Nationalism is a Good Thing.

In 1989, my fifth year in Malaysia, there was a telling confluence of events. 

The German Ambassador held a party on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunion of East and West Germany. At that party he gave a speech in which he said, in English and I quote exactly, “Nationalism is the greatest evil of the 20th century.”

At the same time you could still see the Malaysian national slogan on billboards and handbills: “Nasionalisme Teras Perpaduan.” Nationalism is the core of unity. The use of the English loan word was intentional. The other Malay word translated nationalism is kebangsaan, a contested word that can call to mind ethnicity. 

So how is it that the greatest evil of the 20th century becomes the national slogan for Malaysia? Because the word has different meanings in different historical contexts. 

What the German ambassador meant by nationalism was ethic nationalism, the belief in the intrinsic rights of one ethnic group against others. In Europe that led to war and genocide from the beginning of the 20th century to its end. What the Malaysians meant by nationalism was loyalty to the shared concept of a multi-ethnic state in which each ethnic group had a right to its own mother tongue, religion, and culture but shared a single, unified, political system.

Americans, or at least American progressive Christians, seem to find this distinction confusing. We seem to believe that chauvinistic ethno-nationalism is definitive while forgetting what an incredible advance over previous systems of political identity multi-ethnic, multi-religious nations and their distinctive nationalism really became in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

We might start, of course, with the United States and the nationalism that developed among the colonists and eventually led to the American Revolution. Out of that nationalism there came concepts like freedom of religion and freedom from discrimination based on ethnicity and ultimately gender and even sexuality. It was a nationalism expressed in the sentiment “give me your tired, your poor, your wretched masses yearning to breath free” It was the nationalist ideal that Dr. King demanded be finally realized for all Americans. 

Over in Europe it was this new idea of a nation and the nationalism accompanying it that led to the emancipation of the Jews, and their becoming citizens of states rather than prisoners of ghettos. It was the nationalism of a form of nationhood in which Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Muslims to live together in Germany and France and England.

It remains the nationalism of a new concept of nation that has gradually displaced all older polities and in the process has made life better for more people than any period in human history since the Fall.  

Of course this form of nationalism constantly struggles against older forms of religious and ethnic bigotry. We saw that with the Nazis. Only a couple of years after the Berlin Wall the good nationalism that unifies people of different ethnic and religious groups would fail in Yugoslavia and bad nationalism would lead to genocide. We see it rising with Putin’s Russian chauvinism. We see it our own body politic with the revival of white supremacy. The old chauvinistic nationalism remains a potent reminder of how difficult the process of transforming culture really is. 

Because the idea that a citizen is a person born in a country, or naturalized (think about the meaning of that word) into it, rather than being a person limited to identifying with a particular ethnic group or religion has taken a long time to be realized, and isn’t yet realized. Still the idea of a citizen whose nationalism is tied to a continually affirmed and chosen affinity with people of many different religions and ethnicities far exceeds in worth all that came before. Without it my Malaysian wife of Chinese descent could never become an American. And you wouldn’t have a Muslim mayor of London. And you wouldn’t have an African American president. 

I sometimes think that  Christian Progressives share with Evangelicals a basic pessimism about humanity, and in particular our fellow Christians. We claim to want things to get better, but the slightest bump in the road, much less a major setback, and somehow we think our nation is sliding back down some Deuteronomistic slope into unrighteousness. We need to get a grip quit tearing down that which is good just because it falls short of the best of some imagined eschatological future. 

And oh yes, the reason we have Memorial Day? To remember those who died fighting for exactly for the original American nationalist ideal not only in the Union armies 180 years ago, but throughout the 20th century and on into our own time. They were not killed by American nationalism, they gave their lives for the kind of nation it represents. Were both soldiers and all victims of war sometimes used and abused because of folly, corruption, selfishness, economic interests? Yes, but it wasn’t nationalism that caused their deaths, it was the failure of nationalism and a retreat into factionalism and chauvinism.

Because nasionalisme teras perpaduan. 

How Big is Your Hamster Wheel?

What if instead of asking what we have to say we also asked what we have to learn? What if instead of defending the truth we attack our own ignorance? 

I was struck by a recent article in Scientific American reporting on the latest findings in astronomy based on the coordination of individual experiments designed to measure gravity waves, neutrinos, X-rays, gamma rays, and visible light. This coordination has led to the observation of never-before seen astronomical events of consequence in testing certain theories of the nature of reality and the origins of the universe. 

The excitement in the article, and in the responses of literally 10’s of thousands of scientists to these observations, is palpable. Indeed, hundreds of academic articles are the result of each observation. That excitement seems to stem from a sense of limitless possibilities for continuing discovery about a universe whose unbounded complexity and infinite reach gives humans never ending possibilities for growth in understanding and self-understanding. It is the excitement at the core of the modern scientific endeavor. 

And to tell the truth it make a lot of what Christians do seem pretty dreary. Oh, I know we think we are cutting edge in our engagement with the intense social issues of our day. But do we expect to actually learn anything new about God? Or are we simply offering a contemporary application of what we’ve always known about God. 

And I know that at some of us are at the cutting edge of epistemological and philosophical questions, exploring the enormous complexity of making truth claims in our contemporary culture. But do we expect to learn anything new about God? Or are we simply engaged in the apologetic task of making what has always and everywhere been known by the Church available in a credible and coherent fashion to whatever small segment of society will listen to us? 

And I know that some of us (including myself) are engaged in an intense exploration of non-Christian theologies, seeking to understand better what Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and others say about transcendent reality. But do we expect to learn anything new about God? Or are we simply engaged in identifying long-existing similarities and differences before a break for refreshments and some vague kind of spiritual fellowship?

None of the endeavors above is bad. In fact they are critical parts of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. But do any of them bring the distinctively Christian experience of faith in Christ to bear on discovering something new, something unanticipated about reality? Or are we leaving that to scientists while we concentrate on timeless truths which by their very nature are also antique? Are we going somewhere in our theology? Or are we on a hamster wheel, moving fast but running over and over the same ground?

Back when I was in seminary I remember a professor who said there were only four essential heresies. I think the point was logical, but I remember thinking that when I was studying astronomy I was exploring previously unknown dimensions to reality and when I joined the seminary I was with people who after 2000 years couldn't even come up with a new heresy. 

I’ve just been re-reading Leslie Newbigin’s work, and reflections on it after nearly three decades. And I’ve realized that a great deal of both theological and missiological reflection in the last half century and more has focused on a single question: Do Christians have anything distinctive to say in the context of modern culture, and if so how do they say it? And these questions lead us into endlessly self-referential circles around the content of the Gospel and what it might “mean” in a modern/post-modern/secular context. 

What if instead of asking what we have to say in the context of modernity we also asked what we have to learn? What if instead of defending the truth we attack our own ignorance? 

While driving through Richardson Texas I saw a bumper sticker. It said. “All Truth is in the Quran.” Now I’ve studied Islam and know that whoever had that bumper sticker didn’t know the religion. Because Islam has a robust belief in both natural revelation and revelations outside the Quran. But I also knew that many Christians, and indeed many of my students in the seminary would say the same thing about the Bible, at least with regard to knowledge of God. 

And that is a fallacy. Christians have always believed (as Paul states clearly in Romans 1) that God reveals God’s self in God’s creation. And on a specifically Christian level this means that nature is a revelation of the nature of Christ, the creating Word of God. 

But I find there is no rarer bird in a theological seminary, or indeed most churches, than a person who shows any interest in what scientists are learning about the natural world, and thus God (if they looked) every day. Sure, we are interested in the aesthetics of nature and the emotions to which they give rise. That is our inheritance from Romanticism. But that is not the meaning of natural revelation.

In an culture both obsessed with and drawing massive human benefits from its knowledge of the natural world fidelity to the gospel demands more than asserting the historical fact that Jesus Christ was raised from dead (although making that claim is central to our witness.) Fidelity to the gospel demands that we join scientists in their study of nature with the intention of discovering what it reveals about God. 

Put another way, contextualization of the gospel isn’t accommodation to modernity, it is the recognition of that we who live in the context of modernity share a common commitment to finding the truth. To find that common commitment to truth we as Christians have work to do.

First we need to get over our hurt feelings of rejection by various anti-religious forces in contemporary society. Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk have always been around in some form, running in their own materialist hamster wheels. Let them run. Making claims about who has the better hamster wheel isn’t likely to advance the preaching of the gospel. 

Secondly we need to get over our jealousy of all the attention our culture showers on the so called “STEM” subjects in schools and universities. Ever since Adam and Eve left the garden the chief concern of humans has been how to shape their environment to meet their human needs. When Jesus said that “the sabbath was made for humans and not humans made for the sabbath” he spoke a central truth theologians too readily forget: humans are natural scientists and leisure time theologians. The fact that our society has become so rich that some of us can pursue theology full time shouldn’t fool us into thinking its the most important thing humans do. At any given moment any rational society will put a theologian to work planting the fields before they put a farmer to work doing theology. 

Third we need to become curious about the world again. In a recent conversation with a bishop I was told: “In 90% of the pastor’s offices I visited I could tell the year they graduated from seminary by the books on their shelves.” The primary characteristic of modern culture is curiosity and the desire to discover new things and venture into new realms. But too many of us graduate from seminary and immediately jump onto an ecclesial hamster wheel in which, if we do read anything at all, we read about the wheel and not the world outside it.

Finally we need to become problem solvers.  Because that is the second major characteristic of modern culture; an orientation toward finding solutions to immediate human problems and questions. Nothing puts us more out of touch with our cultural context than our continual rumination on our context. The nature of modern culture is to be a platform for finding solutions to human problems, not to be an object of study. 

Modernity begins as a means of solving the problem of how humans can be free: intellectually, politically, socially, economically, and in every other dimension of human existence. Its key markers are not Kant and Schleiermacher, or Barth or Hauerwas. Its key markers are new churches, new nations, political and scientific revolutions, the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, and a host of new technologies that meet real human needs. Nothing is less contextual than our obsession with describing and contesting our context.

As one atheist responded to one of my blogs, “You keep looking for your lost God, we’ll get on with  curing diseases, feeding the world, and sending rockets into space."  

And that’s what I like about Newbigin. He didn’t see modernity so much as an intellectual puzzle as a missiological context. He described it only to clarify what it means to proclaim the gospel within it. But we need to move beyond that as well. 

The Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once said that the “stage” revealed by science was too big for the story told by Christians. In part that’s because we haven’t done a good job telling our story. He simply hadn’t heard all of it. But in part its because we haven’t explored the stage enough to grasp fully the story that God is trying to tell in Jesus Christ. The stage isn’t too big for God's story, but its way too big for our story. Maybe if we’d join the scientists in exploring its furthest parameters we’d find ourselves out of the hamster wheel and running free. 

Without Anthropology there is No Theology

If we can't see what happens, its because we've blinded ourself to cultural difference.

Let’s start with a short quote from Rev. Dr. Jerry Kulah P. Kulah, Dean of the UMC’s Gbanga School of Theology in Liberia.

Referencing the first of five recent amendments to the UM Book of Discipline he affirms the intention of equality, but 

"we strongly opposed the reference that“it is contrary to Scripture and to logic” to acknowledge or claim the maleness or fatherhood of God.The Scripture is replete with references to God as Father. When Jesus taught his disciples, (and, by implication, us) how to pray, he taught them to call God “Our Father” (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2); throughout his teaching and preaching ministry, Jesus often referred to God as “Father” (Matt. 5:16; 6:9,26; 11:27; Luke 2:9; John 2:16; 4:21; 10:17,30; 14:6-11; 15:9). When he prayed, while carrying the sin of the entire world on the cross, he addressed God as his Father (Luke 23:34). After Jesus’ resurrection, he informed his disciples that he was returning to his Father and their Father (John 20:17). In addition, the Apostles referred to God as “our Heavenly Father” (Romans 8:15; Phil. 2:11; 1 John 1:3; 2:15, 22-23). Furthermore, to accept this inclusion, “The United Methodist Church recognizes it is contrary to Scripture and to logic to say that God is male or female, as maleness and femaleness are characteristics of human bodies and cultures, not characteristics of the divine”would undermine the doctrine of the Trinity, nullify our affirmation of faith (Apostle Creed), and portions of the Bible as non-scripture. Therefore, we voted “NO” to this proposed amendment with a “no” vote of 956; a “yes” vote of 0; and abstention vote of 0.

What is noteworthy here is a comparison of the texts I’ve place in bold italics. The first is a paraphrase of the amendment, the second is the actual amendment.

Dr. Kulah and his conference associate the fatherhood of God with maleness. There is no apparent distinction in their minds between sex and a gender role. Hence to undermine a claim about God’s maleness is to undermine the clear scriptural references to God as Father.

Going further Dr. Kulah even sees this as undermining the doctrine of the Trinity - a position one finds in Orthodox and Catholic theology as well. It isn’t hard to imagine that the Liberian Conference isn’t comfortable with the idea of a Divine Parent substituting for a Divine Father for liturgical purposes. 

Its not my intention here to delve into these theological issues. What needs to be pointed out is simple: The differentiation of sex, gender, and sexuality that has become a common part of Western, post-modern, ways of understanding humans in their social roles IS NOT part of the anthropology of all societies everywhere. Or even most. 

Another example comes from the Philippines, which overwhelmingly supported the amendment above. There it was, and I believe still is, common to refer to gay men as “third sex,” placing a particular way of being human sexually not in terms of sexuality (homosexual) but of sex. A very different way of imaging the human than is found in Africa, but also very different from what is found in the U.S.

What is blindingly clear, so blindingly clear that the United Methodist leaders and indeed virtually the entire UMC in the US are blind to it, is that culture makes a real difference in these matters. And every culture has a different anthropology. If one cannot, or in the case of the UMC refuses to take this into account then the result will not only be division in the church, but increasingly incoherent theologies built on a failure to discuss anthropology. 

++++++++++++Additional Notes

In Chinese metaphysics the distinction between the male and female principles is essential to the relationship of the Tao to creation. Indeed the Tao is the ever-vital relationship between yin (female) and yang (male.) Out of that ever changing relationship comes the creation of the elementals and finally "the myriad of things." In the metaphysics of the Subcontinent we find that Brahman (undifferentiated Being) cannot be grasped without recognizing that Shiva must have a consort, Devi (Kali) if there is to be creation. The idea of a world without male and female is unimaginable. One only need look at the iconography of Shiva (a lingam in a yoni - check your greek on this Sanskrit meanings) to see this. Only in the west do we believe that by distinguishing sex from gender and sexuality that we can actually create a differentiation between the three. Perhaps we should thus question our cultural assumptions rather than belittling others.

Science and Religion in the 21st Century

When considering the relationship between science and religion we must recognize that the fundamental question is not about the existence of God. It is the question of how we know anything at all about reality.

From the beginning of the Enlightenment until the present day we have been trying to distinguish between what constitutes physics and what constitutes metaphysics and which is credible or whether both are credible. For much of the 19^thand early 20^th centuries it seemed that physics, or science more generally, was gradually excluding metaphysics and thus religion as a serious approach to knowing reality. 

There was, however, a shift in the middle of the last century when it became clear that the universe we know of had begun with a “Big Bang.” At that time the astronomer Robert Jastrow famously said

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” 

Since that time numerous efforts have been made by cosmologists to get around this impasse; to find a way to describe reality that does not leave a mystery at the beginning of time. Adam Frank gives an excellent summary of those attempts in his book About Time, Cosmology and Culture in the Twilight of the Big Bang. He says: "The Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it.”

The basis for Jastrow’s mid-century comment has been deeply problematized by advances in both astronomical observation and theories seeking to unify relativity theory and quantum theory. Yet these theories also appear to be both mutually exclusive and currently untestable. So while the phrase, “we do not yet know what will replace it” can be read as a confidence that we will someday know, it may also be read as leaving room for religion as a way of knowing. 

What has changed between the time of Jastrow and Frank is the rise of a vigorous scientism. Jastrow and other scientists who believed that a contemporary cosmology allowed for metaphysics are dismissed with the argument that only the scientific method provides a legitimate way of knowing reality. Only science is sufficiently rigorous in providing coherent testable models to be taken seriously as a way of knowing what is real. One of my colleagues at SMU says: “mathematics is the language of nature.“ It is only a short step further to equate nature with reality and say that what cannot be described mathematically can’t be taken seriously to be real. 

Scientism doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it does claim to possess the only legitimate means of finding those answers. And this includes questions of ethics and meaning traditionally reserved for religion and philosophy. The popular works of Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss and others are contemporary examples of this scientism. 

From this perspective the mere fact that we don’t know what will replace the Big Bang, or even that some contemporary theories are not yet fully coherent and cannot be tested doesn’t justify turning to metaphysics. As Steve Weinstein suggested in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, and Carl Sagan echoed in his Science a Light in a Demon Haunted World, science doesn’t need to provide answers now or even the promise of an answer in the near future. Its pursuit lifts human life from the realm of farce to that of tragedy. Put another way, science gives life authentic meaning precisely in its rejection of all other consolations. This is what the sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor calls heroic atheism in his book A Secular Age.

As there have been developments in science so there have also been developments in religion. One, which I’ll mention and dismiss, is the idea that mathematical tools can be used to prove God’s existence. Robert Spitzers work, New Proofs for the Existence of God, offers an example in its first part. But since he is a philosopher presenting what he regards as a scientific argument I see this as an internal scientific debate unrelated to religion. 

Another I’ll note and dismiss is what is called the “God of the gaps” approach, allowing religion to speak where science is silent. Apart from the critique from scientism itself, this approach is inherently unstable since it allows an ever expanding science to define its boundaries. 

A more serious religious approach, which really rises with Romanticism, is an aesthetic argument for religion as a way of knowing. As Ralph Hodgson wrote, 

Reason has moons, but moons not hers, 

Lie mirror'd on the sea, 

Confounding her astronomers, 

But O! delighting me. 

Romanticism as a movement sees art in all forms not merely as a way of presenting reality, or even the genius of the artist, but as a kind of revelation through which Reality discloses itself. Knowing is not merely formulating models of experimentally verifiable facts obtained objectively. It is a subjective experience of engaging reality as it speaks the language of aesthetic experience.

This kind of aesthetic reasoning typically makes more modest claims than scientism. It acknowledges that nature speaks the language of mathematics, but it also listens for other languages that are spoken through nature.

But my focus in this talk will be neither on scientism nor aesthetics, but on places where there may be a convergence of interests between scientists and theologians with regard to understanding reality as a whole.

I should note that there is an observable defensiveness on all sides here. The pride of place once held by philosophers, theologians, and artists has been displaced by science ever since the 19th century. One only needs look at funding patterns in the academy, business, and government to observe this. 

At the same time scientists are fully aware that they and their work is seriously under attack by resurgent anti-intellectualism led by people who self-identify as religious and artistic. 

What I hope to do this evening is avoid that defensiveness. I will survey briefly the perspectives relating religion to science that have arisen in the last 60 or 70 years and the questions they raise. And finally suggest some avenues through which science and religion may be able to seek a common language of discourse.

To get at the science side of things I’ll mention a book co-written by a physicist and colleague who has been working on the Higgs boson. The title is Reality in the Shadows: or What the Heck is the Higgs? Because it is a collection of independent essays written by three authors it is frankly difficult to read. So I read the book a second time and constructed a spreadsheet to trace the major lines of scientific development and identify their interrelationships. This allowed me to highlight themes that often got buried in the details. 

The categories of scientific inquiry that emerged were: 1. Observation and experiment, 2. The development of new tools for observing nature, and thus new experiments. 3. Discoveries emerging from deploying these new tools, discoveries that gave new information about nature. 4. The evolution of mathematics, both applied and pure, that give scientists the language through which to articulate their theories about the inter-relationships of the emerging information about nature, 5. And finally the theories themselves, each replacing the last to account for new information arising from ever more precise experiments, and each demanding more complex mathematical tools.

Of the many stories that emerge as people and groups absorb and integrate these different lines of inquiry, one is central to the last 70 years: the gradual shift in emphasis from experiment driving the need for new theories, and new theories driving the search for mathematical tools, to mathematical models becoming theories that are then in search of validation through experiment.

Or as Steven Weinberg noted in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, physicists have almost become neo-Platonists, believing the abstract mathematical forms to be more real than nature as experienced through experiment. This is not so far from theology, a critique made by scientists themselves of some popular but unverifiable theories involving multi-verses and undetectable dimensions. 

This internal critique not withstanding, the reach of complex mathematical models and the related theories seeking to achieve a unification of relativity and quantum theory may offer insight into an intersection between scientific and religious discourse. For these scientists are concerned with grasping reality as a whole. They are concerned with a “final theory” that unifies large and small scale descriptions of the universe. They seek something more than a collection of useful descriptions of reality. They have a concern for what Stephen Hawking called in his Brief History of Time (no doubt metaphorically) “the Mind of God.” 

Turning to religious ways of knowing reality it seems to me that there are three broad approaches to justifying religion as a way of knowing reality that might be of interest.

These seek to demonstrate how an a priori assumption of the existence of a transcendent God is a rational, coherent, assumption similar to the a priori assumption of cosmologists that nature as a whole can be described within a single theoretical framework. 

I’m thinking of several recent popular books in particular. Richard Beck’s The Authenticity of Faith, Alvin Planting’s Knowledge and Christian Belief, and Joseph Hinman’s Traces of God, as well as Andrew Newberg’s How Enlightenment Changes Your Brian. These books argue from different perspectives that human experience, properly and systematically measured and interpreted, strongly indicates that the a priori assumption of the existence of a transcendent God is not only coherent, but offers a credible addition to a scientific description of reality toward the goal of descriing Reality as a whole.   

Obviously I can’t review all of these books this evening, but I think they can be characterized. 

Beck, Hinman, and Newberg use psychological, sociological, and neurological approaches to analyze mystical experience. In them we see a revival of the work of William James, Rudolf von Otto, and Marcus Eliade. While Beck and Hinman focus on common observation of religious phenomena, Andrew Newberg argues that measurements of brain activity using a variety of brain imaging techniques show that religious practitioners of meditation have a physically unaccounted for change in the structure of their brains. What all these approaches assert is that through the working of the human mind, both individually and socially, Reality is speaking through nature a language that is more religious and theological than mathematical. 

Plantinga’s approach is more properly philosophical. He argues that religious belief in general, and Christian belief specifically, is warranted by a careful examination of the way in which the human mind is constructed and articulates its inner working through language. His arguments are rigorous and complex, and it is problematic to represent them in a few sentences.

But it seems to me that he is arguing that just as the human mind coheres with the natural world that it knows and explores, so it also coheres with a transcendent God in such a way as to suggest that this God exists and has particular attributes. In other words, if the human mind is capable of grasping the language of nature in mathematics in such a way as to give confidence that what it grasps is real, so its capacity to grasp the language of theology should give confidence that the object of theology, God, is equally real. 

It should be noted that these approaches to demonstrating the credibility of belief in God do not claim to constitute a proof of God’s existence. They are content to assert religious speech about God is warranted on terms similar to those that warrant mathematics as the language with which to explore the unity of natural law.

In closing I’d like to suggest that we can see some constructive possibilities for a dialogue between religion and science. 

One of these stems from the relationship between revelation and transcendence. Such a discussion would focus on two things that are part of both scientific and religious discourse: 1. the beckoning call of the unknowable to be sought out and known, and 2. the idea of an epiphany in which the unknowable makes itself known without any traceable process of human reasoning. Like religious people, scientists find themselves caught up in experiences described with words like “wonder” and “inspiration.” 

A second possibility for mutual discussion stems from a common concern with epistemology, knowing how what we know is true. As I’ve suggested above, Plantinga and others such as my colleague Billy Abraham are engaged in the kind of formal exploration of the warrant for believing that abstract representations of Reality comprehensible to the human mind that should be of equal concern to scientists who are presently must wrestle with whether complex mathematical models can be taken as actually representing reality to us. 

And a third possibility, not unrelated to the other two, stems from a common concern with the relationship between human faith and human meaning. In my own discussions with science minded atheists this appears to be the most contentious point of debate, because typically atheists of a scientism bent argue that “faith” as commonly understood plays no role in their understanding of human meaning. Scientists are, they would say concerned only with that which can be observed and placed in bounded mathematical frameworks. 

To which I must answer that such a claim is in itself based on faith, not accumulated evidence in a comprehensive framework. 

As Kurt Godel showed, the one statement any formal system cannot make is that the system itself is complete. Such an understanding of completeness must come from outside the system. So whether we believe in God or deny the existence of anything transcendent at all, we cannot stand outside the framework of explanation we have adopted and declare that it is complete. Thus at least to the extent that we are seeking a Grand Unified Theory of reality, whether expressed in religious or mathematical language, we are living by faith.

And this, it seems to me, is closely related to whether the pursuits to which we give our lives are meaningful. The scientists I know aren’t excited about the reiteration of known truths. It is precisely the unknown that animates their efforts and makes them seem worthwhile. The same is, or should be true of those in pursuit of religious knowledge. Just as a pursuit of reality that doesn't elicit wonder is unworthy of science, so a God who is fully known through doctrinal systems has become unworthy or worship.