A FIRST STAB AT RELIGION AND SCIENCE
A. Kissel 1/98

I was brought up without any significant religious training, but I always had a superstitious belief in God. Primarily I believed that careful, skeptical rationality was all that was needed for life. But when I finally investigated my vague belief in God and followed it (as well as I could) to its logical ends, I became a Christian. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling showed me how such faith could exist simultaneously with reason but not in conflict with reason.

I consider myself very religious. A general definition of religion might be a dedication to something transcendental and probably also a dedication to one or more transcendental principles. Even more broadly, any belief about the way the world is or how things happen in the world, may be termed religious. But as a Christian, the strict definition of "religious" as believing in God and acting upon that belief, also applies to me. I regularly attend LaSalle Street Church (Protestant) in downtown Chicago.

I strongly believe that science helps us to understand important things about the way the world is and how things happen in the world, but that human science can only show the location of a faith-sized space into which it cannot penetrate, but which human rationality can understand if given help from within that space. In this sense "reason" alone is impoverished until "revelation" enriches it. Each individual must decide how to believe the world is and how to act within the world, and yet every individual is doomed to know only the smallest fragment of scientific knowledge. Can any but a Ph.D. keep up even in his own specialized subfield? But I do what I can, particularly in biochemistry and astronomy. (This year I'm living with a famous Drosophilist who was educated as a Jesuit. That must count for something.)

Scientific knowledge also helps make religious beliefs deeper. Leon Kass's course on Genesis, for example, shows how an understanding of science leads one to take the creation story metaphorically and thus gain a richer understanding of "what God is saying to us." Science helps strip away superstition to the point that only the transcendental truths remain.

Science has little patience for the transcendental, for it cannot be measured even though it can be understood. At the same time religion looks at science and sighs, for science must bootstrap, and science continues to say No until it is forced to say Yes. But religion and reason properly understood are in no way exclusive of each other.