All three of the young people speak to Jared of growing up and not being childish, moving past stupid fantasies. It is no wonder that the adolescent feels particularly drawn to (and even at times forecloses on) the comprehensive social practice of “science.” Their culturally based developmental goal is to grow up, and the social practice of “science” heralds itself as the mature position. To some adolescents this is particularly intoxicating because the social practice of “science” makes the iconoclastic move against the social practice of faith that brought it into the world in the first place.
It is little wonder, then, that some studies have found that adolescence is a particular time when the tension between faith and science is heavy.[1] But this tension is not between faith and scientific findings and theories, but between social practices. When we recognize “science” as a comprehensive social practice, this felt tension makes all sorts of sense, particularly in adolescence. Not only is the social practice of “science” iconoclastic, but it also appears to provide direct explanations, with useful outputs.
The modern concept of adolescence revolves around explanation and usefulness. Adolescence is a cultural and developmental time when we’re invited to embrace the explanation of things. It is no longer appropriate not to think for yourself; it is time to put away fantasies and be responsible for understanding why things are the way they are.[2] It is indeed a time to grow up.[3] As adolescence has taken this shape through education in technological societies, this move into explanation is supposed to prepare you for some form of usefulness. Adolescence is ultimately a time to prepare to be of use.[4] This perspective has the result of making childhood (and children themselves) useless (an anti-Christian perspective, in my opinion). “To be a child” is an insult meaning you lack or refuse the explanation of things and therefore are useless. In adolescence you are invited to explore the explanations of things so that you might be of benefit to society by growing up to manage people and money, producing advancement and growth for corporation, country, and individual portfolio.
The comprehensive social practice of “science” proclaims itself fit for just such a process of growing up because it most fully embracing empirical explanations for the sake of usefulness. It asserts over and again that once we eliminate the possibility that there is a personal force causing things in the world, we are free to find our own explanations that are of use in our day-to-day lives (we can be free from authorities we don’t choose). We can forget all this childish nonsense about gods, spirits, and transcendence, and grow up, embracing impersonal explanations and concerning ourselves with only technological usefulness. It is little wonder then that the modern adolescent, to the point of caricature, is perceived as obsessed with questions of why and technological gadgets.
So we’re stuck with a chicken-or-egg dilemma. It’s hard to know if the modern concept of adolescence, revolving as it does around explanation and usefulness, comes first, or if the social practice of “science” does.[5] But whether it is the chicken or the egg, it’s clear that modern adolescence and the social practice of “science” fit hand-in-glove. Whether you’re a modern adolescent like Sasha or Martin, or a youth running in the streets of ancient Athens, you nevertheless share a task. All human beings participate in social practices, and all social practices have a telos—they have goals that deliver an ethic (what is right and what is wrong action). And because they do, all social practices (whether ancient or modern) call for integration. To come of age means integrating the telos of your social practice. Your task, whether as an ancient or modern young person, is to integrate your social practice.
The comprehensive social practice of “science” is so captivating to modern adolescents because it promises integration that delivers a feeling—an ethos—of maturity. And this social practice of science is doubly captivating because it spends just as much energy showing how older sibling faith fails over and again at the integration that “science” promises. It repeatedly asserts that believing there is a personal force causing things in the world is both a bad answer for why things are the way they are—like why the sky is blue—and worse, are ultimately useless—God has no power to bring a cab to your door like Uber does. Even if God exists; God is useless. But GPS technology has almost more uses than can be imagined! Historian Peter Harrison says it this way: “It is the utility of science—the fact it yields practical outcomes and useful technologies—that now provides the basis of its ambitious claims to give us access to a true picture of the world. Science is true, we are repeatedly told, because it works.”[6]
Aly, as a young adult, chooses this ethos of maturity because in the end it feels more integrated; it seems to fuse with her work, education, and day-to-day life. Aly believes that to possess this integration is to indeed be mature. It is to have grown up. She recognizes that to integrate your social practice as your own is to be mature. And because we have given over the definition of young people to the modern conception of adolescence, the social practice of “science” will almost always promise an integration that will be interpreted as more mature for youth like Aly, Sasha, and Martin.
But if the goal of the comprehensive social practice of “science” is maturity, what does this mean and how is it perceived as scientific? The operations of scientists (those responsible for findings and theories) most often focus in on one phenomenon, using methods of logic and repetition to make a discovery.[7] Again, as we said above, it is to assume that there are firm contingent laws behind phenomena. When this approach moves from a method into a social practice, it makes the assertion that those who can evacuate all subjective, personal commitments and see things just as they are, are indeed mature.[8] Those who can admit that there are only impersonal laws and structures are mature, and those needing some personal force to cause things are childish.
Charles Taylor writes, “For those who take on [the social-practice of science], the noblest, highest truths must have this general [impersonal] form. Personal interventions, even those of a God, would introduce something arbitrary, some element of subjective desire, into the picture, and the highest truths about reality must be beyond this element.” Taylor continues: “From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth.”[9]
And this ultimate truth, which is only for the mature, is that we are alone. Our own personal minds can hope for no divine mind in which to share. And to seek one is to be a pathetic child. Sasha allows her mind to embrace the scientific findings of the expanse of the universe. These findings make no direct assertion that because the universe is enormous, a personal order is impossible.[10] But the comprehensive social practice that accompanies the scientific findings whispers to Sasha, “Grow up and face the fact that you live in an impersonal order. If there is a God, you must at least be a grownup and not trust this God to do much more than give you individual comfort.”
Martin contemplates the age of the earth and the waves of extinction. There’s nothing in the scientific theories of evolution that exclude a personal order.[11] Evolution as a scientific finding does not eliminate the cause of a personal God—divine action may indeed be found within evolution. But the comprehensive social practice of “science” has no time for this. In fact it laughs at such presumptions, sarcastically howling, “Well, if you’re a little child, too scared to face facts, then fine, you pathetic baby,”[12] adding, “Isn’t it just simpler not to have some divine being directing things? And, see, science is brave enough to always look for the simplest explanations. And it is courageous enough to hold to what it finds. Don’t you want to be like that? Be an adult and integrate your beliefs with your practices.”
So there is little conflict and great possibility for dialogue between scientific findings and faith. As we’ll see, it is important for ministry that we wade into these conversations at some level. If we don’t, then scientific findings are swallowed up by the comprehensive social practice of “science” and its telos of embracing an impersonal order and glorifying naturalism. To minister to Aly and Sasha demands that we engage these conversations.
But to wade into these conversations is to confront the sure conflict with the comprehensive social practice of “science” and its commitment to an impersonal order as being mature. Taylor explains this further: “An important part of the force which drove many people to see science and religion as incompatible, and to opt for the former, comes from this crucial difference in form. In other words, the success of [the social practice of] science built on, and helped to entrench in them, the sense that the Christian religion they were familiar with belonged to an earlier, more primitive or less mature form of understanding.”[13]
The comprehensive social practice of “science” demands that we wade into dialogues between scientific findings and faith—this is the only way to oppose the assertions of the social practice of “science.” It reveals that actually the social practice of “science” is not science at all. Only when we enter into these constructive dialogues with scientific findings can we show that the personal commitment of Israel’s laws and the incarnation of Christ are not primitive fairy tales for the immature. Rather, they echo across the universe, providing an integration that connects our own personal mind with the mind of God. If we can’t (or refuse to) do this, adolescents particularly will be drawn to the impersonal presumption of “science,” because in attacking its elder sibling it has won the crown of maturity, and its iconoclastic banter, the robe of authenticity.
It is the comprehensive social practice of “science” that leads people to believe they must make a choice. Aly feels stupid when she comes back to church on Christmas Eve, a mix of immaturity and a sense of inconsistency. In Baby Brooklyn she planted her flag in the social practice of “science.” She believed that she was opting for science over religion because it was more integrated and therefore mature. But here she was back at church, willing at some level to bear the feeling of stupidity. She can’t admit this to herself, but the feeling of stupidity was less crushing than the heavy cold flatness of the impersonal order under which she now suffers. But nevertheless Aly feels stupid because she is running back to what she assumed was a lesser social practice because she believed it lacked the integration “science” promised. If the universe was indeed impersonal, then she was a stupid child for making believe it wasn’t. She felt embarrassed for running back to personal fairy tales when she was too sad to face the harshness of an impersonal order where those we love are struck sick to death. Aly felt bad because in her own mind she was regressing. She was jumping back into a more immature social practice and worldview (but nevertheless, one that seemed to provide her more hope than “science”).[14]
When “science” moves from findings and theories to a comprehensive social practice, it is just as demanding of loyalty as religion. And the social practice of “science” does this, because it is a learned way of life that claims all other perspectives are wrong—it is a comprehensive system or philosophy of life. Social practices ask for loyalty, “science” as much as faith.
But recognizing this, those of us in the church have too often taken a dangerous and unfortunate misstep, failing to see the distinction between scientific findings and the comprehensive social practice of “science.” And this has had an adverse impact on the likes of Aly. When scientific findings are fused with “science,” it is assumed that you have to choose one or the other. You can either be a person of faith or a person of “science.” But not both.
While most young people are deeply uneasy with this distinction,[15] they nevertheless sense that this is the expectation of the church. It is assumed that if you’re going to be a person of faith, then you have to deny scientific findings like a heliocentric solar system, stem cells, evolutionary adaptation, and string theory. But who can do this and actually live in our world? For instance, it’s often (wrongly) assumed that to be a person of faith you have to deny the finding of evolutionary adaptation. But no one, not even the hard-core creationist, denies that the earth revolves around the sun.[16]
Yet, we should see that this strict either/or is only in place if we allow the findings of science to be swallowed by the comprehensive social practice of “science.” People living the social practice of faith can and must engage scientific findings, even doing scientific theory construction (some are brilliant scientists). As we’ve seen above, very little in scientific findings actually contradicts the core commitment of the social practice of faith, that there is a personal force acting in the universe.
There is no either/or to face, and Aly doesn’t have to feel stupid. People living out the social practice of faith are not inconsistent for engaging scientific findings; if not for the elder sibling of faith, the scientific approach would not have been. It is actually endemic to the social practice of faith itself to engage, wrestle with, and actually construct scientific findings and theories. It was the social practice of Christian faith that pushed Newton to construct his equations and experiments, not to mention others like Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, and Asa Gray.
Taylor argues that one of the reasons the “immature” label sticks to faith, and the comprehensive social practice of “science” wears the crown of maturity, is because many people have experienced nothing but bland and flat religious learning. Taylor explains: “What happens is that people are convinced that there is something more mature, more courageous . . . in the scientific stance. The superiority . . . is heavily influenced by the person’s own sense of his/her own childhood faith, which may well have remained a childish one.”[17] Without the depth of wisdom, and the direction into the many practices that draw us close to God, faith as a social practice can seem infantile and stale.
The caricature that faith is for babies is exactly that, a caricature. Aly can still sense that this social practice of faith has the depth and wisdom she needs. But she must now fight with the whispers that she is immature and stupid for still believing.
Recently, the caricature of faith has expanded, taking on a combative edge. The comprehensive social practice of “science” has ridiculed big brother faith not only for being immature, but for being immoral. These are twin critiques that Aly can’t avoid, and most adolescents directly wrestle with—immaturity and immorality. Adolescence is the culturally imposed development time when the young are asked to seek maturity and take responsibility, learning to judge the moral from the immoral. All social practices, because they provide a way of life, deliver an ethic, a deep sense of what is right and wrong, of what is allowed and what is restricted. “Science” asserts that the social practice of faith cannot be trusted because it is not only immature but also immoral.
If Neil deGrasse Tyson is a high priest and spokesman for the comprehensive social practice of “science,” then Richard Dawkins is its supreme ethicist.[18] Dawkins, an Oxford zoologist and bestselling author, has not only made a strong case for the immaturity of faith, but has bombastically asserted that faith is evil. Dawkins believes the practice of faith is diseased. It is a mental illness that must be eradicated.
This is all just a smear campaign, no different from the commercials during an election year. But after 9/11 Dawkins had his case in point. Those deeply committed to a religious social practice had murdered thousands. And, in what was utterly illogical to the worldview of the comprehensive social practice of “science,” the killers killed themselves as well.
“See,” Dawkins could assert, “religion is a dangerous mental illness. It makes such little sense and drives people so nuts, that they will not only kill others, but also themselves. It is not only immature but dangerously illogical.”
But this alleged murderous impulse of the social practices of faith was indeed a dirty trick of the younger sibling—as devious as Jacob’s switcheroo on Esau. With a little perspective, we can spot how secularized governments, who laud the social practice of “science,” have actually ruthlessly killed more people than any religious government.[19] This is all about perception, and the comprehensive social practice of “science” has done well to coat faith with a brush dripping of the paint of illogical immorality.
And that’s Dawkins’s point! His aim is to show that faith is dangerously illogical. What makes faith an illogical mental illness, in Dawkins’s mind, is that next to “science,” it refuses to flatten all of reality to temporary puzzles, and recognizes—even delightfully embraces—mysteries.[20] The social practice of “science” in its drive toward progress, “recognizes no mysteries, only temporary puzzles”[21] that sooner or later will be solved. Because the world is impersonal and there is no mind behind it, everything is an object, and an object (absent personal mind) is only a puzzle that can be cracked.[22] This is pushed so far that it is assumed that one day we will unlock the very puzzle of love, mercy, and self-sacrifice. But, every attempt to do so seems oddly cold and reductive,[23] because it lacks the mysterious spirit of the personal—a personal order.
“But, still,” High Priest Dawkins and his followers herald, “it is immorally illogical.” And to make this case, the priests of the comprehensive social practice of “science” point to theodicy (why God would allow bad things to happen). Matt Dillahunty from The Atheist Experience even goes so far as to say, “I’m more moral than God, because I’d never allow a three-year-old to suffer and die.” Theodicy becomes the unbreakable puzzle that proves that there is no personal order causing anything in the world.[24] It is illogical to believe that there is a loving and powerful person causing things in the universe. This person, the puzzle goes, would then allow children to get cancer and earthquakes to crush villages.
As long as human beings have existed, we’ve been assailed with questions of theodicy. Job wonders why he was struck with such afflictions. But only recently (really, since the eighteenth century) have these kinds of questions been seen as puzzles that need a solution. As a matter of fact, it has been only recently that we have given these kinds of questions the name “theodicy.”[25] Only since the comprehensive social practice of “science” has given us an impersonal universe without the mystery of a personal mind, has theodicy been used against faith.[26]
But in many ways, to play the theodicy game is to play by rules that promise that faith will be mocked. The rules of the theodicy game presume that everything is a solvable puzzle and mysteries are nothing more than hidden contingencies yet to be discovered. For instance, we recognize that there are particles that make existence possible. And we’ve discovered some of them. But all the dots are far from connected. What these particles are and how they function are mysteries. But when we say “mystery,” most often we mean the part of the puzzle yet to be disclosed. Right now, we’re not sure what these particles are, but soon, or someday, we’ll crack this code and solve the particle puzzle. Mystery is redefined as just the occurrence of temporarily unknown variables. But this is to radically redefine mystery, and to do so in a distinctly impersonal tone.
Mystery is the unimaginable depths of reality itself. Mystery is the confession that there are events, occurrences, and happenings in the universe that cannot be captured by the human mind, and yet these things encounter us. Mystery is to be encountered by the deepest experiences of being that cannot be explained. Not simply because they are challenging riddles, but because they are a form of being above or beyond any form of human logical understanding or technological knowhow.
When the comprehensive practice of “science” heralds a need for answers on the playing field of theodicy, the game is rigged. It asks faith to concede that reality is nothing more than impersonal material puzzles that can be cracked—so if God is all-powerful, and providence is real, and yet God is not able to keep babies from getting cancer (and even was stupid enough to create cancer in the first place) then how could there be a God? And if there were such a God, he would be an immoral bastard! The difference between what is and what ought to be seems such a complicated and impossible puzzle to solve that it can only lead to one logical conclusion: there is no God, and anyone who claims there is, is a stupid child, too ignorant or brain-dead to solve the simplest puzzle. They are so brain-dead, Dawkins would assert, that they are a risk to us all.[27]
We can’t trust people of faith, because they refuse to flatten everything into an impersonal, material puzzle. And without making everything an impersonal puzzle, some things in the universe will escape logic and usefulness. The comprehensive social practice of “science” has tricked us into conceding that reality is impersonal and what is ethical or trustworthy is what is rationally logical and ultimately useful. The arrival of theodicy historically comes with the new societal wave of technological pursuit. Technological breakthroughs, bound to the social practice of “science,” are really little more than deeply sophisticated puzzle solving.
After Steve Jobs’s biography came out, it was common to see blogs and articles relaying an anecdote: a junior high Jobs takes a TimeMagazine with a cover photo of a starving children to his Lutheran pastor. Jobs, the budding technologist, asks his pastor, “Why would God allow these children to starve?” According to Jobs, the pastor had no good answer. Jobs never again entered a church. The blogs and articles push us to have better answers for young people like Jobs or they too, like the famous and talented Apple founder, will leave the church and never return.
This is too superficial. Young Jobs came to the pastor with a puzzle. He demanded that the pastor solve the puzzle. When the pastor couldn’t, not necessarily because he lacked the skill but because the question itself evacuated the mystery of a personal order, Jobs left. It could be interpreted that what disgusted Jobs was that the pastor and the church believed that suffering had no usefulness, that there was no puzzle to be solved. Rather, the only thing suffering, joy, beauty, and pain reveal is that indeed we are persons, seeking to connect with and love each other. But next to a modern impulse to fix and solve (and, as we would find out, the young Jobs would grow to have an insatiable drive to solve puzzles, so insatiable that he justified intimidation, fear-mongering, and rageful attacks), the pastor’s response seemed stupid and childish. But, even more, it seemed immoral and useless.
Jobs’s pastor crosses a line that pushes him ethically out of bounds to the comprehensive social practice of “science.” Dawkins can see such people as dangerous and evil because they refuse to see the universe as only an impersonal puzzle. They are willing to embrace the mystery of beauty, suffering, love, mercy, and even pain. Those of us who hold to the mystery of the personal claim that such realities are the tissue of personhood that continue to echo in the universe, calling us to seek connection with each other. Sometimes our actions bring us together with others for no usefulness other than joy, love, and sharing.
The reason we suffer is a perplexing mystery, and we, like ancient Job, have no answer for the puzzle before us. But what we do have is a deeper experience that “science” keeps disparaging and minimizing. We have an experience of the very personhood of God coming to our brokenness, giving us, not answers to riddles, but the mystery of communion, love, and mercy. We may have no answers, and this makes little brother irate. But what we do have is a mystery of friendship. We claim encounter with a personal force that reminds us again and again that although the universe is massive and we are but dust, we are persons, and there is a personal being seeking to encounter us. This echoes out across the mass of time and space in a soft but sure experience of the mystery of our own personhood.
And while Dawkins may call this crazy, he is only partly right. It opposes the comprehensive social practice of “science” that lives from its own normative commitments to an impersonal universe, but there is nothing in scientific findings or theories that oppose faith’s experience of the personal—and young people in our ministries need to see this.
In making this point, we shouldn’t be naïve. Even the methods used for scientific findings attend to material realities, and most often engage a particular phenomenon as a puzzle. Most often they seek some form of progress (like an advance in the theory of quantum mechanics or a new medical vaccine). But where little brother is a trickster, is in taking this method and making it constitute the whole of reality.
Scientific findings and theory construction start with material or human realities, but the comprehensive social practice of “science” turns this into materialism.[28] Scientific findings attend to the natural world, but the social practice of “science” turns this into naturalism,[29] indeed into a new material religion.[30] The comprehensive social practice of “science” takes a method of discovery and twists it into a metaphysic (an underlying philosophy of existence). And when it becomes a metaphysic (opposing the personal order), it can belittle other social practices, like calling faith immature and immoral.[31]
This shows that there is a true tension between the comprehensive social practice of “science” and the social practice of faith. But this tension doesn’t eliminate the social practice of faith engaging (and even constructing its own) scientific findings and theories.[32] As Barbour writes, “Theism, in short, is not inherently in conflict with science, but it does conflict with a metaphysics of materialism.”[33] Actually, as we’ll see, it is the shape of the social practice of faith that births the very method of scientific findings and theory construction in the first place.