Philosophy, Aristotle observed, begins in wonder. Too often today, however, philosophy begins in arid formulas that look more like math equations than like curiosity about the great questions of life—“Does God exist?” or “Is there an ultimate purpose to human existence?” or “What do science and religion tell us about ourselves, and do they conflict?” A new book, The Call of Wonder: How the God of Reason Created Science in His Image, invites readers back into that sense of wonder by exploring how faith, science and reason interrelate. The author, biomedical engineer and theologian Brian Cranley, argues that both science and faith are grounded in reason—reason that is itself rooted in God—and therefore that the two disciplines are not fundamentally in conflict but in unity.
Cranley begins by examining how reason leads to God. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle both discovered God or a God-like first principle through rational inquiry. For Plato, this was “the Good,” which he described as the supremely perfect and eternal fount of goodness, being, and intelligibility. Although Plato did not directly identify the Good with “God,” he did call it “divine,” and his understanding of it comes strikingly close to traditional conceptions of God. As Cranley explains:
The Good is perfect and unchanging just as the God we speak of today is perfect and unchanging. The Good is the necessary existence where all things find their own existence, another quality we discover in the God of monotheism. The Good, and God, are both seen as the great unifier of all things. Both shed the light of knowledge on the human mind to know the world around them.
Plato, then, effectively reasoned his way to a basic (if incomplete) understanding of God, even if he did not explicitly call it “God.”
Aristotle, meanwhile, also reasoned to the existence of God, which he called the “Unmoved Mover” and which he did identify as “God.” He did so by analyzing the nature of change and recognizing that the source of all change in the universe must itself be unchanging. How, though, is this possible? How does something cause change without itself changing? According to Aristotle, God causes change not by “pushing the first domino” but by existing perfectly and thus drawing all things toward himself. As Cranley writes, “The Unmoved Mover is so perfect and so desirable that it causes all the universe to move and change out of desire. The Unmoved Mover draws all things toward itself simply by being who it is.” In this way, God causes change without himself changing.
Over the centuries, philosophers built on these foundations. For example, in the first century A.D., Jewish philosopher Philo synthesized these philosophical insights with the data of revelation. He urged that many stories in the first five books of the Bible (the Jewish Torah) are allegorical rather than literal. He further maintained that scripture often conveys deep philosophical truths—truths about the nature of God and his divine attributes—through imagery rather than literal description. Finally, he also developed the Greek concept of Logos. For the Greeks, Logos was a term that conveyed the “divine order” or “divine meaning” that pervaded reality. Philo, though, refined this term in light of revelation. As Cranley explains, “Philo believed strongly in Platonic philosophy as well as Judaism, which led him to replace Plato’s Form of the Good with Yahweh [God]. He then offered the idea that the Divine Logos was the Wisdom of God … tasked with creating the world and performing God’s desired actions in it.” Accordingly, Philo sharpened the insights he inherited from his Greek predecessors. Other philosophers also synthesized faith and reason, including Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, Christian philosophers Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroës, all of whom are covered in the book.
After surveying these thinkers, Cranley turns to discoveries of modern science. He argues that contemporary scientific findings not only harmonize with what reason and faith tell us about God but also reflect the very nature of God himself. Take, for example, the oneness or “indivisibility” of God. This idea, notes Cranley, is mirrored in both the origin and the structure of the universe. For instance, modern cosmology suggests that, “in the very first instant [of the Big Bang], all things were just one thing.” Moreover, at the largest scales of the universe, “no matter where we point our telescopes and detectors into deep space, the incoming data is relatively the same. … There is a sameness to space in every observable direction.” In this way, Cranley says, the universe reflects God, who “is the ultimate simplicity, the same in every respect.”
But Cranley does not limit this mirroring of divine oneness to the cosmos as a whole. Human beings, he holds, also reflect the unity of God. Drawing on anthropological research, for instance, he writes that
if the first moment of the Big Bang displayed oneness for the universe, then LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, similarly displayed unity for all of life. LUCA were tiny, single-celled organisms containing within them the potential to become every living thing. The single-celled ancestor of life was, like God, indivisible.
Of course, this anthropological evidence naturally leads to the issue of evolution, where Cranley’s analysis is especially helpful. He argues that, far from being in conflict with faith, the long history of life on earth in fact helps illuminate who we are and may also assist us in interpreting certain nonliteral passages of the Bible. He suggests, for example, that the “five mass extinction events in earth’s history” offer a fresh way of reading the “days” of Genesis—a proposal not meant as dogma but as an imaginative exercise showing the harmony between revelation and scientific history.
He goes even further by devoting a chapter to analyzing evolution and showing why it poses no threat to faith. Evolution may be a tool God designed to create abundant forms of life. Seen in this way, God, who is infinite life itself, creates a vast array of finite creatures through evolutionary processes that mirror him in different ways. If this is correct, then a variety of valid options for thinking about evolution emerge, and as Cranley points out, “it really doesn’t matter which one of the options is correct as long as it includes the data we know from science and recognizes a Creator.” In other words, we can and should affirm both evolution and God, and multiple interpretations allow for that.
Among the other topics Cranley addresses are a brief history of humanity, influential theological interpretations of the biblical creation accounts, and an examination of the nature of the human mind. In each case, Cranley draws further analogies between scientific findings and God. As one example, he points to our minds. When we can cease the endless stream of thoughts that pour through our heads, he says, “we are able to catch a glimpse into the unity of our own minds completely at rest and perfectly one. …The mind at rest, in a real way, reveals the image of God’s divine oneness.”
While readers may balk at the analogies Cranley draws between scientific concepts and the attributes of God, it is important to realize that he is offering them not to suggest that science “proves” God. His point, rather, is to illuminate the fundamental harmony between faith and science—and to show further that if there are good independent reasons to suppose God exists, then coherence between science and faith is precisely what we should expect.
Seen in this way, the unity between these two disciplines is unsurprising. If both faith and science are rooted in reason, and if reason itself is ultimately grounded in God, then science and faith do not compete but converge, each drawing us toward the source of all truth. The Call of Wonder, then, invites us to rediscover that convergence, and in doing so to recover the very sense of wonder with which philosophy—and even science—first began.
