MetaCatholic

Those many Christians who rightly reject the ramblings of the creationists often maintain that the Creation stories answer the “Why?” question, whilst science answers the “How?” question. There is a certain force, and truth, in that statement. However, I am increasingly dissatisfied with it as an over-simplification. I don’t know that I have any clearly better alternatives, but I want to offer four observations in the hope that others better versed in the questions will comment or offer posts in reply.

• We can’t simply brush aside the fact that the creation stories are “How?” stories in the way that they are shaped and narrated. That is not a complete objection, for creation myths are usually narrated in ancient cultures as “How?” stories: it belongs to the genre. Insofar as they are “How?” stories, we need honestly to admit that they are wrong. They are, however, not simply “How?” stories, they are also “Why?” ones. In the way they tell the story, the “Why?” questions are less “Why does the world exist?”, and more “Why are things this way?”. They are about locating humans in the world, and interpreting the human situation. They are not as interested in the question of origins as they are in the question of the present, despite their form. Perhaps this indicates that reading them primarily as origin stories is (at least in part) to misread them.
• We make a mistake when we think of Genesis 1- 2 as the totality of what the Scriptures say about creation. They are part of what is said, but other passages also need to be considered. Among them we might note Isaiah 40, where the power of God in salvation is equated with the power of God in creation, so that the former is possible because of the latter. Here the doctrine of creation is primarily a story about God’s power in the present and the future, undergirded by the apprehension of his universe- creating history. Creation is not understood simply as past event, but part of a continuous activity. Reducing this to a doctrine of origins is to miss a significant part of the point.
• When we come to God’s answer to Job (chapter 38 ff) the doctrine of creation takes on a new aspect. It is a kind of anti-theodicy. Questioning God is both a type of faithfulness to be rewarded by an encounter with the divine, and a temerity that will receive no answer other than the “God-ness” of God. Creation is something that only God can understand, and correspondingly we will never fully understand the “Why?” we ask about our location in the universe, neither our pain nor our pleasure. The doctrine of a transcendent Creator is not a full answer to “Why?” questions: it is rather a pointer to their lack of a satisfactory and complete answerability.
• Finally, on a different tack, I want to suggest that there is one vitally important area where the accounts of science and faith both need to align, and in fact do align, in the understanding of the world. The first, priestly, creation account, whose canonical position privileges it in relation to the succeeding stories and poems, is above all an account of ordering. The creation is the organisation of randomness into coherency. This not only gives a significant place to human reason and observation (as the linkage of Wisdom and creation elsewhere implies) but is the fundamental presupposition of scientific investigation. The accounts of Scripture and science are in this particular case making the same assertion about reality: the former seeks to know how to live within that reality, the latter to understand how that reality works. Both are “How?” questions, albeit of a different and complementary sort.

It is in this last area that I believe we can (and must) argue that science with God is more rational than science without God, and why these two accounts need each other as friends, rather than treating each other as enemies (always with the proviso that a doctrine of creation is about more than origins). It is not just that the observable universe is susceptible of rational investigation, but that science can’t work if it isn’t. We have an apparently random quantum fluctuation resolving with great speed into a universe that is not only organised, but finely tuned. We cannot tell whether that fluctuation that began things was actually random or not: whether it was one instant of a typical behaviour pattern that had occurred so many millions of times that the type of inflation that occurred was not in fact as improbable as it looks. It is equally a matter of faith that it was random as that it was the work of God’s mind, since science can’t look below, behind or beyond the event horizon to a non-universe: it can’t even fully approach it. Given the apparently rational and mathematical nature of the world, in which reasonably constructed experiments work, one might be tempted to see greater coherence in postulating a rational rather than a random cause.

When we look at the improbabilities involved in the fine-tuning of the universe, the so-called anthropic principle, we can come to three possible conclusions. The first is that all we can say is that the universe just is, but can give no reasons. A major improbability, but a necessary one given that we can observe it. This is, of course, to say that no explanation at all is possible, which frustrates the scientific and religious spirit in equal measure, and feels intellectually unsatisfactory. The second is to postulate the multiverse, in which all possible universes exist, and in which in millions and millions of other universes life has never formed, or the inflation ran away with itself, or collapsed back on itself, and so on, pretty much ad infinitum. Again, the multiverse is as much a matter of faith as belief in God: as an answer lying outside the bounds of the observable and knowable universe it has no claim to be science. There is, for those of us who tend to appeal to Occam’s razor, something inherently unsatisfying, and less rational about preferring such a complex solution as the multiverse over the simple explanation of God.

The third explanation is God. The existence of a Creator not only explains (with the limitations noted above of it being an transcendently incomplete and partially unknowable solution) the existence of the universe, it explains, at least by way of analogy, the rational nature of the observable universe. Our explanations of the universe are not simply rational because our minds are rational, and therefore construct a rational account, but because the universe is itself objectively rational. I do not think I want to press this as far as, say, Polkinghorne’s theory of mathematics as the equivalent of Plato’s forms, or indeed the mind of God. I do, however, want to suggest that it is more reasonable to see this rationality as a reflection of God’s ultimate reason, than it is as a product of an inherently irrational randomness. Creation is, I submit, ultimately more rational than happenstance.