Submission to the facts

Now then, what is the scientist as a scientist actually doing? Many of them think of their work as "unlocking the secrets of nature," as if the world were trying to hide information from us, and we clever ones were cheating it into revealing what it is trying to hide.

But the Christian realizes that "it is not in our stars, but in ourselves" that we are ignorant. The world is speaking, not trying to hide anything; it is we, who have our ears tuned in to the wrong station, who can't hear what is being said. We look at stones and pieces of cotton falling to the ground, and we expect heavy things to fall faster than light things; and superficial observation confirms us in this (Try the experiment; the stone will hit the ground before the cotton ball). Galileo discovered that if you can eliminate air resistance, then the heavy things we can drop fall at the same rate of acceleration as light things. But he did this because he wanted to show that the earth didn't have to be at the center of the universe; but if heavy things fall faster than light things, Aristotle's earth-centered theory would have to be correct.

The point here is that Galileo discovered the law of falling bodies, not by "probing deeper into their secrets" than anyone else, but by shifting his own focus, which enabled him to look for something no one else had thought of looking for; and all he did when he rolled the balls down the inclined plane was look at what was there for everyone to see.

So the Christian, who already has had practice shifting his point of view, and the Christian layman, who has had practice shifting his point of view to agree with the way things are and not the way they ought to be, has a large head-start on the atheist or even the non-lay-Christian scientist. It is so easy to see what you want to see that you have to be careful that you don't have any very strong "wants." Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man makes this point, in connection with the attempt to prove that white people were essentially superior to other races: very detailed measurements of skulls left out certain data (like the size of the whole skeleton to which they were attached) which made the scientists think that white people had larger-capacity heads than non-whites. Gould himself mentions that as he was checking these data, his own desire to show that the earlier research was false led him to "fudge" his own findings unconsciously in the other direction.

But the Christian layman hasn't got any special thing he wants to prove. He isn't interested, as such, in finding evidence that God made whatever he is investigating, or that God is good, or that Jesus rose from the dead, or whatever. Even if he investigates the Shroud of Turin, what he, as a lay Christian would be interested in is finding what the Shroud is, not in proving that it was the shroud that covered Jesus. So far, for instance, it has been established that the negative image on it must have been made in some way by a dead body whose wounds and so on are similar to what Jesus is reported to have undergone. But even if all the data are consistent with its being the shroud of Jesus, it could still, as Raymond Brown has pointed out, be a shroud covering someone who was crucified in imitation of Jesus--possibly as part of a persecution of his followers. So what? Father Brown has, I think, the kind of attitude I am speaking of, both in this and in his investigations into Sacred Scripture. It is that he is trying to see what the evidence leads to, not trying to make it lead somewhere. That is, he is listening.

And that is what the scientist is, in the last analysis: a listener. And the Christian scientist is a listener; the Religious to God as he speaks through his creation, the priest to creation as it tells people of what God is like and encourages them to believe in him and be saved and happy, and the layman to creation, not because God speaks through it, but because it is God's and worthy of listening to for its own sake. The Religious listens to find the relation of God to his world; the priestly scientist to know it so he can use it to bring others to the fath; but the layman listens in God's way; in Jesus' way: he submits to it, and simply lets it speak.

And this involves, as I said, changing himself so that he can hear it. True, it involves experiments, isolating certain aspects of the world so that we can see what they do when they are not disturbed by other aspects; but all of this is because we are too weak to be able to sort such things out by ourselves in the complexities of real interactions--so even the experiments are really changing ourselves and the conditions of our listening so that we can hear.

The Christian scientist, resting on faith, has no trouble with the scientist's ultimate act of faith, that reality cannot really be a contradiction, and therefore every problem of theoretical science is ultimately solvable. He also realizes that if he can't find the solution here in this life, this does not mean that the world is absurd, but only that he has not hit upon the proper focus; but this doesn't bother him, because, like every scientist, he knows that there is the proper focus; and he, as a Christian, knows that if he doesn't find it in this life, he will find it after he dies. Thus he has a faith that the atheist cannot have, and a hope and confidence that is beyond the atheist.

And he has a love for the universe he listens to that is different from the atheist's--who usually loves the world also. The atheist's love is that of a superior to something beneath him; the Christian recognizes the difference, but it does not matter to him. He can devote his life to the study of the swimming mechanism of the paramecium or to some totally "useless" endeavor that is "beneath" him, because his "dignity" does not paralyze him, though he recognizes it.

No, it is really the Christian who can be objective, because he can afford to be. And he can be happy, because he doesn't have to make the great discovery in this life: that the world is what it is, and that he knows it and eventually will know his corner of it fully, is enough for him.