By DONALD DeMARCO
How Science Points to God by Dr. Gerard Verschuuren (Sophia Press: 2020), 200 pages, $14.95.
Dr. Verschuuren holds university degrees in both science and philosophy. His academic background, together with his Catholic faith, have served him well in providing him the resources needed to write several books on the relationship between science and philosophy as well as between science and religion.
How Science Points to God is the culmination of a series of works in which he explored the contributions of a number of thinkers such as Darwin, Galileo, Hawking, and Dawkins. He knows his way around the various sciences and is well acquainted with the disputes they have engendered.
In his most recent book, the key word is “points.” Man is a “pointer.” He may use his finger to point to the moon, let’s say. In so doing, he is alluding to something beyond his finger. A dog, however, whose destiny is earthbound, will proceed to smell the finger. The human being has a transcendent destiny.
Pointing is, nevertheless, not proving. Science does not prove nor disprove the existence of God. It does, however, “intimate” His presence, in accord with the title of William Wordsworth’s poem, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Although the pointing is not proof, it nonetheless has significant weight, surely enough to convince any fair and open-minded person that science strongly intimates God’s reality.
Science operates from a very restricted position. It cannot take credit for its own starting point. In order for science to get off the ground, it needs to make a series of assumptions that science itself cannot validate. It must assume that an external world exists, that it is both orderly and intelligible, that the human mind is reliable, and that scientific investigation, in the final analysis, will prove to be worth the effort.
“Strange as it may sound,” Verschuuren states, “science is something you need to believe in before you can practice it.” He cites a 1992 papal address given by John Paul II to bolster his argument: “Those who engage in scientific and technological research admit, as the premise of its progress, that the world is not a chaos but a cosmos; that is to say, that there exist order and natural laws which can be grasped and examined.”
For Einstein, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Science is silent on how the macrocosm world and microcosm mind got to be harmoniously linked together. Science points to mysteries that it cannot begin to solve on its own merits.
Verschuuren’s chapters in which he shows how logic and math, genetics, neuroscience, semantics, and the laws of nature point to God’s existence are thorough, clearly written, cogent, and convincing. They illustrate the author’s rich experience as a scholar and as a man of faith. Moreover, Dr. Verschuuren advances his arguments calmly, giving full credit to the reader for being able to understand exactly what he is stating.
It is somewhat of a cliché in Western sagas that one cowpoke will say to his adversary, “This town ain’t big enough for both of us. One of us has to go.” But there is plenty of room in the world for both science and religion.
“Therefore,” the author writes, “we must conclude that science and religion not only are able to live together, but also must live together.”
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