Math Circle 8: Incarnation and Science (Part 4)
On the Matter of Irrelevancy
The idea that science succeeded despite Christianity stems from Enlightenment propaganda that painted the Middle Ages as “dark.” In reality, the Incarnation of the Son (the Logos) grounds the universe’s intelligibility, order, constancy, and wonder. Christian theology, especially Trinitarian faith, made modern science possible by revealing a rational, reliable creation. This is the final segment of Math Circle 8.
On the Matter of Irrelevancy
EN: Some people would say science succeeded despite religion, not because of it. What would you say to someone who sees the Incarnation as irrelevant to scientific progress?
James D. Nickel: As I have noted, the common refrain of saying “science succeeded despite religion” is the outgrowth of centuries of Enlightenment indoctrination now replete in the way people think in the modern and post-modern world.
Enlighten means “in the light.” The primary task of Enlightenment thinkers was to displace everything about the Middle Ages, to replace that self-adjudicated “darkness of faith” with enlightened human reason. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) exemplifies this surrogateship when he said in Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. K. Smith (1965): “when Galileo caused balls to roll down an inclined plane, … a light broke upon all students of nature” (p. 20).
Stanley L. Jaki, in Patterns or Principles and Other Essays (1995), states: “If we do not wish to help turn this most scientific age of ours into the most barbaric of all ages, we had better stop using the term ‘medieval’ as synonymous with obscurantist. In doing so, we may make our mental eyes more sensitive to that light which comes from the Middle Ages. It is a light whose spectrum reveals creativity and inventiveness even with respect to science and technology. It does so because as light it wanted only to participate in the light of true religion. The latter, if true, must have for its primary source the doctrine, nay the very dogma, of the creation of all in the beginning. Aided by that dogma, people of the Middle Ages made the all-important beginning toward since and technology as we know both in our modern times” (p. 82).
What is science? It is the quantitative analysis of things in motion, the motion of which involves distance, time, velocity, momentum, acceleration, an analysis that is appropriately modeled by mathematical expositions.
This motion is grounded in the Word of the Father, the Word of Creation (Genesis 1). All things came into motion through the Son as the spoken Word of the Father. It is by the Incarnation of that Son that we come to understand the nature of the way the universe works. It works the way it does because of the way the Son is.
In The Way the World Is: The Christian Perspective of a Scientist ([1983, 1992] 2007), scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne (1930-2021) commented on John 1:1-4, where he connects intelligibility to the Word, the Logos of God: “Behind the intelligibility of the universe, its openness to the investigation of science, there lies, I believe, the fact of the Word of God. The Word is God’s agent in creation, impressing his rationality on the world. That same Word is also the light of men, giving us thereby access to the rationality that is in the world” (p. 109).
Thomas F. Torrance states on pages 108-109 of The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church ([1991, 1997] 2016) that in Christ we see a beautiful unification of
1. Freedom and constancy.
2. Spontaneity and reliability.
3. Unpredictability and order.
The interplay of these three aspects is what we find when we investigate the created order. What is made reflects the Maker.
In the freedom of interpenetrating love, the Triune God created a universe of limited freedom, restricted because of its creaturely nature. This qualified liberty is grounded in the liberty of the Triune God. It is a liberty of glory, of the freedom to express the essential nature of creaturely fullness and totality, whether in a thing or a person. Glory is when we see something or someone for what or who they really are and the glory we see in the Triune God is the beauty of absolute goodness (Exodus 33:18-19).
The Son is faithful to the Father, always doing what His Father does. It is this intra-Trinitarian loyalty that is the ground of all creaturely constancy. One of Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) most important contributions to science was the assertion of the constancy of the speed of light. This speed is constant irrespective of the nature of the observer’s motion, whether still, in motion with constant velocity (zero acceleration), or in accelerated motion. His Special Theory of Relativity states that all motion is relative to the absolute speed of light. The speed of light is invariant and dynamic. If not, we have chaos, not cosmos. Without the constancy of the speed of light, our investigations into the structure of the universe would be fruitless.
Creation is replete with wonder, all grounded in The Wonder who is the sustaining logos. The universe is full of unexpected surprises, characterized by spontaneity and unpredictability, a “take your breath” away quality, all grounded in order and reliability, in intrinsic intelligibility. This splendid quality of radiance is the beauty that generates wonder in the beholder.
Why can we understand the universe?
Why do our reasonings, our operational structures, cohere with the multifaceted structures of the universe?
Why this structure?
Why is there wonder?
What is its cause?
We have the answer through the revelation of the Incarnate Son.