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Given the ruminations of Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, one might have thought that the absolute limit of scientistic arrogance had been reached. But think again.
Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, has asserted that “science” is on the verge of providing a complete understanding of the universe — an explication that precludes the antiquated notion of God altogether.
Limitations of the sciences
Before addressing the God issue, let me make a simple observation. Though the sciences might be able to explain the chemical make-up of pages and ink, they will never be able to reveal the meaning of a book; and though they might make sense of the biology of the human body, they will never tell us why a human act is moral or immoral; and though they might disclose the cellular structure of oil and canvas, they will never determine why a painting is beautiful.
This is not because “science” is for the moment insufficiently developed; it is because the scientific method cannot, even in principle, explore such matters, which belong to a qualitatively different category of being than the subject matter of the sciences.
The claim that “science” could ever provide a total understanding of reality as a whole overlooks the rather glaring fact that meaning, truth, beauty, morality, purpose, etc., are all ingredients in “the universe.”
Taking God out of the equation
But as is usually the case with scientistic speculation, Carroll’s thought is designed, above all, to eliminate God as a subject of serious intellectual discourse.
The first and most fundamental problem is that, like Hawking, Dawkins, and Dennett, Carroll doesn’t seem to know what biblical people mean by “God.” With the advance of the modern physical sciences, he asserts, there remains less and less room for God to operate, and hence less and less need to appeal to him as an explanatory cause.
Understanding who God is
But God, as the classical Catholic intellectual tradition understands him, is not one cause, however great, among many, not one more item within the universe jockeying for position with other competing causes.
Rather, God is, as Thomas Aquinas characterized him, ipsum esse, or the sheer act of to-be itself — that power in and through which the universe in its totality exists.
Once we grasp this, we see that no advance of the physical sciences could ever “eliminate” God or show that he is no longer required as an explaining cause, for the sciences can only explore objects and events within the finite cosmos.
God and the universe
To demonstrate the relationship between God and the universe more clearly, it would be worthwhile to explore the most fundamental argument for God’s existence, namely the argument from contingency.
You and I are contingent (dependent) in our being in the measure that we eat and drink, breathe, and had parents; a tree is contingent inasmuch as its being is derived from seed, sun, soil, water, etc.; the solar system is contingent because it depends upon gravity and events in the wider galaxy.
To account for a contingent reality, by definition we have to appeal to an extrinsic cause. But if that cause is itself contingent, we have to proceed further. This process to explain a contingent effect cannot go on indefinitely, for then the effect is never adequately explained.
Hence, we must finally come to some reality that is not contingent on anything else, some ground of being whose very nature is to-be. This is precisely what Catholic theology means by “God.”
God is not one fussy cause within or alongside the universe; instead, he is the reason why there is a universe at all.
Common scientistic mistake
Carroll seems to acknowledge the probative power of this sort of argument of first instance, but he makes the common scientistic mistake of identifying the first cause with matter or energy or even the universe itself in its endlessly fluctuating rhythms of inflation and deflation.
But this involves an appeal to contingent things or states of affairs. Energy or matter always exist in a particular modality or instantiation, which implies that they could just as well be in another modality or instantiation. How do you explain why the universe is expanding rather than contracting at this rate rather than that, etc.?
Finally, a cause of the very to-be of a contingent universe must be sought, and this cannot be anything in the universe, nor can it be the universe as a totality. It must be a reality whose very essence is to-be and whose perfection of existence is unlimited.
Philosophy can shed light on the existence of God so construed. The one thing the sciences cannot ever do is disprove it.
Fr. Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and is the rector/president of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. Learn more at www.WordOnFire.org