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Much more what unites us than what separates us
Javier Sánchez Cañizares
researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society. group "Mente-cerebro", group "Mente-cerebro".
group "Ciencia, Razón y Fe" (CRYF), Universidad de Navarra
dissertation at the tribute ceremony to Juan Arana1
Unpublished text, March 13, 2025.
summaryOn the occasion of the retirement of Professor Juan Arana, this text reviews the most relevant ideas on the relationship between science and religion in the context of his most recent work of the same name degree scroll The author emphasizes his agreement with Professor Arana's perspective, highlighting the common interest of science and religion in the knowledge of reality in spite of methodological diversity, the importance of the interdisciplinary approach and the areas of intersection between the two fields of knowledge. At the same time, some minor disagreements are introduced regarding the perception of the religiosity of scientists, the way of understanding the action of God in the world and the relations between their vision of theological work and the epistemology of risk. The conclusion, in any case, is that a healthy feedback between science, Philosophy and theology is more necessary than ever for the believer who wants to give a reason for his hope.
AbstractOn the occasion of the retirement of Professor Juan Arana, this text reviews the most relevant ideas on the relationship between science and religion in line with his most recent work with the same title. The author emphasizes his agreements with Professor Arana's perspective, glossing the common interest of science and religion for the knowledge of reality despite their methodological diversity, the importance of the interdisciplinary approach, and the intersection areas between both kinds of knowledge. At the same time, some minor disagreements are introduced regarding the perception of the religiosity of scientists, the way of understanding the divine action in the world, and the relationships between Arana's vision of theological work and his epistemology of risk. The conclusion, in any case, is that healthy feedback between science, philosophy, and theology is more necessary than ever for the believer who wants to provide reasons for his hope.
1. Introduction
2. What unites (us)
3. What distinguishes (us)
4. Conclusions
5. Notes
How to begin an act of homage to someone you consider a master? Any option seems bad and pretentious due to the tendency of our language to objectify, so I will start with what I consider the least bad: remembering my first meeting with Juan in a lecture of Philosophy in Seville at the end of the 80's, when the buzzword instead of "coronavirus" was "ninety-two". I was beginning to study Physical Sciences and the high school students of Mayor Guadaira took me, from time to time, to listen to philosophers. Probably because they did not trust the ideas that were crystallizing in me, among gradients, divergences and rotations. I do not remember what Juan talked about, but I do remember that Juan himself did not forget me. I heard that they spoke of him as the most important philosopher of nature in my country.
I was very impressed to listen to a philosopher. That is, someone who accepts the challenge of reasoning from a more or less common language shared by all. A philosopher who reasons by putting science as a witness and, sometimes, from science, although that is already more difficult. Perhaps because of the allergy or hidden contempt that many philosophers and humanists continue to show with respect to the vision of the world offered by the natural sciences. I imagine that Juan has often felt that he has the vocation of a prophet, someone who says things that are not understood and of whom there is a certain fear. It could not be less so for someone who is from the North, teaches in the South and lives in the Center, dedicating himself to the relationship between science, Philosophy and theology. It would be out of place to attempt here a brief summary of his work. But I have come to the conclusion that for John there is much more that unites these disciplines than separates them. Therefore, I will humbly focus on giving a few brushstrokes of his ideas in the field of science and religion. I do it also full of pride and satisfaction, because we had him in 2017 as a guest speaker at the IV Mariano Artigas Memorial Lecture of the group CRYF.2in which we have so often felt his closeness, sympathy and understanding.
It is well known that we do not have a definite model about the relationship between science and religion. John Hedley Brooke attempts to summarize these relationships throughout history with the term "complexity".3. Logically, complexity encompasses almost everything: harmony, dialogue and confrontation. Now, for John, "if there have been clashes, it will be because the two guilds have something to do with each other, and so it is advisable to listen to both sides before taking sides".4. As a good philosopher -and I would add as a good modern one-, he complains that reason has been turned into the scapegoat for the ills of our culture, when it itself is the best antidote against any form of particularism. Who else but reason -and Philosophycan act as mediator in this atavistic dialogue?
Nevertheless, it is good to realize that, in all mediation and in all circularity of comings and goings, there is a point of entrance, from which the circle of our knowledge can be widened. John does not hesitate to recognize the contribution and a certain priority of science in knowledge since "the vocation of any subject of "physics" (and modern science, in spite of all its peculiarities, certainly is) consists in getting closer and closer to metaphysics and ultimately linking with it".5. 5 He therefore complains about the scarcity of modern attempts to reconstruct Aristotelian physics from below, taking on board the valuable achievements of the new science and making the necessary changes in metaphysics. John is very critical of the growing separation between metaphysics and experience in modern and official Aristotelianism, which ended up betraying, for example, the very meaning of the Stagirite's teleology. In this breeding ground, it is not difficult to understand that the Darwinian revolution consisted in showing that finalistic explanations do not always imply the existence of intelligent foresight.
At this point, the temptation for many academics would be to take refuge in the excuse of method. As we know, each discipline has its own method and we should not make the categorical mistake of confusing the planes. In other words, the university-educated version of "two do not fight if one does not want to". Juan, on the contrary, dares to ask for the rescue of "the genuinely philosophical nature of science, which comes to the fore as soon as the restrictions of object and method, the only factors that particularize it, are eliminated".6. It is well known that victories based on any particularization subject are pyrrhic and have an expiration date. However, both science and Philosophy -and I would add theology- have the same epistemic cradle, as Aristotle's old physics insinuates.
In an anthological passage of his works, John recalls that "science is by vocation an attempt to find out all the truths that are within our reach, that is, exactly the same thing that Philosophy intends. Therefore, it must be recognized that all science is Philosophy, although not all Philosophy is science".7. Yes. We have been sold for too long the illusion that science is only interested in the sensible and the quantifiable, when science is also interested in form and quality, and in all reality, sensible and suprasensible. Why else do scientists often make incursions into terrain that is considered only philosophical? Why else are we today discussing human specificity, artificial intelligence and transhumanism? "To say that conflicts between science and religion would have been avoided if the limits of each had been respected does not resolve the dispute, because the limits of science are shifting, and vary precisely according to conflicts in which scientists have taken away the right to deal with questions that had previously been considered the exclusive concern of metaphysicians and sometimes of theologians."8.
For Juan, the rupture of this continuity between physics and metaphysics is what has most degraded philosophical mediation in the dialogue between science and faith. The great temptation to which the religious spirits of modernity have succumbed is that science and religion have hardly anything to do with each other. But "science, although it moves within partial and restricted orders, possesses a natural tendency to totalize them, which implies and demands a correct coordination with other spheres of human existence and very particularly with the religious sphere" (9).9. This can be easily understood if we think of multidisciplinarity as a requirement of the unity of intellectual life of persons and, in particular, of scientific believers. All humans who put their intellectual capacity into action maintain a particular and intimate vital dialogue between scientific and religious written request . The point is that the movement of reason is unstoppable even within the necessary transition between its different human registers. A forced standstill leads to a negation of reason against itself.10. Therefore, the "principle of not applying the scientific method beyond what is reasonable, nor pretending to solve questions that we are not in a position to solve, runs the risk of becoming the unhealthy criterion that what is beyond my method or my skill is not really that important".11as we unfortunately see in a resurgent positivism.
Perhaps someone may think that we are exaggerating. But I do not know to what extent those who so judge have recently attempted a dialogue with contemporary professional scientists. A few months ago I met several of them at a congress on Physics and Ontology. One of them was interested in the Christian faith and asked me to explain to him, in terms he could understand, the essentials of this faith. He was a person with a certain natural religiosity, a bit Einsteinian, we could say. Obviously I made reference letter to the Incarnation and how in Jesus Christ dwells the fullness of the divinity bodily.12. The following question from my interlocutor was not wasted: "Are you telling me that you believe that in Jesus of Nazareth the global gauge symmetry of the universe has been broken?
The preambula fidei remain the preferred terrain, the areas of intersection, where science and religion meet and where it is most urgent to find a language shared by all. John recalls that "the preambles of faith consist of substantive affirmations (positive or negative) about the world and man, insofar as they depend on and are related to God. In this field science has much data to contribute, data that Philosophy has to interpret and evaluate in order to draw the appropriate theological (or anti-theological) consequences".13. These zones of intersection, of shared sovereignty, are called for John "universe" and "man". And if for the first of these concepts we are in a kind of pax romana - even if the attacks of the philosophers of the multiverses are lurking on the borders of the Rhine and the Danube as soon as new physics appears - it is on the second and its specificity that most of the current battles are fought, often also in connection with the first.
Let us say it clearly. What is at stake is man's spirituality and his specific causal potentiality in nature: the existence of a properly human freedom. Juan warns that "naturalism has become strong in this last redoubt with the claim that we lack any distinctive feature that would allow us to stick our heads out of the universe to deserve and expect a destiny that surpasses the cosmic. The presence of genuine freedom in man is questioned, his dignity and aptitude for true ethical behavior is denied."14. For the believer in a God staff, free people are the closest thing to himself that God can create. But this does not mean denying the radically natural character of man and, therefore, his evolutionary conditioning. In fact, "the conjunction of the free and the unfree in man is part of the essence of what is human, and it is also the root of man's social character. "1515. However, in my opinion, John puts his finger on the sore spot of all materialisms (including the physicalist one) when he unmasks the trap of converting "the subject into a source infinite formal variety, as anyone who looks at speculative versions of inflationary cosmological theories, for example, can verify". At the root of the difference is the difference16 and it would do contemporary physics no harm to reflect on the philosophical content hidden behind concepts such as symmetry breaking.
After reading Juan for a few years, a pessimist like me can only envy his underlying optimism. Not only is he convinced of the continuity between science, Philosophy (and theology?) but he thinks that, "until well into the twentieth century, the collective of scientists was on average more religious than the average of the society that sheltered them".17. Scientists, especially the enlightened ones, were on average more religious than the philosophers, literati and intellectuals of their generation.18. What we have at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one would be nothing but a fluctuation, as there would be a mutual feedback between scientific work and religious creed. John would surely be happy to know of the existence of current titles such as "The Penultimate Curiosity".19which sustains the mutual reinforcement between science and religion throughout the history of mankind.
I don't know if I agreement with it, but I think there is data for pessimism. In a recent work on the religiosity of professional scientists. Sociologist Elaine Ecklund and her collaborators show a worrying trend in Western countries. Scientists are on average half as religious - in theory and in internshipas the society they work in.20. But even more telling is that these scientists do not generally think there is a conflict between science and religion. Religion simply has nothing to offer to their worldview. They can understand that there are people with a special religious sensibility, just as there are people with artistic, sporting or gastronomic sensibilities. To them, to scientists, religion simply has nothing to say.
Evidently, this clashes with John's position and we must be doing something wrong, as he himself seems to recognize when he states that "as long as Christianity is not truly universal, as long as not every last inhabitant of the planet becomes a full Christian, something important is failing in those who are, and recognizing this is the condition of possibility so that they can or we can get out of the quagmire."21. To me this seems to be a somewhat excessive denunciation, since neither Jesus Christ nor any other saint achieved the conversion of all his contemporaries; not even of all those who passed through their earthly lives. But it must be recognized that its progressive conversion into a cultural and scientific ghetto does not fit in well with the universality of Christianity.
Undoubtedly, there are other gnoseological issues where Juan's position is more open to comment. For example, I do not know if we will ever agreement on his view of quantum mechanics as a theory in which indeterminacy is epistemic and not only ontological. For Juan, as a good philosopher, "the enthronement of chance in science does not imply anything other than the recognition of the intrinsic limits of research activity".22. Much should be said about the concept of chance and this is not the place, but allow me to point out that behind the resource to chance in science - as the absence of correlations between variables in a given context - may be beating the gift of a determination that escapes us, simply because nature and the given appear as gift and gift.
Epistemology points to ontology, as ontology is well known to good-hearted realists, as Juan undoubtedly is, for whom "the diversification of knowledge is merely thematic. It is established by the contents and not by the epistemic forms: identical sensibility, identical intelligence, identical reason are exercised when we do science, Philosophy or theology."23. Perhaps that is why it is usually very prudent, when there is no hope of finding "facts" to decide between the competing theoretical options, to prefer to abstain. He does not seem to be a fan of scientific schemes as adventurous as those offered by superstring theories or models that invoke quantum mechanics to try to understand the mind-brain problem. However, his epistemology of risk does not seem to be entirely consistent with such prudence or with his basic position on the mysteries of religion which, for him, are "enigmatic, and the best we can do with them is to refrain from trying to shore them up (in the spirit of making them less impenetrable) by the procedure of starting a process of rationalization and then stopping it in an arbitrary way. Either you explain them altogether (and thus deny that they are genuine mysteries), or you better leave them entirely unexplained."24. The question is simply what then is meant by the rational reflection of faith that we call theology. It seems then as if the epistemology of risk is discipline-accepting.
I have left for the end the reference letter the core of the questions that interest John, in my opinion, which is none other than the problem of the relationship between the world and God: "so crucial and thorny that all the combination of possible solutions has been explored and exhausted".25. It would seem that John is so profoundly religious that he accentuates the divine transcendence to unsuspected limits. To the point, I would say, of almost rejecting the immanence of God in the cosmos as too close to pantheism. John criticizes those who "accentuate the immanence of God to the point of making him descend to the basements of the cosmos, below the phenomenal level where the blemishes are too noticeable."2626 But one might ask how it is possible to maintain the belief in the action of God in the world and, therefore, the divine causality in every determination of the universe, without maintaining its transcendent immanence so as not to fall into the caricature of an interventionist and bungling God.
John undoubtedly sidesteps these questions by recalling the staff character of God, who calls created persons to communion with him. "It could be said that in the creative gesture the Infinite is opposed to itself, that is, it becomes aware of its infinitude and of the possibility of abandoning its self-sufficient solitude through an act of love. But for this it is indispensable that it be able to become conscious of itself, that is to say, that it be a person."27. That he be a person and that he call persons, we might add; beings capable of freely self-determining themselves, in continuity with a nature that is self-determining according to its own legality at various levels. That is why, I dare say, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural or between the natural and the miraculous is not for John something so relevant, for "the whole history of the universe is summed up in unique portents and repeated portents."28. A marvelous cosmos in which "there is enough order to conclude that there are principles that unify it, and enough disorder to convince us that it is not a monotonous, mechanical, anonymous reality" (John, p. 29).29. For this reason, John continues, "I do not believe that anything else is necessary to make the dialogue between science and faith viable and fruitful with regard to the existence and nature of God."30.
There is much more that unites us than separates us. This idea paraphrases St. John XXIII's emphasis on the search for dialogue with the modern world. I think it also serves to summarize Juan Arana's vision of the relationship between science and religion when Philosophy is allowed to exercise its role of mediation, while remaining faithful to the paradigm of the unity of knowledge. If, as he emphasizes, "the sharp separation of science from metaphysics, morality, and in final, from everything that could have implications of religious subject , was at first part of a strategy of self-defense on the part of the scientists".31Now it seems that it is rather the other way around, since "the believers in revealed religion did not know how to maintain open communication with science and little by little they ended up taking refuge in a divided way of living the demands of faith on the one hand and those of reason on the other".32. The result is there for all to see in the form of various pathologies, "which result when the man of faith ignores the philosophical meaning of science and neglects the work of entering into dialogue with it".33.
In my opinion, there is in John's work a profound teaching for teachers and researchers of theology. Certainly, "the inability of Philosophy to promote dialogue between science and religion manifests the decadence of Philosophy itself. But it also has negative repercussions on theology, tempting it to be a hermeneutic of sacred texts, a gloss on the inner world of the believer or a phenomenology of religious experience".34. My particular pedagogical-pastoral translation is that, if natural theology and revealed theology no longer go hand in hand, students will mock the former and reject the latter. But then, how can John be seriously accused of being an optimist? Because he takes care to remind us that "the Christian faith is not meant to lessen these uncomfortable pretensions and to teach us to tame human ambitions by confining them to the narrow framework of what is within our reach. Nor does it set out to extinguish all desires in believers, showing them the way to indifference and resignation. On the contrary, it teaches them how to enhance their appetites to the unimaginable, encourages them to break through the barriers that limit their desires, and pushes them to seek a goal whose attainment leaves no room for frustration and boredom. God is the name given by the Christian message to the object of this excessive ambition, and what it asks of men is that they not be satisfied with less."35.
Yes, Juan. We cannot be satisfied. That is why your work financial aid and will continue to help us to learn and to remember (as a good Platonist?) that: (i) modern science has unequivocally Christian roots, (ii) it has been losing them for a long time, (iii) however, all attempts to root it in other soils have ended in failure. The root influences the plant more than we sometimes think, since it is not only an instrument of stability but also a channel for searching and feeding. Every living being is a magnificent example of circularity and feedback and the work of Juan Arana financial aid us to contemplate the mutual feedback of science and religion that we call Philosophy.
(1) The following text was used in the tribute, on the occasion of his retirement, to Full Professor Juan Arana Cañedo-Argüelles.
(2) Cf. Juan Arana (2017). La Philosophy en el diálogo ciencia-religión. Una proposal a partir de la obra de Mariano Artigas. Pamplona: Publishing Services of the University of Navarra. https://www.unav.edu/web/ciencia-razon-y-fe/leccion-mariano-artigas/leccion-2017
(3) John H. Brooke (2014). Science and Religion. Some Historical Perspectives (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(4) Juan Arana (2020). Science and religion: enemies or allies? Sevilla. Senderos.
(5) Ibidem
(6) Ibidem
(7) Ibidem
(8) Ibidem
(9) Ibidem
(10) Cf. Étienne Gilson (1966). La unidad de la experiencia filosófica. Madrid: Rialp.
(11) Juan Arana (2020). Science and Religion, op. cit.
(12) Cf. Col 2:9.
(13) Juan Arana (2020). Science and religion, op. cit.
(14) Ibidem
(15) Ibidem
(16) I am decidedly in favor of an ontological pluralism in Javier Sánchez Cañizares (2019). Universo singular. Apuntes desde la física para una Philosophy de la naturaleza. Madrid: publishing house UFV.
(17) Juan Arana (2020). Science and religion, op. cit.
(18) See, for example, Juan Arana (ed.) (2022). La cosmovisión de los grandes científicos de la Ilustración. Convicciones éticas, políticas, filosóficas o religiosas de los protagonistas de la ciencia en el siglo XVIII. Madrid: Tecnos.
(19) Roger Wagner and Andrew Briggs (2016). The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions. Oxord: Oxford University Press.
(20) Elaine H. Ecklund, David R. Johnson, Christopher P. Scheitle, Kirstin R.W. Matthews, and Steven W. Lewis (2016). "Religion among Scientists in International Context: A New Study of Scientists in Eight Regions." Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 2:1-9.
(21) Juan Arana (2020). Science and religion, op. cit.
(22) Ibid.
(23) Ibid.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Ibid.
(26) Ibid.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Ibid.
(30) Ibid.
(31) Ibid.
(32) Ibid.
(33) Ibid.
(34) Ibid.
(35) Ibid.