INSIDE america

Science, Reason, and Faith:
Three Accounts
Knowledge of the Mystery can be sought after from different angles, but for the Christian, “the ultimate meaning of creation is based on the experience of a personal encounter and relationship with Christ”

Consider the following mental experiment. There are three rooms. Room A is occupied by a man totally wired with instruments that read and transmit computer images of every area of his body. There is a large television screen in which he is seeing a live image of his wife. She is thousands of miles away, and they have not seen or spoken with each other in a long time. In Room B, scientists and technicians read the transmitted data. They cannot see him directly, or hear what he says. They do not know that he is seeing and speaking with his wife. Room C is occupied by an observer who hears only what the man says but cannot see him or his wife. At the end of a three-minute conversation between the man and his wife, the three rooms are disconnected and the man in Room A, the scientists in Room B, and the observer in Room C must write an account of what happened.
The account of the scientists is probably a very thick report, detailing the physical processes measured by their instruments: heartbeat, brain waves, variations in temperature and pressure, plus the kinds of things that computer generated images reveal. The observer in Room C reports that a man was talking with someone whom he loved a lot, about whom he was thinking all the time, with whom he had shared many intimate moments, etc. The man in Room A will say that he was speaking with Cynthia his wife back home about the joy of coming back to her soon, about how much he missed her and loved her, how so many things reminded him of particular experiences they had shared, etc.
These three accounts, three “narratives” of the same event, are not in contradiction. The three of them are correct, and they complement each other. Still, it is obvious that the account of the scientists cannot grasp the full personal meaning of what happened, nor can it reveal what exactly the man in Room A was doing, that he was talking to a live TV image of his wife, that his wife was named Cynthia, that they had been married x years, that they liked to hike in the mountains, etc. The scope or horizon of their knowledge was limited to what their instruments could measure. The observer in Room C knows much more than the scientists about what was “really” happening. Still, his knowledge was also limited. He didn’t know what Cynthia looked like, what she said, or how she was reacting to what was said. The man in Room A may not know what the scientists knew, but he had the “fullest” knowledge of the situation, since he knew Cynthia from the perspective of the experience of her love for him.
Creation is an event. It is the revelation of a “rationality,” a “meaning” that is also a personal word, a Logos addressed to us by a Mystery that we recognize as a “You.” Science can study nature and discover many interesting, useful, and important facts about its behavior, but the limitations of its methodology do not allow it to grasp the “meaning” of what happens. A non-scientist rational person, however, is like the man in Room C. A rational person can recognize that there is a “meaning,” a rationality, a Logos involved in creation, an intelligent design that the scientific methodology cannot grasp. The affirmation of the reality of this intelligent design is certainly reasonable. It is not simply based on feelings, or prejudices, private knowledge, etc. It is based on evidence, as real as that of the scientists. It is another kind of evidence, but still evidence based on the experience of listening to what the man in Room A said, the way he said it, etc., and comparing it to his own experience of human love. There is a third account, the account of faith. Faith is the recognition of the presence of Christ as the consistency, the Logos of all that exists. The account of faith is rational, but goes beyond what reason itself can grasp. The person of faith is like the man in Room A, in a relationship based on love. For the Christian, the ultimate meaning of creation is based on the experience of a personal encounter and relationship with Christ, who is the true “center of history and the cosmos.”