The Beginning of All Things

Book

Hans Küng. The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007.

Reviewer

Daryl Culp, Humber College, Toronto, ON

Hans Küng has put together in The Beginning of All Things a remarkable synthesis of philosophical, theological, and scientific reasoning about our universe. He argues that religious views of the universe (understood as symbolic expressions of the meaning of this reality) are compatible with scientific explanations.

This does not mean that science proves theology or that theology undergirds scientific exploration, but that each has its own distinctive procedure for understanding reality. Küng believes this reality is more than what science can explain, which is precisely why we need religion in order to understand reality fully.

Küng emphasizes the limits of scientific knowledge. “If science is to remain faithful to its method,” he says, “it may not extend its judgment beyond the horizon of experience” (52). He outlines the way cosmology cannot examine the constraints of the cosmos in which we find ourselves.

The author acknowledges that science has its own procedures that give reliable and comprehensive knowledge about the world around us. But he goes further and defines physics as follows: “Its theories and models are not literal descriptions of reality at the atomic level (naive realism) but are symbolic and selective attempts that depict the structure of the world” (8).

By stressing the symbolic character of scientific explanations, Küng attempts to gain a foothold for religious explanations of the same reality. One wonders if the parallel can be drawn too closely. Surely the symbolic nature of religious explanations differs from the highly mathematical and theoretical symbols of science, which are tested by experimental data and cause/effect analysis.

In his discussion of creation, Küng stresses the symbolic character of the creation narratives of the Hebrew Bible and repudiates any attempt to gain scientific knowledge from them. However, he feels justified in interpreting evolution in religious terms, as a creation by the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He tries to use the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants to suggest the intelligent design of the universe.

This argument is tempting to theologians, but if the universe has evolved to produce life, the constants of the universe are merely those that we experience. It is impossible to extrapolate to other possible universes, since we have no experience of any alternatives.
Küng proposes that scientists consider God as a hypothesis. Here it seems to me that he is stepping beyond his own wise thesis that science and religion should retain separate procedures. He does acknowledge that that there is no deductive or inductive proof of God. Rather, he insists on a practical and holistic rational approach to God (including the whole experience of the human being, especially subjective awareness).

The author argues that the human being is more than the body, more than brain processes, and still a mystery to neurologists. This ignorance, however, is used as a logical leap towards the “mystery” of the cosmos, which is too easily filled by the idea of God as the primal ground of our existence.

In the plethora of books about science and religion, this one stands out as more comprehensive than most because it puts the discussion in the context of a philosophical argument about reality and the way we perceive it. Küng relies on a depiction of theology as a metaphysical principle that goes beyond the limits of scientific theories. He is too well-versed in the global religions to describe this as a necessary leap and instead depicts it as a choice.

But such a choice would need to be justified in comparison with other religious or metaphysical explanations of the ultimate reality. It would be interesting to see Küng use his wide knowledge of other religions to compare the various religious cosmologies with current scientific descriptions of the origins of the universe and life.