TOWARD INTELLECTUAL COMPLEMENTATION

What each side - the established religions and the rationalistic scientific movement - expects from the other, is that each complement the other in the intellectual arena and in the area of each other’s weakness.

A. The cycle, then, is complete. Science once dared not contradict religion, and posed as an ancillary to religion. Now the opposite is the case. When Kepler, Galileo, and Bacon said that the book of nature cannot contradict the Bible, they meant to mollify opposition. When Pope Pius XII made the same idea into the guideline for his policy, it was an admission of defeat. You may reinterpret the biblical story of the creation, said the pope, if you believe Einstein’s story of creation. You may believe Darwin’s theory that man descended from apes only if you believe this occurred just once in history.

B. The development of a sophisticated view of religion as ancillary to science was brought about by developing the antireligous scientific view to its extreme. Extremes touch, we are told. When one takes any viewpoint to its extreme, said Samuel Butler, one sees its absurdity. The viewpoint in question, then, may be either discarded or comple­mented. There are those who push a viewpoint to its extreme in order to force its replacement (the scientific avant-garde), and others who do so in order to force its complementation (the rear guard of science, but also the avant-garde of religion).

Both extreme mechanism (“man is a machine”) and extreme positiv­ism (“only science makes any sense”) are the paradigms here. They are so very narrow that they make it almost undeniable that there is more to life than science. When extreme mechanism presents the world as utterly dehumanized and aimless, it may suggest² to us that there is depth and meaning to the world, but outside science: the body be­longs to science, and the soul to religion.

The extreme positivist sees religion as a refuge for ignorance and a bastion for superstition. Apart from this, he may see nothing in re­ligion; he may even refuse to comprehend the meaning of a proper name like “God” and declare it meaningless, wanting not only in denotation or designation or reference, but even in connotation or sense; it may declare theology proper as less than false, as sheer mean­ingless gibberish. The philosophers G. E. M. Anscombe and Frederick Copleston, S.J., have endorsed extreme positivism in order to advocate a move which is extremely easy to implement, which is nothing but the tacking of a small rider onto extreme positivism, and which is becoming increasingly popular in certain circles - as the magic solution to hosts of troublesome problems. They favor some version of extreme positiv­ism just because it evidently requires complementation; any prolifera­tion of the meaning of the word “meaning” or “sense” will permit this. “God” does not make scientific or cognitive sense, but can it make artis­tic sense, or religious sense, or perhaps social or political sense, etc., etc.? Proliferation and compartmentalization “sense” put an end to strife. When the same string of words appears in both a scientific and a reli­gious context, then they do not necessarily possess the same sense; and hence, obviously, scientific discourse need never conflict with religious discourse; everybody is happy now - separate, but equal.

C. Yet, what we have achieved is complementation like that which love and friendship as well as arts and ceremonies offer, not intellec­tual complementation. The language of music is not the language of science, we all agree; and even the literal meaning of a ceremonial declaration is not of much import, at least according to the sophisti­cated modern bride who seemingly promises in church to love and honor (or even to obey), not only in the foreseeable future, but “until death do us part” - yet without meaning to disclaim her legal rights to equality and to divorce. All this was and is accepted - perhaps regret­tably - without any contestng or debating. In such cases, no doubt, the ceremonial promise differs from a verbal contract and therefore the word “promise” may signify ceremonially something utterly divorced from what it signifies in business. We do not need extreme positivism to arrive at such conclusions, and such conclusions do not offer new complementations. Anscombe and Copleston offer us stale cakes instead of fresh bread.

VI.