Garvey: What about the meaning of mystery for someone who is a person of faith and someone who’s a scientist? For science, the “inexplicable” is something we have to work on, our next project.
Hwang: But a good scientist will also experience a kind of euphoria or excitement in things that are mysterious.
Kee: Right. I still have that eureka experience when I think about why is it that the world should prove to be so intelligible to mathematical models. But when you ask the “why” question, you’re no longer asking a scientific question.
Bellin: The destruction of the mystery by science is why people feel that science and religion butt heads. But I think that if you believe that exploring something through science is going to destroy religion, then you have a weak understanding of religion.
Fr. Clark: What I try to present to my students is what I take to be a better theological understanding of mystery. It’s not “whodunit.” A mystery is something that you have to relate to from the inside. It’s something that you come to understand by being part of it. The external, objective perspective is not enough.
Freeman: So does one necessarily abandon science when one arrives at that threshold?
Fr. Clark: Absolutely not. No, there are things that you have to look at objectively, but when you get inside them it’s a whole different experience. Sacraments, for example. The original Greek word was mysterion. In describing the rituals, I can tell you in very cut-and-dry ways what happens, what the gestures are, what the words are. But that’s an entirely different thing from enacting it and participating in it. I can tell you what music is, what sound is, what notes are, what rhythm is—I can break it all down. But that’s very different from hearing a symphony.
Hitt: Mark, what does William James tell us about this?
Freeman: William James wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages on the varieties of religious experience. He also offers a commitment at the beginning to do a kind of science. He says we can analyze these things in naturalistic terms. It could be that some mystical experiences have to do with what he calls unconscious or subconscious cerebration. But then, in the last chapter, he has to deal with the question of questions: whether to attribute any sort of independent reality, metaphysical reality, to these experiences that people are talking about. His answer is a cautious “yes.” He says, look, you know, I’m schooled as a scientist. I have a commitment to determinism as a scientist. But he’s faced with the sheer weight of these experiences, not only in the people that he studies, but in himself. And, so, he finally approaches the question—should we buy this idea that these experiences might involve something like higher spiritual energies, or not? And he says, I obviously can’t answer this question definitively; I’m going to answer it with what he calls an “over-belief,” that is, a belief that can never be definitively proven or substantiated in empirical terms.
Hitt: Faith, in other words?
Freeman: A kind of faith, but it’s a faith that’s rooted in experience. It’s not a faith that’s rooted in some kind of a priori commitment to a system of belief. It’s rooted in the felt, lived experience of the world. And he basically says, everything I know about the world leads me to think of this as a real possibility. Now, psychologists will read this and some will say it’s at that point that he stopped being a scientist, and he moved from psychology to theology. James would respond by saying, no, I still think I’m doing a kind of a science because I’m trying to practice fidelity to what experience seems to tell me. It’s radical empiricism.
Fr. Clark: St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, said that everything that is available to us in creation can be a means of finding God. He said that at a time when science wasn’t particularly well developed, but certainly there were a lot of things that people understood in the 16th century. That’s a fundamental understanding that leads to the foundation of colleges like this one. Why did the Jesuits get into education? Why didn’t they fear that the more people learned, the less they’d need God? Because the fundamental understanding is that even in the things I understand very well, on a material level, I can be led to God by realizing that God is the creator of all the things that I understand with my mind. From this point of view, education deepens faith.
Hitt: And on that note, we must conclude. Thank you all for participating in our forum.
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