Science begins and ends with theology

In Ancient Greece, science was intimately connected with philosophy. Aristotle wrote about physics and metaphysics. They informed one another. Until the nineteenth century, science was known as natural philosophy. Peter Harrison has argued that theological ideas were central to the emergence of modern science. In that sense, science began with theology. However, due to the influence of Modernity, including naturalism, theology came to be considered irrelevant to science. But, scientific knowledge raises philosophical questions. Why does science work? What is the relationship between theory and reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the relationship between mind and brain? Do we have free will? Can science provide meaning, purpose, and values? Hence, science begins and ends with philosophy.

Sean Carroll claims that science leads to naturalism, which has the ultimate lesson:  “Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves” (p. 9, The Big Picture). This creates a need for “existential therapy” and leads to “the hardest problem of all”, which is “how to construct meaning and values in a cosmos without transcendent purpose” (p. 5). Hence, he ends up back at theology, in the sense of finding ways to avoid it.

Another atheist physicist who could not escape theological questions was Fred Hoyle. He resisted the idea of the Big Bang theory because he could not accept the idea of “creation” and of “causes unknown to science.” Yet, in the end he had to accept where science led: there was a beginning to the universe. Furthermore, his own work on the synthesis of carbon in stars led to the concept of fine-tuning. The questions it raises struggle to avoid being theological in nature.

I claim these ultimate philosophical questions are also theological, as Christian theology can address them. It does not provide definitive answers, but neither does philosophy.  

The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel caused a controversy in 2012 with his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Nagel published a helpful short summary of the book in The New York Times. He noted how the scientific revolution “depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.” Consequently, physics is not a “theory of everything” as it cannot describe the mental dimension to reality. Nagel argued that there is a need to move beyond the current materialist presuppositions of science.

“This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.

There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.

All four of these positions have their adherents.  I believe the wide popularity among philosophers and scientists of (a), the outlook of psychophysical reductionism, is due not only to the great prestige of the physical sciences but to the feeling that this is the best defense against the dreaded (d), the theistic interventionist outlook. But someone who finds (a) and (b) self-evidently false and (c) completely implausible need not accept (d), because a scientific understanding of nature need not be limited to a physical theory of the objective spatio-temporal order. It makes sense to seek an expanded form of understanding that includes the mental but that is still scientific — i.e. still a theory of the immanent order of nature.

That seems to me the most likely solution. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy. I would add that even some theists might find this acceptable; since they could maintain that God is ultimately responsible for such an expanded natural order, as they believe he is for the laws of physics.”

My goal in raising the views of Nagel here is modest. It is not to claim that of his four options (d) is the correct option, i.e., that the only possible explanation for the existence of mind is divine intervention. That is a God of the Gaps perspective. Rather, my point is that science leads to theological questions and that theological answers to the philosophical questions should be seriously considered. Again, there are competing traditions at play and ultimately, which we choose to give authority to is a matter of trust (faith).