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Faith And Imagination In Science And Religion
By Michael Barnes

"Not only is it possible to say that science is at least implicitly religious. It is also possible to argue that the overall method of science is a method that religion ought to accept consciously as its own in order to arrive at a better self understanding. "

SCIENCE and religion are often separated from one another in order to safeguard the autonomy of each. Yet they must learn from each other, both because science is implicitly religious, and also because religion, especially theology, can benefit by learning to become as imaginative and honest as science in the pursuit of understanding.

Science is a religious enterprise. By that I mean just the opposite of what science was once accused of and often guilty of being, a highly dogmatic scientism. This was the belief that science could eventually subdue mystery, answer even the ultimate questions of life, and somehow provide final salvation by its perfect method of achieving truth. The human project we call science, however, has turned out to be most scientific when it is just the opposite of this. It is, nonetheless, even more clearly today, a project that of its nature has a religious dimension to it.

I

Science is rooted implicitly in a fundamental faith, a faith in truth and value. By various steps it moves with a faithful confidence towards ever more understanding. Science observes reality as best it can, and then by leaps of imagination it creates images, symbols, theories, to express those observations. This is followed by acts of purgation, the ascetical movement of self - denial wherein the scientific mind acknowledges that the fullness of all truth is elusive mystery, which forever exceeds the limits of every symbol or image or theory.

Yet this awareness of the inadequacy of all images does not produce despair or frustration. The scientists remain confident in the validity of their search for understanding. That is a sign of the underlying faith, the fundamental trust in the intelligibility of reality and the fundamental

Michael Barnes is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, the University of Dayton, Ohio.

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commitment to growth in knowledge. With this faith as motivation, science continues creating new images but also acknowledging the limitations of every image. And so science ascends ceaselessly toward truth. In doing this, science is but one form of the overall human ascent toward ultimate truth and value, the mystery symbolized in religious language as "God."¹

There is a popular way of defining science that has obscured both the religious and the imaginative aspects of science. In 1883 Ernst Mach published his influential Die Mechanik in which he confirmed what many people thought then and which many still think today, that science is a passionless observation of brute facts, a detached observation of the regularities in nature. Scientists, Mach declared, should accept as true only what hard empirical data confirms and should therefore remain detached toward all theories. Science should be coldly objective rationality, devoid of feeling or bias.

Even as this notion of science had been growing, notions of what religion is were developing in the opposite direction. Kant had removed much of religion from objective and scientific argumentation by treating religion as a matter of moral vision made complete. The influential Schleiermacher went further. Christian faith, he declared, is based neither on objective observations about the world nor even on rational arguments about what human morality required. True religiousness is a matter of inner experience and vision, not outward facts or rationalistic argumentation.

This division between science as cold objectivity and religion as inner sensibility continued to be reinforced. Bertrand Russell proclaimed that scientific statements are based on external evidence; religion consists of statements about inner emotions and moral feelings. Russell's one - time protégé Wittgenstein eventually decided that science and religion are two separate and distinct kinds of language games, each with its own inner logic, different, and disconnected from one another.

There continue to be ways, however, in which scientific attitudes override this separation and have an impact on religion. Biblical scholars demythologize because they want to be scientifically objective in their exegesis. Stories of God's miraculous intervention in modern life are now considered highly dubious by many because such interventions are not scientifically plausible. In an attempt to withstand these incursions by science, many religious people often work all the harder to emphasize the idea that inner religious experience is the true and unique foundation of religions, not external objective evidence.

In the face of this division between religion and science, there have been some attempts at reconciliation. Some philosophers do this by

¹ The implicit religiousness of the search for understanding has been explored by Michael Novak in his Belief and Unbelief (Macmillan, 1965), especially pp. 145 - 149. David Tracy has elaborated on the religiousness of the scientific enterprise in "The Religious Dimension of Science," in Andrew Greeley and Gregory Baum. eds., The Persistence of Religion (Herder and Herder, 1973), pp. 128 - 135. Both Novak and Tracy reflect the influence of Bernard Lonergan on this.

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emphasizing the aspect of subjectivity that exists in science ² The scientist is a person guided by desires and enlightened by imagination. The work of science is the work of a community of people who, like all people, are taught to interpret reality in conformity with the views of the community to which they belong, sometimes regardless of objective evidence to the contrary. ³

There are even stronger claims that can be made. Not only is it possible to say that science is at least implicitly religious. It is also possible to argue that the overall method of science is a method that religion ought to accept consciously as its own in order to arrive at a better self - understanding. To support that idea we will have to begin with a more detailed description of just what it is that science actually does.

II

Science is, implicitly at least, an exercise of a primal faith in the knowing self and in reality as intelligible. It is also, therefore, the equivalent of a belief in God. ⁴ That rather bold assertion can be tested by considering the meaning of the word "God."

In Western religion, "God" is the name for the infinite fullness of truth, value, and personness. If this infinite fullness exists, then every bit of intelligibility, every moment of value, every person and every act of personness, reflects the deepest and fullest reality, which is God. If God does not exist, then every little supposed truth is part of ultimate unintelligibility. Then every supposed value is part of an ultimate meaninglessness. Then every person is part of a dead and aimless universe. There is a basic option here: Is reality and our life in that reality ultimately meaningful or ultimately absurd? The human project known as science is a project that presupposes, at least implicitly, that striving unrestrictedly after more and more of truth does make sense. Science is an activity that trusts reality to be intelligible, and unrestrictedly so. Science also trusts that being a knower who seeks after that intelligibility is truly valid and worthwhile.

There are, of course, scientists who are atheists or agnostics. They deny that such intelligibility as does exist is grounded in an ultimate intelligibility. They deny that the person as knower who seeks intelligibility is engaged in a project whose validity can be shown to be truly ultimate. But even while they doubt or deny any ultimate fullness of truth and value and personness, they seem to be working out of a different inner sensibility.

David Tracy has insisted that the scientific enterprise is consistent

² Michael Polanyi's position is one of the best known. as in his Personal Knowledge (University of Chicago, 1958). See also Ian Barbour, Science and Religion (Harper and Row, 1968), particularly the articles by Coulson, Evans, and Schilling for similar arguments.
³ This is a major thesis in the perspective of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1970).
⁴ For a fuller development, see Novak. op. cit.

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logically only if it is based on faith in the ultimate truth, value, and personness we call God. After all, science refuses to set any limit to its search for intelligibility. It acts as though intelligibility were inexhaustible and as though the ability of human consciousness to uncover intelligibility were endlessly open. It is illogical to act this way unless intelligibility and consciousness are somehow rooted in an infinite fullness of some sort such as many call God. This may be the actual inner logic of doing science. But I also suspect that the scientist is one who lives by faith in the ultimacy of truth, value, and personness not - just as a matter of logic but as a matter of a general image of things.

Our most basic images of reality often go unnoticed. Because they are so basic we take them for granted. The enthusiastic scientist, the person most in love with the work of science, appears to have a very positive general image of reality. The enthused scientist leaps at the world as a continuing source of truth. The scientist lives out the life of inquiry with a sustaining confidence that to use one's talents and energy in the quest for understanding is so obviously valid and worthwhile as not to be doubted. This is the underlying faith that grounds science. This is the image of self - in - reality in which scientists trust and to which they make a happy commitment. It is a deep and unrestricted faith in truth, value, and personness. It is a sense that human life and all reality together exist not within ultimate emptiness but as grounded in an infinite fullness. The scientist will often not consciously think of science as a deep commitment to the unrestricted pursuit of intelligibility - until that commitment is thwarted by outside interference. When government or church or society opposes the free search for truth, then scientists are apt to become more conscious of just how fundamentally valid and valuable they believe that search to be.

This basic faith in the validity and value of the search for truth is what I want to call primal faith. It is faith in the intelligibility of reality, in the person as knower, and in the ultimate worthwhileness of being a knower in an intelligible world. Out of this faith, this general image of reality, come particular images of reality. In producing those images' science is adventuresome in thought, creative, and passionate. This can be seen easily in the history of science.⁵

In Galileo's time most people lived with an image of the physical universe as an intrinsically very unenergetic kind of reality. Everything physical was resistent to motion. Only continuing effort could sustain any movements. If the stars and planets moved, it was only because God unrelentingly pushed them, or at least assigned angels to do so. And so when Galileo's contemporaries watched a pendulum slowly decrease its arc and come to rest, they saw there a confirmation of their image of all things as seeking rest. But Galileo had the creative imagination to see

⁵ For one description see Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (Harper and Row. 1965), pp. 1 - 24.

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things differently. Watching the same pendulum, Galileo marveled at how very slowly it lost momentum. He was struck by the fact that, having reached the bottom of its arc, it swung on upward again, not seeking rest but tending instead to continue its motion. With this new way of perceiving motion, Galileo set the stage for Newton's laws of thermodynamics and much of classical physics.

Newton had the bold imagination to watch an apple which did fall to the ground, and the moon which did not fall, and see nonetheless that the one force which we call gravity operated both of them. Darwin collected data for twenty - five years. He was not alone in this. His genius lay in being imaginative enough to use Adam Smith's theory of capitalism as applied by Thomas Malthus to a study of population growth, as the key for interpreting the development of all life on the planet.

The history of science is not only a story of individuals who created new images as ways of interpreting things. It is also the story of people committing themselves passionately to their images, sometimes cherishing them beyond what the evidence supported. Darwin's theory made sense out of things. Yet much stood opposed to it. There was no adequate genetic theory to support it. Lord Kelvin offered good scientific reasons for supposing the earth was too young for a process as long as Darwin's theory required. Yet it made so much sense in other ways. Out of a primal faith in the intelligibility of things and in the rightness of devoting oneself to discovering that intelligibility, many began to preach this new evolutionary image as the way of nature. Creative and dedicated imagination in the service of a basic faith produces those models of reality we know as the theories of science.

We can appreciate this more if we realize how very ordinary science is as a method of knowing. By and large, science is not really a special mode of human knowledge, distinct or separate from our daily and prosaic human understanding. All of our human knowledge, including that which we call science, is the result of the use of some basic human powers. Our senses are affected by various pressures, temperatures, wavelengths of light. From infancy we learn to organize these impressions into patterns of sight, sound, touch, and so forth. In doing this we are guided by some genetic predispositions. We are influenced by the sequence of experiences we undergo. One thing reminds us of a second and gives us some help thereby in interpreting what both of them are. And we are strongly guided by our culture. Generations before us developed certain categories for interpreting our sensory experiences. Each category we employ is itself actually an interpretive generalization about some experiences, a generalization codified in an image. And each image is one way of seeing reality, not always the only way or even the most useful way.

From all of this we achieve understanding. We look at the world and find it intelligible. We see not just raw sensory data but interpretations of data. Heat and light appearing in the East in the morning are sensory data. Yet "heat" and "light" and "East" are not just data; they are our way of classifying and making sense of the data. Our lives are crowded

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with such interpretations. Every word we use, every statement we make, every conclusion we arrive at is at least partly an interpretation of the world. This is true of all of our knowledge and understanding, in everyday thought, in science, and in religion, too, as we will see.

IV

By itself it is a genuine marvel that human consciousness can imaginatively interpret sensory data and turn the data into interpretive categories that are ways of consciously relating to the world. It is even more marvelous that human consciousness can compare and assemble facts into vast and complex theoretical images that integrate our interpretations of small aspects of reality. It took great imagination, for example, to develop the overview of the heavens that was the Ptolemaic astronomy. Alert and inventive minds found it possible to classify most stars as fixed stars, all rotating together in the heavens, to classify a few other stars as wanderers, and to devise a mental image of how they all move together in one grand system. Such inclusive systems as these first began to appear in human history in the era Karl Jaspers called the axial age, approximately the sixth century B.C. Then it was that science - philosophy - theology first appeared, all three of them really being just one mode of knowledge, the mode of all - inclusive generalizations. That is the mode of seeking the one large - scale interpretation that makes coherent sense out of all lesser facts and patterns.

On every level of our knowledge, from individual facts to general categories to all - inclusive theoretical interpretations, the human imagination is at work, responding to real experiences of the world by interpreting those experiences in a way that makes some kind of sense of them. To say that the sun rises in the East is one such interpretation. To say that there is a universal and benevolent power named God at work in the world is another such interpretation. We live with interpretations and by interpretations and through interpretations. Without them there is no sense to things for us at all.

Because of this we must also live for interpretations. If we are to have any goals or purposes whatsoever, we must express them in some way. We must give them some concrete form. These expressions and forms are built on interpretations of self and the world; they are interpretations of self and the world. Even the God for whom and before whom we live can only be known to us in the form of an interpretation.

All of this is said here to indicate that science has a basic identity with philosophy and theology. Science, philosophy, and theology are all attempts to construct all - inclusive interpretations of reality in order to make sense of it. And all such inclusive interpretations are built upon other lesser interpretations which together constitute our experience of reality.

V

Science, like philosophy and theology, is creative imagination making sense of reality, in the service of a basic faith. We are accustomed to

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think of science as distinct from philosophy and theology, however, because science is so concerned with empirical testing. This means that science restricts its attention to aspects of reality that can somehow be carefully measured. Science cannot be as all - inclusive as a theological or philosophical system. Nonetheless, science, like any thorough - going systematic thought, is an attempt to take the commonsense search for truth we all practice in some ways in our everyday life and make it more accurate, more complete, and more organized. When science applies its empirical tests to its theories, it is simply doing in its own way what philosophy, theology, practical human sense, and daily religion must all do, and that is find some way of sorting out wise ideas from foolish ones, coherent ideas from incoherent, accurate ones from inaccurate, on a continuing basis. All of these modes of thought are just variant forms of the human process of learning about reality by first developing imaginative interpretations and then purging those interpretations of errors as best is possible.

Every single interpretation of reality can only approximate reality as it is. There can never be a guarantee as to the precise accuracy of our images of reality. On the commonsense level we all know this very well. Each of us makes countless mistakes about where we left the car keys, how strong the rungs of an old wooden ladder are, and whether there really is a worm in the apple. We take it for granted in our lives that our interpretations need to be constantly corrected by further experiences.

On the other hand, there are many ways in which we forget this or even deliberately ignore it. We tend to get a little dogmatic in our interpretations, insisting that there cannot be any worms in our apples, or any flaws in our theories, or any errors in our beliefs. We act this way for a variety of reasons. We do this because it is irritating to have our accustomed beliefs doubted. Such doubts are an attack on our good sense and wisdom. We also do this because it is very upsetting to think that what our family, tradition, culture has believed is inadequate in some way. Who we are is derived from these sources. A threat to our culture's interpretations is a threat to our identity.

Yet a wise person is one who become accustomed to acknowledging that human understanding is imperfect and should always be open to correction. What we call science is nothing else but this wisdom applied methodically. Science is experience and interpretation, as is all human understanding. Science is also methodical doubt. Every scientific generalization is in principle always open to further testing. Twentiethcentury philosophy of science recognizes this by declaring that all general scientific conclusions are not the simple truth, but are models of reality. ⁶ In other words, they are all imaginative interpretations, and so must always be left open to doubt.

Scientists have no easier a time letting loose of their favorite theories than do other people. Scientists are often passionately dedicated to their

⁶ Kuhn's work cited earlier presents one form of this. For another example see Ian G. Barbour, Myths. Models, and Paradigms (Harper and Row, 1974).

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ideas, sometimes defending them beyond what the available evidence warrants. This is valuable. Darwin's theory might still be underdeveloped had not many people promoted it with a vigor beyond what the hard evidence and related theories could support. But mere devotion to an interpretation can be very harmful if there is no balancing technique for finally sorting out the accurate from the fanciful. And so science builds into its method the principle of doubt. Every scientist must be prepared eventually to make the sacrifice of favorite images. Science develops best precisely because of this asceticism.

VI

This description of science, as was said, is a description also of how human understanding in general works. It applies also to religion and to theology. In fact, by using the preceding description of science, it is possible to bring to clarity just what religious imagination involves.

When speaking of science, it is easy to make the mistake of concentrating only on the theories of science, on the conclusions science arrives at concerning the world. Those who have treated science as the sole source of all truth have made the mistake of treating science's theories as fully accurate, complete, and final truth. On the other hand, those who recognize that science's theories are acts of creative imagination, images or models of reality that are tentative and open to change, can easily make an opposite mistake. They see science as nothing but imagination at work devising tentative ways of portraying reality. But science is not just image - making. It is also primal faith expressing itself. And it is also an asceticism of the imagination that seeks always to purge itself of excessive attachment to any set of images in order to remain firm in the primal faith, which is unrestricted in its goal.

All of this is also true of religion. It is possible to make the mistake of defining religion by concentrating exclusively on its theories, on its images or symbols. In religion, these images are often doctrines. Religious doctrines, like their kindred images, scientific theories, are subject to the same two misuses. On the one hand, they can be mistakenly accepted as fully accurate, utterly complete. and absolute truth. It can sound rather bold to call this a mistake. Every religion claims to have some basic beliefs which are indeed simply the truth. But as in science, it is better to treat the primal faith as the most constant element. The particular doctrines, images, symbols, theories, which express that primal faith are never complete and final. (Although that does not mean that all religious doctrines or symbols are completely arbitrary or can be replaced without loss.)

There are a number of ways to make this point clear. One is to note that all doctrines are interpretations. Each is conditioned by its cultural context. There is no guaranteed way of knowing in advance just which doctrines, or which aspects of which doctrines, will eventually be modified or rejected. Secondly, history confirms this. The doctrine of no salvation outside the church was long a hallowed one. Based on the

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parables in Matthew's Gospel and emphasized strongly since at least the second century, it has nonetheless been so drastically reinterpreted today that prior generations would scarcely recognize it in its present attenuated forms. Biblical scholars point out that the New Testament is itself a collection of interpretive writings. And even the most literal of fundamentalists finds it necessary at times to reinterpret these interpretations. Thirdly, to the facts of history and the conclusions of Scripture studies, add the traditional claim of Western theology that there is one and only one totally complete and immutable Truth, the infinite mystery which is God.

Taking doctrines as final, complete, and wholly accurate is one mistake that can result from defining religion primarily in terms of its particular doctrinal images. The opposite mistake is also possible. Still taking doctrine as the whole or the core of religion, it is possible to reduce religion to merely subjective feelings, by treating all the doctrines as nothing but myths, nothing but imagination at work. As in the case of science, religious imagination is best understood only when it is seen as part of a larger process of human understanding. That is the process of primal faith expressing itself in interpretations, and then always developing or correcting those interpretations in order to live out more fully a dedication to the primal faith.

In Western religions, the primal faith is a trust that personas is in some way ultimately true and valid, symbolic of the ultimate reality. This primal faith has its expression in the more particular images of God as Creator, loving and free, incarnate in concrete history.

All of these particular images are expressed at one time or another in specific forms, in words or symbols or actions. Religious people are often most conscious of these particular images and not very conscious of the general primal faith which they express. Science learned to follow its primal faith and practice an asceticism of the imagination concerning its specific theories. These are now times when religion, too, is painfully learning an asceticism of the imagination. Historical research and theological reflection are weakening the power of many specific traditional images. The image of the church, for example, as the elite of God, chosen for salvation out of masses of pagans, all damned to hell, was once a dominant image. Many people still cling to it. But there is danger in clinging to such specific images too tightly. It leads too easily to a fanaticism in defense of the indefensible, a loss of contact with valid developments in culture, or to despair when the images break and fall apart, as everything finite might.

A willingness to hold only loosely to such images is an abandonment of faith only if faith consists solely of such images. Holding loosely to particular images is actually a confirmation of the primal faith. This is the faith that beyond all particulars in life there is that which is the infinite. It is not endless death and darkness. We do not have to cling to this particular image or that as to a life raft in an infinite sea of meaninglessness. The infinite is, instead, beyond and within all the

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individual facets of existence, the fullness of creative power, of intelligibility, freedom, and love. ⁷

There must, of course, always be some degree of particularity to our images or our minds and imaginations would be empty. And we must always make some choices among competing images. A Christian, for example, is one for whom Jesus is the focal image expressing the primal faith in the Infinite as a benevolent, involved, and humanly available Creator. The reality of Jesus expresses most adequately for the Christian what the infinite is. Yet Christians would be unfaithful to the infiniteness of the ultimate if they refused to allow doctrinal interpretations of Jesus to change or be questioned. The asceticism of science has shown us that from critical doubt there can come not confusion but growth. Those who believe in the infinite richness of the divine are empowered thereby to be ascetical also and to doubt their own religion's interpretive images, not in order to lose faith but in order to grow in the expression of the primal faith. That will ordinarily include a deepening of the meaning of traditional images, not their abandonment.

It is obviously far easier to say that than to know just how to practice it. In the concrete, the scientific enterprise is always redefining not just its own image - theories, but also even the basic methods it uses in developing them and criticizing them. It is only actual practice, not just theory, that dictates just how science sees its own faith, its own theories, and its own critical self - assessments. The same is inevitably true of religion. We theologize in order to have a functional and sustaining understanding of our religious heritage. But how we will perceive our own faith, our own particular image - beliefs, and our means of criticizing those beliefs by relating them to the infiniteness of the divine, will develop in ways we cannot foresee. But by accepting that, we acknowledge that there are limits to our images, we prepare ourselves to grow, and we express our faith that in using our personal consciousness and freedom to search after the always - more, we are thereby living for God.

Science and religion, therefore, should not be kept distant from one another. Both are manifestations of a common primal faith. And both can or should share a basic method of creative imagination guided by a careful, even ascetical, honesty as a way of living out that primal faith in the ultimate meaningfulness of human selfhood and existence in the world.

⁷ The perspective described here owes much to Karl Rahner's thought. See, for example, Theological Investigations. Vol. VII, Ch. 1. "Christian Living Formerly and Today." pp. 3 - 24: or Vol. X. Ch. 3. "On the Theology of Hope," pp. 242 - 259.