Milad Nouri's Lecture: 'Theology in the Age of Science'

The beginning of the modern era is the endeavor for the liberal education of the arts and the increase of this-worldly happiness; and its end, in Nietzsche's phrase, is the death of God. God is absent in the contemporary world and is no longer an object of knowledge, but rather an occasional object of religious experience. An experience that itself confirms the absence of divinity from the epistemic life of human beings.

The absence of God, even if we do not say the death of God, is the death of meaning, and the death of meaning is the death of a humanity that is preoccupied with science and technology, destroys nature, forgets morality, turns beauty into a tool, and, having no way out of itself, suffers from boredom, absurdity, and lostness.

Modern science, by turning to the cognition of nature's processes and explaining how things come into being, has turned to the examination of part-to-whole and whole-to-part natural laws and strives to explain the necessary and probabilistic processes of things within the framework of time and space through mathematics.

This is only possible through the self-limitation of knowledge to the framework of space and time, which, by insisting on the unknowability of non-temporal and non-spatial matters, determines the absence of divinity from the epistemic life of human beings.

Although science has been successful in expressing the 'hows' of things within the framework of spatio-temporal rules, it has explained the human and divine dimensions of reality through those same natural laws, and by emphasizing processes and 'hows,' it has inevitably fueled the negation of the 'whys' of human life.

The separation of 'how' and 'why' is a path that makes possible the reinterpretation of theology and human life in the age of science. In this way, if science is the expression of how spatio-temporal things come into being, theology is the explanation of their sacred end. An end that is noteworthy not as something separate and independent, but as the divine continuity of this very world.

Sadr al-Muta'allihin (Mulla Sadra) proposes important foundations:

1) That motion is intrinsic to matter, and God only bestows existence upon the world. In this way, matter moves according to its own rules, and God does not impart motion to it. This view provides a possibility to understand how science reveals the independent and internal laws of a world whose essence is change and transformation from the first levels of corporeality to the highest level of self-conscious human life, without God, as the Bestower of existence, becoming absent from the realm of the world.

2) The essence of matter is in internal transformation, and it reaches from the levels of corporeality to spirituality. This view, while aligning with science as a source of knowledge, accepts the scientific explanation of the 'how' of the emergence of life, consciousness, self-consciousness, culture, morality, and all spiritual matters based on corporeality and this-worldly laws, adding the point that this mode of emergence does not tarnish the sacred status of those matters. Just as if the soul, as a sublime and divine substance, has had a corporeal origination and its status and sanctity have not been diminished, no harm will come to the status of morality, knowledge, and aesthetics if we explain their creation and understanding in their corporeal process.

3) What has principality is existence and the attributes of knowledge, life, and power, which advance in the process of the world's essential motion from the first breaths of corporeality to the highest levels of human self-consciousness and freedom. Through an attitude towards his divine status, with an emphasis on self-consciousness and freedom, and through his earthly life, the human being provides the possibility for a blissful heavenly life; for 'the path to heaven passes only through the earth.'

4) The afterlife is nothing but the inner reality of this very world. Thus, otherworldly happiness depends on earthly well-being. Science, by showing the correct ways to cultivate the earth, can increasingly provide the possibility for a rational and moral life; on the condition that it is the aspect of divine life. This is only possible with the return of God to the realm of human life and the use of science in a direction that considers the earth a window towards heaven. 'Only a god can save us,' if the human being turns his gaze towards divinity.

On September 17, 2019, at the Khaneh Doostan Ashna Institute, I tried to explain such positions in a talk.

Theology in the Age of Science

Milad Nouri

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Theology in the Age of Science - Part 1

Theology in the Age of Science - Part 2

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