Last week, in a Wall Street Journal article, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss defended the view, shared by the atheists Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, that belief in an “activist god” is simply incompatible with modern science.  He cited the evolutionary biologist J.B. S. Haldane to the effect that science is, by necessity, an “atheistic discipline,” since it is coherent only on the assumption that no “god, angel, or devil will interfere with one’s experiments.”  Krauss pulls back a bit from this, specifying that the sciences might be compatible with “a vague idea of some relaxed deity” who doesn’t intervene in the workings of the cosmos, but he quite agrees with Harris, Haldane and others that modern rationality is irreconcilable with “iron age convictions” about a fussily active god.  Well.

I wonder whether scientists who engage in this kind of discourse have any idea how ill-informed they are in regard to the subtleties of religious language?  I wonder how many of them have consulted the intricate analyses of the varying modes of creaturely and divine causality offered by, among many others, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Augustine, and John Henry Newman?  Even a cursory glance at those discussions would reveal that the dilemmas which Krauss and his colleagues point out are the result of fundamental misunderstandings at the metaphysical level, misconstruals of the nature of God and of God’s relationship with the world.

A first clarification is this:  God, in classical Christian theology, should never be understood as one being among many, even the supreme being.  He is not, as theologian David Burrell put it, “the biggest thing around.”  God is not the most impressive instance of the genus “existence,” taking his place alongside of planets, stars, animals, us, and all other existing things.  Rather, God is, as Aquinas neatly put it, ipsum esse subsistens (the sheer act of to-be itself).  God is that unique reality in which existence and essence coincide, which is a fancy way of saying that God is not a type of being, but the very energy of existence itself.  This way of talking about God has its roots, biblically, in the third chapter of the book of Exodus.  When Moses asks the Lord “what is your name?” God responds, “I am who I am.”  In posing his question, Moses was inquiring after God’s identifying marks, the specificity of his manner of being, that which would set him apart from all other existents.   But God’s answer undermines the question.  Mind you, this view is to be distinguished sharply from all forms of pantheism, which simply identify nature and God.  God is not the world, since “the world” simply designates the sum total of finite things; rather, God is the power that creates the world from nothing, sustaining it in existence from moment to moment, remaining intimately present to the whole of it but never becoming an item within it or alongside of it.

Once we get clarity in regard to God’s manner of being, we can speak more coherently about the way God relates to worldly causes.  Pace Krauss, Harris, Haldane et alia, the creator of the universe is not one of the particular causes that, along with other agents, produces events and phenomena.  Let me give a few homey examples.  If one were to ask “what made that cherry pie?” a perfectly valid answer would be “cherries, salt, sugar, flour, water, the heat of the oven, the skill of the baker, etc.”  One would never be tempted to respond to that question (presuming that one believes in God) with “cherries, salt, sugar, God, flour, water, the heat of the oven, etc.”  Or if one were to search out the causes of a rainy day, one would point to the air temperature, the influence of the jet stream, moisture coming from the Gulf of Mexico, etc., but one would never point to God as one of the causes alongside of those others.  God is instead the reason why there is something rather than nothing.  Precisely as sustaining creator of the whole, God is why there are cherries, water, salt, the heat of the oven, the Gulf of Mexico and the Jet Stream at all.

I should like to indicate two great implications of this theology for the question at hand.  First, authentic religion poses no obstactle whatsoever to the explorations and investigations of nature undertaken by the physical sciences.  As the sciences enumerate the various finite causes responsible for a given phenomenon, they should never worry that they have given insufficient attention to God’s contribution to the causal nexus, for God is not one more item in the causal nexus.  And second, when God acts in the world (as the Bible clearly says he does), he never acts otherwise than as the creator of the whole universe, which is to say, he never acts competitively with creatures, as though he was endeavoring to push them aside or interfere with them.  Notice how exquisitively sensitive the Biblical authors are to this dynamic.   Over and again, they stress how God acts in and through ordinary political, cultural, psychological, and natural causes, accomplishing his purposes without fussily “intervening” in the affairs of the world.

I believe that a great deal of progress might be made in the “religion and science” debate if scientists stopped assuming that religion is some naive and superstitious way of talking about worldly causes—if they would stop, in a word, treating religion as primitive science.

Fr. Barron is the Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture at Mundelein Seminary in Mundelin, Illinois.  Read more from Fr. Barron at Word on Fire Ministries

image Murgas Wireless Telegraph Station at Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania developed by Fr. Josef Murga, a radio pioneer.