Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective
statements. Perhaps there is a presumed rivalry on a superficial media-attention-grabbing level, but at a deeper cultural level of discursive analysis the two discourses coexists in relative calm.
The second variant of the interactive view is one of complementarity of the relationship
between the scientific and religious discourses, and sees both as needing each other in order
to provide a more accurate and holistic picture of reality. This is not to say that when the
respective insights of these discourses contribute to this picture that all of reality will be
elucidated, as Barbour correctly asserts (105). Nor does this variant exclude other domains
of knowledge and experience from participating in this process of elucidation. Though it
admits that these discourses bring different ways of understanding the universe to the table,
it insists that neither can explain nor illuminate all of reality on its own. Therefore they need
each other. Some sort of cooperation is the cultural key with which to unlock their seemingly
mysterious complementarity, one with a long genealogy.
Early Christian theologians, drawing on issues already raised by the ancient Greek
philosophers, wrestled with how faith and reason, earlier analogs of the terms religion and
science used here, are to interact. Are they truly separate faculties with one putting the
individual in relation to the divine and the other merely clarifying things of the fleshly,
material world? Or instead, is faith unable to illuminate the way the world (or God’s
creation) works and therefore it needs another faculty to complete the circle? In the fourth
century, Augustine wrote, “I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to
believe.” Here, as in Thomas Aquinas’ vast elaboration on the subject, both reason and faith
come from God and are hence necessary and useful, though each performs different duties.
In Catholic thought (Luther denigrated the efficacy of reason when compared to faith),
reason that uses empirical data to make connections not only reveals its own limits when
attempting to rationalize the supernatural, but it also is needed to ground faith, which deals
exclusively with the supernatural. In this way, faith alone is inadequate to guard against
unjustified belief and superstition, but reason alone is inadequate to describe and make sense
of experiences that transcend the machinery of the natural world.
When translated into religion and science, some of the Catholic principles that guide the
faith/reason dynamic still apply, though with qualification. With the rise of modern science
occurring long after Aquinas articulated his synthesis, most often the findings of scientists,
using reason to understand empirical evidence, are given tremendous authority and only
when they reach limits, does religion step in to transcend these limits. For instance,
astrophysicists are able to trace the history of the universe back to a Big Bang, but none have
been able to explain its initial cause and as such remain silent on the subject. Or the attempt
to unify theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics into a “Theory of Everything”
that could generate fundamental rules of reality again begs the question, does the natural
world alone evince fundamental principles, and if not, is not the supernatural needed to talk
about fundamentals? In addition, do large gaps in the fossil record that problematize an
uninterrupted, comprehensive flow of evolution necessarily lead some to interject God (a
“God of the gaps”) into those gaps as the needed facilitator of evolution?
Many scientists cringe at the suggestion of the limits of the scientific method which religion is often called on to surpass. If science has yet to explain all of reality, it is merely a
