Quest for God
Let There Be Evolution
Because of what it could mean if the shroud is real, because the image are so mysterious and potentially miraculous, the shroud, like it or not, rightly so or not, has become part of the never ending, unavoidable and possibly unjustified scientific quest for God. Balls choice of the word microcosm may not be the best choice. It is not a miniature of the greater quest in the same sense that baseball is a microcosm of team sports. It is its own quest that may lead nowhere even if the shroud is real.
It is wrong, however, to think that this is all that drives the study of the shroud. Ball’s comment should not receive uncritical acceptance. The shroud is a kaleidoscope of mysteries, many perhaps that can be answered by science. But should the goal be to prove by science a religious belief or should it be to seek a clear understanding of the cloth and let the chips fall where they may. John Paul II very wisely puts this in perspective:
The Shroud is a challenge to our intelligence. . . . The mysterious fascination of the Shroud forces questions to be raised about the sacred Linen and the historical life of Jesus. Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions. She entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate, so that satisfactory answers may be found to the questions connected with this Sheet, which, according to tradition, wrapped the body of our Redeemer after he had been taken down from the cross. The Church urges that the Shroud be studied without pre-established positions that take for granted results that are not such; she invites them to act with interior freedom and attentive respect for both scientific methodology and the sensibilities of believers.
Challenge to the Human Spirit
But the shroud is more than a challenge to our intelligence. It is a challenge to the human spirit not unlike the spirit that drives people to climb Mount Everest, grow the world’s most perfect tomato or fathom the universe. In this sense, the quest to better understand the enigma of the cloth should be the primary impetus. Yet in the face of today’s unrelenting attacks on religion, and in particular Christianity, there is an almost inescapable, intuitive sense among believing Christians that it would be nice, if somehow, by way of the shroud, we could use science to prove the skeptics wrong.
So exactly what is the scientific quest for God? Well, first of all it isn't really a scientific quest for God. No one expects to find him by way of some experiment, or see him staring back at us through the Hubble telescope or neatly figured into some formula such as e=G+mc2. He is not a law of nature, a theory or a hypothesis. The quest really is an apologetic, a defense of a belief in and about God in response to claims that God does not exist or need not exist as evidenced by science. Second, it isn’t completely scientific. In addition to real and true natural science it includes, in some aspects, what most scientists and philosophers of science think of as pseudoscience. As much as we may want to brush the unscientific part of it under the rug, we cannot do so because its proponents, many who are real scientists, and much of the non-scientist population at large, thinks it is science. It also engages philosophers of science in the question of its legitimacy. Should we be looking for and can we look for evidence of God with science?
Science Today
Today, science is highly organized and well networked not only through the honorific societies but in universities science departments, corporations, government laboratories and institutions. Peer-reviewed scientific journals abound through which scientific work is shared and reported to the world.
The quest for God, or for that matter to deny God, is real. So, too, is the study of the Shroud. Mostly it goes on beneath the surface and without funding. But occasionally, it pops up to the surface as it did when three prestigious laboratories carbon dated a sample from the cloth. But because, traditionally, scientists have freedom to pursue studies that interest them, they do so. Thus, several scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the most famous and prestigious laboratories in the world have been able to use some of the most advanced scientific equipment available anywhere to study fiber samples taken from the Shroud.
Natural Theology
Natural theology blossomed in the age of science as the first wave of the modern scientific quest for God in William Paley's 1802 book, Natural Theology. Paley, by way of analogy, compared the complexity of living things to the lesser complexity of a watch. Upon finding a watch, he argued, we would immediately realize that it had a maker. Living things being even more complex, he reasoned, certainly were the products of an intelligent designer. But Darwin, just a few years later, demonstrated how very complex living forms could evolve from much simpler forms. Darwin’s ideas demolished Paley’s argument. Dawkins explained it best. Theologian McGrath agrees. In his book, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, he writes:
Dawkins holds that the existence or nonexistence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth-century writer William Paley for the existence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins's home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. This book remains the finest criticism of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley's ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way "proving" the existence of God, and Dawkins's extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.
Intelligent Design
Another, more modern, and more widely accepted approach in the quest for God, one more widely accepted among Christians comfortable with a non-literal interpretation of scripture, is evolutionary Intelligent Design (ID). It is a seductive idea.
It is important to note that many critic of ID simply refer to it as Creationism, or creationism in disguise. ID proponents, however, seldom use the word Creationism. In fact, they rarely use the word God and carefully avoid references to the Bible. ID is in the strictest sense an attack on evolution on scientific (and pseudoscientific) terms. The implication is none the less clear to everyone on both sides of the debate. ID is a defense of the existence of God against those who use evolution to argue that God does not exist. tend to reserve the term Creationism for biblical literalism.
Lehigh University’s Michael Behe, who supports this idea, describes irreducible complexity as “A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”
What does this mean? Behe uses a conventional mousetrap to illustrate. It consists of five parts: a base, a spring, a hammer or trapping bar, a bar to hold the hammer down and a catch to hold the hold-down bar in a triggered state so that when it is nudged the hammer is released. Remove any one part and you don’t have a functional mousetrap.
The important thing to realize is that each part would have needed to evolve independently without a natural-selection-sense of purpose. All the parts would have needed to evolve before the mousetrap could have evolved. “[I]f intelligence is necessary to make something as simple as a mousetrap,” wrote Behe, “we have strong reason to think it is necessary to make the much more complicated machinery of the cell.”
A Fine Tuned Universe
The other major quest for God might rightly be called the Cosmological Quest. The impetus for it started with Father Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître. Lemaître was a Catholic priest who happened to be a brilliant Harvard and MIT trained astrophysicist. He never intended that his work in cosmology be part of any scientific question about God’s existence.
Working to apply Einstein’s theory of general relativity to the field of cosmology, he proposed what we now call the Big Bang. In a paper, published in Nature he called this “creation-like” event as coming from a "primeval atom." British cosmologist Fred Hoyle, a proponent of a static universe—the prevalent view at the time—found the idea so ludicrous that he derisively called it the “Big Bang.” Today, you would be as hard pressed to find a cosmologist who doesn’t agree with the Big Bang theory as you would be hard pressed to find people who believe the world is flat.
The Big Bang, which suggests that the universe started as a hot, dense, small spot, so hot and dense and small that those words make no sense of it, is now widely accepted as part of Guth’s inflationary theory which is not the same thing as his multiverse theory.
A Reinvigoration of Natural Theology
McGrath, in his new book, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology, strikes out in a bold, and some say a refreshing direction. It is a reinvigoration of natural theology not in terms of trying to prove that God exist or that God created all things but a God “much wiser than that,” a God who chose to “make all things make themselves.” McGrath is quoting Charles Kingsley (1819-75) and giving full, enthusiastic consideration to his line of thinking. It’s theological. It’s not scientific. McGrath wants to know if belief in God, specifically Trinitarian Christian theology, is coherent with everything that science tells us and might yet tell us. Can science energize theology?
John Polkinghorne’s Analogy
John Polkinghorne provides a useful analogy. In quantum physics so much seems paradoxical, in fact, without any regard for common sense. It seems that particles, and for that matter, antiparticles, can pop into existence from nothing and out of existence again. And it seems that a single particle can be in two places at once. Quantum physicists call this super-positioning. And if that isn’t enough, changing the spin of one particle can change the position of another particle even at a great distance with no apparent mechanism or communication between them. All this may not make perfect sense, but it helps to make sense of many things that otherwise have no explanation. Is God like that? Is God something (for lack of a better word) that makes no sense in any scientific way but allows us to make sense of things that science cannot explain?
Ball’s microcosm of the quest for God in the study of the shroud is less than the questing and jousting in evolutionary biology and cosmology. Those quests are entangled in the quests to understand how it is that we are where and how where we are came to be. It is less, too, because it is the study of an artifact with a still uncertain provenance. It is more, however, because the study of the shroud unavoidably considers an astounding claim that it seeks to confirm. It leaps beyond questions about creation to a particular historical event that does not respect common sense.
The Natural Option
The second option, the completely natural option, may hold the best opportunity for at least inferring God is the best explanation. It doesn’t prove the resurrection. It doesn’t prove that God exists. It is premature to explain why this option is best if the quest for God is warranted. First we need to test Nickell’s assertion that there is no history before 1350. We need to take a close at some truly amazing things about the images, things that seem more baffling than the fine tuning of the universe or how it is that particles can seem to be in two places at the same time.
Terry Eagleton
The quarrel between science and theology, then, is not a matter of how the universe came about, or which approach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chronological sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough-not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams [the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury] has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it? (Terry Eagleton)
The study of the shroud, if it is a microcosm of the quest for God, must comply with the rules for as much as they are the best rules we have: the scientific method and the means for drawing the best explanations from the information at hand. We must avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscience. We must insist that everything is reasonably verifiable.
In the scientific quest for God, both sides of the fine-tuned universe are well represented by highly regarded scientists—cosmologist, astrophysicists, mathematicians, quantum physicists—and philosophers. There is or there isn’t a multiverse or there is some other explanation not yet understood. This quest will continue. The narrower quest for the historical Jesus is likely to continue unabated. So, too, the even narrower-still quest to understand the resurrection. There is a wide diversity of opinion and countless scholars. Wright lists more than 500 contemporary scholars in his book, The Resurrection.
One would hope that in the very granular study, the shroud, there would be the same give and take of scientists and historians. That just isn’t so. The last time it was so seems to have been in 1988 when dozens of scientists participated in the carbon dating of the shroud. The paper in Nature included 21 authors. Perhaps that was enough. It seemed so decisive. They are now almost universally silent. Perhaps that is justified by the new findings.
Scientists and historians long ago discovered that contending ideas is important when seeking the best possible understanding of anything even if we sometimes resist the impulse to do so. That was what Galileo was doing. It took a long time for the church to come around to his way of thinking. Darwin did the same. It took a long time for many people to accept evolution. The majority within Christian traditions—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Mainline Protestant—have accepted evolution. Unfortunately, there is little debate about the shroud’s authenticity based on new evidence. There is one outstanding exception.
Beliefnet
The site bills itself as the largest unaffiliated spiritual web site on the Internet. Spiritual perhaps, but definitely a business. Beliefnet now is part of the News Corporation that includes Fox Television; over 100 newspapers such as The Times (of London), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post; the website MySpace and the television show American Idol. Beliefnet has created itself into vast multi-overlapping magestias for cyber warriors from various traditions, beliefs and peculiarities, all having to do in some way with faith. Visit the site and you will find thousands upon thousands of people debating, questioning and explaining. They are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Wiccans and Atheists and Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soulers. Everything is organized into groups and subgroups and fragments within each because there are so many varieties and beliefs. There are conservatives and liberals. There are rigid adherents to denominational intricacies and live-and-let-live and what-ever-makes-sense-to-you proponents. Dig deep enough and you will find arguments akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and does the tune change the results.
There are plenty of celebrity participants on Beliefnet. Michael J. Fox did an interview about his battle with Parkinson's disease and how it increased his sense of spiritually and gratitude. Michael Jackson wrote a moving essay for Beliefnet. “What I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary,” he wrote. “The Sabbath was when I could be.” Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have appeared in interviews with Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet’s senior religion editor.
There are countless interactive public interviews with many of the leading theologians and Biblical scholars. An interactive public interview is similar to a radio talk show in which telephone callers ask questions of guests. On Beliefnet, the callers type in questions and the guest replies by typing a response. One such interview was with John Dominic Crossan.
As one might expect, there is plentiful discussion about the scientific quest for God on Beliefnet, and much of it can be very interesting until a extremist fundamentalist, be he a Christian or an Atheist, imposes himself into a discussion and saturates the dialog with proclamations. “The Bible says. . .”
One of the more interesting areas of discussion that has spilled out from academia and the all so commonly disquieting Eastertide season of television specials. It is the quest for the historical Jesus. Who was this man, Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians proclaim is the Son of God? Is there more to the story than what we know from the three synoptic gospels, the theologically rich Gospel of John, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul and others evangelists? In the context of what we know about 1st century Palestine and its people, is it believable? And in the context of a scientific worldview, is it believable? And nothing is more central to the story than the subject of the resurrection? Did it happen?