Scientific reductionism is rather, well, reductionist.

Let's now reconsider the question: Is Christian belief the blue pill to scientific method's red pill?

True science and true faith spring from the same source: Our primitive wonder at the mysteries of being and knowing.

This world is a remarkable gift. It is wonderfully strange that anything exists at all, and that what does exist is beautiful, and that it obeys elegant laws, and that humans have minds capable of understanding those laws. It is with this spirit of wonder that the psalmist looks up at the wheeling Keplerian orbits overhead and writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). This is no “God of the gaps,” but a God whose artistry is found in the regular workings of this miraculous universe.

Christianity is a wholehearted attempt to give expression to the wonder at the bottom of everything, both things known and unknown. There is room enough for a world full of wonder in a humble, personal, existential commitment to the creed.

Scientific beliefs like “ordinary things are made up of atoms” have been put to the test in some of the most creative and rigorous ways that human minds have ever devised, and that ought to be respected.

Christian belief is also put to the test: Not in the scientific way, but in historical, philosophical, textual-critical ways—and, like any personal relationship, in “a lifetime's death in love.”

There is a deep commonality between science and faith. True scientists are scientists because they are committed to taking the red pill. True Christians are Christians for the same reason.

Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Stephen G. Mackereth '15 is a joint mathematics and philosophy concentrator in Mather House.