Values in a world of facts

The integrity and coherence of the world may inspire one with awe and wonder as well as trigger a quest for an ultimate explanation, though ultimate explanations ask for more than what is delivered by science. Each of the two views considered above, naturalistic theism and religious naturalism, involves a similar value judgement: the world is good. If the world weren’t good, why would it be appropriate to consider it the creation of a good God? Or, for the religious naturalist, if nature lacks moral and aesthetic quality, why associate nature with the sacred? The world is not good. There is misery, illness, pain, decay, the death of

beloved individuals and the disappearance of species. A religious view that does not acknowledge the waste in natural history and in human lives is unfair to important experiences. This also challenges ‘religion and science’, since quite a few argue that there is consonance between our scientific understanding and our religious appreciation of the world. I will argue that moral engagement with the world requires us to consider dissonance as well. When we aspire to reduce misery, technology rather than theoretical science

has primacy. We live in a technological culture, and are thereby engaged in transforming our world. Belief in the significance of such human actions challenges any naïve belief in harmony, and hence any straightforward argument from positive experiences to a religious understanding of reality. Awareness of misery, or at least of the possibility that what is natural need

not be good, underlies the distinction between facts and values, between the way the world is and the way the world is envisioned as it should be. In Chapter 4 we heard of a distinction between models of the world and models for the world, of cosmology and values, two elements that any theology holds together, even if in tension. However, values are expressed in human judgements, which are rooted in our biological nature, and thus they belong to the sphere of facts nonetheless. How to think of values in a world of facts? That will be the question towards the end of this chapter. But let us begin with consonance and dissonance, and the place of technology in ‘religion and science’. As indicated earlier with respect to other topics, all such issues are too big

for the space allotted here, as well as being too big for my competence. The

aim cannot be an exhaustive treatment but rather an introduction to some of the major issues at stake in ‘religion and science’.