Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Brownback on Evolution

Sen. Sam Brownback recently wrote a good piece in the New York Times explaining his views on faith, reason, science, and evolution. Since the evolution question came up again in tonight's Republican presidential debate, his key points are worth noting.

Contrary to the chaos at the heart of the postmodern worldview, Brownback believes in an order and unity in the universe:

The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different
questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and
the material order were created by the same God.

His direct answer to the question ("Do you believe in evolution?") is more or less my answer as well:

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes
over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I
believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an
exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place
for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.
And here we get to his most interesting statement:

It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the
philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in
excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm
of empirical science.
In other words: there is nothing scientific about the claim that if science can't explain something, it must not exist. Science seeks to discern the laws governing the material world; it is unscientific to assume that only the material world exists.

The long boom in science and technology in Western civilization that began in the Renaissance was built on a presumption that the Christian God was rational, and had created a material world that operated according to discernable and consistent laws of cause and effect. Far from being incompatible with Christianity, the scientific project that has been so instrumental in creating the modern world we take for granted would have been unthinkable without this belief in a rational harmony between "nature and nature's God," and in the ultimate unity of all reality -- seen and unseen.

But at some point the scientific project began overstepping its bounds, and took quite literally a leap of faith in asserting that if a belief or opinion could not be proven using the scientific method, it must be false. This represented a complete reversal of perspective. The original presumption, "God created the world; God is rational; let's discover how the world works," morphed into "Man is the center of all things; we shall use our reason to effectuate what our will desires; and whatever reason cannot comprehend must not exist or can be safely ignored."

The good news is that this materialistic, narcissistic worldview in some ways is being challenged by a renewed interest in the spiritual side of man's nature. People's souls have been starved for too long. The bad news is that too often this new hunger for God is being hijacked by a seemingly infinite variety of banal "spiritualities," most of which seek to substitute a New Age, irrational religion of the Self for the materialistic, rational religion of the Self.

The challenge -- as it always has been -- is to keep alive a sincere dialogue between faith and reason, a conversation that is fruitful only as long as both wings of man's understanding seek the objective truth outside of our subjective experience and preferences. It is ironic that two of the most notable proponents of the role of reason in this dialogue in recent times have been Catholic Popes. Pope John Paul II challenged Communism and the materialism of the 2oth century by insisting on a true understanding of the good of the human person -- body and soul, emotion and intellect. Now his successor, Benedict XVI, has extended this invitation to the Muslim world with his lecture at Regensburg.

We can be thankful that whatever the future holds for Sen. Brownback's presidential campaign, he too has made a contribution to this dialogue by his steadfast and eloquent insistence that "the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God."