How v. Why

The important questions are about “why,” not “how.”

When Tom Kroc was a young physicist, he visited Russia. On his return, he said, “The Russian physicists are much more creative than we are.”

Creative? Science isn’t supposed to be creative. It’s supposed to be accurate, mathematical, factual. Isn’t it?

In fact, it was mathematics that allowed science to advance. When physicists and others stopped using physical models of the universe and started using mathematical models, all sorts of breakthroughs happened, like the “creative” thinking of E=MC2.

Science is now past even mathematics, though. String theory and chaos theory as well as particle theory have come out of creative thinking, going beyond “how” to “why.”

Christian Fundamentalism is stuck in Enlightenment thinking in a post-Enlightenment age.

Enlightenment thinking is about factual accuracy. It is important in scientific application, like the clinical trial I was on as a cancer patient. Scientists, however, in order to advance, including in cancer care, go way beyond factual accuracy. Creativity and imagination allow all sorts of advances that simple accuracy, sticking with known facts, do not allow.

John Polkinghorne, the eminent British theoretical physicist turned Anglican priest/theologian, reminds us that the factual accuracy of the creation of the world or the virgin birth or original sin can answer the question of “how” but not of “why,” which is much more important.

The Bible does not try to answer the questions of factual accuracy. The snake in the garden is not about how original sin came to be, but why.

The “how” questions are important, but the “why” questions are more so, and they are answered only by faith, which is the province of theology.

If theology gets into a shoving match with science about “how,” it will always lose. When science gets into a shoving match with “why,” science loses.

Fundamentalists are stuck on “how.” It doesn’t mean they’ll lose at the polls or in the text book committees. It does mean they’ll lose the answer to “why.”

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Facts can answer “how.” They cannot answer “why.”