For Our Religious Fractures, Science May Be a Healing Salve

I’ve been working for decades, as an Orthodox Jew, with devoted Christians, both Catholic and Evangelical. It has always been and remains a warm and mutually appreciative relationship. Yet in the country as a whole, a bitterness is increasingly evident across faith divides.

I have never seen anything like it. It started with Tucker Carlson, self-identifying as a Bible-reading Episcopalian, who has mounted from insinuating that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk, an Evangelical Christian, to insinuating that President Trump is the Anti-Christ. For Tucker’s political Right, Evangelical “Christian Zionists” are the boogieman, and the new, despised “civil religion” of the U.S. is “Israelism.”

Some young Christians worry they’ll be drafted to “die for Israel” in a Middle East war. One said so to me the other day. Harsh voices dispute over the Catholic Church’s stance on Zionism, and whether a “Judeo-Christian” tradition exists. Oh, and Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance (a Catholic) are feuding with the Pope.

These are just a few developments that seem calculated to alienate Christians from Jews, Protestants from Catholics, Protestants from Protestants, Catholics from Catholics, and a Christian-majority country, the United States, from Israel. As the prophet Jeremiah asked, is there no balm in Gilead?

There may be, and it might surprise you to hear it could be science. Some of my scientist colleagues at Discovery Institute, here in Seattle, appear in a new theatrical documentary, “The Story of Everything.” They include Christians, Jews, and agnostics. The movie offers what it terms the scientific evidence that “reveals a mind behind the universe.”

The argument of the documentary describes three scientific discoveries. The discoveries are that the universe began to exist at the Big Bang, caused by no force within nature. The cosmos was ultra-finely tuned at that moment to support life, by an intelligence outside nature. And life is ingeniously engineered, again gesturing to an intelligence beyond nature.

That concludes my recommendation of the film and of my colleagues’ work. The reason I bring it up is that science on all three subjects directs us not to a particular religion but to theism, the belief in the existence of a deity.

We could be more specific by saying it directs us to monotheism, the belief in one deity. There was only one Big Bang, sometimes called the Singularity, following the theories of physicist Stephen Hawking. A singular beginning means a singular creator.

All this unites, or it could unite, American religious believers.

If combining science and religion troubles you, remember that the men who ignited the scientific revolution were all believers in God. So were the men of the Enlightenment who founded the United States. Interestingly, not all (notably Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams) were orthodox believers.

I was moved recently by reading social scientist, and ex-atheist, Charles Murray’s wonderful little book “Taking Religion Seriously.” He recounts his intellectual evolution to a not perfectly orthodox Christianity, which included thinking about (that’s the first half of the book) topics in science, especially the “brute facts” of the Big Bang and the cosmic fine-tuning.

Murray’s view includes the “utmost respect” for a range of world religious figures, from Moses to Gautama to Laozi, but “reverence” for Jesus alone. There is a sweet universalism to this science-inspired theism.

Something like it was foreseen by the most respected Orthodox rabbi of the 20th century, Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Writing in 1964, in an essay titled “Confrontation,” and coordinated with a statement of the Rabbinical Council of America, he sketched a way of relating for Americans of different faiths, all equally confronted by the specter of ideological materialism.

He argued that religions possess individual dignity in a way that is incommensurable with each other: meaning, they should be respected but can never be understood in each other’s terms. Yet in what he called “secular” arenas, from science to politics, the same faiths could achieve understanding and friendship.

The science of monotheism may be one of those arenas. A Judeo-Christian tradition, wrote the dialectical Rabbi Soloveitchik, in religious terms is a fiction. But in the fields of the secular, including science, it is very real.

God as “secular”? It seems paradoxical but yes. On specific points of belief, Christians and Jews are not mutually understandable to each other. But the cosmic foundation of scientific evidence is equally accessible to us all, on the very same terms.

Is there, then, no salve to heal our fractures? Maybe it is the universal, non-denominational hypothesis of a singular God.

David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the author most recently of “Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.”