“Science at the Doorstep to God:”
Fr. Spitzer’s Masterwork on Contemporary Apologetics

INTRODUCTION

In olden times, apologetics (reasoned arguments in defense of religious doctrine) relied on philosophy and theology.  Nowadays, one has to defend the Church against scientism, the proposition that science explains everything.  Thus, according to evangelists for scientism, God is an unnecessary (and for some, undesirable) figment of human imagination.   Fr. Spitzer’s new work, as with others he has written,  shows that evidence from science does not disprove the presence of God; rather everything that science truly says about the world argues for His presence, and does so as forcefully as do philosophical and theological considerations.

In this review I will summarize Fr. Spitzer’s arguments in “Science at the Doorstep to God” and also suggest some topics that might be suitable for further exploration.¹

A SUMMARY OF FR. SPITZER’S ARGUMENTS

Fr. Spitzer presents six general arguments for the existence of God:

1. Science shows the universe had a beginning, created from nothing.
2. The physical laws and constants of the universe are constrained to support life. This “fine-tuning” occurs because of design by a transcendent intelligence.
3. Near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, and presence of intelligence in hydrocephalic brains give evidence for a non-material soul, consciousness and rationality.  Materialistic arguments cannot account for these.
4. Human intelligence, self-consciousness, and capacity for language are unique amongst animals.  Only homo sapiens, not other hominid species, have these capacities.
5. A religious experience is common to humankind, including the experience of conscience, and the search for universals, such as the good, the beautiful, the true.
6. Philosophy gives logical proofs for the existence of a first cause, a perfect, totally understanding intelligence, which is God.   In addition to arguments from St. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan, Fr. Spitzer sets forth his own rationale.

I’ll not discuss these arguments in detail, only suggest that they are forceful and convincing.  The arguments involving scientific evidence (1-4 above) rely on abductive reasoning: listing possible explanations and selecting the one which best explains the observations.  The philosophical and theological propositions in 5 and 6 use deductive reasoning.

Additional material is introduced in the Introduction and Appendix.  In these Fr. Spitzer discusses the limits of science, whether hominid species other than homo sapiens were endowed with a soul, and the possibility of ensoulment in extra-terrestial species (should they exist).

I’ll lay out below Fr. Spitzer’s conclusions from these arguments.  Some material has been published previously in posts on Fr. Spitzer’s Magis Faith and Reason website.

PRAISE AND QUESTIONS

Let me emphasize that Fr. Spitzer has an encyclopedic knowledge of science, philosophy and theology.   He convincingly brings to bear theories, propositions and facts from many fields.  I can’t imagine that anyone reading this book with an open mind would fail to conclude that God exists.

Nevertheless, I have one general question, which I’ll discuss below.   Perhaps this will be addressed in future works by Fr. Spitzer.

Humans do not have to the same degree those capacities that Fr. Spitzer designates as attributes of ensoulment: language, trans-algorithmic mathematics, conscience, the search for absolutes, etc.   In particular, children acquire these abilities from essentially nothing as they grow.   How does this gradual acquisition of rationality, intellect occur?   Presumably through instruction.   But is there a blueprint, a framework already set in the child so that he/she is receptive to instruction?  Philipe Rochat has investigated how self-consciousness develops in the infant and child (see “Five Levels of Self-Awareness…“).   Piaget has proposed four levels of development that children go through to achieve abstract thought (see here).    But this bear of little brain doesn’t see what clues these studies of development give to the connection between the immaterial and the physical.

One fact from molecular biology speaks to the need of the immaterial soul for a physical substrate. (And, of course Aquinas would say that follows from the definition of soul as the form of the body.)   The FoxP2 gene plays a role in human capacity to learn language.² (Other genes are also involved.) Can one speculate that there are genes for trans-algorithmic mathematics, searching for God and the Divine, etc?  And, if there are, how do they work?

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve quoted Fr. Spitzer’s final conclusions below:

1. There exists a highly intelligent, transuniversal, transphysical Creator of our universe (and any multiverse from which our universe can be generated) that must also be unique, uncaused (existing through itself ), unrestricted, and the Creator of everything else in reality (referred to as “God”).

2. Human beings have a transphysical soul capable of surviving bodily death that is self-conscious, conceptually intelligent, transcendentally aware, ethical/moral, empathetic/loving, aesthetically aware, and capable of freely initiated actions.  Fr. Robert Spitzer, “Science at the Doorstep to God”

Fr. Spitzer emphasizes that “the correlation between these two conclusions implies another important conclusion—the unique, uncaused, unrestricted, intelligent Creator (God) is personal.”

1. God is the origin of our awareness of and desire for the five transcendentals—perfect truth, love, goodness/justice, beauty,and being/home—because our awareness of the perfect must be caused by something that is Itself perfect, and there is only one reality that is perfect: the one unique, uncaused, unrestricted, intelligent Creator.

2. If God—perfect truth, love, goodness/justice, beauty, and being/home Itself—is the cause of our awareness of the five transcendentals, then God must be present to our consciousness, reflecting His loving, good, and beautiful nature. This is what is meant by a personal God.

3. Inasmuch as God is interiorly present to us in His truth, love, goodness, and beauty, it is reasonable to conclude that He is the source of our numinous awareness, the voice of our conscience, and the love in our sense of the sacred and mystical.  ibid

As I said above, I wonder how anyone who read this book carefully could walk away and still be an atheist.  It presents powerful arguments for a Divine Supreme Intelligence who has specifically endowed humans with the capability to seek Him and love Him.  And, like some of the quantum mechanics and magnetic resonance texts I have used in my academic career, one needs to go back and re-read to learn the full import of the material.

NOTES

¹Here, dear reader, is my bias in this review: I’m on the Committee of Academic Fellows for Fr. Spitzer’s Magis Center of Faith and Reason and have contributed to the Magis Center blog.  Also, I had a shout-out in the book’s acknowledgments for my contribution to Fr. Spitzer’s understanding of entropy.

²An interesting fact: the FoxP2 gene is absent in primates and in hominids, but is found in Neanderthal DNA.  The Neanderthals gave flowers to the dead (see here).   And some modern Europeans show a small percent of DNA common to Neanderthals.  Did they also have souls?