Science, Philosophy and Theology for the 21st Century
ScienceEpilogue to a book of lights and challenges
I thank Agustín Gil for this book, which is so clear-sighted and necessary for today. These are difficult and decisive times for humanity and the entire community of the living.Denialism and dogmatism – two disorders only apparently opposed – are the symptom of a planetary civilizational malaise.
Our species Sapiens has never been so knowledgeable, but never felt so insecure. We never knew so much about so many things, yet we never felt so threatened at the personal, societal or international level. We never had so much instant and global information, yet disinformation was never so severe and universal. Sciences were never so developed, yet never did they create such deadly weapons nor were they used by the big killer powers. We never had so many resources for everybody to live comfortably, yet we never lived so accelerated and suffocated, so lacking in time to breathe and allow ourselves to be inspired. Never has the name Sapiens been more debatable. Never, from the heart of the Earth and of the impoverished, have we heard so sharp and grave the Voice of Life: “Life and death, blessing and curse are before you. Choose life and you and your descendents will live” (biblical book Deuteronomy 30,19).
Now more than ever we not only need scientific knowledge, but vital wisdom, overall intelligence, multiple rationality, deep consciousness, to know how to live, to be happy being good and vice versa, to be free and brothers and sisters, to be able to love and choose our true being, our true good which is inseparable from the Common Good of humanity and of all living beings. There is no other true freedom.
Many are the ways of knowledge, of wisdom, of freedom to be our true being. Knowledge and wisdom are multidimensional, as they have always been. Shamans of the Paleolithic had that vital wisdom. So did ancient myths, poets, artists, people in love. Non-violent activists for justice and peace shared it, too. Likewise, spiritual mystics, whether followers of any religion or not. Sapiential texts of the great traditions, religious or otherwise, were deeply knowledgeable. Of course, scientists are aware of that multidimensionality of knowledge and wisdom. And all of them know that they do not know: “learned ignorance”.
Better than anyone else, Agustín Gil knows all that, for he is professor of physics specialized in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, active and reflective member of popular Christian communities of the Basque Country, ecofeminist committed against all empires, co-director of the (now closed) magazine Herria 2000 Eliza, spiritual seeker, critic of religious and ecclesiastical institutions, follower of the Good News and of the liberating life of Jesus of Nazareth, of the freedom and compassion that he taught and practiced.
This book is the synthesis and ripe fruit of his scientific knowledge, his philosophical reflexion, his human sensitivity, his critical theology, his ethical commitment: Ciencia y filosofía para el siglo XXI. Diálogo intercisciplinar para un nuevo (Science and philosophy for the 21st century. Interdisciplinary dialog for a new humanism) (Círculo Rojo Publishers, 2023). The title contains, as if chosen on purpose, all the terms that define a program of concerted and integral knowledge: science, philosophy, 21st century, dialog, interdisciplinary, new humanism. Knowledge, just like language, is, by definition, a social, trans-individual, plural, dialogical task. Thus, only thus, it becomes a path of shared birth.
Knowledge is also interdisciplinary by definition, the fruit of diverse methods, ways to look and perspectives, all of them interrelated. Perspectives and methods are necessarily different, but not contradictory, insofar as each approximation to reality –philosophical, theological, symbolic in general- rigorously adheres to its own approach and method of analysis. And no discipline can pretend to arrive at the only true knowledge, not even truer than any other.
Of course, scientific knowledge of reality –gained by careful observation, exact mathematical medition and empirical verification- is not the only true knowledge, nor is it the only true reality all that sciences express mathematically and verify. But neither do the Creed’s dogmas and theological explanations express “truths” revealed from above by “God”; they are contingent historical expressions, relative and cultural formulations, of profound (“religious”) human experiences; all dogmas and theologies are symbolic human constructs, just as all scientific statements are empirical-mathematical human constructs. Yet, scientific data –even if they are partial and provisional- are today the common minimum criterion of “truth” and of “reality”. Thus, no statement, even a theological one, can be considered to be “true” if it contradicts or is not consistent with the data established by science.
Since the establishment of the modern scientific paradigm after Galileo, coherence with the sciences is one of the fundamental challenges for all religious and theological language. Incoherence with the general cultural and scientific paradigm is, precisely, the main factor of the current and irreversible crisis of the imaginary conceptual and institutional scaffold of traditional religions, Christianity included.
Therefore, I will finish pointing out, as mere examples and simple conjectures, some of the challenges, questions and requirements that the sciences –cosmology, nuclear physics, biology, biotechnology, neurosciences, artificial intelligence…- pose today to Christian theology:
An unfinished human species, displaced from the centre. The entire Christian theology –about God, creation, Jesus, sin, salvation, life after death…- is still entirely anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. All of it, literally taken, is incomprehensible and it entirely falls apart with the new scientific vision of the human being. We are not the centre, nor the summit of the Universe or of the Earth. We are members of the great community of the living. We emerged, like all beings, through the same physical, biological, planetary and cosmic evolution. And we are about to have the technological power to create brains and organic or cybernetic beings that will be more capable than what this Homo sapiens is today. We are facing formidable ecological, ethical, political and theological challenges, like never before.
A self-creating, evolving, interrelated, cosmos with no centre. We are part of a universe (perhaps a multiverse) with no spatial or temporal measure. An “infinite” universe, at least in the physical sense. A holistic universe that constitutes a unique, evolving and dynamic whole, in which each part is a whole, in turn, made up of parts. A universe sustained by a “matter” –mater, matrix-, with or without mass, which is endowed with a dynamism, potentiality or original “energy” from which all the forms that make up the universe originate. A Universe, therefore, that does not need a “God” who creates it from nothing. Nothing does not exist. If we do not count on some “God” who intervenes from outside, “miraculously”, in the evolving self-creating process of the world, why should we have to resort to a primeval miraculous intervention to create the world from nothing? Would it not be philosophically and theologically legitimate to think about an original non-created and eternal matter that gives rise to the Universe? It depends on what we understand by “God”…
A “life after death” in the “divine” plenitude or in the cosmic information or in the universal memory. It is obvious that I speak on metaphorical, not strictly scientific, terms. The original matter from which everything proceeds is neither created nor destroyed, but it is always transformed forever. It is transformed according to an open, creative and therefore unpredictable internal arrangement, structure, “logic” or “code” that goes by, we could say, an “information” that guides it creatively. Life, in its unending profusion of forms, originated from the self-creating matter. Death implies, specifically, the dissolution of the individual “I” and of its particular consciousness, which is, in turn, a form in constant transformation. We could wonder if the death-transformation of the individual “I” could be considered as a “passage” (Easter) to another form surviving in the cosmic information, in the universal memory, in the “divine”, full and infinite Consciousness?
A prophetic man Jesus, unfinished, icon and symbol of the Kingdom of God. Is it possible to think that Jesus is the unique, miraculous and finished incarnation of the eternal “Son of God” in a point of space and time without measure, in a particular species, in a specific planet, in a given culture, in a perfect man? Coherence with the scientific world-vision requests a different Christology. A Christology that leaves behind traditional dogmas or re-reads them in another symbolic key. A Christology that conceives Jesus as a prophet who, because of his message and good and contingent life, his unfinished liberating freedom and solidarity, can be recognized –by whoever sees him so, Christian or not- as a foretaste, icon or inspiring symbol of the “Kingdom of God”, of the full universal liberation, both present and future.
A transtheistic “God”. We can no longer maintain the “theistic” image of God, if we understand “theism” as the affirmation of a “personal subject” God, who existed before and is external to the world, omnipotent, who created the world from nothing and intervenes in it at his will. God explains nothing. It is Nothing of what images represent and words mean. We can only evoke it in metaphors. It is pure Being with no form, which does not exist but in the beings, in the forms. The Fontal depth, the creating Breath that beats in all beings. It is not a matter of “believing” in God, but of creating it, incarnating it, giving it form in beauty, breath and goodness.
What are beliefs for, what is science for, if they do not bring us closer to the gnosis, the illumination, the liberation, the rebirth to our true being, to our deep sisterhood-brotherhood with all that lives and is?
Aizarna, October 25th, 2022
(Jose Arregi, Epilogue to Ciencia y filosofía para elsiglo XXI. Diálogo intercisciplinar para un nuevo (Editorial Círculo Rojo, 2023, pp. 355-360).
Translated by Mertxe de RenobalesScheifler