Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Method in Theology and Science Part 3A: Critical Realism

Dialogue and Critical Realism:  Part A

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  Here I begin to discuss “critical realism.”  It will take a few more posts, but I’ll suggest that while critical realism is a helpful framework, it also entails limitations as a result of separating science “and” theology.

Many proponents of “dialogue” models between science and religion identify themselves as “critical realists,” and this may be the dominant paradigm in the contemporary “religion and science” literature.[1]  A critical realist approach recognizes that all human knowing is mediated through human thought and language forms, including both scientific and theological knowing – and thus it is “critical.”[2]  Nevertheless, critical realists assert that there is a reality extrinsic to human thought and language that is capable of sustained investigation, and that human beings are capable of making progress towards fuller understanding of that extrinsic reality.[3]  The theological realities that theologians attempt to investigate and the natural realities that scientists attempt to investigate must each be approached with tools appropriate to their respective domains.[4]  As Alister McGrath argues, “[b]oth the scientific and religious communities can be thought of as attempting to wrestle with the ambiguities of experience, and offering what are accepted as the ‘best possible explanations’ for what is observed.”[5] 

McGrath develops his model of critical realism in science and theology in significant part from the philosophical contributions of Roy Bhaskar and Michael Polanyi.[6]  For critical realists in the tradition of Bhaskar, society is both a preexisting given and a product of human activity.[7] Individuals do not create society, but they do continually reproduce and transform society.[8] Society is neither a reified structure that exists apart from human activity nor an entirely voluntary creation of individuals.[9] Bhaskar likens this “transformational model of social activity” to a sculptor who creates something out of the materials and tools available to her.[10] The result is that society emerges from, but is not reducible to, the choices of individuals.[11] Society is “a complex totality subject to change both in its components and their interrelations.”[12]

Critical realists recognize that knowledge has both social and physical dimensions.[13] There is a reality external to human perception, language, and cognition.[14] Human perception, language, and cognition, however, limit our direct epistemic access to reality.[15] Human perception of reality is a “transitive” dimension because it is subject to change based on human language, history, and culture.[16] Reality itself, however, is “intransitive.”[17] According to Roy Bhaskar, reality is stratified and can be conceived as three layered: empirical (observable by human), actual (existing in time and space), and real (“transfactual and enduring more than our perception of it”).[18]

Bhaskar thus emphasized the social aspects of human knowing—of information—without reducing all of reality to a human construction. An important aspect of Bhaskar’s social theory of knowledge is his rejection of “methodological individualism”—the notion that societies are reducible to individuals.[19] A “social atomism” in which the analysis of societies can be reduced to the preferences of individuals will never adequately explain social action.[20] But neither is society merely the result of collective pressures on individuals, or a simple dialectic between these two poles.[21] Rather, society has a dual character: social groups provide the ground through which individuals reproduce and sometimes transform society.[22] A level of reality can emerge from a more basic level without being reducible to the more basic level.[23]

Like Bhaskar, Michael Polanyi sought to mitigate the destructive tendencies of positivism without destroying the normativity of science. One of Polanyi’s primary concerns was the danger of authoritarian control over science extant in the then communist East. [24] Polanyi was keen to demonstrate that science is an inherently social enterprise just like any other human project, and that as a social enterprise science must be subject to democratic control.[25] Also like Bhaskar, Polanyi recognized that reality is stratified.[26] Each level of reality operates under the ‘marginal control’ of higher levels, but the higher levels are not reducible to the lower.[27]

Polanyi recognized that positivism fails because it relies on some unverifiable foundations. As Polanyi noted, “It is indeed logically impossible for the human mind to divest itself of all uncritically acquired foundations. For our minds cannot unfold at all except by embracing a definite idiom of beliefs, which will determine the scope of our entire subsequent fiducial development.”[28] The notion of positivism itself, then, depends on an idiomatic structure that is neither verifiable nor self-evident.

Polanyi also emphasized the communal nature of scientific practice and the “tacit” knowledge involved in such communal information transfers. As he noted, “[t]he transmission of beliefs in society is mostly not by precept, but by example . . . [t]he whole practice of research and verification is transmitted by example and its standards are upheld by a continuous interplay with criticism within the scientific community.”[29] Thus, scientific knowledge is a set of socially constructed analogical models that are developed through practices acquired and implemented in unique social networks.

Finally, Polanyi realized that the social networks through which scientific practices are transferred, like all social networks, incorporate elements of social control. One of the principal means of control over scientific information networks is peer review. Polanyi observed that scientific journal referees “are the chief Influentials, the unofficial governors of the scientific community. By their advice they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research.”[30]  Nevertheless, within this social matrix, science can make genuine progress in understanding.

Similarly, theology, critical realists argue, seeks to interpret experienced reality within the context of a traditioned community.[31]  In this respect, many critical realists are sympathetic to Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the role of community and tradition in the shaping of philosophical inquiry.[32]  For Christians, of course, the central experienced reality that requires theological interpretation is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the interpretive community is the Church.[33]  Christian theology and doctrine develop as the Christian community reflects on this central experience.  Just as in the natural sciences, massive paradigm shifts in the understanding of theology and doctrine should be rare, but some degree of revision must always remain a possibility because the reality that lies behind the experience is only ever partially understood.

 

[1] See, e.g., McGrath, Science & Religion, at pp. 78-79, 82-82.  McGrath identifies Thomas Torrance, Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, and John Polkinghorne, as well as himself, as critical realists.  Id., at p. 82-83.

[2] See id.

[3] Id.

[4] See 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002).

[5] Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science & Religion (Blackwell 1988).

[6] 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002).

[7] See generally Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Routledge 3d ed. 1998) (1979).

[8] Id. at 36.

[9] Id. at 39 (stating that “society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so.”).

[10] Id. at 37.

[11] Id. at 37–44.

[12] Id. at 41. In many respects, critical realism’s transformational model of society sounds like the New Chicago School’s model of law and norms. The difference is that for cyberlaw scholars in the New Chicago School tradition, the architectural “code” that makes up online spaces is entirely socially constructed—whether code-infrastructure is “open” or “closed” is entirely contingent on the individuals who participate in the digital commons. See Part II, supra. In contrast, in the critical realist view, “culture,” “code” and “infrastructure” are not entirely the voluntary creations of autonomous individuals. Bhakar’s treatment of language and grammar is intriguing here. The rules of grammar, Bhaskar observes, are not infinitely malleable—they impose real, given limits on our speech. Bhaskar, supra note 65 at 36. The rules of grammar, however, do not determine what we say; meaning is not reducible to the rules of grammar. Id.

[13] Roy Bhaskar, a germinal critical realist philosopher, states that

Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of ‘knowledge’. The other is that knowledge is ‘of’ things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no-one to know it.

Bhaskar, at 21.

[14]  See Critical Realism: Essential Readings ix–xiii (Margaret Archer, et al. eds., 1998) (noting that “critical realism claims to be able to combine and reconcile ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgmental rationality.”) (emphasis in original).

[15]  Bhaskar, at 21.

[16]  Id.

[17]  Id.

[18] Id. at 21–62.

[19] Id.

[20] Id.

[21] Id.

[22] Id.

[23] Id. at 113 (stating that “the operations of the higher level cannot be accounted for solely by the laws governing the lower-order level in which we might say the higher-order level is ‘rooted’ and from which we might say it was ‘emergent.’”).

[24] Polanyi explains this concern at the beginning of one of his key works, The Tacit Dimension. Describing the denial of independent science under communism, Polanyi says “I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself.” Id. at 3. Polanyi’s views, of course, were not entirely unique; they fit nicely into a constellation of contemporary philosophers of science who deconstructed the positivism that emerged following the collapse of Baconian science, including figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and to some extent Paul Feyerabend. See, e.g., Kuhn; Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge Univ. Press 1978); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (Verso 3d ed. 1993) (1975).

[25]  Polanyi, at p. 3.

[26] Polanyi.

[27] Id. For a discussion of how Polanyi’s thought might relate to Bhaskar’s on this point, see 2 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology: Reality at 226 (2002). Interestingly, the stratification of reality can also be observed in Thomas Aquinas’ approach to law. See William S. Brewbaker II, Thomas Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Law, 58 Ala. L. Rev. 575, 600–02 (2007). It is noted that “Thomas assumes that a single scientific method is insufficient to enable investigation of all types of reality, and this assumption affects his account of law.” Id. at 600.

[28] Michael Polanyi, Scientific Thought and Social Reality 76 (Fred Schwartz ed., International University Press 1974).

[29] Id. at 61.

[30] Id. at 20. Polanyi stated that:

The referees advising scientific journals may also encourage those lines of research which they consider to be particularly promising, while discouraging other lines of which they have a low opinion. The dominant powers in this respect are, however, exercised by referees advising on scientific appointments, on the allocation of special subsidies, and on the award of distinctions. Advice on these points, which often involve major issues of the policy of science, is usually asked from and tendered by a small number of senior scientists who are universally recognized as being the most eminent in a particular branch. They are the chief Influentials, the unofficial governors of the scientific community. By their advice they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research.

Id. Cf. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Happens Next (Houghton Mifflin Company 2006).

[31] McGrath, The Foundations of Science & Religion, at pp. 160-64.

[32] See id., citing Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice?  Which Rationality? (Duckworth 1988).

[33] See T.F. Torrance, Reality & Evangelical Theology:  The Realism of Christian Revelation (InterVarsity Press 1999), at pp.  84-120.

Categories
Biblical Studies Scripture

Job's Friends on the Dungheap

This continues my series on the book of Job.

The middle section of Job includes Job’s dialogues with his friends Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu.  We will see that Job’s friends make some unhelpful suggestions, including blaming Job’s troubles on some hidden sin that Job did not commit.  We can be hard on Job’s friends, but at the end of the folk tale narrative in Chapter 2, we find three of them (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar) sitting “down on the ground” with Job “for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.”  (Job. 2:13).

The “ground” on which they were seated was the trash heap outside the city, where they found Job scraping his sores with broken pottery (Job. 2:7-8).  The period during which they remained silent was the prescribed period of mourning for the dead.  (Chase, p. 25; 1 Sam. 31:13).

This episode, shows the importance and value of lament.  The first right response to suffering is lament, grieving together.  How seldom we take time to lament!  We are quick to make the mistakes Job’s friends will soon make:  assigning blame and offering plans for recovery based on that misplaced blame.  We want to make things better, and that is good.  But first we need to sit on the trash heap in silence for a while.

If sitting in mourning with Job was a good first response, why did Job’s friends so quickly go awry?  Did they so easily forget the lessons of the trash heap?  Did they never really let the trash heap get under their skins?

 

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Religion and Science, Method Part 3: Dialogue and Integration — Process Theology

But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

A continuing series on method in religion and science.

Integration and Dialogue:  Process Theology

Strong Integrationist models tend towards a willingness to reconfigure religious categories in ways that seem required by the natural sciences.  Process theology, which tends to identify Godself as part of the developing and emerging cosmos, is a prime example of this sort of move.[2]  For process theology, reality is fundamentally a dynamic process.[3]  Rather than envisioning God as the transcendent source of the universe, for process theology, “God is not the exception to the dynamic nature of the universe, but rather the dynamic God-world relationship is the primary example of creaturely experience in its many expressions.”[4]  In this view, “[i]n our dynamic and ever-changing world, God is the most dynamic and ever-changing reality; God’s becoming embraces the eternal, temporal, and everlasting in an ever-creative, self-surpassing dialogue with the universe.”[5]

Because God is a dynamic and evolving reality, process theology eschews the classical notion of God’s perfections.[6]  Process theologians view the claim that God is omniscient and omnipotent as remnants of Greek thought best left behind.[7]  They argue that a God who is omniscient and omnipotent must be responsible for evil and that both scripture and Christian experience disclose God in relational terms.[8]  They further argue that God’s classical perfections would destroy the possibility of human creativity and creaturely freedom.[9]

A thread that ties these claims together within process theology is the integration of theology and science.[10]  Indeed, “[p]rocess theology is firmly rooted in an evolutionary understanding of the universe.”[11]  Many process theologians argue that evolutionary theory destroys the classical understanding of God’s perfections:

While some Christians believe that God has directed the course of the universe from the very beginning, determining every detail without creaturely input, and is guiding the universe toward a pre-determined goal, process theology imagines an open-ended universe, in which God’s vision is also open-ended and subject to change in relationship to creaturely decision-making and accidental occurrences.[12]

Thus process theology also eschews the concept of creation ex nihilo, arguing that, instead, “[e]ven before the big bang, God was interacting with the primordial elements of this universe or another universe from which this universe may have emerged, as some cosmologists suggest.  God has never been without a world, which provides opportunities for, and limitations of, the embodiment of God’s creative vision.”[13]

This vision of emerging reality also affects process theology’s anthropology.  Human beings are not metaphysically special but rather are “fully embedded in the evolutionary process.”[14]  Human beings are not impacted by any sort of “original” sin but rather have always partaken in a bilateral relationship of call-and-response with God.[15]  In fact, “[t]o the surprise of many more traditional theologians, process theologians recognize that deviation from God’s moment by moment vision is not always bad:  it may inject new possibilities into the creative process.”[16]  Moreover, process thought tends to identify the human “soul” not with particular individuals, but rather with human society extended over time.[17]  The “soul” is “in every sense a part of nature, subject to the same conditions as all other natural entities.”[18]  Further, “the body, and specifically the brain, is the immediate environment of the soul.”[19]  Because of the embededness of the human person and specifically the human brain in the flux of evolutionary history, the human soul is intimately connected with the entire universe:

The soul is, then, in immediate contact with some occasions of experience in the brain and with the mental poles of experiences of other souls….  Indirectly, but intimately, the soul also prehends the whole society that constitutes its body and still more indirectly, but still very importantly, the wider environment that is the whole world.  At the same time, the soul contributes itself as an object for feeling by other souls, the contiguous occasions in the brain, and indirectly by the whole future world.[20]

The strong integrationist program represented by process theology is in some ways appealing.  It does take seriously the claims of the natural sciences.  It also takes very seriously the problem of evil and the problem of creaturely freedom.  The price it pays to cash out its claims, however, is far too high.  The “God” of process theology, as well as its vision of the human “soul,” tend to devolve into a kind of pantheistic spiritualism that ultimately vindicates neither contemporary science nor natural theology. 

On the scientific side, this problem is represented by concepts of the “soul” that ultimately envision the universe itself as a conscious entity, perhaps as the conscious entity.  Nothing could be further from the claims and methods of contemporary natural science.  On the theological side, process theology’s representation of the classical view of God’s perfections in relation to creation ex nihilo and creaturely freedom tends towards parody and straw man claims. 

It is unclear, for example, who comprises the Christians referenced by Epperly who “believe that God has directed the course of the universe from the very beginning, determining every detail without creaturely input.”[21]  In his Guide for the Perplexed on process theology, Epperly uses popular evangelical preacher Rick Warren’s reference to God’s providence in Warren’s popular book A Purpose Driven Life as representative of the classical view.[22] To suggest that Warren lacks the sophistication of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas or Barth on these problems is more than an understatement, and Warren himself would not argue otherwise. 

Among more significant representatives of the Christian tradition, perhaps some versions of Calvinism or Jansenism would frame this sort of statement, but orthodox Christian theology has always recognized creaturely freedom, and particularly human moral freedom, within the ambit of God’s providence and in response to God’s grace.  Classical Christian orthodoxy is not deterministic fatalism.  Indeed the Second Council of Orange, though it condemned semi-Pelagianism, nevertheless held that human beings can participate or not participate in God’s grace:   “We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema.”[23]  Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church today states that “[f]reedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.”[24]  The Catechism further states that

The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart. On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world….[25]

The Catechism therefore concludes that “[t]he right to the exercise of freedom, especially in religious and moral matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of man.”[26]    It seems, then, that process theology is overstating a case against a mythical opponent.


[1] See McGrath, at pp. 47-49.

[2] See John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology:  An Introductory Exposition (Westminster John Knox 1996).

[3] See Bruce G. Epperly, Process Theology:  A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark 2011), at p. 20.

[4] Id. at 21.

[5] Id.

[6] Id. at 33-44.

[7] Id. at 34.

[8] Id. at 38-44.

[9] Id. at 83-91.

[10] Id. at 92-102.

[11] Id. at 97.

[12] Id., at p. 97.

[13] Id. at p. 98.

[14] Id. at 99.

[15] Id. at 100-101.

[16] Id. at 101.

[17] See John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (Westminster John Knox 2d ed. 2007).

[18] Id. at p. 19.

[19] Id. at p. 21.  See also id. at 43-49 for Cobb’s refinement of Whitehead’s views on this point. 

[20] Id. at p. 23.

[21] Id., at p. 97.

[22] Epperly, at p. 41-44 (citing Rick Warren, A Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan 2002)).

[23] Canons of the Second Council of Orange, available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/orange.txt.

[24] Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1731, available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a3.htm.

[25] Id., § 1742.

[26] Id., § 1747.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Religion and Science: Method 2 — Independence

But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

Part 2 of a series on “method” in religion and science.

2.  Independence

In contrast – or apparent contrast – to these conflict models, many opt for an “independence” model in which “science” and “religion” occupy entirely separate, non-overlapping domains.[1]  The late biologist Stephen Jay Gould introduced the concept of “nonoverlapping magesteria” (NOMA) that purported to separate scientific claims from moral truth.[2]  This perspective is reflected, to a certain extent, in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences statement on the compatibility of science and religion:

Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. In science, explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world. Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.[3]

“Independence” models, however, seem inevitably to devolve into “conflict,” in which “faith and evidence” and “natural and supernatural” are put at odds, as the NAS statement above reflects.  Upon reflection, NOMA seems to represent little more than a Kantian separation between objective truth and subjective values, mediated by a kind of empiricism and positivism that is no longer taken seriously in the philosophy of science.

 

[1] McGrath, at pp. 46-47.

[2] Stephen Jay Gould, Nonoverlapping Magesteria, Natural History 106:16-22 (March 1997).  See the discussion of NOMA in Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, at pp. 270-272.

[3] National Academy of Sciences website, “Evolution Resources,” “Compatibility of Science and Religion,” available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/evolution/Compatibility.html.

Image Source:  NASA

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion

Religion and Science: Method 1

“But already my desire and my will
were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.” — Dante, Divine Comedy

This begins a series of posts, drawn from parts of my doctoral dissertation, on methodology in the field of religion and science.

1:  Convergence to Conflict

The field of “science and religion” has become an important sub-discipline of modern theology.[1]  This development parallels the rapid ascendancy of “science” as the paradigm of trustworthy authority in modernity and the related development of the “conflict” or “warfare” narrative of the relation between science and religion.[2]  The rise of secularism is intimately related to the social and intellectual authority commanded by “science” in modernity.[3] 

Theology in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions historically interacted fruitfully with the “science” of the day, at least prior to the Seventeenth Century.  The Hebrew creation narratives in the Biblical book of Genesis both absorb and distinguish the ancient near eastern cosmologies of Assyria, Babylon and Egypt.[4]  The Church Fathers adapted and transformed Platonic philosophy and cosmology, and medieval Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theologians adapted the insights of Aristotle after the rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus by Islamic scholars.[5] 

In 1616, however, the Copernican view of heliocentrism, confirmed and popularized by Galileo, was condemned by the Catholic Church.[6]  Galileo himself was condemned and his works were banned by Papal decree in 1633.[7]  The Papal Decree of Condemnation asserted that

The proposition that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from its place is absurd and false philosophically and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.

….

The proposition that the Earth is not the center of the world and immovable but that it moves, and also with a diurnal motion, is equally absurd and false philosophically and theologically considered at least erroneous in faith. [8]

There is considerable scholarly debate about the circumstances of Galileo’s condemnation.  As Charles Hummel describes it, “Galileo’s trial of 1633 was not the simple conflict between science and religion so commonly pictured.  It was a complex power struggle of personal and professional pride, envy, and ambition, affected by pressures of bureaucratic politics.”[9]  Galileo’s own acerbic personality, as well as the crisis of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War, are also often cited by defenders of the Church as contextual factors around Galileo’s condemnation.[10]  Even after Galileo’s condemnation, heliocentrism continued to be taught as a mathematical concept, and by 1835, the heliocentric texts of Copernicus and Galileo were removed from the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.[11]  In 2000, Pope John Paul II formally apologized for the Church’s treatment of Galileo, along with apologies for historic mistreatment of Jews, the Crusades, and other matters.[12] 

Notwithstanding these qualifications, the Galileo affair represents a touchstone event for the relationship between theology and science.  The heliocentric cosmos challenged not only the interpretation of a few Biblical passages, but also the broader Aristotelian cosmology that informed the medieval synthesis of “science” and theology.[13]  When Newtonianism subsequently questioned Aristotelian causation and the sense of a great chain of being more broadly, Lyellian geology questioned the antiquity of the Earth and the “days” of creation recorded in Genesis 1, and Darwinism questioned anthropocentric biology, theology faced an even more significant challenge.[14]  At the same time, scientific methods of textual analysis, archeology and historiography were being applied to the Biblical texts in ways that questioned the fundamental integrity of the Bible.[15]

Nineteenth Century Christian thinkers reacted to the Newtonian, Lyellian and Darwinian challenges inconsistently.  During the ascendency of Newtonianism, many opted for a kind of mechanistic Deism that was at odds with the Christian view of a God who is intimately providentially involved with creation.[16]  In Christian theology’s first encounters with Darwinism, notwithstanding the perhaps exaggerated accounts of the clash between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley, the majority responded with cautious appraisal and appropriation of both Lyell and Darwin, while working with notions of providence that attempted to accommodate both the Biblical picture and Newton.[17]  Their efforts sometimes led to theological aberrations such as William Paley’s “watchmaker” natural theology, but they nevertheless worked from a framework that assumed the “book of scripture” and the “book of nature” spoke complementary truths.[18]

The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy that erupted among American Protestants in the early Twentieth Century, however, ignited a tinderbox of conflict, highlighted in the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Dayton, Tennesee.[19]  Fundamentalists rejected Darwinian science in toto, and further rejected in toto the historical-critical inquiry of the Biblical sources.[20]  The rise of Protestant Fundamentalism supported the development of “creation science,” which asserts that the Bible can be read as an innerant scientific text and that God literally created the universe in six days around 6,500 years ago.[21]  The enormous cultural influence of “creation science,” particularly in North America but increasingly world-wide, is evidenced by the multi-million dollar “Creation Museum” in Kentucky.[22]  In the view of “creation science,” there is a clear conflict between theology and modern evolutionary science. 

A somewhat more sophisticated version of this sort of creationism, is the “Intelligent Design” movement, which attempts to disprove the theory of evolution by through scientific evidences for “design” in creation through statistical gaps and probabilities and information theory.[23]  Although many ID proponents do not identify with scientific creationism’s insistence on reading the book of Genesis literally, they likewise presume that the Biblical revelation must somehow conform to and be confirmed by “science.”[24]  And because of this presumption, ID advocates generally argue that the findings of evolutionary biology fundamentally conflict with Christian theology.[25]

The extraordinary cultural influence of “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins represents another extreme node of this warfare thesis.[26]  Darwinism is here elevated to an all-encompassing worldview.  For example, David Sloan Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, argues that Darwinian evolution fully explains everything, including every aspect of human nature.[27]  Anyone who thinks otherwise, even “intellectuals” who are not religious, is a kind of fundamentalist, an “’academic creationist.’”[28]  Religion, for these ultra-Darwinists, is like a pernicious virus that must be eradicated by science.[29]


[1] See, e.g., Rachel Muers and Mike Higton, Modern Theology:  A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2012), Chapter 11; Peter Harrison, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge Univ. Press 2010); Alister McGrath, Science & Religion:  A New Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell 2nd ed. 2010).

[2] See McGrath, Science & Religion:  A New Introduction, at pp. 9-11.

[3] See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:  The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard Univ. Press 1989), Chapter 19; A Secular Age (Harvard Univ. Press 2007), Chapter 7; Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation:  How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard Univ. Press 2012), Chapter One; Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment:  Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford Univ. Press 2002); John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Secularization,” in Peter Harrison, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge Univ. Press 2010).

[4] See John F. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament:  Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Baker Academic 2006); M. Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation:  Genesis and Modern Science (Westminster John Knox 1984).

[5] See Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation:  The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Eerdmans 2011); David B. Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Univ. of Notre Dame Press 1993); David C. Lindberg, “The Fate of Science in Patristic and Medieval Christendom,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion; Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea:  Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Eerdman’s 2010), Chapter Seven.

[6] See Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection:  Resolving Conflicts Between Science & The Bible (InterVarsity Press 1986); “Famous Trials:  The Trial of Galileo” webpage, available at http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galileo.html.

[7] Hummel, The Galileo Connection, at pp. 108-118; “The Trial of Galileo” webpage, text of Papal Condemnation, available at http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/condemnation.html.

[8] “The Trial of Galileo” webpage, text of Papal Condemnation, available at http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/condemnation.html.

[9] Hummel, The Galileo Connection, at p. 116.

[10] See The Vatican Observatory Website, “The Galileo Affair,” available at http://vaticanobservatory.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=197%3Athe-galileo-affair&catid=89%3Ahistory-of-astronomy&Itemid=242&lang=en.

[11] Id.

[12] The theological basis for these apologies is set forth in the International Theological Commission’s December 1999 doucment Memory and Reconciliation:  The Church and the Faults of the Past, available at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000307_memory-reconc-itc_en.html, approved by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger acting as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

[13] See Hummel, The Galileo Connection, Chapter 1.

[14] See Rachel Muers and Mike Higton, Modern Theology:  A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2012), Chapter 11.  As Conor Cunningham argues, it is not at all clear that any of these developments do, in fact, challenge all notions of a chain of being or of human uniqueness.  Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, at pp. 2-3.  This perspective will be developed later in this Chapter.

[15] Cite…

[16] See Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard Univ. Press 2007), Chapter 7.

[17] From a Protestant perspective, for example, see Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone, eds., B.B. Warfield, Evolution, Science, & Scripture:  Selected Writings (Baker 2000).  For a typical account of the Huxley-Wilberforce conflict as a watershed crisis moment for Christian theology, see Muers and Highton, at p. 212-215.  For a more careful account of the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter, David Livingstone, “That Huxley Defeated Wilberforce in Their Debate Over Evolution and Religion,” in Ronald L. Numbers, ed. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion (Harvard Univ. Press 2009); J.R. Lucas, “Wilberforce and Huxley:  A Legendary Encounter,” The Historical Journal 22:313-330 (June 1979).  For an account that limits the immediate significance of the debate but underscores the genuine theological tensions felt by Wilberforce over the problem of human evolution, see Frank James, “On Wilberforce and Huxley,” Astronomy and Geophysics (1) 2005.

[18] See McGrath, Science & Religion:  An Introduction, at p. 31; John Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, at pp. 52-55.

[19] Id., at p. 220-221.

[20] See George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Eerdmans 1990), Chapters 6, 9.

[21] See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists:  From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Harvard Univ. Press 2006); “Answers in Genesis” website, available at http://www.answersingenesis.org.

[22] See Creation Museum Website, available at http://creationmuseum.org/.

[23] See id.; William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design:  The Bridge Between Science & Theology (IVP Academic 2002); “Uncommon Descent” website, available at http://www.uncommondescent.com.

[24] See Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, at pp. 278-280.

[25] Hence the double meaning in the title of one of William Dembski’s recent books:  The End of Christianity:  Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Baker Academic 2009), in which Dembski argues that Christianity fails without a scientifically demonstrable chronology for the Fall from Eden.  Dembski’s attempt to provide such a chronology is certainly far more sophisticated than that of creation science.  He accepts the geological age of the Earth and even the broad outlines of biological evolution (albeit punctuated in some way by infusions of Divine “design” apart from the ordinary processes of nature), but he argues that the Fall had retroactive effects because time can run forwards and backwards.  Absent this sort of mathematical construction of the retroactive effects of time, however, it seems that Dembski would agree with the ultra-Darwinists that Christianity has been scientifically falsified.

[26] See, e.g., Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Mariner Books 2008).  See also Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea, at pp. 272-275 (“Our Auntie Jean and Richard Dawkins”).

[27] David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone:  How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Ourselves (Delacorte Press 2007).

[28] Id. at 3 (quoting The Nation, “The New Creationism:  Biology Under Attack,” 1997).

[29] Dawkins, The God Delusion.

Photo credit:  NASA

 

Categories
Biblical Studies Scripture

The Book of Job: Critical Introduction

It’s a good time to get back into the discipline of writing.  I’ve recently begun reading the book of Job.  I’m working with a commentary from the excellent “Belief” series by Westminster John Knox.

Job is a fascinating and enigmatic text.  As the author of the Belief commentary, Steven Chase, notes, textual and translation issues alone make any effort to interpret the text daunting.  Chase suggests that translators must “often rely on grace and creative imagination” to make sense of the text.  (Chase, p. 9).

It’s difficult to know how and when Job was composed.  The canonical book seems to be comprised of at least three parts:  a folk tale about a wealthy man (Job) who loses everything; poetic dialogue; and additional poetic material concerning Woman Wisdom and Elihu.  The folk tale might represent an early oral tradition, the poetic dialogue might have been composed during or shortly after the Babylonian Exile, and the additional Wisdom and Elihu material may have been added during the post-exilic period, but of these conjectures no one is certain.  (Chase, p. 6).

The author or (more likely) authors who composed and edited the text must have been highly educated.  The poetic materials display deep knowledge of animals, the human embryo, weather patterns, constellations, mining practices (five different words for “gold” are employed), hunting (with multiple different descriptions of animal traps), and Egyptian lore.  (Chase, p. 8).

All of these considerations help establish that Job is not a “historical” text.  Indeed, the text begins with a mythic setting:  “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job….”  (Job 1:1).  “Uz” does not seem to relate to anyplace in ancient near eastern geography — even in the text it is situated in the nondescript “east” (Job 1:3) — a strong signal that we are about to hear a folk tale.  It is not difficult to imagine a group of nomadic herders around a fire, telling each other stories that begin with lines like “There was a man in the land of Uz….”

A final introductory point relates to the character of “Satan” in this story.  It’s tempting to look to the interaction between God and Satan as some sort of window onto the workings of the actual heavenly realm, as refracted through later Christian theology concerning the Devil and demons.  That is a mistake.  The Hebrew term used in Job for this character is hassatan, literally “the adversary” or “the accuser” (ha is the article, “the,” and satan is “adversary” or “accuser”).  The text pictures God in His heavenly court at which various heavenly beings (“the sons of God”) appear from time to time on court business (see Job 1:6).  “The satan” appears to be one of these court officials, whose job is to monitor the earth and report to God when someone has done wrong.  Chase notes that “[t]he satan is not God’s opponent, but rather an advocate surveying human behavior and reporting on persons living in truth with faith and love.”  (Chase, p. 24).

These points about genre and dating suggest that we should not read Job for systematic doctrinal content.  It is not that kind of book.  Rather, Job will tell us things about ourselves and about God in the way of a poem, a painting, or a play.  We are invited to gather around the fire and ponder the strange tale of the man from Uz who finds his life destroyed by the impenetrable machinations of God’s heavenly council.

Categories
Biblical Studies Spirit Spirituality

Paul: Love … All Things

I’ve been reflecting lately on the Apostle Paul’s “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13, particular on verse 7.  Love, Paul says, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (NASB).  What is the force of the term “all things” in this powerful statement?  In Paul’s original Greek, the phrasing is beautifully poetic:  πάντα στέγει, πάντα πιστεύει, πάντα ἐλπίζει, πάντα ὑπομένει (panta stegei, panta pisteauei, panta elpizei, panta hypomenei).  Notice the alliteration in the repetitive use of “panta” (all things) and the rhyme of the active verb endings (ei).  I can imagine Paul dictating this phrase to his amaneunsis, getting more excited as he repeats each panta.  Try reciting it out loud:  agapē panta stegei, panta pisteauei, panta elpizei, panta hypomenei.  Let it sink deep into your soul:  there is nothing to which love fails to respond with patience, faith, hope, and endurance.  Nothing.  All things — panta, panta, panta — love regards with patience, faith, hope, and endurance.  Panta, panta, panta agapē .

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion Theology

God in the Dock 4: On Ontotheology

In my previous post I used the strange term “ontotheology.”  This is a mash-up of “ontology” – the study of being – and theology.  So what’s the problem with suggesting that “theology” is concerned with ontology?

To be more precise, the concern is not over “being” in general, but over the “being” of God.  Ontotheology is a way of speaking and thinking about God by which God is reduced to the same kind of being as other things in the universe.  In this framework, it is as though God is a sort of superhero – a person like human persons, but with super-powers and abilities.  This sort of conception of God is often evident in modern “first mover” arguments.  This sort of argument, in the way modern people often think of it, suggests that the development of the universe since the big bang is like a row of dominoes.  There must have been a giant finger, so to speak, that tipped over the first domino and got things going.  Not only is this picture wrong concerning how physical causes work, more importantly, it is wrong concerning God.  It makes God into just another physical cause, and it is vulnerable to the famous “but who made God” retort.

We must be careful to remember that God is absolutely, infinitely beyond anything in the universe.  God is in fact not “in” the universe in the sense of derivation, containment, or limitations.  Rather, God is transcendent over the universe.  The universe is contingent on God, but God is not at all contingent on the universe. The universe depends utterly on God for its existence, but God depends on nothing.  The character of the universe is determined by God, but God is determined by nothing.[1]  The universe is circumscribed by God, but God is circumscribed by nothing outside Himself.

We must also be careful to remember that God is not part of the order of creation.  Among created things, we can speak of first-order causal relations, progressions, hierarchies, levels of being, emergence, and evolution.  A single strand of DNA, for example, is a chemical molecule.  It possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just a molecule.  A strand of DNA, combined with other molecules in the nucleus of a mammalian egg cell, comprises an egg cell.  It, too, possesses a potential to become part of something more, but on its own it is just an egg cell.  The fusion of an egg cell with a sperm cell produces another level of being, with far greater potentialities.  A grown shrew, the fruit of that fusion of egg and sperm, has yet greater potentialities, and a group of shrews living in proximity to each other and to other animals and plants in a biosphere far greater than a single shrew.  At each increasing level of complexity, the potentiality of the system increases.  The distant evolutionary descendants of that shrew may become human beings who can build universities and study their own evolutionary past.  But the egg cell may die, the shrew may be eaten by a raptor, or the shrew’s biosphere may collapse in a volcanic eruption, and the potential for human beings may never be realized.  This realization of this potentiality is precarious.

God is not like this.  God does not emerge from lower orders of organization, because He is simple, without parts.  God does not develop into something “more,” because He is perfect.  God does not change over time, because He is timeless.  God does not evolve, because He is absolute.  In His freedom and grace God relates to His creatures, but He does not depend on those relations to become what He could be.  Nothing can frustrate God’s potentialities, which for God’s-self are always already realized and thus are always actualities.  The eschatological future in which “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) is certain because it is proleptically present to God, who transcends categories such as “past” and “future.”  God eternally is fully Himself.

All of this means that God simply cannot be an actor in a courtroom drama.  As I noted in my first post, courts are concerned with limited kinds of claims relating to particular kinds of causes and relations.  When a homicide is tried in court, for example, the jury is asked to draw on common experience of the created world to reach a verdict.  Does the forensic evidence prove that the defendant’s gun discharged the fatal bullet?  Does the convenience store’s video surveillance footage clearly show the defendant pulling the trigger and running away?  Did the money in the defendant’s pocket when he was apprehended approximate the amount missing from the store’s cash register?  Does a DNA test on hair samples found at the scene match the defendant’s DNA profile?

If all of these facts line up, the jury can reasonably conclude that the defendant is culpable for the homicide.  It is no defense to argue that the victim’s death was “God’s will.”  As a theological claim, such a statement might in some sense be true.  From the perspective of Christian theology, it is correct to state that nothing can happen outside of God’s providence.  Theologians could debate the fine points of whether God ordained or merely permitted the homicide, the problem and nature of evil, and the relation between God’s providence and human agency, but if God is God, then the homicide is not outside the bounds of His providence.  Nevertheless, the mystery of God’s providence simply is not an appropriate subject for a courtroom.  God’s providential governance of creation is not a causal relation on the same order as the perpetrator’s pulling of the trigger to discharge the bullet that killed the victim.  The courtroom deals entirely with immanent things.  It cannot judge transcendence.

At this point, a devoted materialist might say, “quite right – and let’s not bother with the ephemeral wisps of transcendence when our hands are already full trying to clear the docket of immanent claims.”  But that will not do, at least not if we truly wish to understand phenomena such as homicides.  Reducing the phenomenon of homicide to purely immanent, material causes ends up rendering the phenomenon meaningless:  it is nothing but the outworking of physical laws and molecules.  We can’t begin to speak of the moral and social meaning of homicide without reference to transcendentals such as goodness, beauty, peace, order, and love, which homicides erode.

The same is true for philosophical proofs of God derived only from observation of creation.  As attractive as it seems to suggest that the big bang shows the universe had a beginning and that the “bang” must have been set off by God, it is bad theology – it is ontotheology.  Likewise, proofs based on supposed bottlenecks in biological evolution, such as apparently irreducibly complex chemical processes or structures, require a God who periodically literally reassembles things, as though he were driving a molecular bulldozer through natural history.  The God who is the transcendent creator of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions does not need such flimsy arguments.  In all of its majesty and power, the entire creation already declares His glory (Psalm 19).  Indeed, the material creation points beyond itself, towards a majesty, power, wisdom and beauty so great as to be literally inconceivable.  That is the best original understanding of “natural theology,” a fundamentally apophatic approach utterly at odds with ontotheology and the self-righteous rhetoric of the courtroom lawyer.

Further Reading:

Merold Westphal, Overcoming Ontotheology:  Toward a Post-Modern Christian Faith (Fordham Univ. Press 2001).

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans 2003).

 


[1] By “determined” here I mean constituted in its essence.  This term does imply God’s sovereignty, but it does not imply “determinism” in any sense that would deny true creaturely freedom.  The mainstream of Christian theology has held both that God is sovereign and that He granted true creaturely freedom to agents in creation, particularly to human beings.  The nature of creaturely freedom within the sphere of God’s sovereignty over creation is, of course, one of the great questions in the Western theological tradition, and it cannot be addressed or solved here.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion Theology

God in the Dock, Part 3: Apologia and/as Speech

In my first post in this series on “courtroom” apologetics, I mentioned an order of truth:  God, theology, proclamation, reason, and apologia.  In this post, I’ll explore that order in more detail.  We’ll return to the courtroom in the next post.  For now, let’s dig deeper into our theological and philosophical soil.

The ordering of the categories of theology, proclamation, reason and apologia suggests that these categories are not analytically distinct, but in fact participate in each other.  There is no apologia without theology.  Indeed, properly understood, apologia is a form of public theology.

Apologetic arguments therefore do not prepare the ground for theology, as though there is a neutral form of reason prior to theology.  Rather, apologetic arguments are (or ought to be) a category of theology, which seeks to represent (re-present) the truths of Christian theology in public, beyond and in concert with Church proclamation, in ways that cohere with the reason Christian theology already proclaims is embedded in the human soul and in all of creation.

Notice the subsidiary role of our theology, proclamation, reason and apologia to the reality of the Triune God and the Gospel.  We may do a very good job of proclaiming the Gospel and describing its reason, or we may do a poor job.  Either way, the job is never complete because the Gospel is a dynamic, unfolding reality that flows from the relational life of the Triune God.  The full implications of the proclamation that “God was in the world in Christ Jesus reconciling all things to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19) remain to be seen and can never be fully explained.  The character of our proclamation is bold and certain insofar as its core is the living Triune God, yet it is careful and provisional insofar as it embodies the limits of human thought and human speech about God.

Another comparison between Karl Barth and John Paul II is helpful here.  Barth, consistent with his understanding of revelation and philosophy, resisted any systematic definition of God:

The equation of God’s Word and God’s Son makes it radically impossible to say anything doctrinaire in understanding the Word of God.  In this equation, and in it alone, a real and effective barrier is set up against what is made of proclamation according to the Roman Catholic view and of Holy Scripture according to the later form of older Protestantism, namely, a fixed sum of revealed propositions which can be systematized like the sections of a corpus of law.  The only system in Holy Scripture and proclamation is revelation, i.e., Jesus Christ.[1]

But Barth – who, after all, over the course of thirty-five years wrote a Church Dogmatics comprised of about six million words of dense text – did not mean we can say nothing truthful about God.  After resisting what he understood as the Catholic and Scholastic Reformation’s too-neat methods of systematization, Barth emphasized the importance of words and speech:

Now the converse is also true, of course, namely that God’s Son is God’s Word.  Thus God does reveal Himself in statements, through the medium of speech, and indeed of human speech.  His word is always this or that word spoken by the prophets and apostles and proclaimed in the Church.  The personal character of God’s Word is not, then, to be played off against its verbal or spiritual character.  It is not at all true that this second aspect under which we must understand it implies its irrationality and thus cancels out the first aspect under which we must understand it.[2]

Barth’s concern throughout his discussion of the Word in Volume I of the Church Dogmatics is to preserve the freedom and integrity of theology against Enlightenment rationalism.  Barth was particularly concerned with the way rationalism gave rise to nineteenth century liberal demythologizing Protestant thought.  Barth also resisted how rationalism underwrote both Protestant fundamentalism and the Scholastic Thomism of much Catholic nineteenth century Catholic thought.

John Paul II also recognized the limits of human understanding in Fides et Ratio.  Having asserted that all human beings are capable of exercising reason to learn about things within the order of natural reason, John Paul II offered a cautionary note:

It should nonetheless be kept in mind that Revelation remains charged with mystery. It is true that Jesus, with his entire life, revealed the countenance of the Father, for he came to teach the secret things of God.  But our vision of the face of God is always fragmentary and impaired by the limits of our understanding.  Faith alone makes it possible to penetrate the mystery in a way that allows us to understand it coherently.[3]

Certainly John Paul II assigned a higher value to reason and philosophy than Barth.  Nevertheless, for John Paul II as well as for Barth, the task of “faith seeking understanding” is never complete.  We can never know, or say, all there is to know and say about God, and we can never come to a “coherent” understanding of God without faith.

Both Barth and John Paul II recognized these limits because they were steeped in the scriptures and the Church Fathers.  The recognition of human limitations was a key theme for the Church Fathers and for the great Medieval Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas.  The Fathers understood that limits of human thought and speech in relation to God meant that theology always proceeds by way of analogy or negation.  St. Augustine, one of the Church’s great synthesizers of faith and reason, once said “If you understood him, it would not be God.”[4]  Augustine was not suggesting we can know nothing of God.  Augustine clearly held that God reveals Himself in both the book of nature and the book of scripture.  But Augustine was making emphatically clear that we can never understand God in the sense of having God neatly figured out and contained.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes this beautifully:  “Even when he reveals himself, God remains a mystery beyond words.”[5]

Our human limitations mean that we are simply incapable of speaking directly about God.  Our propositions never correspond directly to God in esse because God, by definition, is wholly other than us mere creatures.  Yet we can speak faithfully of God by analogy, and we can say what God is not by negation.

Consider again the first line of the Apostle’s Creed:  “I believe in God, the Father almighty…..”  Our term “Father” does not apply directly to God.  Every other “father” we know of is finite, fallible, flesh-and-blood.  Every other “father” we know of became a “father” by a sexual act with a woman, or in relatively rare circumstances, by the use of reproductive technologies uniting sperm and egg cells, or by force of law (legal adoption).  None of these characteristics could apply to God as “Father.”  Even the case of adoption, a metaphor often used in scripture, is only an analogy:  there is no law above God Himself that could determine the conditions for our adoption by God.  Nevertheless, there are things about the term “Father” – generativity, compassion, direction, care – that communicate in human concepts who God declares and shows Himself to be.  These are analogical categories that scripture and the Church have given us as a good way of speaking, which provides confidence and certainty concerning their propriety.  Yet we must never confuse the analogy with God in esse, in His essence, which transcends all created things.

The analogical speech in the first line of the Creed also suggests a way of apophatic, or negative speech about God.  If we say God is the “Father almighty,” we can clearly identify things God is not, such as finite, fallible, or flesh-and-blood.  Yet, again, we must never confuse the ability to negate certain kinds of speech about God with the ability to capture or define God in esse.  A god who is susceptible to captivity by human speech and reason would not be the God of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures – indeed, such a thing would be merely a human idea and not a god at all.

Since theology must always proceed only by analogy and negation, and since all apologetics is public theology, it follows that a Christian apologia cannot finally accept any supposedly neutral ground rules for philosophy apart from theology.  A strong foundationalist epistemology is an un-Christian epistemology.

Analytic philosophy and logical-grammatical rules, to be sure, can represent important tools for apologia.  If the creation bears the Divine logos, there is inherent in it a beauty and order that is to some degree susceptible to logical-grammatical analysis.  Even Barth employed the rules of grammar and logic in his fideistic-sounding Dogmatics.   And Christian theology tells us – by way of analogy and negation, of course — that God in His simplicity and perfections does not contradict Himself.  To use John Paul II’s framework, various forms of philosophy, including analytic philosophy, can achieve knowledge appropriate to the subject of philosophy, but this does not mean philosophy stands independent of “faith.”

Therefore, we rightly expect Christian reason to exhibit principles of non-contradiction, correspondence, coherence, and symmetry.  Where our apologia confronts un-reason, we rightly refer to these principles.  But if Christian theology is the truth of the universe, we must recognize the limits of our words and our thoughts, and we must never confuse human attempts at explanation with God Himself.  God is the three-in-one, who created the world from love and became incarnate in Christ to redeem the world.  He is not, finally, an equation of formal logic.

In my next post, I’ll explore the notion of “ontotheology” – the perverse idea that God can be studied just as anything in nature can be studied.  We will begin to see that courtroom apologetics are a form of ontotheology that reduces God to the sort of object suitable for adjudication under the limited rationality of the courthouse.

Further Reading:

Andrew Davidson, ed., Imaginative Apologetics:  Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition (Baker Academic 2012).

Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1.3 §5 (“The Nature of the Word of God”).


[1] CD I.1.§5.2.

[2] Id.

[3] Fides et Ratio, ¶13.  This theme is also evident in the work of another great Swiss theologian – Hans Urs von Balthasar – who was a friendly critic of Barth’s.  In Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth, Balthasar notes that “human words and concepts, though quite useful, can never exhaustively echo God’s word and wisdom, whose inner fullness can never be delivered up for our handling, even to the very end of the world.  Heretical thought has the tendency to close off certain avenues, to overlook certain aspects and to speak in definitive, apodictic formulae.  Catholic thinking, however, remains open.”  Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (Communio Books / Ignatius Press 1992 ed.), at p. 253.

[4] St. Augustine, Sermo 52, 6, 16.

[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶230.

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion Theology

God in the Dock, Part 2: Faith and Philosophy

(Part 2 of the essay I’m working on)

In my first post, I argued that, for Christians, theology must retain its title as Queen of the sciences.  A courtroom, of course, is no place for theology.  A first and basic problem with courtroom apologetics, therefore, is the relation of theology to other kinds of argument.  In the history of Christian thought, this problem has been discussed as the relation between faith and philosophy.  The mainstream of the Christian tradition has always held that philosophy cannot substitute for or rival faith.  Faith either eliminates philosophy or provides the ground for philosophy.  In either case, faith takes priority.

The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth recognized this priority.  His indictment of philosophy was unrelenting:

No matter how philosophers may or may not reach an understanding on these matters, they will do so as philosophers and not as theologians.  That is, they will not do so out of any responsible regard for the theme of theology.  Hence theology cannot learn anything from them and ought not to do so, unless it is ready to let them intrude a philosophical theme instead of its own, as has always happened when it has accepted material instruction from any philosophy.[1]

Because of his theology of the immanence of the Word, Barth rejected apologetic efforts in general:  “the world,” he said, “cannot evolve into agreement with God’s Word on its own initiative nor can the Church achieve this by its work in and on the world.”[2]  “The Church is the Church,” Barth said, “as it believes and proclaims that prior to all secular developments and prior to all its own work the decisive word has in fact been spoken already regarding both itself and the world.  The world no longer exists in isolation or neutrality vis-à-vis revelation, the Bible, and proclamation.”[3]

Barth was surely right about the priority of theology over philosophy.  His insistence on this priority is a tonic for the rationalism inherent in “courtroom” apologetics.  But did Barth miss the realization that philosophy – reason – is itself properly a product of theology?

Pope John Paul II’s 1998 Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio offers a helpful comparison to Barth’s apparent blanket dismissal of philosophy.  This encyclical stands as one of the finest discussions of faith and reason in recent Christian literature.

In his introductory discussion of the relation between theology and philosophy, John Paul II states that all knowledge, whether derived from philosophy or faith, depends first on God, who makes knowledge possible by grace.  “Underlying all the Church’s thinking,” John Paul II said, “is the awareness that she is the bearer of a message which has its origin in God himself (cf. 2 Cor 4:1-2).” [4]   The Church did not receive this message through its own power or abilities, nor was the message communicated through abstract intellectual means.  Rather, John Paul II said, it stems from a personal encounter with God in Christ:

At the origin of our life of faith there is an encounter, unique in kind, which discloses a mystery hidden for long ages (cf. 1 Cor 2:7; Rom 16:25-26) but which is now revealed:   “In his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will (cf. Eph 1:9), by which, through Christ, the Word made flesh, man has access to the Father in the Holy Spirit and comes to share in the divine nature”.[5]

Further, God’s self-revelation in Christ was entirely a free act of grace:  “[t]is initiative is utterly gratuitous, moving from God to men and women in order to bring them to salvation.   As the source of love, God desires to make himself known; and the knowledge which the human being has of God perfects all that the human mind can know of the meaning of life.”[6]

Therefore there is no question, as Barth feared, of philosophy superseding faith.  There is no sharp division, in Fides et Ratio, between “nature” and “grace”:  all that pertains to “nature,” to God’s creative design, is also the gift of “grace,” of God’s ecstatic, self-giving love.  Nevertheless, for John Paul II, “nature” involves empirical realities that are susceptible to human knowledge through a form of reasoning appropriate to the object.  “Philosophy” therefore possesses an inherent integrity, structure, and grammar.  “The truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation,” John Paul II said, “are neither identical nor mutually exclusive”:

There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object….  Based upon God’s testimony and enjoying the supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an order other than philosophical knowledge which depends upon sense perception and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone.  Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the “fullness of grace and truth” (cf. Jn 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Jn 5:9; Jn 5:31-32).[7]

Contrary to Barth, then, John Paul II sees a positive role for “philosophy” as a complement to “faith.”   Indeed, for John Paul II, “natural reason,” apart from revelation, is capable of showing that there is a God who created the universe – a notion Barth rejected.  Whether one sides with Barth or John Paul II on the question of “philosophy” and the role of “natural reason,” however, these great Christian thinkers hold one thing in common with the historic Christian tradition:  they recognize that the final ground of truth resides in God Himself and not in merely human structures of reason or speech.  For John Paul II, it is finally our faith in God’s creative goodness that establishes confidence in the capacities of “natural reason” to comprehend creation, and it is our faith in God’s transcendence that establishes the proper bounds of reason.

We confess in the Creed that we “believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth.”   This means there is nothing apart from God that is not God’s creation.  With this confession, there is no sense in which we as Christians could proclaim anything, provide any reasons, or offer any public apologia, without first acknowledging the Triune God revealed in Christ.  Any effort to offer a Christian apologia that does not operate within the framework of a confession of the Triune God revealed in Christ before proceeding to offer reasons for that confession is a corruption of Christian theology that finally is a kind of a-theism.  In my next post, I’ll begin to unpack this relationship between God, theology, proclamation, reason, and apologia.

Further Reading:

Andrew Davidson, ed., Imaginative Apologetics:  Theology, Philosophy, and the Catholic Tradition (Baker Academic 2012).

Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1.3 §5.

 

 


[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1.§5.1.

[2] CD 1.1.§5.3.

[3] Id.

[4] Fides et Ratio, ¶7.

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Fides et Ratio, ¶9.