Science and Faith Cage Match

There’s a lot of friction nowadays, it seems, between those two umbrellae of generic capital-nounishness, Science and Faith. Particularly, at least how I’ve encountered it, on the side of Science against Faith. Good case in point is the sprinkling of snide throwaway lines that cornerback blitzed me in the book I recently posted on, Life As We Do Not Know It.

The truth – or Truth, yes, allow me another capnoun here – the Truth of the matter is that this need not be so.

May I digress for just a moment? Okay. I come at this problem from both angles. As a young padawan, I see with hindsight that I was equal parts Science Boy and Religion Kid, though I didn’t explicitly know it at the time. Nor did my ultimate light cone or faith journey take me down either path. My point is, simply, that it was not uncommon for me to browse intently through my First Child’s Illustrated Bible then flip reverently through the world’s greatest physics book (lavishly posted on, here). I loved them both, and still love their grown-up counterparts.

So it pains me somewhat to see shining lights and exemplars of apectic mankind on both sides of the aisles at each other’s throats. Because it’s really unnecessary. “And the Unnecessary is the enemy of the Good, or the Beautiful.” (Sorry, that’s a serious line from some terrible black-and-white flick mercilessly lampooned on MST3K. I think.)

I subscribe to the Sandburgian theory of the Meta-Meta-Ness of Ontologicity. Carl Sandburg, that is, that strange and wise and brusk and pithy poet of the pre-modern America we’re saddled to suffer through. The guy who writes poems about Grass and self-aware midwestern cities, and volumes upon volumes of the most intriguing of United States presidents. But the applicable teaching of Dr. Sandburg, the theorem to navigate this hazardous cold war between Science and Faith, lies in the thesis laid out in the poem “Circles.”

You may remember it from third grade. Conceited white man draws a circle in the dirt with a hickory switch (I guess), and says, “This is what the red man knows.” * Then, he draws a larger circle encompassing the smaller one and says, “This is what the white man knows.” Wise sage Indian thinks a moment, then draws a third, even larger circle, encircling both the others. “This is what the white man and red man know not.”

All kidding aside – and most of this post has been non-to-semi-serious twaddle – here’s how I view the conflict. First, there is no conflict. “Science” is that first circle, ever-widening, changing our lives, mostly for the better. Science as a thing, like most things, is morally neutral. It depends on how its used. Thus, Science can bring forth life-prolonging pharmaceutical miracles, and also the atomic bomb. Science pushes ever outward.

But what is it pushing into? A greater circle, which I label with the hopefully inoffensive and non-loaded term, the Transcendent. That’s where we sit, in a circle called the transcendent. I read somewhere that Voltaire, no friend of Faith, once described God as a Circle Whose center is everywhere and Whose circumference is nowhere. Sounds to me like a fourth-dimensional sphere, though I haven’t been able to envision higher dimensions since I gave up hard drugs in the sixties. Anyway, Faith lies within that second, greater circle.

It’s an imperfect analogy, and one I haven’t spent but a few minutes on in thought. But I like it; it fits; and I don’t worry about it.

Thanks, Dr. Sandburg.


* “White man” and “Red man” are Sandburg’s terms – not mine! I’d hate to get the thought police all up in my business. If those terms offend you, may I suggest substituting the terms “Person of European descent” and “Person of Native American descent”? The resulting aesthetic ugliness is the price we pay so someone somewhere does not have his/her feelings hurt.