Robert Barron - Science Points to God
Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this great feast of the Epiphany. It’s just one of my favorites. I love, every Christmas season, having the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of this feast because it just keeps generating meaning, I find. We’re all familiar with the story of the wise men crossing hill and dale and desert and so on, to come to the Christ child. It’s been depicted in what, tens of thousands of Christmas cards. And there is something romantic and charming about this story, but as I say, it also generates an awful lot of spiritual meaning. And so it’s worth a while meditating on it. Here’s the angle I want to develop today, this whole problem of religion and science.
Now, I’ll say more about it as I go, but it’s very much of a modern invention, the conflict between the two, but it’s very much on the minds of a lot of people today. And I say that with confidence because I’ve been studying the issue of disaffiliation for a long time. The fact that a lot of people are disaffiliating from the Christian churches. The numbers are startling. The course of my lifetime, it’s changed dramatically. When I was a young kid, let’s say in the 1970s, roughly 3% of our country would’ve said, we have no religion. That means 97% of the country claimed a religious affiliation. Now, it doesn’t mean they were all saints or we’re going to church every week, doesn’t mean that, but they claimed a religious identity.
Now, the number’s risen to over 25% of our country. That’s a huge increase in the course of my lifetime. And then if you look at young people, the numbers are even worse. They rise as high as 40%. 40% of those under 30 now claim they have no religion. And here’s what I mean when I say I’ve been studying this stuff, because you look at these surveys and they’ll give you the reasons why people are disaffiliating, and there are a lot of them. But one of the prime reasons, in study after study, young people say religion and science are in conflict with each other, or you can’t reconcile the claims of religion and the Bible with the sciences. And now the subtext is, well, the sciences are great. We love and reverence the sciences.
So if religion’s out of step with science, religion must be a lot of old superstition. Now, read the new Atheists who said that over and over again. These are Bronze Age myths and pre-scientific nonsense. Well, they’re preaching convinced a lot of young people that religion and science are at odds with each other, and because of that, many are disaffiliating. Well, I think this story of the Magi has a lot to say on this point. Magi, the word in Greek is magoi, and they’re not entirely sure what that means. It’s related to magic or magician. Were they astrologers? Probably, to a degree, but we know is that to the east of the holy land, at that time there was a pretty advanced culture of, call it stargazing. People who would look up into the night sky and seek to understand its patterns.
So there might’ve been an astrological element, but also I’d say an awful lot of what we call astronomy, doing kind of serious science, plotting the movements and so on of the planets and the sun and so on. Now, here’s the point, and I think, everybody, it’s so important. You can’t do that unless you are assuming that there’s a basic intelligibility and rationality to what you’re examining. You see what I mean? If the heavens were just a chaotic mess, Mars is here. Oh, now it’s over there. And I don’t know why, for no apparent reason.
Next week, it’s going to be over there. The moon, I don’t know. It doesn’t go in any kind of predictable phase. It is here, it’s there, it’s full. If it was just a jumble without any pattern, harmony, intelligibility, no scientist could do his work. See, the scientist assumes, ah, there’s a pattern of intelligibility and I’m now trying with my inquiring mind to understand that pattern. Well, that’s what the magi were doing, it seems to me. They were, to a degree anyway, scientists. Think of any science, psychology, that word ends with logos, doesn’t it? Biology ends with logos. Physiology ends with logos. The idea is there’s a logic. There’s a rationality and intelligibility to the mind, studied by the psychologist, to the body, studied by the biologist, etc. All of science rests upon this assumption of intelligibility.
Well, here’s the next question. If the universe is in every nook and cranny marked by intelligibility, pattern, know ability, where’s that come from? Why should that be the case? There’s nothing self-evident about it. I think just the contrary. How do you explain it? Except through recourse to some great intelligence which has thought that intelligibility into existence. Here’s the way Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI put it, objective intelligibility leads to subjective intelligence. There’s some great subject, some great mind that has thought the world into being.
If you’ve been following me, you’ve seen a reference to this. But there’s an extraordinary article. It came out in 1960, written by a man named Eugene Wigner. Eugene Wigner was a somewhat younger contemporary of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and that great generation of theoretical physicists. And Wigner did work in that area for many years. So late in his career, he’s an older man, he writes this article and it bears this interesting title, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences. Let me say that again. The title of his article, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences.
Now, what’s he talking about? Well, he was a physicist. So he’s studying the physical world. He’s a physical scientist. And what does he find that the deeper he goes into physical reality, what does he find, but extraordinarily complex mathematics. Read your books of theoretical physics. It’s not my area of expertise at all, but read those books and what do you find? You can’t do physics without math and lots of it, and lots of it at very high complex levels. Well, again, the question arises and it arose in the mind of Eugene Wigner. That’s why he said the unreasonable effectiveness. Why should it be the case that using very complex mathematics, I can understand the physical world and I can engage in great engineering projects that work.
Why should that be the case? And now Wigner was a secular Jew. He was not really religious, but very often in this article, he uses the word miracle and miraculous to describe this correspondence between math and the physical world. So here’s the question. I’ll put it this way. Why is there so much math and matter unless the inventor of matter is a mathematician? Let me try that again. Why is there so much math and matter unless the inventor of matter is a mathematician? What? It’s just by dumb chance that the physical world is marked by incredible mathematically describable complexity. Or listen everybody, is a much more reasonable explanation that there’s so much math and matter because the one who invented matter, the creator of the world, is a mathematician.
Now, let’s go from Eugene Wigner to the Bible. «In the beginning was the word, and all that came to be came to be through that word». That’s an extraordinary thing. Those words probably just run through our minds quickly but think about that. In the beginning was the word, the divine intelligence. Nothing came into being apart from that word. God, in other words, thought the world into being. Why is there this unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences? Because the one who invented the physical world has a mathematical mind. Listen, also from the Bible, «the heavens proclaim the glory of God». That’s from the Psalm.
Well, of course that’s what the magi saw. If you look up into the heavens, you don’t just see dumb chaos or chance. What you see is ordered harmony. And therefore the heavens are declaring in their harmoniousness that there’s a harmonizer who brought them into being. How about from St. Paul, «The invisible things of God are known through the visible things of the world». Quite right. And we see that as the foundation for much of what we call natural theology. Well, can I suggest to you, everybody, the wise men, the magi, these magoi, they were natural theologians. Their science led them not away from faith, and that’s the path taken by far too many people today.
Oh, no. The deeper I go into science, the more I run away from faith. No, on the contrary, if you look deeply into science, it doesn’t lead you away from faith. Think of the magi now. Having surveyed the night sky, they make this long and arduous journey to seek out, even though they might not have fully understood this, to seek out the word made flesh. What they found in their hearts was a passion to find the mathematician who gave rise to the physical world, to find the harmonizer who gave rise to the harmonies of the heavens. And that’s what they found in Jesus. I’ve often thought about this. It is no accident that the physical sciences that we reverence correctly, today; physics, chemistry, biology, etc. It’s no accident that they emerged where and when they did. Which is to say, out of the matrix of the great Christian universities of Europe.
See, there are two things required for a science to get off the ground. First, is what I’ve been talking about, that you believe the world is radically intelligible. But you know what the second one is? That you know the world is not God. See, if you think the world is divine or you worship things in the world, you’re not going to experiment on them. You’re not going to analyze them. You’re going to worship them. But if you know the world isn’t God, but yet it’s imbued with intelligibility, ah, now science can begin with confidence.
See, both those assumptions are corollaries of the doctrine of creation that was taught in the Christian universities. That God the Creator gave rise to the world. So it’s not God, but it’s endowed with this radical intelligibility. Those two things allow the modern sciences to emerge. So maybe, if you’re a young person listening to this and you’re tempted by this religion-science thing, heed these words. Maybe parents, grandparents listening might think of sending this sermon to their young people, tempted to disaffiliate because of this. Think of the Magi. They came to Christ not despite science. They came to Christ precisely through their science. And God bless you.