Last night I attended a lecture at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church by Professor John Haught on Science and Faith. It was the second of a four part series, and I have been asked to be the Jewish respondant at the fourth lecture. It was amazing to me to see the considerable audience that turned out to hear Haught's talk. These were mostly middle aged people, not professional religion scholars, who seemed absolutely fascinated with and compelled by what Haught had to say.The gist of his lecture was an introduction to the thought of a twentieth century Roman Catholic priest, Teilhard de Chardin(d. 1955), who was a paleontologist and a theologian who made a case for the connection between scientific findings and a "reconstructed" religious faith.
The lecture began with Kant's famous questions: What can I know? What must I do? What can I hope? Haught argued that in order to answer those questions, we need to ask "what is going on in the universe?"
Recently, several orthodox atheist scientists(Richard Dawkins,etc.) have been aggressively promoting the idea that science "proves" a reductionist, materialist view of reality. The idea of cosmic purpose is mocked by them as wishful thinking or worse. They read the Darwinian legacy as one that "proves" the randomness and hence ultimately pointlessness/meaninglessness of the universe.
Haught understands how, in response to this kind of overreaching by science(scientism), religious folks would retreat into their own world and say "fine.you take care of the material world and facts. we'll take care of the spirit and values." The difficulty with that is the dualism which is untrue to what we now know from science(Descarte's error) and also untrue to (Judaism and) early Christianity. In fact, through science we can learn that something exciting is going on in this world so as religious people we need not leave it behind to find meaning.
As a scientist and a theologian, Teilhard kept matter and spirit together and made a case for meaning as inherent within the physical world.
Of course, for some people that is precisely what religious naturalism is all about. Nature is all there is, but science can help us see how utterly awesome and amazing it is--enough to fill our hearts and minds and give gusto to our ethics and hopes. Teilhard(and John Haught and M.M. Kaplan in his philosophical voice for that matter) wanted a bit more. They wanted there to be God(meaning, purpose) that one could believe in without an existential, non rational, leap of faith.
Once Haught got into the intricacies of the Christology of Teilhard, I lost him. But as best I could understand the argument for the God Jews and Christians share, it went something like this: If we understand the narrative scientists have told of the evolution of the cosmos, matter, life, animals and ultimately human beings, we see that something momentous is working itself out in the universe. In a static universe, we would need supernatural revelation to discover our duty, but in the evolutionary scheme of the universe we can find our calling in contributing to moving the process forward("building the kingdom of God.") The process appears to be moving from inert matter to the human brain(13 billion years)-- a process of increasing consciousness, freedom and spirit.
I understood this to be just the opposite of intelligent design-- a religious claim that places God and meaning at the beginning of the process of creation. In this view, God is up ahead, what the universe is moving toward. God is calling to us from the future, not the past. This seems really exciting to me, although I confess I could not follow precisely the scientific reasoning that showed the universe is increasingly moving away from atomization toward unificiation.(In the Q and A someone asked what this theology had to say about President Bush's Iraq policy and Haught murmered something about not wanting to get into politics but he did think that America going it alone without gathering allies was not the direction his theology would suggest. Seemed a little hazy to me...)
Where I thought Haught was strongest was in his response to the question of suffering(the deal breaker for so many theologies.) He calmly replied, "this is an unfinished universe. of course there is suffering and evil. It is to be expected in an incomplete process. But we are being called forward toward something better." Avoiding the question of how human history does not seem to be moving "forward," Haught addressed us to natural history where there does seem to be a forward movement.(Natural history is 13.7 billion years old and human history is a tiny blip on the screen.)
At the end of the day, I still think we do better to confess with Kaplan, in his spiritual pragmatic voice, that we can't really know if the universe is moving forward or backward or means anything at all, but we can name God in such a way as to alert us to look for meaning where we can find it--even if it is not the overarching truth--and we can opt for it along the lines of William James "Will to Believe." That's what still seems to make sense to me, although the Teilhard project is one that inspires me, if not for the rigor of the conclusions, than surely for the passion of the quest.
