By DONALD DeMARCO
The story is told, in the realm of the mythic, where fantasy can assist our understanding of reality, of an ape who was tormented by an identity crisis. Taking the first step toward solving his dilemma, the troubled primate escaped from captivity in the Bronx Zoo. The fact that he was missing for some time touched off a wave of considerable anxiety among the citizenry in New York.
At long last, and to everyone’s surprise, he was found sitting at a table in the city’s Public Library, holding a copy of Genesis in one hand and a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in the other. “I had to find out,” the ape explained to bewildered reporters, “whether I was my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”
The ape’s identity crisis is also ours. Are we merely “trousered apes,” the product of a long line of blind evolution? Or are we “immortal diamonds” who have been created in the image of God? Are we the products of chance? Or are we the fruit of love? Will our destiny be dust, condemnation or glory? Our desire to know our origin and destiny is tantamount to our desire to know the truth about ourselves. Unless we know where we came from and where we are heading, we cannot begin to know who we are.
St. John Paul II began his encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), by explaining that the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness and the better they are able to answer the fundamental question, “Where have I come from and where am I going?”
“The admonition Know yourself,” he points out, “was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm by those who seek to set themselves apart from the rest of creation as ‘human beings,’ that is as those who ‘know themselves’.”
Science and Faith are two avenues to reality through which we come to learn something about ourselves, answering fundamental questions about our existence. Yet these two avenues — one of knowledge, the other of belief — have posed an enduring problem. Does science or faith tell us more about who we are? Each sheds light on our origin as well as on our destiny. But do they shed lights that contradict each other? Or are their lights harmonious with each other.
There are two extremes: science deified, which rejects faith; and science defied, which accepts nothing other than faith. Both are unrealistic and offer, at best, caricatures of the human being. Science alone de-spiritualizes the human being. Referring to our intensely technological age, playwright Arthur Miller complains: “We now live in an air-conditioned nightmare.” And the existential novelist Albert Camus asks the mordant question, “Why has the Enlightenment led to the Blackout?”
On the other hand, faith alone depersonalizes the human being, leaving him without the proper utilization of his gift of intelligence. Without intelligence, man does not have faith, but credulity. As such, he becomes an easy target for exploitation, culturally, politically, or even religiously.
St. Albert the Great and his illustrious student, St. Thomas Aquinas, were the first to recognize the autonomy of both science and faith. At the same time, they insisted that these two enterprises are organically linked to each other — science depends on faith, faith is reinforced through science. As Pope Leo XIII has said of Aquinas, “Just when St. Thomas distinguishes between faith and reason, he unites them in bonds of mutual friendship, conceding to each its specific rights and to each its specific dignity.”
Nonetheless, the legitimate distinction between these two forms of learning has come to be regarded, from the medieval period onward, as a separation. This separation inevitably came to produce, between science and faith, an antagonism.
But science depends on faith far more than most people realize. The scientist must make an initial act of faith that the world to which he applies reason is one whose laws are both intelligible and consistent. He must believe, or else he would lose heart and fear that the laws of the universe are like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland where the rules of the game change from moment to moment by the arbitrary decree of the Queen.
For this reason, Norbert Wiener — the “Father of Cybernetics,” who received a Harvard Ph.D. in mathematics at 18, and whose book, God and Golem, Inc., earned him the National Book Award in 1964 — asserts: “Science is impossible without faith.” The scientist could not begin to practice his craft if he did not believe that the physical universe operated according to regular and intelligible laws.
Tryon Edwards, great-grandson of the distinguished American theologian Jonathan Edwards, expresses the matter in these terms: “Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws — a thing which can never be demonstrated.”
When Albert Einstein confessed that what was most incomprehensible for him was the fact that the universe is comprehensible, he was alluding to the same need for faith. The laws of the universe are a fit object for human reason, but the reality of this affinity between mind and world, itself a mystery, demands the scientist’s faithful allegiance. “Der Herr Gott ist raffiniert, aber boshaft ist Er nicht,” he wrote (“God is subtle, but not malicious.”).
We need reason for the mind to discover the laws of the universe, but we need a preliminary faith that these laws will not betray us. Reason without faith lacks the confidence necessary to exercise its own act.
Faith and reason, John Paul II comments in Fides et Ratio, are like “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” They are best utilized, not in isolation from each other, but as a harmonious duality. Faith guides science, science strengthens faith. Together, they more effectively contemplate the same truth.
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