Having faith in reason
RECENTLY I heard a child declare on the radio that God made the Big Bang. I was impressed. There is a growing unease about the teaching of creation in schools. Yet one of the most common features between all religious beliefs is some form of creation myth. The Christian one is taken from the Jewish story at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Contemporary Christianity normally treats the story as an analogy for a divine plan and most people accept the theory of evolution in one form or another.
This topic has become politically sensitive, even controversial. Doubtless it will play a significant role in the coming elections in the United States and the two sides will be presented as faith against reason. This marks a seismic shift in the traditional thought pattern of the West. Our language, laws, literature and learning have all evolved within a tradition that attempted to bring faith to reason and reason to faith. The division of one against the other is a significant change in the way we have always lived and prayed.
Even the story of Galileo's condemnation before the Inquisition is not an example of the present divide. Galileo was condemned by his colleagues at the university and lost his teaching post for teaching something contrary to the scriptures - yet what he taught was no more radical than what Copernicus had written some 90 years earlier in his Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Galileo was not involved in a dispute between faith and reason but was the victim of academic politics.
What we are witnessing today is the evolution of science as a religion. The Big Bang theory has become a dogma and ideas such as creation or intelligent design are heresies and must be crushed! We can think of the child on the radio and remember: out of the mouths of sucklings you have perfected praise. The boy offered a common approach that could help us to know and understand our origins better. Some approach our origins in purely material terms, others find no answers in evolution theory for the spiritual side of our nature.
Neither approach is in any position to prove or disprove the beliefs of the other. So confrontation will polarise us rather than assist us. Scientific research helps us to understand where we came from but cannot tell us where we are going. Spirituality offers ideas of where we could go but has shaky images about where we physically came from. As a culture we are exposing ourselves to the frightening possibility that we will reduce our knowledge to empirical facts and deny our higher reasoning. That certainly didn't happen in the time of Galileo when one Augustinian friar made the first bicycle (and was admittedly burned as a witch) and another began the Reformation.
When Europe pitched its camps as Catholic versus Protestant we gained little from our confrontation. Maybe it would have been better if we listened to each other so we could learn and grow. The earth bears the tracks, not just of the Neanderthals but of our more recent history. From these we have proof that where politics divides faith from reason nothing good ever comes.
FMacE