Two Meditations on the Idea of the Creation

The Creation 

        Religious and metaphysical belief systems should not be confused with empirical states of affairs.  They are (among other things) rather different ways to understand the meaning of significance of these states of affairs. This distinction is forced on us in ways it could not have been for cultures in which modern science played no role. Logically, the belief that our human meanings are ultimately reducible to causal nexuses of events amenable to scientific explanation – a belief that determines that religious questions will be treated logically no differently from empirical questions – is metaphysical: it is not a possible scientific hypothesis (subject to experiment, etc.); it corresponds to no clearly delimited empirical state of affairs. It organizes how some people interpret the world (or parts of it), thus playing an analogous epistemological role as belief in the Creation. Both express an attitude toward the world. Evolutionary biology may be able to tell us something about the origin of morality; it cannot tell us (at least without committing the genetic fallacy) whether to see a human fetus as an appendage to a female body or as an “unborn child” with all the moral connotations attaching to both expressions. But the attitudes expressed by Genesis and scientific reductionism, while not mechanically determining how a person will see the fetus, reveal it to be different kinds of realities, with similarities and dissimilarities. And no possible scientific, rational procedure will tell us what this reality is apart from the attitudes we bring to the “seeing” of it. Looking at the ultrasound photograph cannot in principle decide the correct attitude.

            Members of set of possible attitudes expressed by Genesis can of course come into conflict with members of the set of possible attitudes represented by belief in reductionism. I would like to emphasis the plurality of these attitudes. Only for “fundamentalist” members of each set need anything resembling a contradiction manifest itself. Clearly, if a person believes that Genesis is to be read like a newspaper report of an actual event in history, then that must collide with the overwhelming evidence accumulated by science that the universe is far older than that suggested by Genesis, that life took much longer to develop, etc. Here atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Creationists share a common ground, epistemologically, with Creationists attempting to cast doubt on scientific findings and create conceptual space to see Genesis as a possible report of how things really were. The attitude that lends meaning to the lives of such people has been fatefully linked with an empirical state of affairs, forcing them into a kind of philosophical skepticism concerning science, in some cases combined with a set of quasi-rational arguments for the existence of God.

            But other positions are possible within these sets (they being far from the only ones). No hidden logical tension inheres in scientific reductionism and Genesis. The tension comes from what people make of them in the course of their lives, the way they use them to express attitudes, justify actions and practices, and so on. As Peter Winch has written, seeing Darwin’s Origin of Species as colliding head-on with Genesis was and is not the only possible understanding, even though given the Enlightenment context (and critique of miracles) it was perhaps culturally if not epistemologically inevitable that they would collide. Both science (though less so scientific reductionism) and Genesis can express “man’s sense of wonder at the world.” To judge the meaning of religious language (and images) in terms of empirical hypotheses to be tested is like seeing Michelangelo’s depiction of God and Adam logically like a diagram of an auto accident for an insurance company. That it can be seen like that is obvious; it should be equally obvious that it must not be so seen.

          And in the context of many people’s lives (and the artist’s intention) it makes more sense to see it as an expression of a sublime attitude – perhaps (as Winch puts it) “how the power of God the Father and Adam’s dependence are, on both sides, inseparably linked by love. God’s power is not simply combined with his love; it is his love (“Meaning and Religious Language,” 121).” This, in turn, we can see as an image of the wonder and goodness of human existence at its core – an attitude, as Winch points out, that may also motivate the work of a scientist. Indeed one may either worship or do scientific work as a sort of homage to this sense of the world. The image expresses an attitude, which may fill a life with meaning, which to give up may empty that life of meaning. It has a formative influence on the way we respond to the things of the world. It can symbolize man’s relation to the cosmos – symbolize in the sense of expressing in concrete images an indeterminate relation to transcendence, meaning a relation that cannot be explained by science or pre-scientific, everyday ways of dealing with empirical matters.

         The idea that “language games” are somehow insulated from one another, such that science is one thing, and religion another, and never shall they meet, does not go deep, even though it does point to problems of understanding the latter thought. Science has changed the senses in which we may find religious language intelligible or unintelligible, and Wittgenstein’s own thought by no means leaves everything in place. The current state of scientific knowledge even in its popularized forms does change the ways we think about, defend, or criticize religious dogmas like the virgin birth or the resurrection of the body – in Wittgensteinian terms, the grammar of many religious concepts has been transformed under the cultural impact of the natural sciences (and capitalism).

        The God of history has indeed become much more problematic than for Aquinas, not only because of apparent conflicts with the scientific worldview but also owing to historical catastrophes and cultural transformation. The intelligibility of religious language certainly cannot be insulated from such developments – indeed, intelligibility is conditioned and limited by them. That in my case, the idea of God as an agent intervening in history is problematic is connected to moral changes: there is less tolerance morally today, and I find it unintelligible for an all-powerful and all-good agent to allow horrible suffering for inscrutable reasons. Of course, suffering can be morally good and necessary. In my life I have suffered but I have never suffered anything that would shake my faith. That doesn't imply all suffering is good or morally necessary (I am sure you can think of examples of what I mean).

       Dostoevsky portrays this brilliantly not only in the scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan confronts Alyosha with his rejection of God’s Creation because (over-simply) for him nothing that could happen an any subsequent afterlife could justify the torture of the child he described – he rejects a world in which such things are possible. He makes it clear that this has nothing to do with the question of God’s existence and that he “lives by this,” which is to say that his rejection is a deep attitude. The Grand Inquisitor parable may then be seen as an image of this attitude. All this may have an impact on one’s ability to embrace Genesis in the spirit of seeing the wonder of the world. That Ivan does not shatter Alyosha’s faith but rather evokes his deep compassion for his brother is only intelligible in light of Alyosha’s whole character. In another man, the adherence to faith might have been blind or sentimental.

 

 Evolution and Genesis – Contradictory Theories? 

Does Genesis conflict with scientific theories such as the “Big Bang” and evolution?  Of course it depends on how one understands both – on how much one reads into both. Creationists want to make Genesis do scientific explanation; science popularizers like Richard Dawkins want to make science do religious and metaphysical work.  Both ask Genesis and science to do more than they can.  My claim:  religion and science have very little directly to do with each other, at least at the most fundamental level of their practice: no more than writing a poem about a garden because you find it beautiful and wonderful has to do with the practice of making sure the garden grows well. 

            Whatever criteria of sense operate in religious language, they have little or nothing to do with the things science investigates.  If a renowned scientist and philosopher like Stephen Hawkins finds no conceptual space for God in the universe, then it is not science that backs him up, though he himself may be as confused about this as the fundamentalist preacher.  God is not a possible object of scientific investigation. No scientists are actively collecting data to prove or disprove God's existence. 

Of course, scientists are not actively collecting data on the existence of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny either, but (although many people think like this) to put God in the same category as Santa Claus involves a simple error (for an adult if not a child): projecting a human, mythical, imaginative picture of God as a figure in a story (perhaps the somewhat frightening old man with the white beard) into the material universe as we know it.  If Hawkins means there is no conceptual space in the physical universe invested by physics for this fairy tale image of God, he is right; but that doesn’t tell us anything of astonishing importance about serious religion (or even fairy tales).  If Hawkins doesn’t feel the need to speak of God in connection with the deepest longings, with the ultimate mystery of existence, it is not because there is no conceptual space in the scientific universe for God; it is because there is no conceptual space for any of his understandings of God in the universe of his heart or imagination. He just finds other images more meaningful to express his deepest response to existence.

            Science – to take a homey example – can tell gardeners what makes tomatoes grow well, how much water they need, ways to protect them from pests, and such things. What science can tell gardeners (mostly gardeners learn by experience: that’s not the issue here) are things that are true for everybody: If either Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Atheists – however different their ideas about gardening – forget to water the tomatoes or fertilize the soil properly, the tomatoes won’t thrive. Experience shows this, and science can investigate to find out the causes of what we can learn by experience. The task of scientific understanding is to adapt our thought to the biological aspect of the garden, not force the biology of the garden to conform to our preconceptions. Similarly, finding the cause of cancer, discovering the physical properties of aluminum, or studying climate changes are matters of science.  Religion can’t tell us much about such things. 

            Scientific statements must be somewhere along the way lend themselves to intersubjective research, such that particular biographies, religious beliefs, cultural backgrounds, and emotional states of mind are independent of the results of the research: the idea of a Christian, Jewish, or atheist science is absurd. Ideologically, I may want global warming to turn out to be based on a misunderstanding; personally, I may want to win the Nobel prize and proving global warming is based on a mistake would advance my claim. None of this matters to the science of global warming.          

            But who I am does matter greatly to my attitude towards religious (as well as moral and aesthetic) judgments. When I watched a documentary of the humiliation African Americans were subjected to during segregation, my anger and shame was not incidental to the truth that segregation was evil: it was the form my conviction that it was evil took. Yet I suppose many people of my grandparents generations did not respond with anger; the pictures of humiliation did not signify to them what they did for me. But unlike the case with global warming, no one can point to any independent data beyond personal responses to independently verify the truth of my conviction that what I was seeing was evil. That in no way undermines my conviction that it was evil – of few things am I as certain as I am of that.

Or to get at the point another way: what makes a statement scientific is often that scientists know how at least in principle to test it. Testability is part of what distinguishes astronomy from astrology.  If someone claims that tomatoes will thrive when the soil contains a certain amount of iron, then we can test that assertion by having one garden with soil containing that amount of iron, and another garden that does not contain it, all other things being equal: and see which tomatoes do better.  Questions like “How can these capitalists destroy those ancient forests?” or “How could people treat other people like that?” can be answered by no possible experiment; they are not intersubjectively testable in the way scientific questions such as “How much iron do tomato plants need?” are.  Often our feelings about the former kind of questions are rooted in our deepest response to life – to religious attitudes in the broadest sense of that term.

I was listening to an evolutionary account of why we humans and other animal species are warm-blooded – made for older children, a series entitled ‘It’s Okay to be smart.’ After reconstructing a couples of explanations that made sense (however difficult to test in practice), the speaker noted that “evolution doesn’t really have a destination; it is the journey that is important.” Now that is an interesting thought, possibly, perhaps from the point of view of the kind of evidence that a scientist can take seriously, very probably true. But it is not a scientific hypothesis; it is a metaphysical thought – meaning it cannot be possibly mathematically described, generalized, tested, confirmed or falsified, used to make predictions, etc. It is not possibly something we can know, at least that way, for we would have to know that there are no realities that are to us as we are to cats and fish, realities that may in fact have imprinted the cosmos with purposes, possibilities, tendencies that our finite purely intellectual reason cannot reach. The question of whether there are such realities is not one that interests scientists as scientists, and there is no rational-scientific basis to assume that science explains all there is to explain.

            Indeed, these metaphysical questions are rooted in our experience of meaning. And whether we are open to discourses of meaning does depend on who we are.  Science can’t tell me anything about the meaning of life, my loves, and my regrets, how I should live, what I should do, what I may hope for. And the deepest roots of religion don’t have anything to do with what fertilizer makes tomatoes grow well, what stars consist of, or whether genetically engineered corn causes cancer.  In other words, science can reveal the biology of birth and death: understanding the biology allows technicians to make birth safer and allows pathologists to do autopsies to determine cause of death. But it can tell us nothing whatsoever about the awesome mystery of the birth and death of a human being, which in turn is a function of the meaning an individual life can have in the world – how utterly strange that certain people can move us the way they do!  And Genesis may not have much to say about the causes of birth or death; it does contain deep clues for those who are open them as to their meaning for us, at least one possible way to understand their meaning.  This is only revealed in the inner symbolic (or perhaps better: iconic) universe of the heart – not empirically, like the dissection of a corpse in an autopsy.

            We all have attitudes to life that originate outside of science. Some people, for example, don’t care about gardens; others deeply love their gardens: for both sorts of people the “laws of biology” are the same, though the difference in what the garden means to one may be infinitely greater than what it means to another.  The lover of his garden may be moved by a sense of wonder over growing things; that things are as they are and not different; over nature’s producing what we need to live and what gives us joy; even over the wonder of life and the beauty and goodness of growing things.  Science can’t tell us anything about meaning, about love, about wonder, but Genesis can.       

            The deepest meaning, our most “primitive” attitudes towards existence – these represent the source of religion.  Genesis is one possible expression of wonder over the miracle of Creation – and existence is a miracle, is the miracle.  It is an expression of the experience of the goodness of existence, or the beauty of the earth:  he saw that it was good, very good.  Genesis expresses a deep moral attitude to the Creation: that its origin is divine; that it is kept in being by love; that it is not ours to possess and desecrate as if it were of no more value than goods humans make for profit; that humanity is privileged to be potentially in (however ambiguous) relationship with the divine source of Creation.  Like the gardeners above, the scientist apart from any conscious religious beliefs may investigate the Creation either in the spirit of wonder, love – or, to find better ways to exploit it for profit, which also expresses an attitude towards nature that is no more independently verifiable than the experience of wonder or reverence.  But the religious orientation of the scientist is strictly speaking no more logically relevant to the practice of science than it is to growing tomatoes, though one may ask whether the scientists and gardeners who are inspired by love and wonder might be differently empowered.         

            Wittgenstein wrote that even if all the possible puzzles of science could be solved, the problems of life wouldn't be touched.  Our thinking can never reach reality at deepest levels. God/Reality/Good is made visible (or not) though experiences of meaning: reverence, love, caring, beauty, wonder, selflessness, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, authentic pleasure (the taste of garden tomatoes!); also, I must add, in remorse, the pained recognition of guilt.  But who knows ultimate reality?  Who can give us the correct theory?  No one.  There is no theory to give.  And this applies to church theologians – the “scientists of God.”  As soon as one starts talking about religion, confusion threatens. When this talk about religion becomes implicated in all-too-human social or personal power, the confusion is inevitable. Thus Wittgenstein wrote, slightly paraphrased: Of the Sublime one cannot speak without reducing it to literal nonsense, and thus one must be silent.