THE BIBLE & THE BIG BANG - They don't have to jibe.

There is a kind of wavering faith, if not bad faith, that religious people often bring to discussions of science and religion. "The Bible is not a scientific text," we solemnly intone, and then are pathetically grateful when something like the Big Bang theory looks so, well, biblical. The science that indicates the possibility that the earth is uniquely fit, in all the universe, to host complex forms of life is also comforting to some believers.

We are appropriately irritated when prominent physicists reject belief with sophomoric appeals to the problem of evil (the good suffer, therefore there is no God, because if he existed he would fix those Nazis); but New Age writers who bend science to make subatomic physics seem to echo the teaching of the Buddha or Christian mystics do an equally simple-minded job on science, and too many of us love it.

One widespread assumption is that science, since the Enlightenment, has challenged religious belief in an unprecedented way. The picture we are given is this: Until Galileo (or Copernicus, or Darwin), our ancestors believed in a small universe with a large earth at the center and a tiny surrounding nest of spheres where stars and planets revolved, and then came science, challenging the central place of humanity, and between them evolution and physics made it possible to conceive of a universe that could be explained without God.

There are some important half-truths here, but they are half-truths. One of them is the uniqueness of our situation. Some of the ancients, while believing in a geocentric universe, did know that the earth was comparatively tiny; and there have been atheistic approaches to science, and efforts to explain the universe without recourse to divine design, since before the time of Christ. One corner we painted ourselves into was accepting an Aristotelian approach to divinity, with a prime mover. (We avoided the Neo-Platonic divinity, with its Demiurge, as too gnostic, though we did accept a more or less Platonic approach to the soul as something potentially detachable from the inferior flesh.) In both the popular and the philosophical Christian imagination we moved away from the strange God of the Bible toward a more Greek understanding. This movement is somewhat understandable when we are debating the reasonableness of belief, or at least trying to make it look not unreasonable, with people who accept a similar world view. We should not, however, equate this attempt at dialogue with Christian dogma, or the idea of the uncaused cause, or the prime mover, with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.

A static view of religious understanding also must be challenged. Reinterpretation has been part of being a believer in the God of the Bible from the time the Hebrew Bible was first pulled together, and the attempt was made to see what God is trying to tell us. (The first great leap of faith is to think that God is trying to get anything through to us at all.) Given God's promises, for example, the Babylonian captivity was not supposed to happen. The prophets had to move the story forward, taking this apparent impossibility into account, revealing a continuity that was not at all obvious. By the same token, the revelation of Jesus as the only Messiah upset all expectations, and revealed something about God's relationship to us that could not otherwise have been known; it required a radical reinterpretation of what preceded it. That the savior of all, the light of Israel, would be revealed as a man who died a shameful death was not something we would have expected, to say the least. New readings are part of the process.

But to what extent does this apply to our encounter with science? In a recent issue of Commonweal, John F. Haught says, "A theology obsessed with order and design is, I believe, ill-prepared for evolution" ("Evolution and God's Humility," January 28). True enough; and it is important to stress the fact that our understanding of God's power tends to be distorted by such notions as God as designer, playwright, punishing parent, one-who-would-do-what-I-would-do-if-I-were-in-charge- of-this-mess, etc. God's revelation always upsets the ideas we want to have of God. We look for him in mighty displays of power, and he is found in the "still, small voice." The power that created the universe from nothing is revealed most completely on the cross. Our ideas of power, creation, sustaining-all of those things we believe God to do- are not, apparently, God's ideas of the same things.

I would like, however, to challenge the idea that we need a theology that is prepared for evolution, subatomic physics, or cosmology. Look, for example, at the joy some believers take in the Big Bang theory. What if it were to fall apart, and a version of the universe as eternal, with no beginning in time, perhaps forever expanding, then imploding, then expanding again (as Hindu cosmology would have it) were to gain ascendancy? Would the Judeo-Christian idea of creation be challenged in any serious way? Not unless you want some scientific validation for something that was never a scientific statement in the first place. The universe does not need to have a beginning in time for the doctrine of creation to be true. What the teaching says, finally, is that without God there is nothing, that God is responsible for everything that is. How the universe came to be what it is, physically, is not a matter for theology, and we should not look to science for theological consolation. If there seems to be correspondence between the Big Bang theory and the biblical doctrine of creation, it is what Wittgenstein called a "charming" idea, but it isn't very important.

Religious understanding is different in kind from scientific understanding, and we should not be shy about pointing out the inherent limitations of science. It is finally about those things that can be replicated experimentally, weighed, and counted. Apologists for what amounts to the religion of scientism (the late Carl Sagan, for example) like to say that it is the only way we have of really knowing anything. It is true that there is a limited certainty available here, but it does not apply to anything that matters most to us. I cannot be sure that my wife loves me in the same way I can be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow-that is, I can convince myself that she is trying to fool me, that it is all a plot, that her motives are not what they seem. Of course, this would be madness. When theology looks at the world for clues about God's presence, all it can ever find, this side of the end, are clues, hints, things that may be so. We hope they are; we count on it. We put ourselves at the service of a story that begins with creation and ends with resurrection. It can't be proven.

Science is about the ever-more accurate description of a limited (but enormous) range of phenomena. The realm of theology requires belief-and this is why those who claim that it can be taught as well by an unbeliever as by a believer seem to me to be seriously tone-deaf. Belief opens us to something that cannot be proven. It is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen" (Hebrews 11: 1). There is something necessarily incomplete about it, but this is not to say that nothing is sensed, or known in any way. At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein wrote, "It is not how the world is, but that it is, that is mystical." Science is about the "how"; it cannot touch the "that-ness."