Our understanding of the nature of science compared to the nature of philosophy is subject to many of the same misunderstandings as can be found in science-religion debates. As with religion, however, one hopes that we can go beyond naive concepts of conflict or replacement.
It is important to recognize that while science and philosophy can interact, each must be given its own due. In this, one is reminded of what St. John Paul II wrote in his 1987 letter to the director of the Vatican Observatory, Fr. George Coyne SJ, about science and religion: “Both religion and science must preserve their autonomy and their distinctiveness. Religion is not founded on science nor is science an extension of religion. Each should possess its own principles, its pattern of procedures, its diversities of interpretation and its own conclusions.” One could substitute “philosophy” for “religion” and the statement would remain valid.
But while both science and philosophy each represent an independent mode of searching for truth, this does not mean that the one cannot provide motivation and inspiration for the other. The immensity of the universe revealed by JWST makes it difficult to be satisfied with a narrow, parochial understanding of reality, just as it forces the believer to look beyond an Earth-bound God. Indeed, the ability to observe the universe in a new way, as has been granted to us by the James Webb Space Telescope, means that we can be inspired to deeper questions about the nature of the reality behind these images.
In the face of astronomical data, a philosopher must confront a universe larger than the common-sense experience of our quotidian experience, just as a believer must confront the fact that the only possible sort of creator-God is one even bigger than that observed universe. And just as by seeing the nature of the universe one can begin to deduce and appreciate the “personality” of such a Creator — one who is both eminently logical and yet transcendently beautiful, so the philosopher can begin to ask what principles remain constant even as the nature of space and time itself becomes bent beyond recognition.
Science, in turn, can be inspired to reflect on the nature of its limits, even as it is inevitably directed toward the unbounded possibility of a universe that exists beyond the borders of what we can observe. And science can perhaps be guided by the expectation that the more elegant its understanding, combining both logic and beauty, the closer it comes to truth. The person of faith can put it this way: the author of Truth is the One whose essential being is reflected (however faintly) in the elegance of any theory that we poor creatures can devise.
It is perhaps worth recalling another phrase of St. John Paul II, introducing his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Again, one could substitute “metaphysics and physics” for “faith and reason” in that statement. The essential insight is this: our goal is Truth. Physics and metaphysics are both wonderful tools; but the goal of our efforts is neither science alone, nor philosophy alone. No human understanding or expression that is guided toward any goal other than Truth will ever satisfy the urge within us that drives us to be scientists, or give us the faith that an accomplishment like the JWST could even be achieved.
In the discussion that follows, we find an eloquent discussion of the shifting boundaries of physics and metaphysics in light of the JWST results; a discussion of how the Catholic intellectual tradition has pondered the apparent directedness of the human mind towards truth and beauty; and how our understanding of theoretical cosmology, especially in the work of Stephen Hawking, may be motivating a fundamental paradigm shift in our understanding of our place in the universe.