Humans have always tried to understand the world around them, if only to survive, and to value their place in it in order to enjoy life as beings conscious of death.  In this context the theology of primitive spirit believing faiths can be seen as a certain science; an early attempt to explain how things are by virtue of their familiar or indwelling spirits.  By explaining natural processes, both predictable and unpredictable, within such a rational framework the world became safer, even tameable within certain limits.  Eventually the understanding developed through the observation of higher organising principles at work in the world, that maybe even a “Highest Principle” a Supreme Spirit or High God was “born” out of an existing multiplicity of spirits, gods, goddesses, angels and the like.

Monotheist religions, those that believe in one God, took these developments to their logical conclusion: ONLY the ONE High God could be equal to creating the Cosmos as a whole, the lesser spirits being demoted from the throne of Godhead.  At this stage of development in monotheism, however, it is still the One-God-Who-Is-One who explains how things exist and come to be.  So, If the wind blows, it is His breath.  If the ground trembles and swallows you up in an earthquake, it is His anger.  If the stars shine it is because He has lit them as burning torches for navigation, timekeeping and astrological guidance.  At some point, however, most if not all monotheisms woke up to the fact that there are ways of understanding how the world works that do not involve the all too easy and, frankly, rather demeaning (to God) idea that He has to be invoked to explain the unexplained.  If God only exists as an explanation for our ignorance about the world then he is no God at all.  With every scientific discovery, in this understanding, this false God retreats as the Great Explainer. For God to be God He must be the God-of-the-Whole or no-God-at-all.  Science explains how the world works, faith explains why the world exists and what is its purpose.

So, difficult though it may be for many of us in varying degrees to accept, God does not explain anything at all.  We do not believe in God to satisfy our ignorance about the world; in short to give us a nice and comforting alternative to science with its allegedly godless explanations and “theories.”  If we are thinking like that then we do not truly believe in the God who is the source of ALL truth both religious and scientific, nor do we understand the world as it truly is.  We need to start the other way round.  God does not explain things, things explain God.  The fathers make this approach to the Cosmos and its Creator explicit and I am going to quote two.  Firstly, we have St. Maximos the Confessor.  In this quotation the “logoi” are the inner essence and rational, working principles of all created things.  These are working principles that God has granted us to understand through science.  St Maximos sees them has gathered up in the Logos, the Word of God, the very Word that became incarnate in our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ.  This is what he wrote:

The Word becomes thickened […] concealing Himself mysteriously for our sakes within the logoi of creatures and thus He reveals Himself accordingly through the visible things as through some written signatures as a whole in His fullness from the whole of nature and undiminished in each part, in the varieties of natures as one who has no variation and is always the same, in composites, as One who is simple, without parts, in things which have their beginning in time, as the One without beginning, as the Invisible in the visible, the ungraspable in tangible things.  (Ambigua 33)

The key idea here is the “logoi of creatures” ... what I am referring to in the shorthand of this sermon as “things.”  These “logoi” function for St. Maximos as written signatures of God-in-creation; the disclosure of God in the being and beauty of things, accessible to science and testimonies to the creative power of God.  So, as we discover more about the being and beauty of things through science, poetry and mystical contemplation and in so doing we discover or “explain” the God Who creates all.  St. Maximos is clear in his teaching elsewhere, that it is Christ the Word of God, the Logos of God who is concealed and then revealed within the logoi of creatures, the self same Christ who is the Logos Incarnate.  To use the theological terminology of St. Gregory Palamas, we might say that the energies of God in creation are disclosed Incarnate in the Word.  Christ, as in our Pantocrator icon, is the Ruler and Creator of all, the Word from the Father, the Bearer of the Spirit from the Father, and every created thing in all its radiance and beauty is to be found in Him and in the Trinity.  This is why the vocation to be a scientist, or indeed an artist, is to become a certain kind of priest in the natural order, revealing the God Who Creates to all.

Orthodox Christians with this faith do not suppose then that science or the arts are alternative truth perceptions to theology.  The more we discover and know about the world the stronger and deeper in Christ revealed in the very sinews and flesh of our humanity and in the very physicality of Creation itself; its terrible and majestic glory ... signatures of God, vehicles of God indeed.

St Augustine along with all the other Fathers knew this and reckoned, rightly, that there could be no dispute between theology and what they called “natural philosophy” but what we now call “science.”  If you are an Orthodox Christian, you cannot dismiss science, the arts or any other aspect of human truth.  All is one truth in God.  So, the Bible is not a science text book, for faith asks why not how … how the world works is the role of science. 

Here, then, is how St Augustine warned against any kind of phony war between religion and science, even in his own day this was an issue.  He clearly believed that science had its own truths that complemented theology and that ALL truth came from God.  Here is an extract from his commentary on the Book of Genesis.

Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

So, things explain God, God does not explain things.  Please remember this when a believer (of any kind) tries to pit religion against science.  Please challenge this ignorance or else faith will be distorted and ignorance will overwhelm us.  God’s truth, in all its varied forms and expressions is one. God is the Source of all that is good, beautiful and true.