the tension

Recent posts by Ross McKenzie and Philip Jensen (h/t to Ross, again; I wouldn't have gone seeking out that particular blogger) remind me to try to sum up the tension that's really bothering me.  Here goes.

My Christian friends are not nearly scientific enough.  And my scientist friends are not nearly spiritual enough.  It's a rather longstanding tension, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier to handle.

On the one hand, Christians (and especially Evangelical Christians) really are prone to lapse into a rather mediaeval understanding of the world around us.  They are not alone in this, of course: woeful ignorance of, say, Newton's laws of motion is quite common in the general population. But as I've said previously, the theology of prayer really needs a radical overhaul.  Many of the things which are said to arise through spiritual means are much, much better explained by chance or by psychology, or a raft of other sciences.  Just tolerating the young earth creationists (even without agreeing with them) is a shocking piece of intellectual sloppiness.  Failing to follow through and accept that archaeology casts doubt on the historicity of big bits of the rest of the Old Testament is equally a careless piece of head-in-the-sand thinking.    Denying the results of good textual criticism of the biblical texts - and holding instead to vague myths about origin and authorship - is just setting yourself up for a fall.

And so it goes on.  None of these things is essential or central to the Christian gospel, and pretending that the metaphysics of the dark ages is better than today's scholarship is just a distraction, and liable to make thinking people reject the whole package out of hand.  Then there's issues of morality ... but those are best left to a different discussion.

On the other hand entirely, many scientists seem equally stuck - albeit in the nineteenth century instead of the fourteenth.  There is an optimistic hubris which assumes every problem will be solved eventually.  There is an appeal to a kind of reductionism which 20th century mathematics and physics showed to be fundamentally untenable.  Some will point out that in the middle ages, the thinkers of the day were kept from certain topics whereas today everything is open for research: conveniently ignoring that there is a long list of areas in which you would truly struggle to get taken seriously, or even allowed to proceed at all.  (I refer not to the periodic nutter who invents a perpetual motion machine, but to a range of questions whose answers are not incontrovertibly settled but are nevertheless entirely un-researchable.  There are subjects for which we do not want to know the answer, or are unwilling due to concerns of ethics, to ask the question).  Equally, epistemology has moved on immeasurably, even to the point of asking whether there are truths about the universe which human minds will never comprehend.

The language we use to describe those truths is of course instructive.  If pressed, most will admit that they are dealing with models of reality, models which must be mutable to take account of new observations.  Frequently that language is suppressed in favour of a discussion of "how it is" - deficient as such wording is, along with its cousin "existence".  A fixation upon whether or not things "exist" seems awfully dated, and not terribly helpful - whether one is dealing with quantum theory or theology.  Insofar as we can understand the cosmos from our position inside it, taking account of the role of the observer seems to matter greatly - and therein is spirituality.

So I find myself reluctantly living in that tension.  I find a lot of people who want glibly to resolve it one way or the other, or who want to inhabit "faith with science-lite" or "science, with personal faith if you must" but both seem really quite unsatisfactory to me.  Perhaps this is partly due to that unhealthy parting of the ways in the mid-to-late 19th century, wherein real rigorous dialogue dried up in favour of is/isn't debates which often miss the point.  In many ways, I envy those priest-scholar-scientists who lived before that divide, for theirs was a more holistic existence.  But we cannot go back there. The Universe is much more wonderful than they could possibly have imagined; life more incredible than they might have dared to think.