Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [58]
One could logically argue that God is the laws and forces of nature, but this is pantheism and not the type of personal God in which most people profess belief. One could also reasonably argue that God created the universe and life using the laws and forces of nature, but it leaves us with those nagging scientific questions: Which laws and forces were used, and in what manner were they used? For that matter, how did God create the laws and forces of nature? A scientist would be curious to know God’s recipe for, say, gravity. Likewise, it is a legitimate scientific question to ask: What made God, and how was God created? How do you make an omniscient and omnipotent being?
The theists’ response to this line of inquiry is that God needs no cause—God is a causeless cause, an unmoved mover. But why should God not need a cause? If the universe is everything that is, ever was, or ever shall be, God must be within the universe or be the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be caused, and thus the regress to a first cause leads back to the question: What caused God? And if God does not need to be caused, then clearly not everything in the universe needs to be caused. Maybe the initial creation of the universe was its own first cause and the Big Bang was the prime mover.
The problem with all of these attempts at blending science and religion may be found in a single principle: A is A. Or: Reality is real. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is a violation of A is A. It is an attempt to make reality unreal. A cannot also be non-A. Nature cannot also be non-nature. Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism.
Pope John Paul II, whose theology was influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, two of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy and theology, understood this fundamental principle and argued the point in his 1996 encyclical, Truth Cannot Contradict Truth. The only way science and religion can be reconciled, particularly in the context of the evolution-creation controversy, is if body and soul are ontologically distinct; that is, if they exist in different realities. Evolution created the body, God created the soul:
With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say. Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again, of aesthetic and religious experience, falls within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans.11
Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. Thus, the most logically coherent argument for theists is that God is outside time and space; that is, God is beyond nature—super nature, or supernatural—and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes.