I do not remember seeing Mr. Townes at Riverside Church during the period he was there but it may have been a different set of 60s years. IBM was close in that area then, in more than one personality. A Watson was on the Board of Union and I believe a relative still is. One of my uncles, John Wesley Graham, was an IBM VP of the era, set up their corporate accounting. WWII Marine enlisted, street fighter extraordinaire, disliked me for wasting time not working (aka, for completing college and graduate school). I liked him, though.

Townes is clearly a sweet man, generous to the core. He is right that religion has to do with questions of purpose and meaning, but so does science. The difference between them is related to the sources of human experience in/from which questions of purpose and meaning are posed/received, the media through which answers to those questions are gained and the norms by which answers to those questions are accepted as accurate or inaccurate. Those sources, media and norms are distinct and do not overlap, although some methodological procedures certainly do overlap between them because they are basic to all epistemological activity.

Faith certainly is not postulates. This is an old hope of scientists who remained in circles of religion without becoming positivists, but it is a forlorn hope. Faith is given, not manufactured. Man is grasped by faith, he does not develop it and cannot develop it. Whoever talks about faith as a leap of or a reasoning to or anything else human-sourced has not looked at the phenomenon carefully enough or is an ignoramus parroting something they heard. Nothing science has achieved comes even close to how religion starts and cannot. Science has no tool, no mission, no interest and no ability to even approach the vertical phenomenon of life much less postulate regarding it. It is strictly horizontal, which is nothing pejorative, it merely is akin to saying that a whale is going to live in the sea and not in a tree and an ant is going to live in the dirt and not in a fire. Everything has its place and purpose in that place.

Also, the laws of physics, science, law, logic, whatever, neither predict, pre-figure nor prove anything ultimate, anything in the vertical dimension, such as a so-called “existence of God.”

Finally, there is no evolution to new religious knowledge or a new coincidence of science and religion. (There is no coincidence of science and religion now or at any time or space.) The philosophy of history which underlies such a notion is radically inaccurate and comprises no more than wishful thinking.

First, history and evolution are already complete, in principle, at their start, and second, novelty appears in history that is unpredictable, unextrapolatable from existing phenomena of evolution, not to mention from the feeble, paltry grasp of those phenomena we proudly collate as a “theory of evolution.” For starters, for example, every phenomenon of evolution is accompanied by an equal and opposite act of involution (where is Sir Isaac when the tendentious need him?!), a fact that, to my knowledge, only Teilhard has included in a system and expressed with some thoroughness in both ontologically and cosmologically significance.  And besides evolution and involution, there is also devolution, all happening simultaneously everywhere.

Also — and Townes is accurate on this point — what we think we know about evolution, indeed, any field of science, comes under Twain’s, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Any construction of human labor is feeble and paltry when seen as human labor but glorious and sublime — to include therein even that which is evil — when seen as Inspired labor.

A man such as Townes who has genuine religious sensitivity and experience is so because he has been grasped by the power of Spirit. He did not get this experience from science, he could not. However, science would have illumined the experience for him, and that is what has happened in his life, clearly. That is what makes him sweet and endearing. That he does not yet understand, or, perhaps articulate, this order of awareness is inconsequential unless he is held up as a theological mentor, meaning, a professional guide in the structure of being and the phenomenology of Spirit. He is not that.

The “arguments for the existence of God” (one ontological, one cosmological and one historical, to which Townes refers here) prove nothing and argue nothing about God when they come towards God from man’s position, that is, from the horizontal towards the vertical. But when they come towards man from God’s position, that is, from the vertical towards and indeed into the horizontal, they are beautiful and sweet demonstrations of the power and immanence of God in every general and every intimate aspect of reality.

Likewise, the phenomenon of evolution/involution says nothing about the purpose or meaning of anything at all when used by man to say what he “knows” this or that about anything. However, when revealed by God as a content of grace operating through faith — which itself is a product of grace — to illustrate what man is experiencing, the phenomenon of evolution also is a beautiful and sweet demonstration of the power and immanence of God in every general and every intimate aspect of reality.

Nothing in nature says God to a scientist because science treats of nothing that is ultimate. It cannot because it participates in the conditions of existence. Everything in nature says God to a person grasped by any concern that is genuinely ultimate. It cannot help but do so because it already has been jolted by the experience of its own impermanence, of the possibility of non-being.

Postulates also, and indeed every one of the great achievements of epistemology in the fields we term science — the fields of horizontal experience — when experienced as coming to man from God rather than as pitiful man, poster child of tragedy, beating his breast that he can reach God with his methods and achievements, are beautiful and sweet demonstrations of the power and immanence of God in every general and every intimate aspect of reality.

The difference is in the flow of the mind and the will and especially with how their initiation is conceived (a rather lovely double entendre, if I do say so myself, the second, less obvious meaning implying the point of the sentence).

When mind and will are taken as starting from the horizontal direction, they have power, though only with the greatest struggle, in that direction and have no justification rendering opinions about anything in the vertical direction. When mind and will are taken as starting from the vertical direction, as elements of the gifts of reality and specifically personality, essentially and even existentially, then living in the horizontal direction, which is a given of anything having existence, is pure velvet, without struggle, and every labor of man, science, religion, culture, morality, economics, engineering, whatever, is felt to be saturated with the sweetness of God.

This is the science Roger Bacon intended. God is the prius of science, which delectates the inhabitants of all fourteen worlds. Science as the prius of science is madness and terrifies the inhabitants of all fourteen worlds. Townes appears sensitive to this truth, but from being grasped by it, not from achieving or reaching it through science, which is impossible.

Riverside Church is a Rockefeller foundation. Its demographics are unlike what they were in the 60s. One of my front teeth was chipped in a basement gym at Riverside during a volleyball play one Monday evening in 1968.

AMDG