Science and Faith

Lately, as displacement activity from thesis writing, I've been reading an autobiography of a great physicist and acoustician, Gabriel Weinreich, whom I first read and heard of when I referenced his papers. Very very brilliant chap.

In his book "Confessions of a Jewish Priest" (2005, Pilgrim Press, Cleveland), Gabriel Weinreich relates his life and childhood growing up in a proud secular Jewish and academic family (his father and brother were famous linguists) in Vilna, found a love of music, later fleeing to the US as a refugee of the Holocaust, becoming a physicist and later master acoustician, and in the course of things, attended church, became an Anglican priest, and finally found God.

In the book, he muses and explains how he comes to grips with Christ, in light of his Jewish but atheistic heritage, as well as his scientific heritage. Strangely resonant. Straddling seemingly very opposed worlds, he offers me a glimpse, a basis for which I may verbalize my own questions, faith and doubts.

Here is an excerpt from pg 111:

"Rather than being a game of solitaire, [physics] is a game played against Nature as your opponent: you make a move, then Nature makes a move. Thus the physicist is always trying to outwit an opponent who is infinitely more clever, a task that would be hopeless were it not for one thing: Nature does not cheat, but deigns to play the game in a manner accessible to human beings. So, for example, the laws of motion predict that a free falling projectile fired directly at a freely falling object will hit that object, and a satellite launched according to the same intricately computed laws will land on Mars, and these things actually happen. The physicist's conviction that nature does not cheat, and that if the satellite doesn't get to Mars it is due to a mistake in the physicist's own calculation that is findable, amounts to a deep faith in what can only be labeled a miracle.

...First of all, the entity that I then playfully personified as "Nature" has become much more real to me, having slowly acquired the name "God". Second, I have come to see the relationship embodied in physics research as a basic prototype of how human beings deal with God. It is, after all, true (or so I believe) that God is omnipotent; but if that were the whole story, human life would be nothing but a torrent of wild rapids in which we are caught: we may come out of a particular turn alive, or have our heads smashed on the rocks at God's whim, but our own exertions would, in the face of such power, remain pointless (except, perhaps, as attempts to grovel slavishly for God's favor).

I see the actual situation as very different, it is due to the supreme miracle (some call it "covenant") that God does not cheat: there are, indeed, rules, but God, too, abides by them. Thus assumed obligation is not, however, to be seen as an abridgment of divine power: like a loving parent, God may sometimes, under exceptional circumstances, temporarily modify the rules, but always so as to help us learn and grow, not to inject confusion into our attempts to do our part in the covenant.

As to the human urge to question, to imagine, and to comprehend, I now see it as itself part of God's image in which we were created, which prompts us to treat the universe as though we were co-owners of it. The difference between God and us, however, is that we have limitations on what we can comprehend, imagine, and question, whereas God does not. These limitations are, by definition, the boundaries of Science: comprehending the humanly comprehensible, imagining the humanly imaginable, and questioning the humanly questionable is what science is about."

Later in page 153:

"True faith, rather than resulting from being told what one must believe, comes fundamentally from the definition of the word "faith" - "an acknowledgment of the part of the universe that we don't understand" - together with a notion that at the far edge of the part of the universe we don't understand there exists a being that does understand it - for whom, in other words, the whole universe is not only comprehensible but comprehended. We refer to that being as "God"; in other words, the faith of the believer - as perceived by the believer - does not arise internally but comes as a gift of God.

The same logic applies in miracles. I clearly recall an item the Ann Arbor News carried about fifteen years ago about a junior high school biology teacher who allegedly told her class that the virgin birth is a biological impossibility. Quite a fuss was raised over this, and (if I am right in my recollection) the father of one of the students even went so far as to bring suit against the Board of Education, claiming that his daughter's freedom of religion - meaning her freedom to believe in the virgin birth, which is what she was taught at home - was being attacked. "Well, Gabi," one of my parishioners asked me at the time, "what do you think? Is the virgin birth a biological impossibility?" "Of course it is," I replied without hesitation, "otherwise it would not be a miracle."

After all, the word "miracle" already signifies that the event in question violates the law of science, but (as we discussed in an earlier chapter) the laws of science are not capable of ruling out an isolated unique occurrence. In other words, saying that it is a miracle does not preclude it from having happened, and our Ann Arbor girl's freedom to believe in it is not affected in the least. Looking at it this way: if God legislated the laws of science in the first place, there is no reason in the world why God cannot break them on a whim. But the real question, to a thinking person, is not whether God can but whether God does; why, in other words, would an omnipotent, omniscient God create laws of science that would later need to be broken?

Indeed, no such reason can be imagined unless it is the breaking itself that is the point, in the sense that by suspending the laws of science God is trying to tell us something. Thus the validity of a miracle, too, depends on the perceived presence of an accompanying message. Of course, perceiving the presence of a message does not necessarily imply a clear understanding of its content; the miracle of Jesus' resurrection, for example, has been acknowledged by Christians since the beginning of Christianity to carry a message of enormous significance, but opinions have differed markedly on what that significance might be. (Some Christians, in fact, will freely acknowledge that they are still searching.)

... Yet as I grew older, and as the expereinces in my own life became more complex and began to involve other people in a more profound way (becoming a parent was an important example), I more and more began to feel that the part of the universe that could be logically comprehended was steadily becoming too small for me. Indeed science, which we defined at the beginning of the chapter as knowledge of the part of the universe that we understand, furnishes a great deal of comprehension but little room for choice; we can perhaps choose the topic of our research but certainly not what its results will be. There is no question, however, that making choices, especially in situations of great complexity, is one of the most fundamental of human urges and desires; and faith, being a simple acknowledgment of the part of the universe that we don't understand, provides us with an arena where there are many choices to be made, or in the which (to use the Greek word) God's great gift of heresy ['hairesis' i.e. choice] can be freely exercised."