Preface

Science and Faith

THIS VOLUME contains three published papers and one not published previously. One of the former is longer and more elaborately documented than most of the papers in this series. All three are concerned basically with a single theme: the position of man in the universe and the importance, for his spiritual well-being, of a clear understanding of what this position really is.

The first paper--"The Universe: Designed for Man?"--is intended to show that there are excellent reasons for believing that the world we live in did not come to its present form by accident, but by design was structured and furnished in a way peculiarly suited as a setting for such a creature as man is. It owes its unique character to the character of the universe as a whole--as though the universe was made for the world and the world was made for man. In that case, in the final analysis, the universe was made for man!

But can such a tiny speck of life in the immensity of space, living on such an insignificant little planet circling around a third-rate sun, which is only one among countless millions of other stars of far greater magnitude, possibly have any significance? Could this puny creature be the cause of such a tremendous display of creative activity which is then merely a stage for him?

The answer, I believe, is in the affirmative. Indeed, it can be argued--and is even now being seriously argued by some who have no stated Christian conviction--that it is man who gives significance to the universe by his very presence within it. If the world was made for man, it begins to appear that even the universe was created on his account...This is a staggering thought, but it may be the simple truth.

The second paper, "Scientific Determinism and Divine Intervention," explores the increasing evidence that mechanism is all-pervasive in the natural order and that one area of supposed freedom after another has had to be surrendered as research has demonstrated a surprising measure of rigid causality even in areas that we normally associate with willed activity. For the Christian, the implacable offensive of science seems about ready to drive God out of His own creation entirely. Where will it all end? Are we simply links in a chain of causality without any escape, without any real freedom of action or even of will, and therefore without any responsibility either? Has man any significance if he has no responsibility? And if man has no significance, does anything have significance?

Up to a point, such research did underscore the perfection of the natural order. The universe looked like a perfect watch, to use Newton's analogy. But is there any way in which God can now intervene which does not at the same time involve the disruption of His own handiwork or show, in effect, that His handiwork is not perfect? The watchmaker cannot tinker with his watch without admitting there is something wrong with it. Can we discover any pattern of intervention which is reconcilable with the concept of a perfect mechanism, such as our faith in the flawlessness of God's handiwork would seem to demand? Can we account for the Watchmaker's need to tinker while still maintaining that He had made a perfect watch?

My thesis is that there has arisen a circumstance--a fatal disturbance for which God is not directly responsible--which now demands constant corrective action on God's part, perhaps throughout the whole universe, to preserve the mechanism from a total breakdown. How this circumstance arose in the first place is a subject of divine revelation, and I believe that Genesis 2:3 has an important bearing on the matter in a way not previously recognized.

The third paper, "Medieval Synthesis and Modern Fragmentation," is a somewhat longer study which attempts to show by an examination of history how very important it is to man to have a clear picture in his own mind of what his relationship is to the universe, why God has placed him in this setting, and what is expected of him while he makes his journey along the way. This may be usefully summed up in the term world view. Cultures have world views and so do individuals. And there are world views belonging uniquely to periods of history. In its assessment of man's significance in the universe, the medieval world view, which was essentially spiritual, contrasts markedly with the modern world view, which is essentially technical. For all its faults, the former had tremendous advantages over the latter, yet it could not be sustained: not because its objective was at fault, but because certain of its foundations were faulty. Today we have corrected the foundations to some extent, but in doing so, we have shattered the superstructure and found nothing to put in its place.

The gradual shift in perspective and goal from those days until the present is traced in some detail, and the sad consequences in terms of man's spiritual health are analyzed. Some suggestions toward the recovery of a world view appropriate to man's spiritual needs, yet in harmony with the factual knowledge we now have, are proposed with particular attention being paid to the responsibility of the Christian in this process of recovery. Along the way, constant reference is made to the admissions of scientists regarding the inadequacies of the present world view, with some consideration of the kinds of alternatives such men are proposing--all of which are, to my mind, inadequate. The only satisfying world view for man will, in the end, be one which not only recognizes the spiritual dimension of man's life (which many secular writers do) and not merely his physical and intellectual needs, but will also pay due attention to what God was pleased to reveal in Scripture simply because man's native intelligence was not capable of discovering the whole truth without His help. A new synthesis is needed, and the evidence indicates that Christian faith alone can supply the framework and the cement.

The final paper, a new one hitherto not published, deals with the question of how fitness of living things is constantly adjusted to a changing environment. Is this due to chance improvements arising from mutations that happen to be beneficial (as current evolutionary doctrine requires); or the inheritance of acquired characters by the conventional route as proposed by Lamarck (which is now entirely out of favor); or an immanent divine intervention, adjusting every element in the web of nature as required? Or is there after all some built-in mechanism of self-adjustment which operates as a kind of Lamarckianism but not via nuclear genes?

The evidence for the latter alternative, generally referred to as Dauer modifications, but still virtually ignored by Christian writers, has been accumulating for some years. It seems to provide for the maintenance of the integrity of the species as such, while providing an effective means whereby long-range variation to suit changing life conditions can also take place. This paper explores the evidence for this fourth alternative.

All these papers bear witness to the existence of divine for thought in creation, as well as emphasizing the importance of recognizing this evidence in the search for meaning and purpose in life.

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Introduction

THERE ARE times in history when calamities of such magnitude have overtaken whole societies that they suffer a kind of spiritual trauma from which it may take thousands of years to recover, if they recover at all. Perhaps the event which did most to undermine the Medieval world view was the Black Plague. It was not merely that an appalling number of people died under frightful conditions and in great agony; it was rather that the plague itself seemed totally indifferent to its victims. The righteous died with the wicked. Those who might have been expected to be given some divine protection by reason of their Christian piety or their nobility of character were struck down just as mercilessly as the most evil among men. The older view of the universe as being governed by a righteous and beneficent God who punished sinners and rewarded the righteous received a staggering blow. It left men wondering whether God is in His heaven at all, whether life has any transcendental meaning, and whether man is any more than just a pawn of a capricious fate. But men did recover some measure of peace and assurance in time--for hope springs eternal...

The Second World War had a somewhat similar effect because so many millions of innocent people were uprooted or destroyed, people who were essentially harmless individuals and in a tremendous number of cases God-fearing and devout. Once again men began to ask whether God really is in His heaven and whether life really does have any transcendental meaning. Perhaps, after all, the universe is a giant accident and man totally insignificant, his fate being of no consequence except to himself.

Viktor Frankl, a world-renowned psychiatrist of Vienna, found, after a very great number of interviews with disturbed people since World War II, that whereas children tend to seek in life pleasure above all, and adolescents power, mature adults seem to feel a great need to find meaning in life than ever before. (1) And there is no question that the search for meaning demands that the individual find in some way a satisfactory answer to the question of his own relationship to the universe, to eternity, to the sum of things--and not just to his own little world of immediate experience.

In Medieval times, whatever miseries may have marked the lot of the common man, it does seem that he enjoyed this at least namely, that he possessed some sense of the meaning of life in transcendental terms--that is to say, in terms of his relationship to God, his origin, his destiny and the meaning of the created order of which the earth seemed to be the central focus. Whereas his means, his resources, were pitifully small, his ends or goals--though honored more in the breach than in the fulfillment and often wrongly motivated--were nevertheless reasonably clear and lifted him to some extent above his miserable circumstances. They provided him with both a stimulus and a comfort. But today, as Sir Eric Ashby has pointed out, while we have tremendously improved our means we have almost completely lost sight of any worthwhile ends. (2) Aldous Huxley observed sadly that modern education in our higher institutes of learning has become dedicated to providing improved means to unimproved ends. (3) We have reached a point where we spend our energies acquiring a first-class ticket on a train, the destination of which seems of little concern to us. It is more fun to travel than to arrive, and the only goal in life seems to be to travel in style.

The question arises whether we can find ends without defining man's destiny: and we cannot define destinies without settling the prior question of origins. If man has been cast up accidentally as a by-product of purely materialistic forces in a universe which has no meaning or purpose except to burn itself out so that everything that charms or challenges will perish with it and all aspiration will be as though it had never been, then "nature" has played a tremendous and tragic joke upon us all and our strivings are ultimately meaningless. So the crucial question, really, is whether the universe does have meaning: and, in the final analysis, this meaning must be "meaning for man." Is it possible, then, to make sense out of such a gigantic display in terms of the time taken, the distances involved, and the inconceivable masses of material which compose it, to find in all this vastness that such a puny creature as man is the ultimate explanation? How did it all begin, and why: where is it all tending, and to what end? Is man of consequence in this tremendous drama? Does the evidence provide us with adequate cues in cosmic terms sufficient to justify the conclusion that the universe is not a meaningless accident destined to burn itself out to no end, but a demonstration of the power and the wisdom of God and so designed as to convey this message to a creature such as man is?

References:

1. Frankl, Viktor E., "Reductionism and Nihilism" in Beyond Reductionism, ed. Arthur KoestIer and J. R. Smythies, Hutchinson, London, 1969, pp. 396f

2. Ashby, Sir Eric, "Technological Humanism" in Nature, 10 March 1956, p. 443.

3. Huxley, Aldous: quoted by John Walsh in a note on Aldous Huxley, Science 142 (1963):1446.

First published 1978. Internet edition, February 6, 1997. Corrections April 24, 1997.