To avoid burning up in the fire of conflation or being frozen in the ice of contrast, it assumes, at times, a rather fluid and even turbulent character. Its efforts to find coherence are interesting and promising, but seldom completely conclusive.
Nevertheless, according to the contact position, though scientific “facts” are always in some sense our own constructs and are inevitably theory-laden, they are not simply wild guesses that have no reference to a real world existing independently of our preferences. This appreciation of the mind’s capacity to put us in touch with the real world—in an always provisional way—is known as “critical realism.” Critical realism maintains that our understanding, whether scientific or theological, may be oriented toward the real world; but precisely because the world is always too big for the human mind, our thoughts are also always open to correction.77
Science and religion make meaningful contact with each other, especially when they decide to play by the rules of what we are calling critical realism. Accordingly, good science hopes more or less to approximate the way things are, but it is always willing to be critical of its contemporary ways of representing the world. And in the case of religion, the same critical realism allows that though our religious symbols and ideas need constant correction, they may nonetheless reflect—in an always limited way—a Transcendent Reality which is truly “there” and which always necessarily transcends our subjective narrowness.
Scientific theories and religious metaphors, in this epistemological setting, are not just imaginative concoctions, as much modern and postmodern thought asserts. Rather, they bear an always tentative relationship to a real world and its ultimate ground. This world beyond our representations is always only incompletely grasped, and its presence constantly “judges” our hypotheses, inviting us continually to deepen our understanding in both science and religion. It is their mutual sharing in this critical openness to the real that provides the basis for genuine “contact” between science and religion.
IV. Confirmation
While it would be quite fruitful to leave our discussions in science and religion at the stage of contact, I would personally prefer to go even further. I appreciate all the efforts to discover consonance between science and religion, but I envisage an even more intimate relationship of religion to science than any of the first three approaches has yet explicitly acknowledged. I propose that religion is supportive—in a very deep way—of the entire scientific enterprise.
Religion, of course, should not be solicited to reinforce the dangerous ways in which scientific knowledge has often been applied in practice. My suggestion is simply that religion essentially fortifies the humble desire to know that gives rise to science in the first place. I call this approach “confirmation,” a term equivalent to “strengthening” or “supporting.” It holds that religion, when carefully purged of idolatrous implications, fully endorses and even undergirds the scientific effort to make sense of the universe.
I am aware that science has come under heavy criticism today. Many critics even think that it is responsible for most of the ills of the modern world. Were it not for science, they say, we would have no nuclear threat, no global pollution of the air, soil, and water. We and our planet would probably be better off without it. Science, they claim, is at root an assault upon nature, a crushing exercise in control. It is a Faustian effort to wrest all mystery from the cosmos so that we can become masters of it. Some even argue that science is inherently patriarchal, an exploitation of nature closely tied to our culture’s oppression of women.
Obviously theology would not wish to endorse science if it were inherently connected to these evils. But I suspect that much criticism of science mistakenly identifies it with trends and motives that can, at least in principle, be clearly distinguished from science itself. Essentially speaking, I consider science to be a modest but fruitful attempt to grasp, with mathematical clarity, some small part of the totality of reality. Any pretensions to omniscience, such as we find in scientism, are not a part of science at all—a point that Appleyard cannot accept, but one that the contrast position rightly clarifies in its protest against conflation.
Most criticisms of science fail to distinguish the humble desire to know that constitutes its basic dynamism from other human desires—such as the will to pleasure, to power, or to security—that place science in servitude to impulses that have nothing to do with truth-seeking. When I say that religion supports science, therefore, I am not arguing that it favors all the twisted ways in which science is exploited and conflated. I am simply saying that the disinterested desire to know, out of which science grows and flourishes, finds its deepest confirmation in a religious interpretation of the universe.
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