Theism and the Preconditions of Science

In so far as one considers in man…his intelligent and rational consciousness, one cannot but deal with what is related intimately to the universe and its ultimate ground. — Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), p. 657

It is a classic symptom of our age to suppose that questions which traditionally occupied the interest of metaphysics and theology have now been relinquished to the domain of Science™. Many people, while readily conceding that those questions to which God once served as an explanation remain inexplicable by science, nevertheless insist that, in due time, we will have a comprehensive, natural account of the world, which will at last drive the final nail in the coffin of theistic religions.

This is, of course, nonsense of the highest order, for the questions the metaphysician and the theologian are concerned to answer are not scientific questions to begin with. They are different, not in degree, but in kind. Science qua science depends on an operative framework which cannot, even in principle, be ‘proven’ by itself, but must be presupposed in all empirical inquiry, whatever the empirical facts turn out to be [1]. It is this framework — the roots from which physics, chemistry and biology spring forth — which the metaphysician and theologian seek ultimately to explain, and which points to the existence of God as its ultimate ground.

Science, as it is understood today, deals with phenomena that are quantitative and/or subject to mathematical abstraction. It concerns, broadly speaking, the measurable properties of time, space, matter and energy. But in order for scientific inquiry to be operative at this level, one must begin with certain ontological preconditions about the way the world is. We take it for granted that the world has meaning; that it is intelligible; that there is a rational order to which our minds are attuned; that there is a concrete object (the world) that is the subject of our empirical observations; that the world operates in law-like patterns; and so on. All of these conditions were already operative in the cosmos before anyone ever thought to articulate what they meant. They are already ‘there’ before our scientific investigations, much as the world is already ‘there’ as the stage in which we experience our lives. But surely all of this calls for an explanation: if all empirical inquiry is conditional upon the world being intelligible, orderly, rational, and so on, just what accounts for these conditions in the first place? What accounts for the universe being like this, and not some chaotic, unintelligible mess?

One response would be simply to take the preconditions which give rise to science as a mere matter of fact, without explanation. But this strikes me as an admission of defeat, rather than a reasonable response to a legitimate question. To say that something is “merely a matter of fact” is no different from saying “I refuse to think”, or “it feels good”. It is to arbitrarily abandon the notion of intelligibility and explanation which all scientific inquiry is predicated upon, and thus to make a mystery of science itself. For is there not something incoherent about holding, on the one hand, that the scientific project depends on the world being both comprehensible and explicable, and holding, on the other hand, that these preconditions are themselves incomprehensible and inexplicable? What reasons can plausibly lend credence to such a view, independently of any desire to avoid alternative conclusions, much in the way that some atheists avoid the force of the cosmological argument for God’s existence by appealing to the existence of the world as a “brute fact”? No, these preconditions need to be put into effect, as it were.

Perhaps the intelligibility, order, etc. which may be ascribed to the world does not, in fact, belong to the world itself; rather, such characteristics are impressed upon it by our minds. In other words, it is man, in the process of coming to understand the world, that makes it comprehensible, orderly, meaningful, and so on. This argument rests on the conviction that mind is fundamental to reality, a conviction I certainly share. But the terminus of explanation cannot rest with us, or any consciousness existing within the nexus of natural causes. For that which is fundamental to reality must be prior to reality, and the nature and being of the world certainly predate the human process of thinking about it.

If the question of what ultimately accounts for the preconditions of science cannot be brushed aside as a mere matter of fact, nor can it be said to be causally dependent on our minds, then one begins to feel the force of the conclusion reached by most philosophers since the time of Parmenides. A world that is orderly, structured, rational, intelligible, and subject to the sort of inductive investigations that make empirical science possible is very much at home with a universe that is the product of intention. The world is intelligible and knowable because it is the work of an intelligent will, and not the product of chaos; it is orderly because it bears the imprint of the Logos, primordial Reason, rather than the mark of something which is by nature irrational; it exists only insofar as it participates in that which just is Being Itself; it exhibits regularity because some Supreme Intellect exists “by whom all natural things are directed to their end”[2].

And this all men call God.