Review of “Love and Quasars: An Astrophysicist Reconciles Faith and Science” by Paul Wallace, Part 10.

Review of “Love and Quasars: An Astrophysicist Reconciles Faith and Science” by Paul Wallace, Part 10.

Chapter 12 is entitled, Scary Mom and the Atheists: How an Enlarged Faith Reveals the Limits of Science.  Wallace relates how his mother would put him and his brother to bed, turn off the lights but remain in the room, then jump up and grab them and scare them.  For some reason, she found this hilarious; needless to say, nine year old Paul did not.  He says he spent much of his youth scared of being scared by his mother.  This had the effect of him finding it amusing when people get suddenly scared without there being any real danger; also Halloween became his favorite holiday.  He says every Halloween he would write down his fears and then laugh at them.  He says laughter has a way with fear, like love, laughter drives it out.

Beginning in 2005, with the publication of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, the so called New Atheists (also known as The Four Horsemen), Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens rose to fame.  Wallace found himself morbidly fascinated.  He says:

For years, I read the Horsemen’s books, lurked about their blogs, and came to know a number of atheists personally.  My fascination persisted long enough to baffle me: Why should I care so much?  It was a scary question.  As a professor of physics and astronomy, I told myself that I care because the New Atheists say science (of all things) disproves the claims of faith.  During my seminary years, I told myself that I cared out of theological interest.  But what really frightened me was the possibility that the New Atheists were right…

Perhaps my fascination resulted from my own unconscious unbelief.  I began to ask myself, “Do I need to grow up and face the truth? Does a larger freedom await on the other side of faith?  Am I a closet atheist?”  The thought terrified me, but today I view the New Atheists with the kind of bemused curiosity reserved for things that used to scare me but don’t anymore, like lava and Scary Mom.

Wallace says he’s not afraid anymore for two reasons.  First, he tried on atheism; but it didn’t fit.  He couldn’t pull it off.  He opened himself to the very real possibility that he didn’t’ believe in God, but never felt the click of discovery.  It never felt true.  He says his belief in God had so merged with his deepest identity that he couldn’t cast it aside.  He says: “Stop believing in God?  I might as well stop believing in my own existence.”

Second he says, his faith has shown him the limits of science.  Science reveals how the universe works; tells us deep truths about the nature of energy and matter and our material origins.  But science cannot reveal all things, and it does not address whole classes of questions that are important to everyone – questions concerning good and evil, purpose, and meaning.

Wallace refers to the August 17, 2011 “Jesus and Mo” cartoon (written by an atheist and wonderfully hilarious, but not for the easily offended religious person).  Wallace says:

Jesus is right: science is limited by its refusal to make stuff up, if by “make stuff up” he means taking seriously anything that’s not grounded in the methods and theories of science.  If this is what Jesus means, then we all make stuff up every day.  We have to, because no one lives their lives in strict accordance to the truths and methods of science alone.  And everybody lives according to virtues like love that have nothing to do with empirical science.

Science can shape the way you think.  It can prevent you from believing nonsense.  It provides an infinite supply of wonder.  But science alone will not help you navigate the challenges and heartbreaks and joys that are part of every human life.  In this sense, science is hollow.  It will not give us morally satisfying to Jesus’ question: “Why are we here?” and “What is the purpose of beauty?” It can’t console a mother who has lost a child.  It can’t tell us how we are to live.  It can’t fill our everyday lives with meaning and direction.  Science alone will not tell us how to respond to injustice or oppression or violence.

Wallace wants us to consider the unavoidable question: What is a human being?  Science answers that question from a strictly material standpoint.  A human is an organism within an environment.  Just like any other organism; there is no qualitative distinction between Homo sapiens and any other organism.

On a more basic level, science says a human being is a collection of trillions of atoms.  About 62% of these atoms are hydrogen, 24% are oxygen, 12% are carbon, and 1% are nitrogen; traces of calcium, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, and about fifty other elements are also found in the human body.  Science also tells us that these atoms must be arranged in a very particular and complex way, and thanks to billions of years of evolution, they have been.  The atoms themselves are neither living nor conscious, but when they are arranged in this way, both life and consciousness somehow emerge from them.

Wallace says this is both weird and wonderful: but also quite limited.  To see this, let’s ask Christianity the same question: What is a human being?  He says, like science, it says we are creatures, organisms in an environment.  It not only acknowledges but embraces the wonder and mystery of our physical bodies of atoms and molecules and cells and evolution and consciousness.  Wallace says Christianity contains all this.  It recognizes and celebrates our physicality.  In his view, faith has no argument with scientific accounts of Homo sapiens.

But it goes further.  It takes what science says, interprets it, and “makes stuff up,” in the words of cartoon Jesus.  Its data set includes and surpasses the biological and physical to encompass the emotional, social, and spiritual.  Faith takes into account not only the objective features of the human body but also the subjective experiences and meanings of millions of individual and communal lives.

So when it comes to human beings, faith says we are organisms that bear the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  Many ideas have been proposed about the meaning of that phrase.  Some say it means we have skills and capacities that sets us apart from other animals; such as reason, creativity, or the use of language. Others say the image of God is relational.  We relate more intimately with God and with each other than other creatures do.  Wallace says:

However you think about the image of God, it’s clear that love has something to do with it.  Scripture and Christian tradition say we were created out of love and for love.  God, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28, 1 John 4:8) is love.  The Gospel of Mark tells the story of a scribe who asks Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?”  Jesus replies, “The first is, ‘Hear of Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  There is no other commandment greater than these” (12:29-31).  Love is why we are here, and love is how we should live…

You won’t learn about any of this from science.  The divine image is not a scientifically verifiable idea.  Neither is love. Science also cannot contradict these things. They simply exist in the land beyond science.

If everything beyond the borders of science is made up, then the question is not whether we should make stuff up; it is what kind of stuff we should make up.  As followers of Jesus, we reach for love, a very fine made-up thing indeed.  And our faith is nothing less than a love story big enough to contain science and the cosmos it reveals, open enough to take all question, and generous enough to set all human creatures free to laugh at everything that scares them.