For the “classical ideal of science,” God’s significance for the cosmos is straightforward: that necessary cause to which all contingent causes are reduced. With the advent of the modern, empirical ideal of science, the significance of God suffers an ambiguity. On the one hand, modern science does not engage in reduction to the universal and necessary, but aims at complete explanation. Thus, it should raise the question of God. On the other, there are no data on God, so there can be no empirical science of God. How, then, should we characterize the relationship of God to modern scientific knowledge?

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Jonathan Heaps, PhD, is the Director of the Bernard J. Lonergan Institute at Seton Hall University and the author of The Ambiguity of Being: Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural (CUA Press, 2024).