I have responded to this literalist mentality by insisting that searching for scientific truths in any ancient, prescientific, or classical text, religious or otherwise, is an anachronism that transcends mere silliness. And yet, such silliness is almost the norm in contemporary scientific skepticism. The problem is that literalism, whether by atheists or creationists, is a way of avoiding a genuine encounter with deeply hidden meanings—not only in religious texts but also in the story of the universe. Literalism, I have argued, protects the religious fundamentalist from hearing the word of God on the one hand and gives the New Atheists a pretext for mocking ancient religious writings because of their failure to satisfy contemporary scientific criteria of meaning and truth on the other.
Much of my writing is an attempt to articulate an alternative to literalist readings of both religious texts and the new cosmic story. In the writings collected here, I take for granted that theology and science are distinct but compatible ways of understanding and knowing. They cannot contradict each other because they both seek understanding and truth from within formally distinct horizons of inquiry. These horizons do not overlap, so they cannot meaningfully compete or conflict with each other. This is because the kind of evidence, the quality of understanding, and the type of confirmation operative in one horizon of inquiry is not identical with what passes as evidence, understanding, and confirmation in the other.
I am using the term “horizon” metaphorically. Visually speaking—and here I am following the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan—a “horizon” is the field of all the things we can see from a specific point of view.12 By analogy, a “horizon of inquiry” refers to what can be understood and known by way of a determinate method of understanding and knowing. Accordingly, since the horizon of inquiry characteristic of the natural sciences is distinct from that of theology, there can be no genuine conflict between them. This is such an obvious point, it seems to me, and yet countless contemporary scientists and philosophers claim, unreasonably and without the scientific justification they demand elsewhere, that science alone is epistemologically reliable, and hence that science and theology are irreconcilable ways of reading the world.
To arrive at this verdict, of course, they first make the false assumption that theology is supposed to look at the world—or read the cosmic story—from within the same horizon of inquiry as the natural sciences. Stuffing ancient religious literature by force into the modern scientific horizon of inquiry, they conclude that it no longer deserves our attention. Ancient religious ways of understanding, they agree, fail to base themselves on the kind of empirical evidence that modern science requires, so they can never again be taken seriously. In The God Delusion, for example, Richard Dawkins rejects what he calls the “God hypothesis” because it cannot compete with or survive our scientific ways of understanding the natural world. For Dawkins (who is far from being alone among contemporary skeptics), it is only within the territory proper to scientific investigation that the idea of “God” can rightly be examined. In his belief system, the only reliable way to arrive at the true understanding of essentially anything is to follow scientific inquiry. I say “belief” because his dismissal of other horizons is not something he can back up by way of scientific experimentation. Dawkins is a true believer and not a scientist, inasmuch as he decrees that only one legitimate horizon of inquiry exists. Today, scientific skepticism in general is not the result of following the scientific method but rather of gratuitously assuming that the horizon of scientific inquiry is the only epistemologically permissible way to see, understand, and know anything whatsoever.
Science and a Personal God
The question arises, however, as to how and why an educated religious person in the age of science could still believe in a personal, caring, interested God. I appreciate the question, but my response to it has been consistent throughout my academic life. Science is not equipped to confirm or deny the existence of a personal God, but the idea of a personal God is completely consonant with what we now know from science. In backing up this point, once again I admit my indebtedness to Teilhard.
Evolution is a process of becoming more, of giving rise to fuller being over the course of time. But at each stage of evolution, the world can become more only by organizing itself around successively new and higher centers. Teilhard called this recurrent cosmic trend “centration.” Centration occurred very early in cosmic history when subatomic elements organized themselves around an atomic nucleus. Centration happened later when large molecules clustered around nuclear DNA in the eukaryotic cell, still later when the “central” nervous system took shape in vertebrate evolution, and yet again when social insects gathered around a fertile queen.
At present, the latest dominant units in evolution are human persons, but they can only be brought together socially into higher organic syntheses if their unifying centers are at least personal. We human persons cannot be fully alive or fully moved to “become more” by clustering around anything that lacks subjectivity, freedom, and responsiveness or that fails to acknowledge our own free personhood. As both Teilhard and theologian Paul Tillich agree, human persons, at the center of their being, cannot be fully attracted to or challenged by anything that is less than personal. Consequently, that which is most real—God, if you will—must at least be personal. To be fully real and deeply attractive to persons, the centering reality must be a “Thou” and not an “It.”
Like Teilhard, I cannot make sense of what goes on in the cosmic drama apart from taking, in faith, the reality of an attracting, transcendent, promising, and personal Center to which the universe is awakening. And if, as Christian faith affirms, this Center has entered intimately and irreversibly into the struggle and suffering of life, to me it is not merely interesting but worthy of worship. At the same time, however, I believe with both Tillich and Teilhard that our ideas of God must always be presented not just as personal but also as suprapersonal (to use Tillich’s term). This means, today, at the very least, in order to merit a religious surrender on our part, God must be thought of as infinitely larger than the immense universe of modern science. An anthropomorphic, one-planet deity is no longer enough.
I believe that modern scientific skepticism’s disillusionment with the idea of a personal God is partly due to the fact that our theologies have made God seem too small for the minds and souls of scientifically educated people. The God of evolution and contemporary cosmology, therefore, must be thought of as continually creating the world not by pushing things forward from the past, but by drawing the world in all its wonders towards a new future ahead. This means that the entire process of cosmic creativity finds its destiny only in an unimaginably wide and redemptive compassion transcending the world. Because of the infinitely resourceful being and compassion characteristic of what theology calls God, even if the physical world will eventually “die” of energy exhaustion, as astrophysicists predict, nothing in the cosmic story needs to be thought of as ever lost or forgotten, as Whitehead also suggests. Today, theology needs to emphasize that the entire cosmic story—and not just the human soul—is saved and redeemed forever in the everlasting life and love of God.
Finally, like Teilhard, I do not want to exempt my own faith tradition from undergoing the disturbing phase transitions that occur in other evolving systems. In 1933, Teilhard wrote: “I believe Christianity to be immortal. But this immortality of our faith does not prevent it from being subject (even as it rises above them) to the general laws of periodicity which govern all life. I recognize, accordingly, that at the present moment Christianity (exactly like the mankind it embraces) is reaching the end of one of the natural cycles of its existence.” This is “an indication that the time for renewal is close at hand.”13
It is this call for renewal that has energized my own theological life and work. I realize that, for many Christians (perhaps even the majority), a prescientific understanding of the cosmos as static and immobile is the only legitimate framework for theological reflection. At the same time, scientific skeptics are uncomfortable with Christian theologies that fail to acknowledge the depth and expansiveness of the new scientific understanding of the