The existence of order presupposes a designer, just as the existence of a law presupposes a legislator.

Science, faith and atheism
By Donald DeMarco

    “Science is agnosticism,” proclaimed Thomas Huxley. It is a richly ambiguous remark. The word “agnosticism,” we must remember, has no inherent reference to the Deity. It fundamentally refers to a person’s state of “not knowing” or even “knowing nothing.” In this sense, Huxley’s statement is false. Science does, indeed, provide us with real knowledge. In another sense of the term, agnosticism is traditionally linked with an absence of knowledge concerning the existence of God. But even in this sense, the statement is equally untenable because the knowledge gained through science, far from drawing a blank with regard to the reality of God, actually furnishes us with an intellectual bridge to his existence.
    Dr. Werner von Braun, the “Father of the Saturn 5 Rocket” that made it possible for 12 men to walk on the surface of the moon, is one of innumerable scientists who do not think that science precludes knowledge of God. As a scientist, and surely an eminent one, he states that “Anything as well ordered and perfectly created as is our earth and universe must have a Maker, a Master Designer. Anything so orderly, so perfect, so precisely balanced, so majestic as this creation can only be the product of a Divine Idea.” The existence of order presupposes a designer, just as the existence of a law presupposes a legislator.
    Reason, including scientific reason, moves easily and naturally from effect to cause, discovering in the natural order implications for the existence of a higher order. Christians, surely, should have no fear that reason and science lead to an agnosticism of God. As St. Paul has written, “Test all things; hold fast to that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). For Paul, God and man, faith and reason, life and love, are marvelously unified in Christ: Christ dwells in the intellect by faith, in the heart and affections by charity, and in the soul by grace.
    If science does not lead to agnosticism, even less can it lead to atheism. Pope John Paul II states in his international best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, that the visible world, in and of itself, cannot offer a scientific basis for an atheistic interpretation of reality. Consequently, an atheistic interpretation would be “one-sided and tendentious.” He then goes on to recall participating in many meetings with scientists, in particular, with physicists, who, after Einstein, were quite open to a theistic interpretation of the world.
    The dictum “Science is agnosticism,” then, is not particularly rational; rather, it is the proclamation of a credo. It does not oppose, but actually presupposes faith, the gratuitous belief that science and faith will prove to be incompatible with each other. Let us read more from the thought of von Braun: “There are those who say that science and religion are incompatible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Science seeks to answer the questions about creation, and religion seeks to learn about the Creator.” Science and faith are convergent, not divergent. Just as the creative act of the Creator and his creation are in continuity with each other, so, too, though in reverse order, are the scientific inquiry that illuminates creation and the reasonable faith in the Divine Being that the findings of such scientific inquiry imply.
    “Science is agnosticism,” therefore, is not a paradox. Nor is it an oxymoron. It is simply a contradiction. Nonetheless, the myth persists that science and faith, reason and religion, are mutually exclusive.
    Allow me to offer a personal example that may help bring into focus the contradiction involved in making the activity of reason (or science that is based on reason) incompatible with faith in God.
    I recently had an article published in the secular press in which I made the point in passing that the ultimate source of all authority is God. What I thought to be a non-inflammatory remark nonetheless inflamed a local atheist who dispatched an angry letter to me. Before opening the envelope, that bore an address I did not recognize, I noticed the words: “Nothing Fails Like Prayer!” My thoughts immediately turned to a recent conference on cancer held in Kingston, Ontario at which one of the participating scientists stated to the media that the only factor we can be sure about that benefits cancer patients in the recovery of their health is prayer. And she had the statistical data to back her claim. I thought it rather curious that someone would use envelopes to beseech the world not to pray. It is like urging others to become solipsists. What is presupposed by the philosophy is negated by its very expression.
    I read the letter and was informed that I was guilty of “making irrelevant and spurious character assaults” against all atheists. My atheist advisor informed me that if I contend that God is the source of authority, I logically implied that those who do not believe in God have no basis for their authority, and consequently are immoral.
    While this is an interesting point, it is entirely bereft of logic. Imagine, for example, a young desert-dweller who has never seen rain. He knows about water, which he uses on a daily basis. But he believes, due to his limited experience, that the ultimate source of water is the local oasis. He knows about water, but is understandably mistaken about its ultimate source. To see it rain for the first time would be a wonder and revelation to him. Similarly, it is possible to know about morality and even be highly moral, without knowing that God is the ultimate source of morality. An atheist can manifest attributes of God —love, kindness, generosity—without knowing that God is the ultimate source of these virtues, just as easily as a person can wear a particular hat while remaining ignorant of the identity of its milliner. Moral behavior is one thing, its foundation is quite another.
    The letter was actually quite strong in its denunciation of me, accusing me of making the kind of “nonsensical” and “unsubstantiated claims” that “continue to do much damage in our society today.” His underlying point, however, was really the contrary of what he expressed. He was implying (though perhaps without realizing it) that it is precisely the people who believe in God who are immoral because they establish their morality on a basis that does not exist and therefore cannot be truly moral. Of course, this makes no sense either, but it is curious that my atheist instructor can enjoy the liberty of advising the world not to pray, while denying anyone the liberty to assert that God is the source of all authority.
    If God exists, of course, the issue is settled. But our atheist does not want to deal with the question of God’s existence. He simply assumes he does not. But he also assumes that the activity of human reason and the existence of God are disjunctive. Therefore, the only truly reasonable people in the world are atheists.
    I have always found it odd that a person who neither believes in God, the supernatural, the immortality of the soul, the consolation of religion, and so on, could be apostolic about such barrenness. It would be like discovering that your grandfather was a completely unscrupulous fellow and devoid of a single redeeming quality, and then sending letters out to complete strangers, informing them of this embarrassing and disconcerting fact. Is it that misery loves company? Or that certain people, like gossip columnists, love to spread bad news?
    The debate that an apostolic atheist wages against faithful Christians is also a bit odd. He wants everyone to believe that his ancestry goes back to mud and slime, and holds that it is damaging to one’s self-esteem to believe that a human being is made in the image of God.
    But my atheist correspondent does not operate alone. He is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. In keeping with his apostolic zeal, he sent me information about how and at what price I could become a supporter of “freethought” and a subscriber to Freethought Today (“the only freethought newspaper in the United States”).
    My single and seemingly innocuous reference to the Deity precipitated a virtual attack by the one agency in the world that, presumably, would be the most likely one to leave me alone—the freethought brigade! Apparently, believing in God impairs my freedom, even if I freely came to the belief that God exists, and freely hold to it.
    I opened one of the pamphlets that came with the letter (“Nontract No. 3” as it is called). I read the following passage: “We are all born atheists.” A startling suggestion! But is it not premature to ascribe a theologico-philosophical position to the mind of a neonate? Was this a self-defeating admission that had eluded the writers of this statement, for in the newborn, ignorance is at its high point. Are we most free when we are most ignorant? Is it not the truth that will make us free, not ignorance of it? No one is born knowledgeable or virtuous; no one is born with the conviction that God does not exist. Atheism is not a natural endowment. A blank sheet of paper is unprinted, but it is not unimprintable.
    More startling, two sentences later, however, was the assertion that among the great artists exemplifying the spirit of the skeptic or the freethinker who refused to bend to religion, is Alfred Lord Tennyson. This seemed to be a particularly bad example of a role model for irreligion. The most often quoted line from the pen of this great Victorian poet is a glowing testimony to the efficacy of prayer: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”
    I put the pamphlet aside and opened a critical edition of Tennyson’s great poem, In Memoriam, and read the first stanza:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
    Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
    By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.

    Tennyson himself advised that the opening line “might be taken in a St. John sense”: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5).
    This did not sound like the style of a freethinking atheist. Tennyson, in fact, had from boyhood a deep religious sense and a genuine capacity for mystical experience. Scholars have hailed In Memoriam as the most dramatic as well as the most religious of English elegies. Queen Victoria, upon losing her husband, stated that In Memoriam was her comfort, second only to the Bible.
    In Memoriam, inspired by the sudden death (at age twenty-two) of Tennyson’s dear and closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, charts the triumphal journey from doubt to faith. In Tennyson’s mind, reason and faith were not antagonistic to each other in the least. This is amply evident in the following two stanzas from In Memoriam’s “Prologue”:

We have but faith: we cannot know;
    For knowledge is of things we see;
    And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
    But more of reverence in us dwell;
    That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before.

    Tennyson laments the modern world’s loss of faith. “As before” refers to the age of faith that characterized the Middle Ages, before modern science had created the gulf between intellectual “knowledge,” on the one hand, and instinctive “reverence” on the other. Reason and faith, knowledge and reverence, should harmonize to make one music.
    Tennyson is hardly an apologist for the “freethinker.” He is, by all accounts, a deeply religious Christian who knows the limitations of knowledge and the need of faith. He knows, all too well, that he is not free to reject either.
    I proceeded to “Nontract No. 11,” which purports to explain “What is a Freethinker?” Here I read that freethinkers are not entirely free but are bound by the natural order. They are “naturalistic.” “Truth,” the pamphlet goes on to state, “is the degree to which a statement corresponds with reality.” This sounded remarkably similar to St. Thomas Aquinas’s notion of truth: “The human intellect is measured by things so that man’s thought is not true on its own account but is called true in virtue of its conformity with things” (Summa Theol. II-II, 26, 1 ad 2.). Could Aquinas (as well as Tennyson) be an apologist for atheistic freethinkers? Then why has the Church canonized him?
    A freethinker, then, does have restraints. He is neither an ignorant child nor a reckless and licentious adult. His thinking, if it is to be true, must conform to reality. A freethinker, then, since his thought is limited only by reality, can be religious, since faith also has reality as its object. Therefore, reason and faith are perfectly compatible, though distinguishable, because they are united by the same object, namely, reality. Shoes and socks are distinguishable, but not incompatible. A person may wear shoes and socks, just shoes, or just socks. So, too, a person may have reason and faith, or emphasize one more than the other. Tennyson, Aquinas, and my atheist correspondent can all be freethinkers, by the very tenets established by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. So what is all the huff?
    The tract goes on to claim a basis for morality that is independent of religion. It cites a certain Barbara Walker who states: “What is moral is simply what does not hurt others. Kindness . . . sums up everything.” Yet, as St. Thomas Aquinas notes: “The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth” (In div. nom. 4, 4.). Kindness cannot sum up everything, because if it did, it would exclude a proper concern for truth. It is not kind to allow a person to wallow in error.
    I then turned to “Nontract No. 4” for further illumination. There I read a statement attributed to Gloria Steinem that was supposed to embarrass anyone who believes in religion: “It’s an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.”
    Ms. Steinem is being glib. But her rhetoric is without rectitude. First, she mistakes a “covenant” for an “exchange.” Religion is not a deal (pay now, reap the rewards later), but a loving relationship with God who is the essence of love. Nor is there an essential discontinuity between this world and the next. Our happiness in the next life is a consequence (more properly than a “reward”) of our love in this life. Moreover, it is inaccurate to suggest that we are dead in the next world. We are not “posthumous” in paradise, but very much alive (more so than ever before). In addition, corporations do make their reward systems posthumous. This is the normal way in which a widow or widower receives life insurance benefits once the spouse has died.
    Not wanting to abandon reality, or the laws of logic, I came to the conclusion that the material sent to me directly from my atheist letter-writer, and indirectly from the Freedom From Religion Foundation is highly confused. There would be a lot less quarreling and invective in the world if there were less confusion. We human beings, diverse as we are, are more alike than we often realize. But we have a strange proclivity to isolate elements that belong to a greater whole and then launch an artificial war between absolutized fragments. Even doubt and belief co-exist in the same person. The religious person is not one who is free of all doubts (because of his presumed “blind faith”). Nor is the atheist free of all belief. I was heartened by the atheist’s complimentary close: “Best regards” (it was in stark contrast with the cynical maxim on the envelope).
    Cardinal Ratzinger states in his Introduction to Christianity that “both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape doubt or belief: for the one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt.” Thérèse of Lisieux horrified some of her sisters when they read these words in the saint’s diary: “I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism.”
    Science depends on faith far more than is generally assumed. The scientist must make an initial act of faith that the world to which he applies reason is one whose laws are both intelligible and consistent. He must believe, or else he would lose heart and fear that the laws of the universe are like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the rules of the game change from moment to moment by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. For this reason, Norbert Wiener—“Father of Cybernetics,” who received a Harvard Ph. D. in mathematics at 18, and later wrote a book, God and Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964—asserts that “Science is impossible without faith.”
    When Albert Einstein confessed that what was most incomprehensible for him was the fact that the universe is comprehensible, he was alluding to the same need for faith. The laws of the universe are a fit object for human reason, but the reality of this affinity between mind and world, itself a mystery, demands the scientist’s faithful allegiance. “Der Herr Gott ist raffiniert, aber boshaft ist Er nicht,” he wrote (“God is subtle, but not malicious”). We need reason for the mind to discover the laws of the universe, but we need a preliminary faith that these laws will not betray us. Reason without faith lacks the confidence necessary to exercise its own act.
    In addition, many of the truths of science, from quarks to quasars, involve aspects of reality that, while affirmable, are nonetheless inconceivable. In this way, the human mind is disposed to affirm realities that are real but nonetheless beyond comprehension. Let us return one final time to the thought of Dr. von Braun:
The electron is materially inconceivable, and yet it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies, and take the most accurate measurements.
What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electron as real, while refusing to accept the reality of God on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?

Dr. Donald DeMarco is an associate professor of philosophy at St. Jerome’s College of the University of Waterloo. He studied theology at the Gregorian University in Rome and earned his Ph.D. at St. John’s University in New York. His most recent books are: How to Survive as a Catholic in a Parochial World (St. Martin de Porres, New Hope, Ky.) and The Incarnation in a Divided World (Christemdom). Dr. DeMarco resides in Kitchener, Ontario, with his family and is a frequent contributor to HPR.

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