Science and Religion: The Missing Facts
David J. Larkin, Jr. | November 2011
Life is a puzzle that I’d like to solve, and I’m lucky. I’m human. I have a body that comes with lots of receptors. What I see, hear, smell, feel, and taste strikes me as “true,” and I make decisions about the future based on my perceptions and past experience. When a rock comes hurtling toward me, I jump out of its way because the last one hit me. It cut my head and almost put my eyes out. I also have a brain that processes my perceptions and allows me to imagine things I have not perceived, based on those I have. The rock that hit me hurt, all right, but I can imagine something worse: a boulder, big as a house, that drops from the sky and kills me.
Like most humans, I enjoy puzzles. I’m addicted to Rubik’s Cube, video games, crossword puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, murder mysteries and more. When solving a puzzle, I work in the most efficient way possible. Take jigsaw puzzles. I group all the straight-edged pieces together first, knowing they’ll form a border that will limit the space I work in and give me a hand up in spotting where other pieces fit. I sort what’s left by predominant color or shape and sometimes see at once where the next piece goes. Other times I struggle before finding a good fit. In the end, though, when the last piece slips into place it fits snugly, with no gaps and no room for improvement. Assembly recreates what the puzzle looked like when it was first cut. It had a beginning (when I dumped the pieces onto the table), a middle (when I assembled them), and an end (done!). But if I had not assembled it, if I had not caused it to take its present shape, the pieces would still be where they were—in a box, untouched and unassembled—which does make sense to me. Everything on earth has a cause. There are no chickens without eggs, no apples without trees, no trees without seed. No house exists until it is built. No rock hurtles through the air without having been launched in some way. In short, life has taught me that nothing comes from nothing. So where did the universe and the life that’s in it come from?
In the Beginning
Early morning, 15,000 years ago. I stand, almost naked, in an open field. It’s cold out, but warming up. My right hand shields my eyes as I watch a flat, yellow disk rise above the eastern horizon. I feel no motion beneath my feet. When I throw a rock from east to west, it passes through the sky. When it lands, it’s as still as I am. The disk, propelled by something, must therefore be moving while I stand on a flat, immobile earth.
As a Greek, thousands of years later, I walk into town and a chariot passes. It is earthbound, but as I watch the sky-borne disk, I can imagine a chariot that flies. I see its driver, too. He wears a radiant crown as his flaming chariot rolls forward, lighting the world and heating it like a giant fire. Clearly he possesses powers I don’t have. He must be a super-human, a god. Here, in Greece, I call him Helios. The Romans will later call him Sol.
For us Israelites, God made heaven and earth on the first day of creation but didn’t place the sun and moon in the sky until the third day. The Holy Scripture I’m studying doesn’t precisely say the sun circles the earth, but why should it? That’s obvious. One day, as we were engaged in battle with our enemies, the sun began to set. We needed more daylight to win. Thank God the Lord let Joshua command the sun to stop. Daylight was prolonged, and we won. If you don’t believe me, read Joshua 10: 12.
What didn’t I perceive as I looked up at the sky from ancient Greece and Israel? The missing facts: That the disk that passed overhead was a gigantic sphere of leaping gases; That the much smaller globe I lived on rotated on a tilted axis and was orbiting it. In truth, the ground beneath my feet pitched itself through space at an astonishing rate, but I felt no movement and knew nothing of atmosphere, gravity, or their effects. My eyes and brain told me a story, and I accepted it as true. Without something to give me a different perspective—a telescope, a series of mathematical calculations that revealed shifts in the positions of stars, or a spacecraft that flew me to the moon—I was deceived into thinking that all the relevant facts were already at my disposal and believed that my explanation of them was true. I even put it into words and gave it a name: Holy Scripture.
Truth (If and Only If the Data Supports It)
Words are written or pronounced symbols for concepts or thoughts. Thoughts can relate to an observed rock that cuts my head or an imaginary one that could fall from the sky and kill me. If I say “apple,” and the person facing me speaks English, I am likely to be understood as referring to the fruit most English-speaking people would agree “apple” represents, and I will probably be able to mention the apple pie I intend to make, without being misunderstood. The problem is, words can be used to express any thought—the pie I’ve made, and the pie I haven’t. They can relate to something actually in the external world—the sun—or something that exists only in my imagination—Helios.
Words can therefore fool us. They bring such clarity to the thoughts they symbolize that those thoughts take on reality. As a child, I thought unicorns existed, as did most Westerners until the 1800s. I knew exactly what one was. Their pictures appeared in the books I read. The royal throne of Denmark was said to be made of their horns. The Bible refers to them over and over. If I had been born before the 19th Century, “bearded, single-horned, horse-like creatures called ‘unicorns’ live in the woods, are strong but shy, and can only be tamed by virgins” would have been “true.” But I was born in 1948 and have learned otherwise. What, then, makes something “true” to more than one person? Agreement. People must agree that something is true for it to be regarded as such, and what they agree to can, like unicorns, be complete fiction. When the Bible claims that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” it may be onto something.
“Heaven” and “Asgard” are both words for places gods have been said to dwell. Asgard, home of the gods in pre-Christian Northern Europe, is described in literature as a vast land, full of gold and jewels. It is no longer believed to be god’s home because no one agrees that it is. By contrast, heaven is still thought by most Christians to be where God reigns, but there is one thing “heaven” and “Asgard” have in common: Both symbolize places scientists cannot see or physically locate in space. The “truth” of their existence cannot be corroborated by any amount of enhanced peering, through a telescope or otherwise. Indeed, heaven’s only claim to existence is the agreement of a select group of people that it does, just as Northern Europeans once agreed Asgard did. Should that agreement cease to exist, heaven would also be shuttered, and what was once God’s throne would, like Asgard, become a myth. In cultures without a significant Christian presence, it already is a myth.
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