Recently I read an online news story about a scientist objecting to the Vatican’s process of declaring someone a saint. He stated that the alleged miraculous cures used to prove sanctity could, sometime in the future if not now, be shown to be naturally effected. It reminded me of the never-ending argument about evolution. One side refuses to admit the acceptability of the other’s source of information.
Putting aside the motives of the scientist trying to debunk a religious process several centuries old, one has to ask whether the scientist isn’t guilty of going outside his field of competence by declaring that the only acceptable source of information is observation of the physical world, the way the scientific method insists, for reliable scientific conclusions. He would object if someone from religion were to go outside his or her field and state, for instance, that the earth is the center of the universe, when Copernicus and Galileo both convincingly determined we live in a heliocentric world. Does the scientist rely on detectives or investigative reporters to affirm that his wife loves him and is faithful to him? I bet he trusts until trust has been betrayed and would in fact scoff at the idea that fidelity be scientifically proven.
Another source of information besides observation is faith, accepting divine revelation that is not observable the way orbits of planets are observable, but is believable because of the experienced trustworthiness of the Revealer. To the believer, both sources are reliable without conflict even if they originate differently. A believer can and should place “faith” in established scientific conclusions that have withstood the testing and probing that science requires. (We believers have not always done this well, hamstrung by faulty fundamentalism, the excessively literal misreading of the Bible.)
Faulty fundamentalism is the reading of Genesis as though it were a scientific series of affirmations about the physical world instead of a religiously motivated claim that the God of Israel created the world, and in a very orderly way. The author of Genesis had no clue let alone interest in scientifically laying out how the world came to be. The scientist is much better equipped to do this. Genesis is intent on stating that God made the world. Science is intent on stating how the world came to be.
For reasons I do not understand, it comes as a surprise to such skeptical scientists that there is a parallel physical science just like their own, governing the correct reading of texts, any texts. If internal evidence shows that the purpose of a text is to urge the accepting faith of the reader, that is the only way the text can be read. If the evidence instead shows that the purpose of a text is to convey how a scientific physical process took place, that is the only way it can be read.
But because we religionists went at each others’ throats five centuries ago about biblical affirmations, many of us – Catholics and Protestants – came away thinking that the safest way of reading a scriptural text is literally, as though that would remove any chance of error. In theory, it seemed right. If we stuck to the text instead of embellishing and elaborating on it and reading meanings into it unintended by the author, we would discern the author’s intent, since the author is the final authority – pun intended – on a text’s meaning.
Yet because some thought it would be unseemly and beneath God’s dignity to affirm that God could reveal to us great truths by means of non-historical stories, the two sometimes conflicting creation accounts in the opening pages of Genesis were misinterpreted as factual narratives instead of as claims of God’s work. You would think they had never read any of the parables of Jesus.
Consider that Jesus, a devout Jew thoroughly familiar with Genesis and all the Hebrew Scriptures, did as the Bible writers before him: teach truths to fellow adults using the common teaching methods of the day, allegorically. We do it all the time without embarrassment. The point of affirmation of the Santa Claus parable is that good children are rewarded and bad children punished. Anyone want to submit that parable to scientific scrutiny? This is not to say that all the Scriptures are “only” allegory. Whole books are historical narratives.
When pre-Christian Rome was at war with north Africa’s Carthage, Cato the Elder ended every speech he gave in the Roman senate, whatever its topic, with, “Because these things are so, Carthage must be destroyed.” Until it happens, I would like to similarly conclude each column with: Because these things are so, the Second Amendment must be repealed.