Science and Religion Revisited: A Provocative Lesson for Today’s Christians

For decades, now, debates on “Science versus Religion” have remained by and large inconclusive.[1] Could this be due to the debates’ having been systematically framed conceptually by one of the two poles for the sheer sake of proving that our “scientific societies” are so liberal as to allow all religions to thrive?  Had debates not taken for granted their “scientific” framework, they would have readily and openly acknowledged that the science/religion dichotomy camouflages an underlying scientistic attempt to quantify the hiatus between the inanimate and the animate.[2] How could such a “quantification” be achievable?  By reducing the animate to a function of the inanimate.  This may be said to be the key to contemporary materialism, or the belief that life can be retraced—at least “on paper”—to death, as soul to the soulless.[3] But let us take a step back (lest we be accused of slighting a neo-Kantian impulse at work in relevant contemporary debates).

In speaking of “science,” today, what people mean may be summarized in the following terms: systematic appropriation and control of the gap between the inanimate and the animate.  Herein lies the foundation of an innocuous-sounding “measuring of nature,” for such a measuring presupposes that nature is reducible to something measurable; but any such reduction is possible only where nature has been abstracted from life, or the living element of nature; yet again, the abstraction of nature (its reduction to something dead) is possible only where life can be kept, so to speak, at bay, or at a distinct distance from inanimate nature.  Mechanical control of the distance or gap between unmeasurable life and measurable “material” is of the essence for science.  That gap can be measured, or rather “digitized,” in the name of Science, on condition that a great concession be made that not the human being, but the inanimate is the master-key to understanding the animate.  The reduction of the animate to a function of the inanimate makes sense only on the basis of a belief that the animate world (life) is overall indifferent to the human being; that life in general does not point to humanity as its pivot and end, but to lifeless mechanisms given which humanity emerges as a radically contingent phenomenon in the process of being overcome and replaced, in all likelihood, by other radically contingent phenomena.

Insofar as it is man as man who abstracts quality or “value” out of quantity, modern Science cannot but teach, if only tacitly or between the lines, that the discrepancy between the inanimate and the animate has no meaning transcending the measurable or mechanical passage through which the animate emerges out of the inanimate.  The role of mediation between the inanimate and the animate that in classical antiquity had been attributed to man, is now appropriated by a machine.  Accordingly, the passage in question is assumed to be shut to a transcendent meaning, or telos, leaving students of modern Science accepting that meaning is but a (by)product of mechanical forces and that man as man is either a delusional animal, or what amounts to a prophet of Deism’s deux ex machina—an absolutely transcendent divinity intervening upon nature as an alien might upon a machine he fabricated once upon a time.  In this case, man should appeal to his God as guarantor of modern Science, or more concretely of a scientistic, trans or post-humanist way of life.  Whence a certain widespread habit among contemporary “Christians” to rest satisfied with an unthought-through dichotomy, or open (not to say tragic) conflict between 1. modern progressivism incarnated by technological development, and 2. moral conservatism retracing itself to a Deist divine consciousness at work in “the hearts” of men (as a Kantian transcendental), but not in the “objective” natural world.

Little are Christians helped in the face of their dualist predicament by an appeal to divine providence, as long as the divine is assumed to guide bodies (including our own) mechanically and thus independently of our freedom to choose.  As long as Christians do not allow for a divine providence cutting through scientism’s mechanical nature, thereby making a mockery of modern Science’s “natural laws,” Christians will remain subservient to scientism, accepting, if only mindlessly, that God enters into the natural world (the world of physical mutations) only through man’s measuring of nature, which amounts to our reducing the animate and its constitution to the inanimate.  By treating nature as a machine, Christians can attribute to nature a divine meaning, or finality as revealed most remarkably, if not exclusively, by the Bible.  As a result, unless he jumps on the wagon of fundamentalism, today’s Christian can accept without quibbles to work tirelessly as a promoter of technology in the very act of attending Sunday services and praying for God’s universal salvation.  By living thus, the modern Christian reflects the modern character of his God, who reveals himself at once in the hearts of men (as end) and in nature’s mechanical processes (as means).[4]

Modern man invented “moral sentiment” as consummate replacement of classical virtue.  Although the replacement was first conceived or advertised as universal, it would gradually yield to feelings universally relative to atomistic egos, “individuals” products of their “times” or “societies”.  The “moral sentiment” that had been appealed to as providing a refuge from the onslaught of a modern science of quantification, or from its world, gradually exposed itself as a bundle of feelings born of language and remaining trapped within it.  The “transcendence” provided by our feelings about right and wrong, or good and evil—indeed, about the very nature of divinity—remains confined within “the house of language”.  In this respect, we have traded—most likely unwittingly—classical transcendence with a symbolic reification.  For our classics considered transcendence, not within speech, but as speech, whereby the logos is not our refuge from reality (or the “lens” through which we relate to reality), but our way to reality.  It is this way that calls us to admit that Kant and his progeny, including Heidegger, have mislead or helped mislead our world—including that of Christians bowing, if only reluctantly, to the authority of “Science” and its “historical criticism” offshoot—into accepting a false transcendence.

The Christian’s current predicament points directly to the progressive reduction of Religion to fuel for Science, where Religion vouches for the divine origin of Science and its findings—thus, for instance, speaking prophetically of (modern) “mathematics” as “the language of the universe”—even as it tries to convince us that in the absence of a religious voucher, Science risks losing, or is doomed to lose itself in its own findings.

Christians who, wishing to remain Christians, are dissatisfied with the contemporary erosion of Christianity—an erosion stemming from the de facto reduction of Christianity to the status of servile, even flattering handmaiden of modern science—are faced with a way out of their predicament, namely Catholicism, or more properly speaking, medieval Christianity, as a Christianity immune in principle to the temptation of dying out as ancilla technocratiae.  Yet, for today’s Christians to transcend their modern predicament and remain Christian would be for them to revert to medieval Christianity, not as an end in itself, but as a path to return to the truth about Christianity.  For, as early-modernity reminds us, no sooner does medieval Christianity take itself, its present for granted than it fossilizes into a formidable motor of political revolt against Religion.  Christians’ return to medieval Christianity should then be understood as a return to a Christianity facing constantly back to its origins, or the mystery thereof, as the living presence of the divine in man, and through man (not through his “science,” or his “creations”), in nature (understood as the very generation of things).  The Christianity capable of saving our Christians from their current predicament would be a Christianity that, witnessing the mystery of its own origins, does not take for granted its own departure from what preceded those origins—from what lies on the other side of the curtain of its origins—but seeks that “other side” as providential mirror of Christianity’s own raison d’être.

But is modern man, including the modern Christian, still “in search of his Soul” (Jung)?  Is he still yearning for a land beyond the confines of atomistic “spheres”?  Or has he cynically and unconditionally bowed to the modern replacement of classical spheres of intelligibility (consummated in a divine intellect) with mechanically quantifiable heavens (viz., stratosphere, mesosphere, exosphere, etc.) consummated in meaningless darkness?  If we are still in search of our Soul, do we irrevocably conceive our search in Frankensteinian terms, as the prerogative of ingenuity or “Science,” or are we still capable of asking as regards a Soul to be returned to unconditionally, by leaving all aspirations (and thus, too, all expectations) for the future, behind?

Notes

[1] The high-point of pertinent discussions was arguably reached by Leo Strauss.  See especially his “Progress or Return?” in Modern Judaism, 1.1 (May, 1981): 17-45.

[2] On the essence of modern science, see my “Mastery of Nature,” in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 45.2 (2019): 123-48; and 45.3 (2019): 427-54.

[3] More cautious materialists are likely to allow for the practical impossibility of creating life as if ex nihilo, or out of the inanimate (absence of life).  Yet, modernity may be understood as stemming from a Christian-inspired impetus to resurrect the dead, even as this impulse has been confined to the virtual universe of evolutionism’s “theoretical models”.

[4] See Kant’s 1788 Critique of Practical Reason, 5.161: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (reproduced on Kant’s tombstone in Kaliningrad).

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