world more knowledgable. Summary
"Your God is Too Small": Retracing the Origins of Conflict Between
ABSTRACT. In this paper I reexamine the origins of John William Draper's "conflict thesis." I propose an alternative conclusion than what most historians of science have offered, one based on a synthesis of recent work, and one which treats Draper's "conflict thesis" not simply as anti-Catholic propaganda, nor as a quest for cultural dominance, nor even as anti-religious in intent.
Disciple-making: Key Ingredients for Building God's Kingdom
The goal of this research was to better understand disciple-making in a way this research could be useful to faith communities who wish to focus on disciple-making to reach those far from God that would result in a faith community like the one found in Acts 2:42-47. The data was compiled to develop a greater understanding for the
The goal of science is to understand God
The goal of science is to understand God. General News. Posted on AllSides May 22nd, 2024. Save for Later . From The Right. The atheist narrative has in the past century engulfed the West with its denial of the metaphysical realm. History has been rewritten to fit this Marxist and socialist ideology. The idea that religion and scientific ...