There are two ways to speak of God: one of them is faith, grounded in the direct, free, unexpected intervention of God himself in the history of men; an intervention—it is called Revelation—that is verifiable experimentally, like any other historical fact. The second way to speak of God consists in verifying that without You, without God, it is not possible for something to exist—the world—whose existence is beyond dispute. It is the path that Scripture suggests when it notes that “the invisible things of God, his eternal power and deity, are known through the works” of Yahweh (Romans 1:21). It is worth stressing that this way of arriving at God is not equivalent to that other one which tried to set out from the disquiet experienced when one lacks God: against arguments of that kind there always appears a Sartre ready to say that men may very well fail to find a meaning to their lives, but that so much the worse for them! (if men are not at ease, let them not invent a god; let them shoot themselves if they wish, as—indeed—some disciples and readers of the aforementioned author have done, persuaded of human uselessness).

The path for speaking of God must be such that it cannot be cut short with an exit of that kind: “Well, so much the worse for men.” One will arrive rigorously at God if one manages to show that God is indispensable (in the sense that, in denying God, one would also have to deny other things—the world—that nevertheless cannot be called into doubt).

One will have to conclude by affirming God when it is verified that without him certain things would be impossible that cannot be impossible, for the simple reason that they are there. In order to speak, then, of God apart from supernatural faith, two principles must be firmly established:

—that the world exists, beyond any kind of doubt; and

—that this real world would be simply unthinkable—contradictory, impossible—without a God at least as real as the world itself.

We shall have to see whether science contradicts these principles; but before going into details it is worth detecting a certain state of opinion: quite a few people have the impression that those who know the world best—that is, scientists—can very well reason about the universe without thinking at all about God. In fact, there is no shortage of researchers who assert that they find no room for God in the nature they study.

It is necessary to underline that phrase: they find no room for God; and it is worth commenting on it. Some people, not very well informed, suspect that something more serious is going on: they fear not only that scientists may dispense with God; they fear that, with their discoveries, they may contradict him. It seems fitting to make clear that this is in no way the problem. As the biologist A. Santos Ruiz recently warned, “it may be stated categorically that no fully confirmed scientific fact has ever had to be rejected for being at odds with revealed doctrine; or, conversely, that none of those facts can call faith into question.” There was certainly a time—during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—when the question was posed in those terms: some atheists, cultivators of the sciences, nourished the hope of dealing—with their knowledge—the “coup de grâce” to the idea of God. The truth is that today no one even moderately rigorous approaches things in that way. The well-known anthropologist, an atheist, Lévi-Strauss recently acknowledged how science cannot serve to justify his atheism. And the biologist Jean Rostand, likewise an atheist, also confessed not long ago to the writer Ch. Chabanis: “I have said no to God…”—but apart from his science; with it he has not managed to prove that God does not exist; still more, “the problem of faith,” he says, “I pose to myself every day; it obsesses me; it is a problem that returns at every moment…” Although many have attempted it with admirable tenacity, it is truly no longer possible to cherish the hope of a “coup de grâce” to the idea of God on the part of science; some even believed they had settled the problem…, only to verify—with the aforementioned biologist—that nothing is settled, that “never has so much been said about God as since he died” (in the words of his gravediggers). Only people who are not too profound, or for whom science is a kind of mysterious well that must surely have proved things unknown to them, can pose the subject in terms of a “God-science contradiction.” Since it is a “phantom” fear, it is preferable to set it aside: there are enough genuine problems to occupy us without also discussing the difficulties that might arise; when they actually do arise, that will be the moment to deal with them. But those supposed contradictions vanish—as we shall see—as soon as one comes to know the proper scope of the positive sciences.

The problem of God, in relation to science, will today in any case be posed in the sense mentioned earlier: that physicists, biologists, and so on find in their investigations no room for God. Although some—perhaps out of superficiality—simply identify that “absence of room” with a demonstration of the nonexistence of God, the truth is that in no way is it the same thing. The mere fact that a biochemist—let us say—does not come upon God in his laboratory, or upon the need to resort to God, means very little; as little as the fact that a Geiger counter—devised to measure atomic radiation—does not register, for example, variations in atmospheric temperature. What would truly be prodigious is that it should detect those variations which are, on the other hand, captured by another apparatus—intended to record temperatures—called a thermometer. But this calls for a more detailed explanation.

The Scope of a Method

It was said earlier that in order to reach God from the world, two foundations must be laid: that the world exists, and that the world is impossible without God. Descartes was one of the precursors who openly called into question the existence of the world. Probably Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Torricelli, Mariotte, or Huygens—more or less of the same period as Descartes—never thought to doubt that things existed. And yet Descartes was doing nothing more than proclaiming, as a theoretical question, something that in a certain way was already contained in the method that, in order to know the world, all those learned men used in practice. Descartes truly took things to extremes by asking himself, in earnest, whether the world existed or not; but with his doubts he was reflecting the attitude that, in another order of things (this is the difference), was already common among the scientists of his time: the experimental method.

Scientists, in fact, do not deny that things are as they are in themselves: they simply tend not to concern themselves with it. To domesticate the world, one need not strictly know what the world is; it is enough to know how it works. The electrician who comes to repair the wiring in my house very probably does not know what electricity is—I fear that, strictly speaking, almost no one knows for certain—but he does, in fact, get the switches and the appliances to work. To formulate the law of falling bodies it is likewise not indispensable to know what gravity consists of, nor what that mutual propensity of bodies is: it is enough to measure the force with which they attract one another, and to gauge to what degree that intensity depends on certain factors.

Indeed, the so-called positive sciences—physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so on—usually find it enough to ascertain how objects work, and to discover to what extent one factor is bound up with others: to keep a bridge from breaking under the effect of heat, it is sufficient to know the exact expansion its materials undergo for each increase in temperature (there is no need to know what heat is, nor to define the concept of extension). It is true that when one discovers—following the same example—the constant relation between the variations in a body’s extension and those of its temperature, scientists are accustomed to say that this body has an expansion coefficient of, let us say, 7.6; but this does not mean, nor does the scientist claim, that this coefficient is something that is in that body in the way that I have, for example, a watch, or in the way that I have a toothache, or that I have brown hair. No; that coefficient means a quotient—exact, if it is well calculated (because it can also be calculated badly)—between two facets, volume and temperature, compared by the scientist. The same can be said of a great many other realities that researchers speak of. The “inert mass” of a body, for example, is also a quotient between two measurable aspects chosen by the scientist: the amount of force that must be imparted to it for it to accelerate to this or that degree. But no scientist will say that this body has a certain mass, in

the same sense in which it is affirmed that it has, for example, a spherical shape. For his experiments, the scientist will lose no sleep over defining what mass in itself is in a body: rather, he will be aware that he, the scientist himself, is the one who has decided to call mass the constant quotient between two measurements of that body.

It is also true that scientists are accustomed to providing imaginative models of those notions with which they work (although lately they do so less, for they have found that imagination often hinders the understanding of a concept, since it represents it as if it were a thing). If they observe, for example, that light produces a certain type of impacts upon objects, or that it propagates in a certain way, they will say that light is a set of corpuscles, or of waves (or even of corpuscles with a wave, like little beating hearts)…, or they will say nothing. But this does not mean that light is a heap of corpuscles, or of waves, or of corpuscles with a wave; it means only that light acts as if it were one of those things. When Max Planck depicts the electrons of the atom revolving at various levels, he does not mean to say that the atom is like that; he merely provides a model suited to the fact that energy proceeds in jumps: as if there were orbits of different heights. That “model” will be changed as new facts are verified. Sometimes one even arrives at the same practical results starting from different “models.” Two psychiatrists, with two different “images” of the human psyche, can bring a patient back to health (using, of course, different therapies, suited to the “image” each physician holds): those models, to be sure, are not the human mind.

There would undoubtedly be much to qualify about the scope of the examples given. But, simplifying matters, one understands what was meant in affirming that scientists, in practice, do not concern themselves with what things are; frequently they cannot even observe them directly, but rather interpret symbols supplied by the instruments of control and measurement they use (we are accustomed to seeing medical dramas on television; and we all know that when, in the operating room, the luminous dot—beep, beep, beep…—stops producing that oscillating line projected onto the cardioscope screen, and turns into a continuous straight line, the patient’s heart has stopped beating;

It might seem that the topic of atheism lies far from all this. But it is not so. These considerations—quite trivial ones, by the way—about the experimental method help us understand why the scientific analysis of the world may perhaps find no room for God. To reach God independently of faith, one must be sure that there are things, and that things are unthinkable without God. One notices that, although they do not deny the existence of the objects studied, physicists, for example, deal with a set of notions that certainly do not exist in the same sense in which we say that my neighbor’s cat exists, or my neighbor himself in person.

So much for the first of the requirements for affirming the existence of God. But, moreover, this very peculiarity of the scientific method explains why researchers have no need to resort to God when they analyze the world in their own way (a very profitable way, to be sure). Still more, it must be said that it is impossible to discover God in that analysis of things. What happens is that such a way of examining things is not the only possible one. It is a good way, and an extremely effective one, for example, for making use of the world (harnessing its forces in order to improve heating, to increase the speed of communications, or to cure hepatitis). But it is by no means the exclusive way of studying nature. Positive scientific analysis in no way constitutes an exhaustive, total analysis of things, the only one possible. And here lies the error of those who think they can be atheists because in positive science there is no room for God. That is no longer science: that is “scientism,” a new form of fetishistic idolatry (“new,” from the eighteenth century).

As If God Did Not Exist

In general terms it may be said that, on principle, the positive sciences confine themselves to those facts that can be verified experimentally (in nature or in the laboratory). By definition they bound their domain to the terrain of the experimentable. This does not mean that such sciences limit themselves to describing phenomena; they also investigate the “whys” of those facts. But they seek only causes that are as experimental as the very facts whose origin they inquire into. Faced, for example, with the expansion of a metal bar, the scientist will seek, among the factors that can be experienced in the vicinity of that body, to which one such a phenomenon must be attributed: to the passage of an electric current, to exposure to the open air, to the incidence of light, to the rise in temperature… As long as he does not succeed in isolating with certainty one, or several, of those conditions, perfectly verifiable (as verifiable as the expansion itself), on which that fact—the expansion—depends, the scientist cannot regard the problem as solved. It is not legitimate for him to say: “that increase in size is due to a factor—dilatofaction—that cannot be verified.” If he says that, he is simply acknowledging his failure as a researcher: for verifiable facts he must seek, as a cause, other equally experimentable facts. That is what, among other things, will later allow him to reproduce the phenomenon—the expansion, in this case—by the simple procedure of intentionally provoking the fact that triggered the process (in the example before us, it will be enough to raise the temperature).

Now then: it must be firmly established that this way of analyzing things can in no way lead to God. If it is a method that, by definition, accepts only experimentable causes—ones that can even be provoked at will—and disregards any other possible cause, it is clear that, by their very nature, these sciences are “blind” to God; which does not mean that God does not exist. These sciences serve neither to establish nor to disallow that second observation—necessary when it comes to demonstrating that God exists—according to which the world is unthinkable without God. They are sciences that can, and must, think the world as if there were no God. But this means nothing. These forms of knowledge grasp only causes that are visible facts, to the naked eye or by means of instruments; but God is not visible. Therefore such sciences are definitively incompetent to say anything about God: neither for nor against. To expect a biologist, a physicist, or a paleontologist to discover God in their laboratory experiments would be as foolish as trying to detect the passage of an electric current using a manometer of the kind used to measure the

pressure of a gas (for example, of the air contained in the tires of an automobile). With his manometer, the attendant at a gas station cannot affirm, or deny, that a current is passing through a cable; if, on applying his manometer to a socket, he were to notice an oscillation of the needle, one could be sure—beyond any kind of doubt—that what causes that oscillation is not electricity. In the same way, with a scalpel or a microscope one cannot see the soul. If some physician were to say in a mocking tone that he had not found the soul, his words would enclose only foolishness; and he would have to be warned that if one fine day he were to discover something—there on the stage of his microscope—and did not know what it was, he could at least be sure of one thing in advance: he will have come upon anything at all except the soul. It would likewise be well to warn him that there are other ways of looking at the world, apart from that one which consists in observing it through a microscope; or through X-rays; or through carbon 14; or through the mathematical method. (One can come to prove, for example, that a mother loves her child, or that she loathes him: but this, of course, cannot be proved by means of algebraic equations, nor through a cathode-ray oscillograph, or a barometer. Mathematics and the aforementioned instruments are extremely useful, but they do not serve to measure love; much less, then, to say that this thing we call love does not exist, nor to say that it exists.)

That is what happens with the positive sciences with respect to God: by their very nature they are inadequate to speak of him. Consequently, it would not be legitimate for a researcher, in the course of his scientific analysis, to say that he had found God as the cause of the phenomenon he is studying; that would be what is usually called a deus ex machina, which simply means a subterfuge, an alibi, to cover up the failure or laziness of a poor physicist, or of a poor biologist, who has not hit upon the “experimentable” cause he was seeking, and tries to justify himself. Of course, one would likewise be resorting to a deus ex machina, identically anti-scientific, if one attributed those phenomena—whose cause he seeks and does not find—to any equally unexperienced factor, such as chance or randomness. Positive science can deal only with verifiable facts: if it has not yet discovered those facts, it must go on searching. But it will not do to declare the question settled by the simple expedient of appealing to God, or to any other “invisible” principle, for example the spiritual soul; still less to “chance,” which, in the final analysis, means nothing more than ignorance of the cause being sought.

In normal circumstances, things must happen for science as if there were no God, as if no causes intervened other than controllable ones. (God can, it is true, intervene directly, thereby altering the natural operation of the causes that produce a fact; this is what is called a “miracle.” For example, that a solid body, of greater total density than water, should float on the surface of a river. In this exceptional case, what could a scientist say who observed the phenomenon? If the causes of that fact are perfectly known—the density of the body and of the liquid in which it floats; if they are controlled beyond any kind of doubt, the scientist who observes the anomaly will only point out that such a phenomenon is inexplicable by natural causes; causes that, in matters of flotation or sinking, are perfectly well known.)

But when one speaks of “God-and-the-sciences,” one is not speaking of exceptional, miraculous cases; these would be situated on the supernatural path, that of faith, for reaching God; not on the path that seeks God from the ordinary reality and functioning of the world. Here we are dealing with nature in its normal processes, just as a scientist investigates them every day. It is in this dimension that it is said that for the “positive researcher” events happen, by definition, as if God did not exist. And that is how he must try to explain them.

But this in no way means that God does not exist: the sciences are incompetent to affirm and also to deny his existence. If, by their very nature, they are incapable of referring to God, neither can the scientist, in the name of science, say that there is no God. It would be as if, thrilled by his manometer, the gas-station attendant were to assert that electricity does not exist. If he says so, he certainly cannot invoke in support of his thesis the authority of the manometer, since this is a device manufactured only to measure gas pressures, not to determine what things there are, or are not, in the world. Besides manometers there exist other apparatuses (galvanometers, ammeters, voltmeters, etc.) that do register electricity; among them are the fingers which, beyond a certain intensity, also experience it. In fact, gas-station attendants, besides manometers, have fingers, and scientists, besides being researchers, are also men. Whoever applies the manometer to a place through which an electric current passes, even though the needle of the apparatus does not move, will very probably feel the shock, and begin to suspect that—apart from those of compressed gas—there exist other forces that his manometer does not detect. It is the same as has usually happened to not a few scientists. The experimental method serves to know experimentable realities; but it does not serve to say that only the experimental method exists. Just as there can be more apparatuses besides manometers, there may very well be other ways of studying the world, besides positive experimentation. Kepler, Newton, Linnaeus, Volta, Faye, Pasteur, Fabre, Lecomte du Noüy, Heisenberg, Von Braun, Jordan…, in cultivating their sciences, have also noticed that, apart from the physical, biological, or chemical questions they were investigating, there arose—regarding the same objects—questions that were neither physical, biological, nor chemical; a series of quite real questions, as real as an electric shock; but their positive sciences could not answer those questions. Some of them, besides investigating in their specialties, also endeavored to travel this other path that opened to them on the occasion of experimentation; and many of them reached God (certainly not by the experimental route, but by other equally valid ways). It is what Faraday proclaimed: “The notion of God and reverence for him reach my spirit by paths as sure as those that lead us to truths of the physical order.”

Even though certain learned men may not have raised those real questions of a “supra-physical” type, it would not be legitimate to reject such questions on principle, and their possible answers, in the name of a “physics” that is incompetent to say anything in domains foreign to it. Let us formulate two hypotheses, contradictory to each other: “In the world there is something more than chemical reactions,” “in the world there are only chemical reactions.” There are two assertions, of which one is necessarily true and the other false. Which one? That will have to be seen. But, in any case, chemistry does not serve to elucidate it. Faced with that alternative, one may keep either the first or the second assertion: now then, one will not do so by chemical arguments, since these are not chemical assertions.

Science as a Fetish

We have seen that positive science is not capable of dismantling those two principles that made it possible to demonstrate the existence of God. A scientist may be an atheist, but apart from his science; within his science he finds no room for God, but that is a matter of logic. It is worth pointing out, however, that, above all in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were some researchers who, invoking the “absence” of God in their microscopes, tried to “ground” atheism. Now then, in order thus to establish the denial of God, they had, for their part, to formulate two other principles that are in no way “positive-scientific”: to take for granted that there is nothing that is not experimentable; and to affirm that experimental science has an absolute value. This amounts to making, for extra-scientific motives, a profession of scientistic faith (“profession of faith,” since science itself has no authority to assert it: just as the manometer has no authority to testify that there is nothing but gas pressures).

In this way, the mechanism of all idolatries was repeated: to lack God, and to replace him with a fetish (in this case, the fruit of human ingenuity), to which the value of an “absolute” was attributed. The “positivist religion” of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is both moving and comical: with its daily rites, its calendar and its prayers, all of it officiated by the father of positivism who—in the name of science—thought he had pulverized Religion. In any case, it is not common today for a scientist to fall into that scientistic fetishism: they tend to be more aware of the limitations of their knowledge, and usually understand that positive research confers no authority to speak, affirmatively or negatively, of God (nor of other subjects equally foreign to experimentation: art, love, etc.). If this type of idolatry has been mentioned here, it is because, nonetheless, some scientist sporadically appears who revives postures typical of the last century.

An example of these could be the French biologist J. Monod who—abandoning the field of his competence, that is, biology—is accustomed to formulating professions of atheistic faith, of the type: “Life arises by chance.” The most curious thing is that he usually claims, for assertions of that kind, the same credit that his teachings deserve.

Author: José Miguel Pero Sanz

Source: Encuentra.com