Science vs. religion (II): some possible answers.

Chet Raymo demands a reply. I have sympathy for his predicament and have argued toward conclusions similar to his own more than once, but his treatment of the disputed questions runs the risk of unwittingly perpetuating error.

First, Raymo laments the general conservatism of the Roman style and the inability of the Roman church to develop its teaching in accord with modern science. The problem of the development of doctrine and the aggiornamento of the church is an abiding one, but the issues are more subtle than Raymo's account suggests. Secondly, as a particular case, he rejects the dualism of body and soul that he has experienced as the teaching of the church. This is a pseudo-problem. Such a dualism is not only not taught by the church, but is frequently not tolerated by the church. In the light of his understanding of modern science, Raymo then offers his own rather dualist description of the essence of human being: "thinking meat." I shall respond to each of these three moves in turn. I join Raymo in taking these issues seriously. His experience is not isolated, I am sure, and what follows is written in an attempt to heal wounds and offer hope.

First, the development of doctrine. The history of the church reveals a continual refining, restating, and even innovation of doctrine. This is not to say that the "truth" changes, but to acknowledge that the absolute truth resides with God and that the progressive articulation of the contents of the faith is part of the life of the pilgrim people of God as it journeys through history and different cultures, languages, and worldviews. If the framing of the propositions that express the contents of the Christian faith were obvious and fixed and unchanging, there would be no place in the church for a teaching office, a magisterium. There would be no need for councils and synods and encyclicals. Even Vatican I allowed for "growth and abundant progress in understanding, knowledge, and wisdom." It is a curious paradox that conservatives tend to support the magisterium and liberals to attack it. The very existence of a teaching office is irrefutable evidence for the possibility of change in the teaching of the church, something not dear to the conservative outlook. Where growth ceases to be evident, there the church struggles: it runs the risk of being like that parable of another Temple, the withered fig-tree.

As the early Jewish-Christian community spread out into the Gentile world, it soon adopted aspects of Greek philosophy as well as models of Roman law and Roman priesthood. And, quite properly, it rejected other aspects of its host cultures--idolatry and temple prostitution for example--as foreign to the faith. The church's appropriation of elements of Greek philosophy in its early councils is an example of vitality and change, as was its embrace of the medieval synthesis after the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle. Its appropriation of contemporary worldviews in our own time, slow as this process may be, is an example of further change. Thus the encyclical Redemptor hominis (1979) offers an anthropology without reference to body and soul, but with an emphasis on the indivisible wholeness of the human person. This should not surprise us, as its author, John Paul II, had studied and taught personalism. Again, in 1988 John Paul urged theologians to embrace the findings of science in the search for new expressions of theological doctrine:

The matter is urgent. Contemporary developments in science challenge theology far more deeply than did the introduction of Aristotle into Western Europe in the thirteenth century. Yet these developments also offer to theology a potentially important resource. Just as Aristotelian philosophy, through the ministry of such great scholars as Saint Thomas Aquinas, ultimately came to shape some of the most profound expressions of theological doctrine, so can we not hope that the sciences of today, along with all forms of human knowing, may invigorate and inform those parts of the theological enterprise that bear on the relation of nature, humanity and God?

The other side of the story, the one Raymo tends to portray, is of course also partly true. The authorities of the church tend to be wary of the corrosive influence of secular learning. During the Modernist crisis at the beginning of this century, for example, much modern scholarship was firmly condemned and all speculative theology was put on hold, only to emerge renewed at Vatican II. Raymo cites the case of Galileo as a classic instance of the church's inability to learn. My own favorite example of ecclesiastical conservatism, coming from Australia as I do, occurred in the year 748, when Pope Zacharius condemned the idea of the Antipodes (the notion of the earth having opposite sides) and their human occupation as a perverse and iniquitous doctrine.

The conservatism of large institutions is not a peculiarly Roman disease: it is the nature of the animal. John Dillenberger, in his study of Protestant Thought and Natural Science, describes an even greater resistance to science than that showed by Rome at the time of the rise of classical science. And even in the culture of science there is a natural conservatism. New ideas are always initially resisted. When Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr received their Nobel prizes for physics in the early 1920s, the awards were made not for their revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, published many years earlier, but for their more orthodox and acceptable contributions to science. And when Heisenberg produced the socalled uncertainty principle in 1927, Einstein became the leader of the conservative resistance, finding it unthinkable that Newton's classical causal view of reality could be wrong.

These horror stories may dismay us, but they must be put in context. Henry McAdoo's The Spirit of Anglicanism shows that, in seventeenth-century England, the uncritical embrace of science by theology resulted in the gradual reduction of Christian faith to deism. Similarly, the attractions of Enlightenment thought in the nineteenth century produced a liberal Protestantism which diluted Christian faith to humanism. Even the recent theory of cold fusion had to be questioned. Seduction by new ideas is as adolescent as resolute resistance to them is morbid.

In human institutions a variety of factors are at work. The condemnation of Galileo offers an interesting case in point. This was not just a piece of papal conservatism: it had much to do with local vanities and rivalries. Further, Galileo's scientific evidence was insufficient for his thesis: his telescope may have shown that the other planets revolved around the sun, but it offered no direct evidence about the earth's motion. Oddly, Cardinal Bellarmine grasped the hypothetical nature of Galileo's work more clearly than did Galileo; and, on the other hand, Galileo's understanding of the reading of Genesis was more perceptive than Bellarmine's. Or, to take another example, the iron grip of papal authority at Vatican I and in the years that followed has been perceived to have had as much to do with political threats to the papacy--after the loss of the papal states and the need to claim some kind of moral power against the progress of humanism--as it had to do with progress in theology.

This is not to say that the Holy Spirit does not play a part in the life of the church, but to recognize that the Spirit moves in history and that the discernment of spirits remains crucial to the unlayering of truth. Having a headache is not an excuse for killing someone. Nor is the church without fault in its own history. The issues, however, remain subtle. It is possible for an institution to be too conservative. It is equally possible, though less likely, that institutions can adopt new ideas too rapidly and uncritically. We may despair at the slowness of change at the center of the church, but we can also smile in the knowledge that, first, the development of the articulation of doctrine is part of the church's self-understanding and, secondly, whatever reluctance to change the present pope may show in some areas of church discipline and teaching, he is expressly affirmative about new notions of what it means to be human and the contributions to be made to theology by the modern scientific worldview.

Raymo's second objection concerns the supposed dualism of body and soul. Yet despite Raymo's experience and the church's Platonic tendencies, the church has never taught a dualism of body and soul and indeed has on occasions rejected such teachings. It is true that in Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy the soul is seen as able to have a separate and prior existence, and to be held captive by the body. But some Christian versions of this anthropology held by Gnostics and Manicheans were roundly condemned, for example at Constantinople (543) and Braga (561). The early creeds developed the biblical teaching on the resurrection of the dead and changed it into resurrection of the body, deliberately to counter gnostic tendencies.

The Greek concepts of body and soul have no precise counterparts in the Bible. The Old Testament term nefesh is very inaccurately translated as soul: it has a fluid meaning, referring to the essence of one's life. "Person" or "self" may be the basic meanings of the word. Paul in the New Testament uses Greek terms like sarx (flesh), soma (body), psyche (living being), nous (mind), and pneuma (spirit). In using these terms Paul may be speaking about different aspects of our experience of ourselves, but he nowhere suggests that soul and body are separate things that go together to make up a human being.

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught that "man consists of two essential parts--a material body and a spiritual soul," the soul being the form of the body. At the General Council of Vienne (1311-12) the heresy that the soul is not the form of the body was again condemned. At Vatican I it was asserted that "Though made up of body and soul, man is one." In this anthropology the soul is immortal, but this does not mean a continuance in time rather than something supratemporal. Soul and body are not seen as two separate objects: where there is stuff there is shape; where there is matter there is form; where there is body (not "corpse"), there is soul.

The matter in my body changes as I age, especially if I have organ transplant operations, but I remain the same person with the same history. This matches the Hebrew sense of body, which has more to do with my communication with others in space and time than with a matter/spirit distinction. But it remains true that the atoms and molecules in my body are continually shuffled around so that in a space of seven years virtually all of them have come and gone and been replaced by others. What is it that gives unity to my being? Some philosophers answered, "soul." Aquinas, the theologian singularly endorsed by the church, did not mean by "soul" a separate substance, a ghost in the machine. He used the terms "soul" and "body" to describe different aspects of what it meant to be human. Just as Raymo's "thinking meat" and "animated slime" combine two descriptive terms to describe human being, so also do the notions of "body" and "soul."

True, there are tendencies to dualism in John's Gospel, in Saint Augustine, and several other places. It is also true that many of us, like Raymo, may have learnt a kind of dualism in school. The great influences on the dualism of the modern age were not the medieval philosophers, however, but paradoxically the giants of classical science: Descartes explicitly so, and Newton indirectly so. The more the material world looked like a machine, the more the soul was seen as separable and God as external. The scientism of the modern era is much more responsible for our divided view of reality than is medieval philosophy. Modern science is a wonderful art, but it is not beyond reproach. Evelyn Fox Keller's Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, for example, offers a salutary account of the masculine perversion of science in its self-proclaimed efforts to penetrate the secrets of nature, that is, to treat nature purely as an object to be dominated.

Finally, Raymo pleads that we face the fact that we are "thinking meat," "animated slime." In so doing he concedes different aspects of human being: one aspect--meat/slime--has to do with mass and space and time; but the qualifiers--thinking/animated--add a less tangible dimension. Both the old medieval worldview and modern physics offer us a way of understanding these conflicting aspects not as a dualism but as a complementarity. In the medieval synthesis the material and the spiritual were not seen as separate layers, the one here and the other somewhere out there. Where there is the material, there also you have the spiritual. Karl Rahner, in his essay on "The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian Understanding of Faith" (Theological Investigations 6), describes "matter as the complement to the creaturely spirit." Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, founders of quantum physicists, both talked of the complementarity of matter and spirit.

Quantum theory has delivered us from the causal mechanical worldview derived from classical Newtonian physics. Deep down there is a level of reality that is "nonlocal," that binds apparently separate things together as an entangled whole, a realm which can be thought of as "metaphysical" in the same way that the medievals thought of "being," or that primitive peoples imagined "spirit." Thus physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term "black holes," speaks about the "great smoky dragon" of quantum mechanical reality. Bernard d'Espagnat, director of the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique et Particules Elementaires at the University of Paris, explores the disclosure of a level of Being and veiled reality and God. Abner Shimony, professor of philosophy and physics at Boston University, speaks of the discovery of an "objective indefiniteness." "Objective indefiniteness" describes a presence that is real and yet not completely traceable; a presence that is part of our experience, and yet eludes captivity; a term that matches our traditional understanding of spirit. Such is the material world as described by quantum physics: it is full of windows and openings onto a deeper order. It is not a closed machine. It does not lead to dualism.

Though I lament with Raymo that most theology operates in a culture in which science is either resisted or unknown, theologians have not been entirely unaware of these developments. In the journals with which I am most familiar, Theological Studies and Pacifica, a dozen or so articles have been published in the last few years on theology and physics. Centers for the study of religion and science are multiplying, though they may struggle for support. Changes in worldview, as a result of the discoveries of recent science, do open the way for a new philosophy of knowing and being and a new theological synthesis. One day this synthesis will become outmoded, and that is nothing to be ashamed of. Nor should we be embarrassed by the medieval synthesis: there is much in it that remains helpful, but it is time to move on.