I often stop myself mid thought when considering questions of truth to ask whether I believe in something or know of something. The distinction here is rather simple, knowledge is founded upon evidence, upon scrutiny & careful consideration of the facts of a case. Belief on the other hand is more of a gut feeling, it’s something we can discern but never really know until that feeling is backed up by fact-based evidence. Of all the forms of knowledge we have yet devised perhaps the most precise and useful is science, or rather the Scientific Method, which is fundamental to understanding the most innate truths of our world.

Both belief & science are built on a certain degree of faith. If the hard facts found in scientific inquiry are the bricks used to construct a house for our collected wisdom built up over every generation, then faith is the mortar that keeps those bricks together. You have to have faith in your senses, in your reasoning, and in the methods and tools you use to come to your scientific conclusions. Similarly, faith is necessary to believe, faith in an idea, in a hope, yes even in a dream of eternity. I’ve been using the English for these ideas so far, but now I think it might be useful to dive into the Latin, which will give us a better idea of how these concepts of belief, science, and even faith, interact in our Modern English.

In Latin the verb crēdō fits my own understanding of belief best. This verb refers to the action of believing and trusting in something, for belief is inherently an active thing. This verb is the origin of our English word creed, and in fact is the opening word of the Latin version of Nicene Creed. Something is credible because it can be believed, and so perhaps there is a certain degree of belief necessary and inherent in science whose facts and statements have enough credit to be considered irrefutable.

Science is itself an English adaption of the Latin word scientia, which had its origins in the Late Roman Republic as an abstract noun referring to the present active participle sciēns, a form of the verb sciō meaning “to be able to,” or “to know,” or “to understand.” Sciō is a practical sort of knowing, it refers to a manner of knowledge that can be tested, reviewed, and proven. Science relies on these proofs to survive and flourish, yet moreover science relies on the tools used to know being credible in their utility. You wouldn’t use a dull knife to cut meat, let alone blunted senses or scientific instruments to prove the fullness of our perceivable reality.

I have a deep admiration for many of the great scientific thinkers of the last few generations, and frequently mention the likes the great public science educators as Drs. Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and my generation’s favorite science teacher Bill Nye as people whose curiosity and intellect I look to for inspiration. It is striking then that someone like me who does believe in God, who is a practicing Catholic, would be so admiring of thinkers who themselves are profoundly atheistic in their worldview. I understand where they’re coming from, the existence of God cannot be proven through science, that is an indisputable fact, and to say otherwise would likely diminish the power and vitality of my own faith. I don’t mind that God cannot be proven real or otherwise, for the simplest summation of God in Christian theology as I was taught it, largely coming from the Latin Catholic and Greek Orthodox perspectives, is that God is a paradox. God can only really be approached through belief, through the hope that one might be doing things as some original Creator hoped things would turn out, because in my tradition Free Will is something fundamental to Creation.

I think of God in terms of a Divine Essence, certainly not physical let alone personal in a way that we as humans could fully understand a guy sitting across a table from us. I wonder then can we say that we knowGod, for knowledge relies on those same proofs born out of scientific inquiry? I’m not sure there, and I hesitate to talk about a personal relationship with God because how does one really go about talking to or feeling for someone who can’t be discerned by our methods or means? In the end, if God exists, as I believe, then it relies on that same belief, guided by faith, in Latin fidēs, a word that can also mean reliance, trust, confidence, or a promise that the thing you believe in, whether it be the accuracy of the Webb telescope to find for us the rings of Neptune in greater detail than ever before seen, or in the existence of a God who created all things at some moment deep beyond the furthest reaches of our known past.

I used to think that one could place God’s act of creation at the moment of the Big Bang, after all the image of a great explosion fit neatly with a certain idea of an outpouring of Divine Love, caritas in Latin, that is so central to the writings of many of the mystics of the Church. Yet now using scientific measures our experts have determined that the Big Bang was caused by an eruption of pure energy that had built up before the beginning. It makes me wonder whether we will learn more about those earliest moments as time goes on, whether today’s and tomorrow’s cosmologists will find new truths determined by their own proofs of what might well have happened when all matter in our Universe was compressed into a minute area of tremendous mass.

It seems fair to me to argue then that the moment of Creation did take place, and that at some point our own abilities as humans, all our own wisdom, ingenuity, and cleverness, will reach its limit. Thankfully our scientific tools have yet to reach that limit, and I doubt that limit will be reached in a good long while. It is in our nature as humans to continue pushing the boundaries of our knowledge, first beyond the campfires our ancestors gathered around on the long cold nights of the Last Glacial Period which ended somewhere around 11,700 years ago, then as we learned to plant crops and live sedentary lives, building villages, towns, and later cities where we settled. 

As our ancestors continued to develop their societies, they continued to fill in the edges of what became their maps, pushing the edges of what they came to call Terra incognita (unknown land) further and further out to the periphery until 500 years ago the disparate human family was reconnected through our ingenuity and technology transforming the oceans that were once barriers into bridges which we today can cross with ease. In the last seventy years those boundaries have begun to be pushed upward and outward from our home planet and into the stars beyond. We are explorers driven by our desire to understand the unknown, to see over the next horizon. Yet at the core of all that exploring we have continued to explore ourselves, to look within and ask deep questions about who we are not just as physical beings made of flesh, blood, and bone but as individuals, personalities each distinct from the rest. It is this exploration of the self that continues to drive our desire for some greater truth than we can know, a memory of a Creator who began our long and winding story as a species billions of years even before we ourselves evolved into the species we are today, Homo sapiens, discerning humans.

In times now past our ancestors often turned to belief rather than science to answer their questions, to find truths behind the mysteries they faced in their lives. Ideas of monsters, magic, and spirits out for good or ill were born from that worldview. Today, many of those same phenomena could be readily explained using the tools that our sciences have provided, yet still there are limits to our reason, for there are limits to what we as rational beings are capable of. The fullness of God as I believe in such a Divine Essence is beyond that reasoning, something reliant on my belief supported by my faith, my reliance in the possibility of the wisdom that such a Word, to borrow from St. John’s Gospel, promises. That belief is far from scientific, yet it is reinforced by my faith that we as humans can make sense of the reality into which we exist through our own tools, our Scientific Method.