Abstract
In this essay I argue that the perceived conflict between religion and science arises from a mistaken, reductive notion of ultimate truth as mere propositional correctness, the result of lingering metaphysical dualism (the idea of an unchanging realm gives reality to what-is). Drawing on Aristotle, Heidegger, and Ricœur, I contend that truth is better understood as the “event of ongoing disclosure” (fundamental truth) rather than a fixed object to be mastered in an exhaustive propositional representation of that truth. The latter is necessary to human life but poses a grave danger in that it tends toward becoming the only mode through which we understand the disclosure of what-is. Further, I argue that the language of religion is that of practical wisdom, of “know-how” for faithful living through interpretation, narrative, and continual rereading—that, rather than a language that aims at correct propositional representation, makes human life and values continue to be possible. From this perspective, scientific and religious languages are incommensurable but non-competing responses to the same reality. Science discloses truth through explanation and control, while scripture reveals truth as divine disclosure, wisdom. Scripture offers a viable alternative to technological domination without opposing scientific truth.
Introduction
Many Christians and other believers have little to no difficulty reconciling their religious beliefs and practices with current scientific explanations of the things and events in the world. Yet a significant number do have trouble. For some the biblical story of Creation is impossible to accommodate to the scientific teachings about evolution. Many religious people disagree with science about the nature of human consciousness: For them it is a divinely endowed spirit, not an emergent property in the evolution of the brain. But the tension between those who are religious and scientists isn’t only in the province of so-called conservative believers. Perhaps the tension that looms largest, though most often only lurking in the background, is that of change. Since the early twentieth century, physicists have argued that there is no objective basis for the reality of becoming.1 But Christian salvation requires that it must be possible for the old person to become the new, for the old world to become new. (See, for example, John 3:3–5.) If there is no change, no becoming, then those distinctions are unreal and Zion, to say nothing of salvation, is meaningless.
In my experience, when Latter-day Saints think about these tensions, they often rely on Joseph Smith’s teaching about spirit and matter to avoid them. He taught: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131:7). Assuming that the word material in the verse refers to material in its not-well-defined ordinary sense rather than a theoretical sense, the verse tells us that even some things that we assume to be immaterial, such as spirit, are material. But we cannot overlook the fact that describing the material of spirits as “more fine or pure” leaves us in the dark as to how to think about it. As well, contrary to what many Latter-day Saints assume, unless the only two categories of what-is are matter and the undefined category of spirit, the revelation does not tell us that everything is material. For example, it doesn’t say that concepts are material.2 So, contrary to what some Latter-day Saints, including me, have believed, the verse does not offer strong evidence for resisting traditional dualisms that divide what-is into two distinct metaphysical realms, spirit and nature.
I suspect that my overinterpretation of Smith’s words are the result of having been influenced by a philosophical and theological movement that began at least in the late nineteenth century and continues today—the rejection of metaphysical dualism. For metaphysical dualists, there are two realms of what-is: the realm of human experience, which is a realm of change, and the unchanging realm of things that give our experience reality. In Christian terms, these are often thought of as the world and the body, on one hand, and God or the realm of God on the other. Though I can no longer cite Doctrine and Covenants 131 to support my rejection of that kind of dualism, I reject it nonetheless. An account of why will turn out also to be an account of why religious language and scientific language are incommensurable with each other and not in tension.
Perhaps the most obvious origin of the rejection of contemporary metaphysical dualism (a rejection agreed with by not only non-believers, but also by believers) is to be found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. He argued that though the Christian philosophical foundation of Western culture had served it well, that foundation had crumbled:
Through Christianity, Western culture had built a metaphysical structure to hide its lack of foundation: Together, the world of the impassible and never-changing god (adopted from Greek philosophy) and the human world that mirrored the static god served as the grounds for explaining the world and human life.3
That two-world structure served us well for most of two millennia, but by the late nineteenth century, the supposed interrelation of the divine and human realms no longer functioned to serve Western culture well, and nothing had taken its place. Life and the world had come to be, literally, absurd: off-key, deaf to lived, truth-full human life.
In other words, over time the metaphysical structure on which Western culture was built had corroded to meaninglessness even though most people either did not see or ignored that meaninglessness. They continued on pretending that nothing had changed, though the decay of society said otherwise.
Obviously, not everyone—if many at all—agreed with Nietzsche during his lifetime. Few saw the West as in decay or in crisis because what they assumed to be God and his realm no longer structured what-is. Most denied that crisis, or “the death of God,”4 which meant the inability of the god of metaphysics to be the foundation for human life. For many, especially the more-educated, science purported to fill the gap left open by that loss, yet in spite of itself, contributed to the gap’s widening. That attempted replacement for the metaphysical god created the tensions we still see between the languages of science and religion.5 Nietzsche’s argument had little effect until the middle of the twentieth century, when many European philosophers began to respond to his thinking, among them Martin Heidegger (though Heidegger’s response to Nietzsche mostly came after the publication of his major work, Being and Time.)
My purpose in this essay is to argue that Latter-day Saint teaching gives us a response to Nietzsche’s critique, a response in which we acknowledge the critique as valid but offer a religious and non-dualistic understanding of our accounts of what-is that avoids his critique. Doctrine and Covenants 131 at least weakly implies that is possible. Properly understood, such an alternative understanding makes it possible to undo the tensions between the languages of religion and science: They are not rival accounts of what-is (including human being), but equally valid responses (among other equally valid responses) to what-is. Each offers a way of speaking truthfully about an under-determined what-is.
