c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is the publisher of RNS and considers the C she received in calculus to be evidence of grace.)

UNDATED _ To be a good scientist, do you need to check your faith at the lab door? To be a good believer, do you need to abandon reason in order to worship?

For the last few decades at least, the majority of intellectual thought seemed to answer in the affirmative. Science and faith were considered incompatible and even mutually exclusive.

But in a trickle turned torrent, scientists and intellectuals seem to be reassessing their previous ties to absolute rationalism and are seeing the light of faith and belief.

Welcome to the post-secular age.

Scientists are coming out of the closet about their own religious convictions, intellectuals are exploring the mind/faith connection and those who sneer at belief are, themselves, being decried as small-minded bigots.

A recent Wall Street Journal article entitled”Science Resurrects God”puts it this way:”If the scientific findings of the 19th century eroded belief in God, those of the 20th century have had just the opposite evidential force. … Traditional arguments for the existence of God, which seemed outmoded a century ago, have had new life breathed into them.” In popular culture, we have already seen the proliferation of TV shows with religious themes. But to see the same trend among intellectuals is something else altogether.

Major book publishers are releasing faith-oriented titles they might have thrown into the slush pile a year or two ago. And serious thinkers are openly writing about the compatibility of faith and reason.

Two new books demonstrate that strong intellectual premises can coexist peacefully with firm Christian beliefs.

The first,”God _ The Evidence”(Prima) is appropriately subtitled”The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World.”In it, author Patrick Glynn chronicles both his personal journey and that of the intellectual community from adamant atheism to open belief.

Glynn, who received undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard, first pokes holes in the scholarship of skepticism and secularism that led him to his own view that atheism was the only reasonable mindset. He now believes he was less educated than manipulated on matters of faith and reason.

He then systematically shows that a reasonable person is actually led to faith if allowed to consider all the evidence.

Another book,”A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization”(Rowman & Littlefield) is not for the faint of mind. Author Dean Overman is a practicing attorney who”dabbles”in physics enough to make full-time scientists sit up and notice.

His arguments cover mathematics, molecular biology and particle astrophysics but rely on a central theme: Accidents don’t just happen in the universe. For Overman, belief in God is totally logical. That the world exists in its present state without a divine creator defies reason as well as statistical evidence, he claims.

Those of us who tremble at the memory of calculus class can understand enough of this book to give Overman the benefit of any doubt. But mathematical and scientific types I know who have read this volume pronounce it”brilliant.” Perhaps most importantly, it is taken seriously by a rarified intellectual community called the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, consisting of individuals who have tested off the charts in reasoning abilities. Go figure.

None of this makes me believe that”Jesus loves me this I know”will be embraced as an intellectual anthem, but it does appear the so-called pendulum is swinging back toward the center and may even continue on a path favoring faith.

If that happens, I hope and pray those who favor faith in the debate will remain open to reason, ushering in a period of enlightenment lasting longer than reactionism. And I also hope our intellectual communities and institutions of higher learning will become more open to true diversity, allowing debates to flourish among the best minds and hearts in this country.

Perhaps Overman says it best:”There is no such thing as scientific truth and religious truth. Truth is truth. The object of dialogue for all of us should be to discover that truth.”

MJP END BOURKE