Can a Good Scientist Believe in the Supernatural?
Photo by Casey Clingan on Unsplash
“Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.”
As I’ve written before, many great scientists have been Christians, believing in a supernatural God and His miraculous interventions. To some, that seems odd and even surprising. Aren't scientists supposed to follow cold, logical facts and only believe what they can prove? How can a person who studies the observable laws of the universe put their faith in something that can't be seen, heard, felt, or tested?
To answer that, we have to consider just what Christianity claims. It says that physical reality is not all that exists, but is a creative product of an all-powerful supernatural being (God). God has created other things besides the universe, such as angels, some of whom rebelled against God.
God interacts with the universe He made in several ways. First of all, He sustains it every moment by His will; the universe would cease to exist the moment God stopped upholding it with His limitless power. In addition to this constant engagement, God intervenes through miraculous signs and wonders, most obviously the miracles related the Bible. Finally, God has interacted with the created order in the most intimate and incredible way possible, by becoming a part of it, taking the form of a man, in order to redeem us and restore us to right relationship with Himself.
Secondhand Experience
Those are some pretty big claims, and they might feel overwhelming for a couple of reasons. First of all, the supernatural is hard to believe in simply because it is not visible to us. We cannot see the supernatural reality that exists all around us unless we experience a miracle. Secondly, it all seems so complicated; the Bible is a big book, and libraries of other books have been written about what it means. Shouldn't it all be a lot simpler than this?
Those are two good objections, and responses to both can be found in examples of other things we accept to be true. First of all, much of the knowledge we enjoy comes to us second-hand and not by personal experience or things we test ourselves. For instance, history falls under this category. In this life, I will have no direct experience of Socrates, William Shakespeare, or Abraham Lincoln (if I meet Lincoln in Heaven, I am definitely going to try on that hat). But I have no problem believing they existed, because I have it on good authority that they lived and left evidence of their lives.
Much of our knowledge is based on the unseen and unprovable. I believe that my friends care about me, even though I can't prove it (though there are ways I could test it, like asking them to attend a child's party at Chuck E. Cheese, which is a kind of purgatory). I believe in the validity of scientific experiments that I have no intention of replicating, on the authority of those who performed them. We believe all kinds of things of which we have no direct experience; we simply couldn't function otherwise. If you only believe what you can prove or experience for yourself, you're going to be pretty ignorant.
It's Complicated
Secondly, Christianity can be very complicated, as anyone who has been to seminary can tell you. But, in another way, it is so simple a child can understand it. That's because it has many layers; the simple Gospel story is easy to grasp, but there are many layers of meaning behind every part of it, and you can keep digging in your whole life, as theologians tell us. This isn't surprising, when we consider how true things typically work.
Think about nuclear physics. On its face, it is simple but shocking to hear that everything in the world is made out of particles too small to see. But once you start asking questions about those particles, you get some very long and interesting answers. Can you imagine being the person who invented the atom bomb, and having to explain it for the first time?
"Hey guys, I just found something that is more explosively powerful than many tons of TNT."
"Wow! Where is it? It must be huge!”
"Well, actually, it's somewhat smaller than a pile of normal explosives."
"Excellent! How much smaller?"
"It's so small, you and I cannot even see it, and neither could we see it with the most powerful microscopes on Earth."
"Perhaps it's time for you to take a vacation, Bill."
Truth is often counterintuitive. Think about the first time you learned of how humans reproduce (if you haven’t heard yet, ask an adult; don’t Google it). Until you're used to the idea, it sounds insane. But reality has that kind of odd, surprising slant to it, and that's one of the things that makes science so fun.
I believe that Christianity is like that. On its face, it sounds simple and straightforward: God made people, people sinned, and God came down to make things right between Him and us. He'll come back someday to do away with everything bad. And yet, when you read the Bible, it has that odd twist that true things have; it takes a little while to get used to it. How is God three persons, but one being? How is Jesus completely God, but still completely human? How does God know everything we're going to do before we're born, and yet grant us free will to choose our own paths?
If Christianity was a nice neat little theological package, it would be easy to believe it was made up. When we make things up, we can make them as simple as we like. But Christianity is full of debates about the details of theology, and it has spurred several offshoot religions, such as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists. That's not proof that it's false; it's proof that it's just as complicated as true things tend to be.
Admitting to Not Knowing
What it really takes for a person of science to believe in the supernatural is not a suspension of reason. It takes the humility to admit how much we don't know. If we could figure out everything on our own, we wouldn't need revelation in the scripturesand the Church to tell us about the reality behind reality.
But we can't figure it all out; we aren't equipped, and we probably aren't that smart. What we ought to do is to investigate everything we can, and believe whatever makes the most sense of the world around us. I have done that, and it led me to Christianity. Then, once I intellectually admitted that Christianity forms the most complete and sensible picture of the universe, I was able to have faith - to trust not just in the facts, but in the Person behind those facts.
I have respect for honest Atheists who have done their homework, learned about Christianity, and simply find it too hard to believe (often because of the Problem of Evil). It's much more difficult to appreciate the Atheism often on display in culture today, where a person decides that God doesn't exist, comes up with a caricature of God that nobody actually believes in, and then knocks down that straw man as though that's some kind of accomplishment. These Atheists hide behind vague terms like Reason and Freethinking without really engaging with Christianity the way thoughtful Atheists do. But for those men and women who have honestly engaged with the idea of God and cannot believe, I pray for them and love them and hope that God will deal with them mercifully.
Natural and Supernatural
Belief in the supernatural does not replace belief in an orderly and rule-bound natural world. Supernaturalism just adds the belief that the God who made this universe and its laws can intercede in His creation as He pleases. In fact, believing in things like miracles is a confirmation of science, because to say that a miracle has occurred is to say that there was a rule to break (or bend) in the first place. Science, the process of learning the rules of physical reality, does not tell us if the rules are ever broken.
Good scientists can believe in the structure and order of the universe and delight in its laws, even while they believe in the most fantastic of miracles. The two beliefs might not go hand-in-hand as often as they used to, but there isn't any logical contradiction occurring when they do. That's why a man like Francis Collins can map the human genome and understand genetics perhaps better than any human alive, and still believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. The virgin birth doesn't claim to be simply a statistical oddity, but a supernatural event, where God breaks through into our world in a beautiful way.
When we believe in the supernatural, we don't need to leave our reason at the door. Just because I believe that Jesus came back from the dead doesn't obligate me to believe that every miraculous claim in the world must be true. Consider the Catholic Church; they have teams of scientists and doctors who do thorough investigations into claimed miracles and produce detailed reports on the probability of them being real.
All Christians ought to have skepticism regarding miraculous claims. I believe that even if we do, we'll find instances where God has interacted with creation in a supernatural way. When we hear of miracles we can ask ourselves, "Given what we know of God, does this fit His personality? Does it have His signature on it?” He does have a personality (more so than any of us), and the more we get to know Him, the more we'll see Him in the things He does. God made the universe, and He interacts with it because He loves it. There’s nothing unscientific about that.