This section was a complete challenge to me. Barth not only discusses preaching, but he discusses why preaching exists, how it is arrived at by an ecclesiology that is itself immersed (baptized) in revelation.
Preaching has always been a given from my youth. We read the Bible. We talk to others about what we’ve read or hear from them what they’ve read. Preaching is this same thing but broadcast out with greater authority due to the calling of the preacher and the deference of the community of hearers.
Yet, this isn’t a preaching supported by dogmatics, rather sociology or cultural anthropology. This is an emotional or intellectual appeal. Not that the preachers from my youth have not been sincere men. Not that they did not understand their own ministries dogmatically--they may have and probably did. No, I mean my understanding was largely a shallow one.
Later Reformed theology taught me to respect the Word preached, but the dogmatic apparatus was still missing.
Now I completely see the oversight; “in this dogmatics preaching is not only assigned less importance, but virtually no importance at all“ (65)! And without the confessional apparatus, how can one truly address oneself to or urge the church on to attend to proclamation? How can one understand what should be preached and why? “Proclamation along these lines can only end with its dissolution. Proclamation as self-exposition (read, oh twenty-first century, the term “authentic” or “authenticity”) must in the long run turn out to be a superfluous and impossible undertaking” (64). Indeed, without preaching the church is either the mystery of performance or a center of social justice practiced by human beings “alone in and with (the) world” (Ibid).
And now I am left to wonder about proclamation as a sacrament. “The Word is the audible sacrament and the sacrament, the visible Word” (71). I may be instructed by preaching, but do I receive grace in the hearing--a grace that allows for the “hearing of the promise” and for “obedience to it” (67)? So is grace available--I speak as if it is a substance--as a punctiliar judgment once-for-all applied or is it an ever flowing stream “whose waters make glad”?
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Church Dogmatics pp 25-44: the Church Emerging
Here are a few disconnected thoughts puffed and wheezed at the summit of the slight but sheer face of Barth’s prolegomena.
Having established his presuppositions in the previous section, Barth fixes the task before him, namely to overcome Modernity (Pietism) and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism in favor of a (miraculous) Evangelische Theologie. The whole forms a scholastic Quodlibet. It is dialectical and masculine. We feel the direct, interested squint of the sportsman. The leaning in and warming to an argument from one who likes nothing better. “If this faith falls” he says, by which we may understand the two forms of faith aforementioned, “so does this interpretation of faith, so too the presupposition of an anthropological prius of faith, and so finally the possibility of prolegomena of this kind” (39)
Barth’s agenda follows in the footsteps of the Reformers by emphasizing the fallenness of humanity and the unmerited grace of God. First, he puts the error in both of these dogmatic emphases at the feet of any definition of faith which finds traction in humanity, in “human possibility” (38). That, he says, cannot be, recalling the doctrine of human depravity. Similarly, the correct definition is one that centers itself not on human possibility or decision, but only (sola) on the free (gratia) revelation of the triune God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Barth’s attitude toward Reformation emphases does not cease there, however. As I’ve said before, he seems to take up Reformation emphases without fear and explore them, twentieth-century feet soldiering about in sixteenth-century boots. The result is a Christologic prolegomena out of which an ecclesiology emerges. Let me just throw this against the wall.
Sacraments: “In, with and under the human question, dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12). Barth’s discussion of the necessity of faith for dogmatic work is working with the same tools as form the doctrine that the efficacy of the sacrament is not bound by the worthiness of the priest who administers: “The time has come to go back with a new understanding to pre-Pietist doctrine of the theological habitus in virtue of which the theologian is what he is by the grace of God quite irrespective his greater or lesser likeness to [Kierkegaard’s existential awareness]” (20). Note especially Barth’s trouble with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby “that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church . . . Roman Catholic faith believe this transformation (emphasis mine). . . . It affirms an analogia entis . . . the possibility of applying the secular ‘There is’ to God” (41). This hints at a much more existential sacramental theology perhaps to come.
Community: "The results of earlier dogmatic work, and indeed our own results, are basically no more than signs of its [truth’s] coming. They are simply the results of human effort. As such they are a help to, but also the object of, fresh human effort. . . . Our dogmatic labors can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. (15)” “To be in the Church . . . is to be called with others by Jesus Christ. To act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call. This obedience to the call of Christ is faith” (13).
Spiritual Disciplines. Prayer as “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” (23). “We do not speak of true prayer if we say ‘must’ instead of ‘can’. According to Romans 8.26ff., the way from ‘can’ to ‘must’ is wrapped in the mystery at the gates of which we here stand” (23-24). Penitence. “Dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience” (22). Confession. “There can be success in this work . . . on the basis of divine correspondence to this human attitude: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’” (24).
The Great Commission. This is the substance of preaching, the need to test what one preaches, and a warning against apologetics which gives unbelief an ontological hold on the argument that it neither deserves nor has.
Election underlies the entire enterprise. Election is the event. The free work of God. To bind God’s freedom is to bind his election. (And what affect will this have on Barth’s doctrine of baptism?)
Having established his presuppositions in the previous section, Barth fixes the task before him, namely to overcome Modernity (Pietism) and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism in favor of a (miraculous) Evangelische Theologie. The whole forms a scholastic Quodlibet. It is dialectical and masculine. We feel the direct, interested squint of the sportsman. The leaning in and warming to an argument from one who likes nothing better. “If this faith falls” he says, by which we may understand the two forms of faith aforementioned, “so does this interpretation of faith, so too the presupposition of an anthropological prius of faith, and so finally the possibility of prolegomena of this kind” (39)
Barth’s agenda follows in the footsteps of the Reformers by emphasizing the fallenness of humanity and the unmerited grace of God. First, he puts the error in both of these dogmatic emphases at the feet of any definition of faith which finds traction in humanity, in “human possibility” (38). That, he says, cannot be, recalling the doctrine of human depravity. Similarly, the correct definition is one that centers itself not on human possibility or decision, but only (sola) on the free (gratia) revelation of the triune God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Barth’s attitude toward Reformation emphases does not cease there, however. As I’ve said before, he seems to take up Reformation emphases without fear and explore them, twentieth-century feet soldiering about in sixteenth-century boots. The result is a Christologic prolegomena out of which an ecclesiology emerges. Let me just throw this against the wall.
Sacraments: “In, with and under the human question, dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12). Barth’s discussion of the necessity of faith for dogmatic work is working with the same tools as form the doctrine that the efficacy of the sacrament is not bound by the worthiness of the priest who administers: “The time has come to go back with a new understanding to pre-Pietist doctrine of the theological habitus in virtue of which the theologian is what he is by the grace of God quite irrespective his greater or lesser likeness to [Kierkegaard’s existential awareness]” (20). Note especially Barth’s trouble with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby “that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church . . . Roman Catholic faith believe this transformation (emphasis mine). . . . It affirms an analogia entis . . . the possibility of applying the secular ‘There is’ to God” (41). This hints at a much more existential sacramental theology perhaps to come.
Community: "The results of earlier dogmatic work, and indeed our own results, are basically no more than signs of its [truth’s] coming. They are simply the results of human effort. As such they are a help to, but also the object of, fresh human effort. . . . Our dogmatic labors can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. (15)” “To be in the Church . . . is to be called with others by Jesus Christ. To act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call. This obedience to the call of Christ is faith” (13).
Spiritual Disciplines. Prayer as “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” (23). “We do not speak of true prayer if we say ‘must’ instead of ‘can’. According to Romans 8.26ff., the way from ‘can’ to ‘must’ is wrapped in the mystery at the gates of which we here stand” (23-24). Penitence. “Dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience” (22). Confession. “There can be success in this work . . . on the basis of divine correspondence to this human attitude: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’” (24).
The Great Commission. This is the substance of preaching, the need to test what one preaches, and a warning against apologetics which gives unbelief an ontological hold on the argument that it neither deserves nor has.
Election underlies the entire enterprise. Election is the event. The free work of God. To bind God’s freedom is to bind his election. (And what affect will this have on Barth’s doctrine of baptism?)
Monday, January 10, 2011
Church Dogmatics 1.1.2
You say what you are. That’s what Barth is getting at in this section. Perhaps “are” is the wrong term, as it presupposes a metaphysic of being (and the personal jury is still out as to whether Barth’s is a metaphysics of ontology). Nevertheless, Barth’s doctrine of revelation--what you say--is dictated by what you are. Say, then, that you are God, then Truth is what you are. So what you say of yourself, what you reveal of yourself, is Truth. Say, then, that you are a human being. Limited. A created thing. A creature. Your “saying” is also limited and created, encompassing at best only a world of created things.
But when the Church becomes--when it is elected in God’s providence for faith in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, then it confesses what it knows to be there, but with created lips. And so Truth erupts eschatologically into the world through its confession--a confession it is given, not one it has appropriated, a confession born of seeking not of obtaining. “It does not have to begin by finding or inventing the standard by which it measures [what is true]. It sees and recognizes that this is given within the Church. It is given in its own peculiar way, as Jesus Christ is given, as God in His revelation gives Himself to faith. But it is given” (12).
There are two levels of knowledge, even as they are two levels of what can be expressed. Because it is Jesus who speaks, and because Jesus is the incarnate Son, and because the Son enjoys the pure agape of trinitarian fellowship with the Father, then his word can be trusted. His word, he himself, is an analogia fidei (τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως) which is a true canon. “He is the truth, not merely in Himself, but also for us as we know Him solely by faith in Jesus Christ” (12).
The one level is a level of perfect comprehension and speech--a “charismatic theology from within” whose characteristic theologian in Paul. The other is steps out after, asking and fumbling according to the ontology of those who ask. “As the Church accepts from Scripture, and with divine authority from Scripture alone, the attestation of its own being as the measure of its utterance . . . (16 emphasis mine). This is a “theology from without” whose characteristic theologians are the second-century apologists. “It alone creates fellowship and can be ecclesiastical and scientific” (22). Nevertheless, it is “always undertaken as an act of penitent obedience” and its chief method is prayer born of faith that the Spirit “will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16.13 ESV). It believes that “in, with and under the human question [note the inference to Luther’s doctrine of the Eucharistic presence] dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12).
I should note, as well, that this two-layered matrix of speech, the Truth and the questions that point to the truth, is very reminiscent of the scholastic argument that the efficacy of the sacrament was not bound to the piety of the officiant, or lack of it.
I like that Barth is not content to set out on beaten paths. He goes to foundations and comes back with a doctrine of revelation that I’ve heard lampooned and spoken against my whole life. Barth’s theology can make a dead dog into divine revelation. He denigrates the scriptures, they say, and dissolves revelation into subjectivity.
Most of these criticisms and the critics that wield them have not read Barth, or, if they have read him, have not attempted to understand him--at least that is my governing hypothesis. I do not think he denigrates church history, the creeds, or the scriptures. They are, in fact, the matrix upon which his Dogmatics is built. So the truth of the matter is more subtle.
I have the feeling Barth is not out to change the accident but the substance of theological activity in the world. And I have a feeling he is wresting the podium from the hands of confident rhetoricians and reminding everyone, “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great” (Prv. 25.6 ESV). The self-revealing of the Triune God is a power beyond the epistemological dictates of scientific reductionism, and He is coming into the world.
And I wonder if Barth is reading Calvin better than Calvin has been read in a very long time. I wonder if Barth is breathing the spirit/Spirit of the Reformers and grasping the true sense of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming, and therefore calling subsequent comfortable Protestant-scholasticism what it is.
Karl Barth; revelation; analogy of faith; election
But when the Church becomes--when it is elected in God’s providence for faith in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, then it confesses what it knows to be there, but with created lips. And so Truth erupts eschatologically into the world through its confession--a confession it is given, not one it has appropriated, a confession born of seeking not of obtaining. “It does not have to begin by finding or inventing the standard by which it measures [what is true]. It sees and recognizes that this is given within the Church. It is given in its own peculiar way, as Jesus Christ is given, as God in His revelation gives Himself to faith. But it is given” (12).
There are two levels of knowledge, even as they are two levels of what can be expressed. Because it is Jesus who speaks, and because Jesus is the incarnate Son, and because the Son enjoys the pure agape of trinitarian fellowship with the Father, then his word can be trusted. His word, he himself, is an analogia fidei (τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως) which is a true canon. “He is the truth, not merely in Himself, but also for us as we know Him solely by faith in Jesus Christ” (12).
The one level is a level of perfect comprehension and speech--a “charismatic theology from within” whose characteristic theologian in Paul. The other is steps out after, asking and fumbling according to the ontology of those who ask. “As the Church accepts from Scripture, and with divine authority from Scripture alone, the attestation of its own being as the measure of its utterance . . . (16 emphasis mine). This is a “theology from without” whose characteristic theologians are the second-century apologists. “It alone creates fellowship and can be ecclesiastical and scientific” (22). Nevertheless, it is “always undertaken as an act of penitent obedience” and its chief method is prayer born of faith that the Spirit “will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16.13 ESV). It believes that “in, with and under the human question [note the inference to Luther’s doctrine of the Eucharistic presence] dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12).
I should note, as well, that this two-layered matrix of speech, the Truth and the questions that point to the truth, is very reminiscent of the scholastic argument that the efficacy of the sacrament was not bound to the piety of the officiant, or lack of it.
I like that Barth is not content to set out on beaten paths. He goes to foundations and comes back with a doctrine of revelation that I’ve heard lampooned and spoken against my whole life. Barth’s theology can make a dead dog into divine revelation. He denigrates the scriptures, they say, and dissolves revelation into subjectivity.
Most of these criticisms and the critics that wield them have not read Barth, or, if they have read him, have not attempted to understand him--at least that is my governing hypothesis. I do not think he denigrates church history, the creeds, or the scriptures. They are, in fact, the matrix upon which his Dogmatics is built. So the truth of the matter is more subtle.
I have the feeling Barth is not out to change the accident but the substance of theological activity in the world. And I have a feeling he is wresting the podium from the hands of confident rhetoricians and reminding everyone, “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great” (Prv. 25.6 ESV). The self-revealing of the Triune God is a power beyond the epistemological dictates of scientific reductionism, and He is coming into the world.
And I wonder if Barth is reading Calvin better than Calvin has been read in a very long time. I wonder if Barth is breathing the spirit/Spirit of the Reformers and grasping the true sense of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming, and therefore calling subsequent comfortable Protestant-scholasticism what it is.
Karl Barth; revelation; analogy of faith; election
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Church Dogmatics 1.1.1
Why does Barth care about science? Right away, with this obsession with science, we twenty-first century readers realize we’ve crossed over into a different way of things. Einstein yet lives. Science has shoved the epistemology of the West under the iron lid of its own method. What concord should Jerusalem have with Athens? Why does Barth care about science?
Earlier today, I commented on Daniel Owen’s blog Beginning Barth that it seems to me as if “Barth is offering theology on the altar of post-enlightenment scientism.” But having read the whole of this section, I do not think this is the case. Barth does flirt with science, but the word and thing are not identical to what is commonly understood. Theology can be called a science in that it has internal consistency that is defined according to its object (Sachlichkeit). But it cannot be called a science if it must submit to “the idea of unity, the possibility of myth, and the humanistic relevance of Christianity” (Arthur Titius, Berlin 1932. Note Barth's attentiveness to the scientific pronouncements of his day).
What emerges is a taking up of the term “science” as an act of solidarity, an act done from forgiveness and for evangelical hope (or judgment). That which is not assumed cannot be atoned for, and theology extends an invitation to every other science, saying, “come and be assumed.” Theology is no different from them. It also is a flawed, human discipline. And it is weaker than they, for rather than being fixed solidly in this age, theology hovers in gossamer fragility between the times. “It cannot think of itself as a link in an ordered cosmos, but only as a stop-gap in a disordered cosmos.” There is a signpost here pointing decades forward to Jürgen Moltmann’s assertion that eschatology is the only foundation of dogmatics. And there is also a statement made about the possibility of natural theology. It is possible, if I understand Barth, but it is improbable. “Might it not be that Jer. 31.34 is in process of fulfilment? . . . There might be such a thing as philosophia christiana.” “Now if God be wisdom (sapientia Deus est), as truth and scripture testify, then a true philosopher is a lover of God” (Augustine. De Civitas Dei Chap 8 Sect 1).
The difference between those sciences and this theological one (Augustine’s de divinitate ratio sive sermo), is the central principle. Those other sciences judge “the utterance of the Church about God in accordance with alien principles” whereas theology has its own principle: Jesus Christ, the “basis, goal and content” of the Church.
Barth’s treatment of Christ the Center is amazingly apophatic. Biblical theology (Does Christian utterance derive from Him?), practical theology (Does it lead to Him?), and dogmatic theology (Is it conformable to Him?) are three circles overlapping in a venn diagram from whose center one respectfully turns “it is well neither to affirm nor to construct a systematic center”. The threefold pattern of theological disciplines, its questions, and the three-fold adjectives he uses of Christ (basis, goal and content), loosely correspond and together beat the tempo of a trinitarian schema to come. The apophatic Christology of a center that is “neither affirmed nor constructed” and the apophatic nature of the one ousia at the center of three hypostasis. This is poetic metre. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but is this a truly necessary trinity? Did Barth begin with science and end with . . . worship?
Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics; science; apophatic theology; Augustine
Earlier today, I commented on Daniel Owen’s blog Beginning Barth that it seems to me as if “Barth is offering theology on the altar of post-enlightenment scientism.” But having read the whole of this section, I do not think this is the case. Barth does flirt with science, but the word and thing are not identical to what is commonly understood. Theology can be called a science in that it has internal consistency that is defined according to its object (Sachlichkeit). But it cannot be called a science if it must submit to “the idea of unity, the possibility of myth, and the humanistic relevance of Christianity” (Arthur Titius, Berlin 1932. Note Barth's attentiveness to the scientific pronouncements of his day).
What emerges is a taking up of the term “science” as an act of solidarity, an act done from forgiveness and for evangelical hope (or judgment). That which is not assumed cannot be atoned for, and theology extends an invitation to every other science, saying, “come and be assumed.” Theology is no different from them. It also is a flawed, human discipline. And it is weaker than they, for rather than being fixed solidly in this age, theology hovers in gossamer fragility between the times. “It cannot think of itself as a link in an ordered cosmos, but only as a stop-gap in a disordered cosmos.” There is a signpost here pointing decades forward to Jürgen Moltmann’s assertion that eschatology is the only foundation of dogmatics. And there is also a statement made about the possibility of natural theology. It is possible, if I understand Barth, but it is improbable. “Might it not be that Jer. 31.34 is in process of fulfilment? . . . There might be such a thing as philosophia christiana.” “Now if God be wisdom (sapientia Deus est), as truth and scripture testify, then a true philosopher is a lover of God” (Augustine. De Civitas Dei Chap 8 Sect 1).
The difference between those sciences and this theological one (Augustine’s de divinitate ratio sive sermo), is the central principle. Those other sciences judge “the utterance of the Church about God in accordance with alien principles” whereas theology has its own principle: Jesus Christ, the “basis, goal and content” of the Church.
Barth’s treatment of Christ the Center is amazingly apophatic. Biblical theology (Does Christian utterance derive from Him?), practical theology (Does it lead to Him?), and dogmatic theology (Is it conformable to Him?) are three circles overlapping in a venn diagram from whose center one respectfully turns “it is well neither to affirm nor to construct a systematic center”. The threefold pattern of theological disciplines, its questions, and the three-fold adjectives he uses of Christ (basis, goal and content), loosely correspond and together beat the tempo of a trinitarian schema to come. The apophatic Christology of a center that is “neither affirmed nor constructed” and the apophatic nature of the one ousia at the center of three hypostasis. This is poetic metre. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but is this a truly necessary trinity? Did Barth begin with science and end with . . . worship?
Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics; science; apophatic theology; Augustine
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Preparing to Read Karl Barth
So it seems that I and a dozen or so other bloggers have answered J. R. Daniel Kirk's invitation to read through Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics (CD). And you would think that, having written lengthy reviews on several "how to read Barth"-style books, and having read a bit of Barth over the years myself, that this would be an enthusiastic undertaking. Nevertheless, I'm terrified.
Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics
Blogging takes time. Thus the long falling off since Caleb was born. Two kids don't translate into T-I-M-E. Can I find time enough to write again and stay with it?
Interpreting Barth correctly is a kind of cottage industry among Barthians. Will I understand him? Will I miss some fundamental foundation and read a thousand pages in the wrong direction? And, in so doing, will I embarrass myself?
Barth himself was not kindly received by thinkers from the traditions of my youth, namely Southern fundamentalism and conservative Reformed. Based on their reading, Barth is the quickest way to undermine every sure plank of doctrine. His is the hand to topple unwary young minds into the slough of liberal despond.
And then there is the simple difference in time. The first volume of the CD was written in German in Switzerland in the 1930s. That means that Barth's interlocutors, his enemies, his politics and, indeed, his language require interpretation beyond bare cogitation.
In the face of these difficulties, the presence of a community of, at this writing, strangers comes as great comfort. I have no doubt that they will educate me more than I them. It feels right to be climbing in to the CD in the presence of a congregation (ekklaesia).
Finally, something Ezra Pound said in his book The ABCs of Reading stays with me. Pound said that a student should study masters. "It is my firm conviction," he said, "that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many."
Barth himself is, undoubtedly, a master. And with him comes a community of masters; indexed citations cluster around Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and, most prevalently, Luther. Who can hang back in such a company? And so, friends, let us begin!
Barth himself is, undoubtedly, a master. And with him comes a community of masters; indexed citations cluster around Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and, most prevalently, Luther. Who can hang back in such a company? And so, friends, let us begin!
Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics
Friday, September 17, 2010
Theology as craft
Theology is not who you have read most recently. It is not the newest jewel in your cap of jargon. It is not the recognition that the argument has been better traced by another. It is not understanding of the history of ideas. It is not the playground of the leisure class. Theology does not require your razor wit or applicable metaphor. It is not necessary for it to prove anything, nor does one who needs proof go to it. It does not swell with victory over its enemies, nor is it threatened by them. It fills dogma as a vessel. Yet, dogma does not exhaust it. If one learned the Summa by rote for recitation, would it make one a theologian? Doesn’t the Devil quote the Bible chapter and verse?
I have degrees. What did I learn?
I have spent. What did I buy?
I have read. What did it profit?
I should know better, and yet have so often regressed.
I should be a teacher, but do footnotes teach?
What is theology, then? I deny it as a footnote or a name. I forbid it to be bound hand-and-foot by historical situation. I forbid it to be owned. And so, if not philosophy or taxonomy, it must be something else, something ignored and of little account in modernity. Ah, yes, it is that thing behind the work of self-discipline--that is the way. Theology is rules that engender ways of being. In short, it is a craft.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Channeling Napoleon Hill
What follows is a comment made to a post that my pastor, Father Jody Howard, made following an article in the Living Church about the challenges facing the Episcopal Church. At the end of the article, Rev. Dr. Neal Michell, canon for strategic development in the Diocese of Dallas, writes, “The problems facing our church are spiritual in nature. We have not been faithful enough disciples of Jesus Christ. We have not reached out to those around us with the Good News of Jesus Christ.” My response is as follows:
Brueggemann's call for a return to personal discipleship is definitely part of the solution; however, that is simply not enough. That may become a vibrant monasticism or fundamentalism, (which may be the option that best exemplifies God's design for the church in the world. For me, the jury is still out on that one. And if it does come down here, I choose monasticism over fundamentalism.) but it will not solve the puzzle of why there simply isn't traction in the culture. In my mind, this is a problem with language and with anthropology. Language because there is simply no longer a common linguistic "game" that allows people to talk about religious ideas. (And, one might say, this is part of a broader problem: that the public square has so collapsed that even talking about ideas of public consequence has been reduced to grandstanding, party politics, and the manipulation of conspiracy theories.) Anthropology because the formula for a whole human being living a human life no longer includes the habits and practices of faith as a necessity but has relegated it to, at best, an app that can be downloaded and run on the software of the self if one so chooses, for reasons that are highly personable but lend themselves to the psychotic, the aesthetic, the social/political, or even the pragmatic--but certainly not the necessary. Western human beings are practical atheists, one and all, and it is a struggle even to be religious for the religious. The church catholic in the West has ignored these extremely thorny philosophical problems and applied, instead, Western and especially American ideas of individualism and success-through-right-action (channeling Napoleon Hill).
theological anthropology; Walter Brueggemann; missions; culture; atheism; modernity
Brueggemann's call for a return to personal discipleship is definitely part of the solution; however, that is simply not enough. That may become a vibrant monasticism or fundamentalism, (which may be the option that best exemplifies God's design for the church in the world. For me, the jury is still out on that one. And if it does come down here, I choose monasticism over fundamentalism.) but it will not solve the puzzle of why there simply isn't traction in the culture. In my mind, this is a problem with language and with anthropology. Language because there is simply no longer a common linguistic "game" that allows people to talk about religious ideas. (And, one might say, this is part of a broader problem: that the public square has so collapsed that even talking about ideas of public consequence has been reduced to grandstanding, party politics, and the manipulation of conspiracy theories.) Anthropology because the formula for a whole human being living a human life no longer includes the habits and practices of faith as a necessity but has relegated it to, at best, an app that can be downloaded and run on the software of the self if one so chooses, for reasons that are highly personable but lend themselves to the psychotic, the aesthetic, the social/political, or even the pragmatic--but certainly not the necessary. Western human beings are practical atheists, one and all, and it is a struggle even to be religious for the religious. The church catholic in the West has ignored these extremely thorny philosophical problems and applied, instead, Western and especially American ideas of individualism and success-through-right-action (channeling Napoleon Hill).
theological anthropology; Walter Brueggemann; missions; culture; atheism; modernity
Friday, February 19, 2010
GEB 2: strange loops and the back end of materialism
GEB is a series of rooms, locks, and keys, and the first of these keys is the concept of a strange loop. Discussing the central musical idea of the work, the “Canon per Tonos” of J. S. Bach's Musical Offerings, Douglas Hofstadter writes,
What makes this canon different from any other [is that] it is so constructed that [its] ending ties smoothly onto the beginning. . . . These successive modulations lead the ear to increasingly remote provinces of tonality, so that after several of them, one would expect to be hopelessly far away from the starting key. And yet . . . the original key of C minor [is eventually] restored.
This mobius strip of a thing, traveling further and further from a point only to arrive there again, Hofstadter calls a strange loop. It is a phenomenon that “occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system [a tangled hierarchy], we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.”
Strange loops occur in different ways. Hofstadter finds them in the work of M. C. Escher in, for example, “Ascending and Descending” or “Waterfall.” But implicit in all of them, he says, whether they encompass a dozen steps or only one, is the concept of infinity. “What else is a loop,” he writes, “but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way.” The representation of strange loops through modulation of musical keys or in the optical illusion of a waterfall existing on two and three dimensions at once is paradoxical—the conflict between finite and infinite. It smells like a higher mathematics and is, as he continues, a kind of translation of the Epimenides paradox or liar paradox, namely “All Cretans are liars,” when Epimenides himself was from Crete. Epimenides gives us a linguistic paradox. A self-referential statement of language which is neither true nor false. What is it?
Hofstadter goes on quite a while discussion twentieth century mathematician Kurt Gödel's discovery of a strange loop at the heart of mathematics. His description is hard to feel, being read today at the end of a continuum that begins with special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the literary term. Nevertheless “Gödel showed,” he says, “that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.” If I understand him correctly, he is saying that Gödel discovered at the base and heart of mathematics itself that disorder is the beginning even if order is the end: that language shouldn't make sense, but does. That Escher shouldn't be able to draw his waterfall, but there it is. That Bach can write a canon without end, a canon that cannot be written by formula, a canon whose every note makes sense only as it is nested in a network of contexts and relationships, that “there is something deeper” than “mere fugality.” He scrawls a question mark across Euclid's planes and then asks how it can be done.
So what is Hofstadter after? Why paint a picture of the mystery of meaning arriving from an infinite variety of tangled disorder? Hofstadter is after one mystery: the mystery of intelligence. Where does intelligence come from? And can it arise from systems of logic when such systems exist only as they bracket acceptable possibilities—a bracketing unavailable to real intelligence. Life, the context of human intelligence, is not a bracketed thing. Life is messy and random—infinitely so. There are rules, and then there are rules about rules, and then there are rules for constructing new rules, and so on and so forth. “Sometimes the complexity of our minds seems so overwhelming that one feels that there can be no solution to the problem of understanding intelligence.” And, lest it be missed, Hofstadter is a materialist . . . a materialist face to face with the question of the meaning of life and the challenge of transcendence—which, for him, is not an option. He's painted himself into a metaphysical corner, how shall he escape?
J. S. Bach; intelligence; meaning; Kurt Gödel
What makes this canon different from any other [is that] it is so constructed that [its] ending ties smoothly onto the beginning. . . . These successive modulations lead the ear to increasingly remote provinces of tonality, so that after several of them, one would expect to be hopelessly far away from the starting key. And yet . . . the original key of C minor [is eventually] restored.
This mobius strip of a thing, traveling further and further from a point only to arrive there again, Hofstadter calls a strange loop. It is a phenomenon that “occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system [a tangled hierarchy], we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.”
Strange loops occur in different ways. Hofstadter finds them in the work of M. C. Escher in, for example, “Ascending and Descending” or “Waterfall.” But implicit in all of them, he says, whether they encompass a dozen steps or only one, is the concept of infinity. “What else is a loop,” he writes, “but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way.” The representation of strange loops through modulation of musical keys or in the optical illusion of a waterfall existing on two and three dimensions at once is paradoxical—the conflict between finite and infinite. It smells like a higher mathematics and is, as he continues, a kind of translation of the Epimenides paradox or liar paradox, namely “All Cretans are liars,” when Epimenides himself was from Crete. Epimenides gives us a linguistic paradox. A self-referential statement of language which is neither true nor false. What is it?
Hofstadter goes on quite a while discussion twentieth century mathematician Kurt Gödel's discovery of a strange loop at the heart of mathematics. His description is hard to feel, being read today at the end of a continuum that begins with special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the literary term. Nevertheless “Gödel showed,” he says, “that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.” If I understand him correctly, he is saying that Gödel discovered at the base and heart of mathematics itself that disorder is the beginning even if order is the end: that language shouldn't make sense, but does. That Escher shouldn't be able to draw his waterfall, but there it is. That Bach can write a canon without end, a canon that cannot be written by formula, a canon whose every note makes sense only as it is nested in a network of contexts and relationships, that “there is something deeper” than “mere fugality.” He scrawls a question mark across Euclid's planes and then asks how it can be done.
So what is Hofstadter after? Why paint a picture of the mystery of meaning arriving from an infinite variety of tangled disorder? Hofstadter is after one mystery: the mystery of intelligence. Where does intelligence come from? And can it arise from systems of logic when such systems exist only as they bracket acceptable possibilities—a bracketing unavailable to real intelligence. Life, the context of human intelligence, is not a bracketed thing. Life is messy and random—infinitely so. There are rules, and then there are rules about rules, and then there are rules for constructing new rules, and so on and so forth. “Sometimes the complexity of our minds seems so overwhelming that one feels that there can be no solution to the problem of understanding intelligence.” And, lest it be missed, Hofstadter is a materialist . . . a materialist face to face with the question of the meaning of life and the challenge of transcendence—which, for him, is not an option. He's painted himself into a metaphysical corner, how shall he escape?
J. S. Bach; intelligence; meaning; Kurt Gödel
Thursday, February 18, 2010
NYT, Elif Batuman, and theology
Elif Batuman scored a review of her book The Posessed in the February 10, 2010 edition of the New York Times. Not that I am much of an aficionado when it comes to especially contemporary fiction. Nevertheless, there is a part of Dwight Garner's review that caught my eye.
Ms. Batuman’s search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.
And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?
Now, I ask you. Why can't theology do that? Why can't theology talk about grad school, love affairs, The Queen is Dead, and "our favorite books"?
I believe that as much as it was the printing press and mercantile politics and nationalism and justification by faith, as much as it was all of these, it was also the readability of the Reformation that made it so dangerous and so popular. How many of the church fathers were rhetoricians, trained in the subtle and liquid power of the spoken word? Why is it that the Bible not only can be literature, but is literature?
Our schools produce schoolmen, and their grammar is exactly so. And how many today read John of Salisbury or settle in with a bit of Duns Scotus? Are these inspiring or do they serve as foils for the construction of the endless paper parcels that make for an academic career?
I've said it before, I think to a large degree that the appeal of deconstructionism was a loosening of the corset of tenure for the sake of a little literary imagination. God, I wish theology would take the hint.
Elif Batuman; theology as literature; boredom; scholasticism
Ms. Batuman’s search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.
And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?
Now, I ask you. Why can't theology do that? Why can't theology talk about grad school, love affairs, The Queen is Dead, and "our favorite books"?
I believe that as much as it was the printing press and mercantile politics and nationalism and justification by faith, as much as it was all of these, it was also the readability of the Reformation that made it so dangerous and so popular. How many of the church fathers were rhetoricians, trained in the subtle and liquid power of the spoken word? Why is it that the Bible not only can be literature, but is literature?
Our schools produce schoolmen, and their grammar is exactly so. And how many today read John of Salisbury or settle in with a bit of Duns Scotus? Are these inspiring or do they serve as foils for the construction of the endless paper parcels that make for an academic career?
I've said it before, I think to a large degree that the appeal of deconstructionism was a loosening of the corset of tenure for the sake of a little literary imagination. God, I wish theology would take the hint.
Elif Batuman; theology as literature; boredom; scholasticism
Thursday, December 17, 2009
GEB 1: stumble trip
Douglas R. Hofstadter, now a professor of cognitive and computer science at Indiana University, wrote Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in the late seventies. Today, it is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning book and something of a cult classic. Reading it gains one admission to a worldwide fraternal order. I hadn't known that. What I did know was that it asks questions about the self, about what “I” means, and about the origin of meaning and thought—and that it suggests answers. “In a word,” write Douglas R. Hofstadter, “GEB [Goedel, Escher, Bach] is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.”
epistemology; Douglas R. Hofstadter; materialism; subjectivity
epistemology; Douglas R. Hofstadter; materialism; subjectivity
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
a universal dual
I have been struggling for three years or more to escape from one universe into another. Wandering and flailing in the dark, gathering snatches of truth from rumor and hearsay, leaving the familiar paths of habit--catchphrases and methods--and striking out into the woods after this or that light or landmark.
When I say universe I'm speaking of a universe of meaning: familiar symbols, habits, and assumptions that fix the stars and horizons that make up the mental furniture of daily life. Human beings exist in a meaning universe more directly than the physical one. Ask the reductionist-materalist how difficult it is to truly cleave to the "nothing but" of things and then watch them realize that this, too--this arrival at the bare whatness of objects in the physical universe is just another shaping of the mental universe of meaning. That's the double-edge of Kant's great divide: even the scientist is a phenomenologist.
I didn't furiously start and break into the forest chasing after a new universe. You don't realize you've left a path until it is long behind you. It starts with tiny deviations. "Look at that over there!" Then a quick investigation to get a better view. Soon you've left the trail behind.
The first steps were quite simple: the resolution that matter is not of itself a sinful thing. The body too can hope. An eschatological lean toward the Postmillenial end of Amillenialsm. A strict habit of avoiding material notions about godself so that the triune being is not a thing among things. A denial of the present-day urge to use the doctrine of providence as a divining rod. A realization that it is modernity that values authenticity, this baptized in "God has a plan for my life" (the kingdom of God recruits worshipers for God's sake, not for the sake of a realization of one's inner you.) Leaving Anabaptist traditions behind and joining an Episcopal church. These all taken together slowly lead away from that universe that others have called the enchanted universe.
Just naming the darn thing took years. The enchanted universe--yes! I've blogged about this before. This is the universe in which the Christianity of my youth dwells. Naming the other universe has taken nearly as much time. I'm an alien and a stranger to it after all. Moving in large rooms by candlelight. Nothing is familiar. This is the sacramental universe.
I've not fully arrived in the latter. And so much of the habits of mind and the phrases that go with being a Christian go with the former, it has been an odd process of sorting it all out. The brits have pants but call them trousers. Both universes have the word "worship" but mean very different things. It is a repatriation.
Here are a few things I've discovered: One fundamental difference between the two is the way each understands the relationship between God and the world. The god of the enchanted universe is far away, though invoked and expected in the smallest parts of daily life with great fervency. Matter in the enchanted universe is hopeless, the world will burn up and the soul will one day put aside the body and go on to a better realm. The god of the sacramental universe is astonishingly close, though far less invoked and expected in daily life. One expects laterally, the way that plants grow or time flows in unnoticeable continuity that evades the most intense awareness. Matter has hope, the world will be redeemed and transformed, and human beings will go into the new creation as embodied persons, transformed, yes, but still human beings. The eschatologies are different, and so is the drama. Warfare characterizes the former; wonder the latter--at least in my experience.
The way religion and science relate to one another is also very different depending on which universe you inhabit. In the former, science is a helpful maker of comforts but is not allowed to say anything of real importance. In the latter, science is taken seriously. It is not embraced, but it becomes a partner in dialogue. If one is a Christian coming up in an enchanted universe, the only option available if you take the scientific route is to put things in tight boxes, otherwise there is no motivation to engage in the mental and physical rigor of scientific investigation. If one grows up in a sacramental universe, there is a great deal of motivation to pursue the sciences, perhaps more motivation than if one grows up an agnostic.
At any rate, the doctrine of revelation is far different in the two universes. In an enchanted universe, revelation is immanent and pregnant in all things, what is necessary are the keys to its discovery. It is personal, and so God is personal. In a sacramental universe, revelation is restricted to word and sacrament: and perhaps even to word through sacrament (word governed by sacrament). It is largely impersonal, though one's person is caught up in the story. God became a person, and so what is confessed is a God in three persons. The self is wholly at the center of the enchanted universe; God's redemptive purpose at the center of the sacramental one. Faith is also differently understood. In the former faith is a Kierkegaardian leap full of the will and human drama; in the latter it is a signpost planted by the Holy Spirit sticking stubbornly from one's own rocky heart, sometimes a beacon but most times a nuisance.
science and religion; enchanted universe; sacramental theology; Christianity
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Science & Religion: a second and historical look
Turns out, Christianity and science have walked further together than apart, at least that is the message of Profs. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers. Taking on directly the popular and prevalent view that science and religion have always been at war with each other, Lindberg and Numbers maintain that historical investigation suggest otherwise. “Although it is not difficult,” they write, “to find instances of conflicts and controversy . . . recent scholarship has shown the warfare metaphor to be neither useful nor tenable.”[1]
The thread of antagonism they trace back to an American historian named Andrew Dickson White. White taught at the University of Michigan and served in the New York Senate before assuming the presidency of Cornell University, where he refused to impose any religious examination of students. He wanted to create an asylum for science, and some pious citizens did not approve. Therefore, in 1869, a thirty-seven year old White began a white-hot, lifelong anticrusade on behalf of science and against dogmatism, culminating in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.
History of the Warfare has been amazingly successful in the intervening century. Translated into German, Italian, French, Swedish, and Japanese, it is still in print today. Not only, but modern historians still defend its conclusions. Bruce Mazlish, for example, has written in favor of White’s conclusions, saying that they are “beyond reasonable doubt,” a declaration to which the Harvard historian George Sarton would agree. Sarton went so far as believe that White’s thesis should be levied against non-Christian cultures.
Nevertheless, despite its dazzlingly dense references and “military rhetoric,” History of the Warfare is eisegetic in its interpretations. White was wrong, and Lindberg and Numbers are out to prove him so.
White claimed that Christianity “arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years” crushing its appearance under the boot of superstition and ignorance. Is this true?
Lindberg and Numbers, beginning with the church fathers, find a more complicated truth. As it turns out, the church fathers took on the approach toward science that characterized the pagan cultures in which they lived. Some ignored science. Others believed that it had its place. Augustine, for example, believed that, though science could not dictate dogma, it should be respected in its sphere.[2]
It frequently happens that there is some question about the earth or the sky or the other elements of this world, the movement revolutions or even the size and distance of the stars, the regular eclipses of the sun and the moon, the course of the years and seasons; the nature of the animals, vegetables and minerals, and other things of the same kind, respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from the most certain reasoning or observation. And it is highly deplorable and mischievous and a thing especially to be guarded against that he should hear a Christian speaking of such matters in accordance with Christian writings and uttering such nonsense that, knowing him to be as wide of the mark as . . . east is from west, the unbeliever can scarcely restrain himself from laughing.[3]
Christian apologists also found science useful—and their use of it helped preserve and extend what science was available in often tumultuous times. Science aided theology. Science was its handmaiden—a position far different from White, who would say they were enemies. As it is, “Christianity was not the enemy [of science], but a valued (if not entirely reliable) servant.” They worked in tandem with each other, and often the exchange was beneficial.[4]
One benefit of the relationship was that science gave Christianity categories which allowed it to dialogue with the world. “The notion that any serious Christian thinker would even have attempted to formulate a world view from the Bible alone is ludicrous.” Theologians could adapt parts of a worldview that are, well, worldly from the natural philosophy at their disposal. In the thirteen century, for example, theologians busily integrated Aristotelian categories, taking on it physical, metaphysical, and cosmological and integrating them with creedal fundamentum. This synthesizing process culminated in the condemnations of 1270 and 1277, whereby theologians and philosophers were forbidden to pursue certain Aristotelian positions, such as pure determinism.
Interestingly enough, Lindberg and Numbers deny that these condemnations prove intrinsic warfare. They maintain that the condemnations allowed thought to run outside the shadow of Aristotle. Fourteenth century attacks on Aristotelian dogma led to new questions, such as the rotation of the earth on its axis. Questions which otherwise may have languished. Further, the authors state the the condemnations also turned scientific questioning away from fruitless rationalism.
A central concern of the condemnation was the desire to preserve the sovereignty of God over creation. God is omnipotent over the material world, and this means that the physical laws that govern it are subject to the will of their creator and can be changed if necessary. And that meant that an investigation into underlying causes could very well be a fool’s errand.
The condemnations generated a certain skepticism about the ability of the human mind to penetrate with certainty to the underlying causes of observed events; this attitude encouraged the view that science should restrict its attention to empirical fact. . . . Four hundred years later, the idea of God’s absolute sovereignty and its corollary, the total passivity of matter, became central features of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic world view.”[5]
Lindberg and Numbers pursue their argument into the affairs of Copernicus and Galileo. In the case of Copernicus and the publication of his system in 1543, there was no reason for religion to attack Copernicus and every reason to hear his voice as one of many. The rotation of the earth had already been proposed by Nicole Oresme, a bishop of the fourteen century, and Nicholas of Cusa, a cardinal of the fifteenth. Various members of the church, including a bishop and a cardinal, urged Copernicus to publication, and his manuscript was dedicated to Pope Paul III. A young Lutheran mathematician, Georg Jachim Rheticus, saw it through the printing process. And the theologian Andreas Osiander wrote its preface. Organized Catholic opposition to Copernicus didn't appear until the seventeenth century. “The church,” they say, “had more important things to worry about than a new astronomical or cosmological system.” Up-and-coming mathematicians “adopted Copernicanism simply as a mathematical reform, offering a better way of predicting planetary positions, while overlooking or rejecting the radical thesis that the earth really moves.”
Where Galileo was concerned, the issue was not science versus religion but politics and the question of Scriptural interpretation. Galileo and his telescope came on the scene amidst the wagon-circling activities of the Roman Catholic church during the Counter-Reformation. The Protestant Reformation had waged a now seventy-year-old argument with Roman Catholicism on many fronts, one of the most divisive being biblical interpretation. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) forbid scriptural interpretation on any matter of faith or practice “contrary to the sense determined by the Holy Mother Church.” And Galileo’s teaching did just that. Galileo argued that nature and scripture were two organs of divine revelation, and that reason was their proper interpreter, not the Church. When questioned, his science was not unique enough to support his hermeneutics; other natural explanations, such as that provided by Tycho Brahe, served well enough and did not run afoul of orthodoxy. At best Galileo raised questions about the relationship between reason and revelation. At worst, he acted imprudently by mixing scientific observation and hermeneutical method. Nevertheless, as Lindberg and Numbers state, the Galileo affair is an ecclesial one. Everyone involved identified themselves as Christian and acknowledged the centrality of the Bible. The struggle was between opposing theories of biblical interpretation: Trent’s conservative position versus Galileo’s liberal one. Both positions could claim an intellectual tradition, but neither existed apart from militant politics in Galileo’s day; his flair for cultivating powerful enemies notwithstanding.
The story of Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species falls along similar lines to those of Copernicus. Once again, the publication of Darwin’s ideas finds a religious atmosphere eager to dialogue with or even absorb his views. “Clergy were among the first to embrace and popularize [Darwin’s] hypothesis.” Nevertheless, Andrew White brings up the matter of Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and so it is helpful to look closer at what Wilberforce actually said.
It is a bit of a history-of-science, isn’t-Darwinism-fantastic chestnut that, on June 30, 1860, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Wilberforce condemned Darwinism for contradicting the Bible. He is reported to have said, “that he was not descended from a monkey.”
Upon hearing this remark, Darwin’s friend the zoologist Thomas Huxley shot back: “If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for the truth.”
As legend has it, the Bishop shot back and asked Huxley whether it was “on your grandfather or grandmother’s side that you claim descent from the apes.” To which Huxley rejoined, “I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.” (The authors note that J. R. Lucas and others have demonstrated this story to be apocryphal.)
What White fails to mention is that Bishop Wilberforce had earlier written that he would be willing to embrace the theory of natural selection if it proved correct.
If Mr. Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning [as Newton] demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms . . . only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation. . . . We have no sympathy with those who object to any fact or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears is taught by Revelation.[6]
Darwin said the Bishop’s review was “uncommonly clever,” and said that Wilberforce “picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts [of the Origin], and brings forward well all the difficulties.” Wilberforce was no idiot.
Lindberg and Numbers outline several different theories that attempt to understand the subsequent conflict over Darwinism. I will list them here:
(1) James R. Moore says that the Darwinian debates occur not between scientists and theologians, but in individual minds struggling to come to terms with the new paradigm, a “conflict of minds steeped in Christian tradition with the ideas and implications of Darwinism.”
(2) Neil C. Gillespie argues that the conflict was between competing systems of science or “epistemes.” “Because the new episteme for science differed from the old in having within it no place for theology, serious questions were thereby raised that made the conflict” very real. The conflict rose from transformations within science, not as a result of a war between scientists and the religious.
(3) Frank M. Turner sees the conflict as a result of a change in priestly class. The authority and prestige of one group of intellectuals was passing to another, including political control of education and the social power of religious dogma and explanation. In Turner’s view, the conflict is as much a social and political as intellectual.
In the end, the picture Lindberg and Numbers paint between religion and science is a human one. People in the day-to-day struggle to come to terms with what they know and how they know it: religious ideas and scientific ones bleed, inform, and bump each other as a reflection of the minds of the people and the cultures that contain them. “Christianity and science alike,” they conclude, “have been profoundly shaped by their relations with each other.” What is needed is an ideological history that refuses the simple—and thus seductive—answers of White and warfare and commits itself to the difficult, nuanced, but worthwhile retelling of the story.
__________
The above largely taken from the article by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers. “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science.” Church History 55 (1986): 338-54. A similar article appeared as the introduction to God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science. University of California Press, 1986.
[1] As a critique to the warfare metaphor, the authors also cite James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, 1979), 19-122. See also Ronald L. Numbers, “Science and Religion” in Historical Writings on American Science, ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, Osiris 1, 2d ser. (1985): 59-80.
[2] Augustine, Enchiridion 3:9.
[3] Augustine. De genesi ad litteram 1.19; trans. Meyrick H. Carre, Realists and Nominalists (London, 1946), 19. For another translation, see Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., 2 vols., Ancient Christian Writers 41-42 (New York, 1982), 1:42-43.
[4] See also David C. Lindberg, “Science and the Early Church” in God and Nature, 19-58.
[5] For a good account of the effects of the condemnation, see Edward Grant, “The Condemnations of 1277, God’s Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages,” Viator 10 (1979): 211-44; reprinted in Edward Grant Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy (London, 1981), article 13.; Gary Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God and Nature, 181-85.
[6] J. R. Lucas, “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter,” The Historical Journal 22 (1979): 313-30. See also Sheridan Gilley, “The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration,” in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Rommins, Studies in Church History 17 (Oxford, 1981), 325-40.
science and religion; David Lindberg; Ronald Numbers; history of ideas; Augustine; Christianity; history; Andrew White; church history; Nicolaus Copernicus; Galileo Galilei; Charles Darwin; Samuel Wilberforce; James Moore; Neil Gillespie; Frank Turner; natural philosophy
Friday, August 01, 2008
Plantinga pulls a Samson
Alvin Plantinga throws out a nearly adorable argument against naturalism, or reductionism, in the July/August 2008 issue of Books & Culture. It is quite a straightforward move, almost syllogistic, and it goes like this: "Naturalists say that science proves their position, and in particular evolution. Plantinga disagrees. “Evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows,” he writes. “One can’t rationally be an evolutionary naturalist.” Now why does he say this?
Here’s the critique: if the mind has arrived by means of evolutionary processes, forces conditioned by history and the larger cosmological context, then how do we know that what it thinks is true is true? Plantinga quotes Darwin:
With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[1]
He goes on to say that for the naturalist, beliefs, along with other mental states, are caused by neurophysiology. And evolution says that this equipment has been adapted, and is still adaptive for the purpose of genetic reproduction. I like his quote from Francis Crick, “Our highly developed brains . . . were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents” (from The Astonishing Hypothesis). Natural selection doesn’t care about truth, it cares about sex, and if false beliefs mean more sex, then that is fine.
Plantinga, with the help of a math buddy, asks, then, what is the chance that any one proposition is true? Out of one hundred beliefs, how many will be false and how many will be true. Answer: not even a handful, and there’s no way to tell one way or the other.
Evolutionary naturalism, then, is self-refuting. Or, as he says, “One who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it.” What this means is that evolution spoils naturalism of its epistemological power. The reductionist is the one in danger of falling into an unholy skepticism (although Plantinga points out that Aristotle, the Stoics, and Hegel managed to be atheists without simultaneously embracing naturalism.) And what about the Christian? Well, is there any need to explain it? Get thee, saint, to Augustine and read his de Magistro, and get thee to the imago Dei, the doctrine of the logos, of creation, and of general revelation.
POSTSCRIPT: August 2019
Discussing the hypothesis of emergence, author Russell Howell writes, "This approach has been debated extensively. For example, Alvin Plantinga's celebrated essay, "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism"[2] claims that rationality is very unlikely a quality produced by survivability. Plantinga's approach, as he acknowledges, is similar to that found in C. S. Lewis's Miracles. (Lewis's argument, incidentally, was recently enhanced by Victor Reppert in his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.) The thrust of their thinking here is that you cannot get (or are very unlikely to get) rationality out of a causally closed system that works solely on the basis of blind chance physical interactions operating in accordance with a "survival of the fittest" paradigm.[3] (cf Pattern 83: Opening a Closed Circle.)
[1] Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." ~ Albert Einstein
[2] This essay has appeared in various forms. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 12. Fruitful research can be made in to the Naturalism debate between C. S. Lewis and G. E. M. Anscombe. Considered along a timeline, Plantinga's argument is either a repetition of or a development of the Argument from Reason. See Lewis's Miracles at http://stefangillies.wordpress.com/c-s-lewis-2/
[3] Russell W. Howell "Does Mathematical Beauty Pose problems for Naturalism?" Christian Scholar's Review 35:4 (Summer 2006): 498-499. Also Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001). Howell: "Any theory that would combine evolutionary explanations for rationality with naturalism "would still run up against the arguments of Mark Steiner . . . Strictly speaking, Steiner's argument attempts to refute "non-anthropocentrism" rather than naturalism. But if Steiner is correct, the naturalist should not take comfort. For any form of naturalism, Steiner muses, is ipso facto non-anthropocentric, n that it would disallow a privileged status for humans in the scope of the universe. If, as Steiner argues, the success of mathematics can be shown to put humans in some sort of privileged position, then naturalism has some problems to sort out. . . . mathematicians and scientist . . . rely on human notions of beauty and symmetry in the development of their theories. In fact, such activity has been a longstanding and consistent strategy" (500).
Thursday, June 19, 2008
three scientists
Science, too, stumbles toward religion. The horizon of human imagination and aspiration is just too large and too curious to submit to the narrow confines of a method, measure, rule.
So far I have pointed out the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations that have largely shaped the attitude of religion as it addresses science. Now I would like to survey three voices that come from the other direction; science addressing religion—well, not properly religion, more like faith or ethics. Two of these come from interviews broadcast in 2008 on American Public Media’s radio program “Speaking of Faith.”
The first is "Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth" with author Janna Levin, assistant professor of astrophysics at Columbia University and author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, among other books.
The second is "Science and Hope" with Templeton Prize winner Dr. George Ellis, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and a Quaker.
The third is an interview between host Dr. Moira Gunn and biologist and author Stewart Kauffman broadcast 6 June, 2008, on the podcast IT Conversations. The context of their discussion is Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred, but the subject is really emergence.
The Conversations
The conversation with Janna Levin centers largely around the following points. (1) Truth goes beyond what mathematics can demonstrate; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. (2) How do we know what is real, when our perception is a point along a phenomenological continuum? We don't see the quantum. Our intuition is based on the neurons that have evolved in this world for our purposes. There are no true things that are unambiguously true, save things like 1+1=2. The rest of it is always something we approach without arriving, glimpsing truth out of the corner of the eye. “Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false” (Hegel). (3) How is it that mathematics not only exists, but we can perceive and understand it? (4) Time, determinism, and freedom [16:00], including the existence of free will. I especially like her reminder that we have come through radical changes in worldview since, say, pre-Copernican societies [33:15]. Same for her commitment that existential meaning must be based on truth. Levin is a reductionist, seeing, for example, many of our behaviors as an outgrowth of animal instincts encoded through evolutionary processes. At the same time, she is uncomfortable with this, only too glad to argue for free will in a world of lawful inevitability and subconscious instinct.
George Ellis is a cosmologist and an activist. And in his experience there exists what he calls “deep ethics,”an ethics emerging from the mathematical fabric of the universe. It is there, and no one knows why. As Ellis says, “We haven't got a clue in what way mathematics is embedded there, but it is there in some platonic space waiting to be discovered. We actually haven't got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they're there. We know they're effective. We don't know how they are embedded.” This deep ethic emerges whether one wants it to or not. And it is kenotic in nature: it is selfless, it is humble, it serves others. The proof of its existence is “self-authenticating. There is actually no other way of saying it. It is just something you either see or you don't see. There is no proof. It's something you recognize or you don't recognize.”
Ellis says that science has limits. “Science sees nothing about aesthetics or meaning or metaphysics.” Of course, this language evokes the God of the gaps problem. Ellis says, “It’s not the God of the gaps, it’s the God of the boundaries.”
The point about this is that there are boundaries to what science can handle, boundaries science cannot cross. (Not will not [which is the god of the gaps] but cannot.) And one of these important boundaries is ethics. So let's go back to the ethics. There's a whole lot of people out there trying to say, 'Well, ethics is understood by science through sociobiology.' There's another lot of social scientists saying ethics is understood through sociology and psychology and anthropology, and so on. And they are just profoundly mistaken when they say that, for a whole host of reasons. And perhaps we don't want to get technical about this, but the simple way to see how mistaken they are is to ask the following question to a scientist who says 'Look, science can comprehend ethics.' We can use science as a basis for ethics. 'So fine,' we say. 'Tell us what science says we should do in Iraq today.' Then you get this deafening silence because science is totally unable to say anything about that. The reason is there are no experiments in science to do with what is good and what is bad. There are no scientific units for good and bad. There's no experiment. It's just outside the scope of science, not only now, but forever, never ever will be within the bound of science.
And as for the origin of the universe:
My colleagues are producing theories of what they call creation of the universe out of nothing. But when you probe them, you find they're not producing theories of the creation of the universe out of nothing. They are assuming a huge machinery of quantum field theory and fields and particles and interactions, which generates the universe, not the creation of the universe out of nothing.
And, yet, it had to come from somewhere. “In the end, we run into a metaphysical blank, whether you pursue it scientifically or religiously, and you simply have to give up in wonder and awe and say, ‘I don't know the answer, and it's just marvelous the way things are.’”
Biologist and author Stewart Kauffman studies self-organizing systems, pursuing a cosmological position called emergence, which is growing in scientific popularity. What has to be overcome, Kauffman says, is reductionism, of which he outlines three features: (1) Everything that happens is describeable by natural laws. This means that the universe is (2) fundamentally deterministic. Like a computer, once you know the relevant information, then you can predict everything. And finally (3) reductionism is analytic. It says that knowledge is the product of reducing things to their elemental parts. Reductionism has been very successful, it is true, but not without ethical and existential costs. For the reductionist, the universe is made up of unrelated happenings from which no meaning can be abstracted; bare juxtaposition without explanation or narrative.
For this and other reasons, the adequacy of reducationism is being questioned by some within the scientific community. In its place is a platform called "emergence," which asks questions about the nature of the universe from the perspective of pure and infinite complexity. The result: a universe which cannot be completely explained, now or ever, by the fundamental laws of physics. Two nobel laureates in physics are notable enthusiasts: Phil Anderson, who wrote an article in Science in 1972 entitled "More is Different," and Robert Laughlin, whose latest book is entitled, A Different Universe. Like Anderson and Laufman, Kauffman believes that emergence is not only real and demonstrable, but it is a better platform than reductionism for doing science.
Reductionism doesn't work, he says, because complex things cannot be deduced. Reality is so unplottably chaotic, so infinitely complex, that trying to say "this comes from that" is a fool's errand. You can't simulate the development of complex things. In biology, for example, a physicists cannot explain the coming into existence of the heart. Emergence allows for cause and effect, but it throws its boundaries much larger to encompass the unexplainably complex.
This is the basis for Kauffman's critique of darwinian preadaptation. He asks, "Do you think you could say beforehand all the possible darwinian preadaptations of all the organisms now, or just for humans? Can we know all the adjacent possibles?" The answer is, of course, no. "There just isn't a mathematical framework to even try and do this. How would we know we plotted all the adjacent possibles?" Predictability is impossible. There are just too many variables. The future is just too odd.
So, then, Kauffman outlines four implications from emergence.
1. We cannot do what Newton said we should do. We can't specify the laws and then calculate what is going to happen, because we can't know all the adjacent possibles.
2. We can't make probability statements. We don't know all the adjacent possibles, and so we can't plot a sample that would allow us to come up with a probability statement. Nobel laureate Marie Gilmont says that a law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, but can we really do this? The evolution of the biosphere is beyond prediction and beyond the reach of natural law. What we're left with in the biosphere and up through economics is ceaseless creativity. You don't need a creator for this. Every advance through an adjacent possible reshapes the next adjacent possible. The entire matrix of adjacent possibles changes with every step in a way that cannot be predicted.
3. Reason is an insufficient guide for living our life. We have to reunite narrative, allegory, intuition, emotion, and reason. We have to rethink and understand our integrated humanity, throwing aside the split between the two cultures: science and the arts. Science is no longer the only way to get to the truth. History, art, law--lots of things tell us the truth now, not just the scientific method. We need more than just reductionism to help explain things. We live our lives forward, in the face of mystery, not knowing what is going to happen. What does it mean to be fully human in such a world? Kauffman goes on to talk about religion. He takes to task his reductionist friends, such as Richard Dawkins--Enlightenment atheists. What if you take "god" out of the equation and leave creativity, poses Kauffman, hypostasizing creativity. We have lived with creativity and have invented gods to explain it. Indeed, how many gods have we worshipped in human history? God is our most powerful symbol, but it is rife with abuse. "We can choose to use the word "God" if we want to," he says. But it isn't necessary. Instead, we can use "god," not to mean a creator, but to refer to the creativity that itself characterizes and shapes the universe.
4. We need a global ethic. We are connected to everything, emerging along with the rest of the universe. We are caught up in the natural creativity of the universe: which means, to use a religious word, we are all sacred. We need a shared ethic, a global ethic, an ethic that includes all of life and the planet. The secular West is reduced to fairness for friends, love of family, democracy, and free markets, but this is not a global ethic. We are reduced to consumers. We are commoditized. We need an ethic that will help guide the hetero- or homogeneous civilization that is developing. We need to be reconciled to nature. The notion that nature is there to be used by man, the whole purpose of knowledge from a Baconian view, needs to be thrown off. Instead, we need to embrace nature. So can we use this sense of god, and find meaning in it to orient our lives today? Kauffman thinks we can, and that it is as good as any other model of god, and perhaps better, since there is no theodicy issue.
Grammar
So what to do with the above three examples? I hope they serve to show that not only theologians, but scientists are struggling to make sense of the no man's land that exists between too-tidy reductionism and the Wild West of pure fideism. There seems to be a complete lack of any grammatical rules for passing between one side or the other, any schema that allows statements made by one side to be properly heard and evaluated on the other. No one seems to be able to define what governing power a scientific theory should have in the development of doctrine and vise versa (though things have gone unidirectional for a good while.) Can you just equate the big bang, with all its supporting mathematics etc., and Genesis 1.1? (As, for example, William Lane Craig tries to do in this debate with Peter Atkins.) What happens when they turn the Hadron Collider on early next year in Switzerland and discover the whole brane thing is correct and that the big bang is just a temporal phenomenon in a much larger and more complicated universe? Theology risks too much when it latches such and such a doctrine to today's scientific post--but, for all that, it can't just ignore it. And, if the above three physicists say anything about science, it says that scientists, too, cannot avoid the ethical and, yes, religious implications of their work.
Janna Levin; George Ellis; cosmology; religion and science; ethics; Stuart Kauffman; emergence; complexity; evolution; philosophy of science; probability; freedom; kenosis
So far I have pointed out the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations that have largely shaped the attitude of religion as it addresses science. Now I would like to survey three voices that come from the other direction; science addressing religion—well, not properly religion, more like faith or ethics. Two of these come from interviews broadcast in 2008 on American Public Media’s radio program “Speaking of Faith.”
The first is "Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth" with author Janna Levin, assistant professor of astrophysics at Columbia University and author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, among other books.
The second is "Science and Hope" with Templeton Prize winner Dr. George Ellis, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and a Quaker.
The third is an interview between host Dr. Moira Gunn and biologist and author Stewart Kauffman broadcast 6 June, 2008, on the podcast IT Conversations. The context of their discussion is Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred, but the subject is really emergence.
The conversation with Janna Levin centers largely around the following points. (1) Truth goes beyond what mathematics can demonstrate; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. (2) How do we know what is real, when our perception is a point along a phenomenological continuum? We don't see the quantum. Our intuition is based on the neurons that have evolved in this world for our purposes. There are no true things that are unambiguously true, save things like 1+1=2. The rest of it is always something we approach without arriving, glimpsing truth out of the corner of the eye. “Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false” (Hegel). (3) How is it that mathematics not only exists, but we can perceive and understand it? (4) Time, determinism, and freedom [16:00], including the existence of free will. I especially like her reminder that we have come through radical changes in worldview since, say, pre-Copernican societies [33:15]. Same for her commitment that existential meaning must be based on truth. Levin is a reductionist, seeing, for example, many of our behaviors as an outgrowth of animal instincts encoded through evolutionary processes. At the same time, she is uncomfortable with this, only too glad to argue for free will in a world of lawful inevitability and subconscious instinct.
George Ellis is a cosmologist and an activist. And in his experience there exists what he calls “deep ethics,”an ethics emerging from the mathematical fabric of the universe. It is there, and no one knows why. As Ellis says, “We haven't got a clue in what way mathematics is embedded there, but it is there in some platonic space waiting to be discovered. We actually haven't got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they're there. We know they're effective. We don't know how they are embedded.” This deep ethic emerges whether one wants it to or not. And it is kenotic in nature: it is selfless, it is humble, it serves others. The proof of its existence is “self-authenticating. There is actually no other way of saying it. It is just something you either see or you don't see. There is no proof. It's something you recognize or you don't recognize.”
Ellis says that science has limits. “Science sees nothing about aesthetics or meaning or metaphysics.” Of course, this language evokes the God of the gaps problem. Ellis says, “It’s not the God of the gaps, it’s the God of the boundaries.”
The point about this is that there are boundaries to what science can handle, boundaries science cannot cross. (Not will not [which is the god of the gaps] but cannot.) And one of these important boundaries is ethics. So let's go back to the ethics. There's a whole lot of people out there trying to say, 'Well, ethics is understood by science through sociobiology.' There's another lot of social scientists saying ethics is understood through sociology and psychology and anthropology, and so on. And they are just profoundly mistaken when they say that, for a whole host of reasons. And perhaps we don't want to get technical about this, but the simple way to see how mistaken they are is to ask the following question to a scientist who says 'Look, science can comprehend ethics.' We can use science as a basis for ethics. 'So fine,' we say. 'Tell us what science says we should do in Iraq today.' Then you get this deafening silence because science is totally unable to say anything about that. The reason is there are no experiments in science to do with what is good and what is bad. There are no scientific units for good and bad. There's no experiment. It's just outside the scope of science, not only now, but forever, never ever will be within the bound of science.
And as for the origin of the universe:
My colleagues are producing theories of what they call creation of the universe out of nothing. But when you probe them, you find they're not producing theories of the creation of the universe out of nothing. They are assuming a huge machinery of quantum field theory and fields and particles and interactions, which generates the universe, not the creation of the universe out of nothing.
And, yet, it had to come from somewhere. “In the end, we run into a metaphysical blank, whether you pursue it scientifically or religiously, and you simply have to give up in wonder and awe and say, ‘I don't know the answer, and it's just marvelous the way things are.’”
Biologist and author Stewart Kauffman studies self-organizing systems, pursuing a cosmological position called emergence, which is growing in scientific popularity. What has to be overcome, Kauffman says, is reductionism, of which he outlines three features: (1) Everything that happens is describeable by natural laws. This means that the universe is (2) fundamentally deterministic. Like a computer, once you know the relevant information, then you can predict everything. And finally (3) reductionism is analytic. It says that knowledge is the product of reducing things to their elemental parts. Reductionism has been very successful, it is true, but not without ethical and existential costs. For the reductionist, the universe is made up of unrelated happenings from which no meaning can be abstracted; bare juxtaposition without explanation or narrative.
For this and other reasons, the adequacy of reducationism is being questioned by some within the scientific community. In its place is a platform called "emergence," which asks questions about the nature of the universe from the perspective of pure and infinite complexity. The result: a universe which cannot be completely explained, now or ever, by the fundamental laws of physics. Two nobel laureates in physics are notable enthusiasts: Phil Anderson, who wrote an article in Science in 1972 entitled "More is Different," and Robert Laughlin, whose latest book is entitled, A Different Universe. Like Anderson and Laufman, Kauffman believes that emergence is not only real and demonstrable, but it is a better platform than reductionism for doing science.
Reductionism doesn't work, he says, because complex things cannot be deduced. Reality is so unplottably chaotic, so infinitely complex, that trying to say "this comes from that" is a fool's errand. You can't simulate the development of complex things. In biology, for example, a physicists cannot explain the coming into existence of the heart. Emergence allows for cause and effect, but it throws its boundaries much larger to encompass the unexplainably complex.
This is the basis for Kauffman's critique of darwinian preadaptation. He asks, "Do you think you could say beforehand all the possible darwinian preadaptations of all the organisms now, or just for humans? Can we know all the adjacent possibles?" The answer is, of course, no. "There just isn't a mathematical framework to even try and do this. How would we know we plotted all the adjacent possibles?" Predictability is impossible. There are just too many variables. The future is just too odd.
So, then, Kauffman outlines four implications from emergence.
1. We cannot do what Newton said we should do. We can't specify the laws and then calculate what is going to happen, because we can't know all the adjacent possibles.
2. We can't make probability statements. We don't know all the adjacent possibles, and so we can't plot a sample that would allow us to come up with a probability statement. Nobel laureate Marie Gilmont says that a law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, but can we really do this? The evolution of the biosphere is beyond prediction and beyond the reach of natural law. What we're left with in the biosphere and up through economics is ceaseless creativity. You don't need a creator for this. Every advance through an adjacent possible reshapes the next adjacent possible. The entire matrix of adjacent possibles changes with every step in a way that cannot be predicted.
3. Reason is an insufficient guide for living our life. We have to reunite narrative, allegory, intuition, emotion, and reason. We have to rethink and understand our integrated humanity, throwing aside the split between the two cultures: science and the arts. Science is no longer the only way to get to the truth. History, art, law--lots of things tell us the truth now, not just the scientific method. We need more than just reductionism to help explain things. We live our lives forward, in the face of mystery, not knowing what is going to happen. What does it mean to be fully human in such a world? Kauffman goes on to talk about religion. He takes to task his reductionist friends, such as Richard Dawkins--Enlightenment atheists. What if you take "god" out of the equation and leave creativity, poses Kauffman, hypostasizing creativity. We have lived with creativity and have invented gods to explain it. Indeed, how many gods have we worshipped in human history? God is our most powerful symbol, but it is rife with abuse. "We can choose to use the word "God" if we want to," he says. But it isn't necessary. Instead, we can use "god," not to mean a creator, but to refer to the creativity that itself characterizes and shapes the universe.
4. We need a global ethic. We are connected to everything, emerging along with the rest of the universe. We are caught up in the natural creativity of the universe: which means, to use a religious word, we are all sacred. We need a shared ethic, a global ethic, an ethic that includes all of life and the planet. The secular West is reduced to fairness for friends, love of family, democracy, and free markets, but this is not a global ethic. We are reduced to consumers. We are commoditized. We need an ethic that will help guide the hetero- or homogeneous civilization that is developing. We need to be reconciled to nature. The notion that nature is there to be used by man, the whole purpose of knowledge from a Baconian view, needs to be thrown off. Instead, we need to embrace nature. So can we use this sense of god, and find meaning in it to orient our lives today? Kauffman thinks we can, and that it is as good as any other model of god, and perhaps better, since there is no theodicy issue.
So what to do with the above three examples? I hope they serve to show that not only theologians, but scientists are struggling to make sense of the no man's land that exists between too-tidy reductionism and the Wild West of pure fideism. There seems to be a complete lack of any grammatical rules for passing between one side or the other, any schema that allows statements made by one side to be properly heard and evaluated on the other. No one seems to be able to define what governing power a scientific theory should have in the development of doctrine and vise versa (though things have gone unidirectional for a good while.) Can you just equate the big bang, with all its supporting mathematics etc., and Genesis 1.1? (As, for example, William Lane Craig tries to do in this debate with Peter Atkins.) What happens when they turn the Hadron Collider on early next year in Switzerland and discover the whole brane thing is correct and that the big bang is just a temporal phenomenon in a much larger and more complicated universe? Theology risks too much when it latches such and such a doctrine to today's scientific post--but, for all that, it can't just ignore it. And, if the above three physicists say anything about science, it says that scientists, too, cannot avoid the ethical and, yes, religious implications of their work.
Janna Levin; George Ellis; cosmology; religion and science; ethics; Stuart Kauffman; emergence; complexity; evolution; philosophy of science; probability; freedom; kenosis
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Jonathan Edwards may be on to something
To be frank, I have never been attracted to the theology of American Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Perhaps because of his historical and geographic situation, he always seems to exist in an eddy of history, a backwater, protected and immune from the force of the enrushing early Enlightenment and its theological questions and challenges. Plus, in matters spiritual or otherwise, the guy was a hard ass. There, I said it.
Nevertheless, this quotation from Sam Storms, the author of Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections says I'm no doubt badly mistaken. In an interview printed in Crossway's publicity publication, The Book Report, Storms says:
[Edwards] saw everything in the light of the glory and power and majesty of God, from the smallest of spiders to the most expansive of galaxies. Everything exists by virtue of God's incessant infusion of life and energy. Everything exists to reflect the glory and splendor of its Creator. Everything exists to draw us to God so that we might glorify him by finding satisfaction in all that he is for us in Jesus.
Let's face it. In the wake of a personal openness to science, I'm hunting around to see what models theology can provide. And though I am not at all interested in adopting process theology, a direction which, in my opinion, gives the store away in exchange for contemporary ideological legitimacy, Edwards "incessant infusion" hints at possibility.
Jonathan Edwards; Sam Storms; process theology; science and religion; theology; metaphysics
Nevertheless, this quotation from Sam Storms, the author of Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections says I'm no doubt badly mistaken. In an interview printed in Crossway's publicity publication, The Book Report, Storms says:
[Edwards] saw everything in the light of the glory and power and majesty of God, from the smallest of spiders to the most expansive of galaxies. Everything exists by virtue of God's incessant infusion of life and energy. Everything exists to reflect the glory and splendor of its Creator. Everything exists to draw us to God so that we might glorify him by finding satisfaction in all that he is for us in Jesus.
Let's face it. In the wake of a personal openness to science, I'm hunting around to see what models theology can provide. And though I am not at all interested in adopting process theology, a direction which, in my opinion, gives the store away in exchange for contemporary ideological legitimacy, Edwards "incessant infusion" hints at possibility.
Jonathan Edwards; Sam Storms; process theology; science and religion; theology; metaphysics
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Evolution: three faithful responses
In the October 2007 edition of First Things magazine, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., wrote an interesting article surveying the general approaches Christians (he says Roman Catholics, but includes many who are from different traditions) are taking to evolution. I would like to briefly summarize these positions.
Those who, believing that science and religion address “different levels of knowledge,” espouse a combination of “Darwinism in science and theism in theology.” This group rejects “Darwinism as a philosophical system” and “holds that God, eternally foreseeing all the products of evolution, uses the natural process of evolution to work out his creative plan.” Theistic evolutionists believe that science is epistemologically limited. “It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole.” God, to this group, gets things going by the big bang, knowing from that point how it will all go. Dulles includes in this group Kenneth R. Miller, Stephen M. Barr, Francis S. Collins, Fred Hoyle, and Arthur Peacock. Intelligent design
Michael Behe is the only researcher named to this school, though there are others. Here we find the usual appeal to irreducible complexity. God interferes in development by producing organs that are irreducibly complex. Dulles says that sudden divine intervention in the formation of species should not be ruled out. Nevertheless, he prefers Darwin, and warns.
A teleological position once called “vitalism,” Dulles includes Henri Bergson, Michael Polanyi, and Teilhard de Chardin in this group. This school believes that mechanical principles just can’t explain the behavior of living things. Living things want to live. And “this internal finality” sets them apart from the dead earth. Life goes somewhere. It stretches out toward the future. Dulles references English physicist John Polkinghorn’s insight that “there must be in the universe a thrust toward higher and more complex forms.” God urges, advocates, and initiates each graduate development. “Many adherents of this school would say that the transition from physicochemical existence to biological life, and the further transitions to animal and human life, require an additional input of divine creative energy.” And we hear from Georgetown professor John F. Haught [see my post “Let’s ask the Catholic about science”] who notes that
faith and science; John Haught; evolution; epistemology; Avery Cardinal Dulles; causation ; scientific method ; Etienne Gilson
“Catholics who are expert in the biological sciences,” Dulles begins, “take several different positions on evolution.” These are as follows.
Theistic evolutionismThose who, believing that science and religion address “different levels of knowledge,” espouse a combination of “Darwinism in science and theism in theology.” This group rejects “Darwinism as a philosophical system” and “holds that God, eternally foreseeing all the products of evolution, uses the natural process of evolution to work out his creative plan.” Theistic evolutionists believe that science is epistemologically limited. “It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole.” God, to this group, gets things going by the big bang, knowing from that point how it will all go. Dulles includes in this group Kenneth R. Miller, Stephen M. Barr, Francis S. Collins, Fred Hoyle, and Arthur Peacock. Intelligent design
Michael Behe is the only researcher named to this school, though there are others. Here we find the usual appeal to irreducible complexity. God interferes in development by producing organs that are irreducibly complex. Dulles says that sudden divine intervention in the formation of species should not be ruled out. Nevertheless, he prefers Darwin, and warns.
As a matter of policy, it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained [what today appears irreducibly complex], because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion.
Process thinkingA teleological position once called “vitalism,” Dulles includes Henri Bergson, Michael Polanyi, and Teilhard de Chardin in this group. This school believes that mechanical principles just can’t explain the behavior of living things. Living things want to live. And “this internal finality” sets them apart from the dead earth. Life goes somewhere. It stretches out toward the future. Dulles references English physicist John Polkinghorn’s insight that “there must be in the universe a thrust toward higher and more complex forms.” God urges, advocates, and initiates each graduate development. “Many adherents of this school would say that the transition from physicochemical existence to biological life, and the further transitions to animal and human life, require an additional input of divine creative energy.” And we hear from Georgetown professor John F. Haught [see my post “Let’s ask the Catholic about science”] who notes that
Natural science achieves exact results be restricting itself to measurable phenomena, ignoring deeper questions about meaning and purpose. By its method, it filters out subjectivity, feeling, and striving, all of which are essential to a full theory of cognition. Materialistic Darwinism is incapable of explaining why the universe gives rise to subjectivity, feeling, and striving.
Thomist Etienne Gilson, in his book From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again put the blame on Francis Bacon and his peers. Seeking to explain everything mechanically, they elided two of Aristotle’s four causes. They kept the material and efficient causes, but discarded formal and final causality. In their wake, writes Dulles, science “simply disallows the questions about why anything (including human life) exists, how we differ in nature from irrational animals, and how we ought to conduct our lives.” He continues,
Without the form, or the formal cause, it would be impossible to account for the unity and specific identity of any substance. In the human composite, the form is the spiritual soul, which makes the organism a single entity and gives it its human character. Once the form is lost, the material elements decompose, and the body ceases to be human. It would be futile, therefore, to try to define human beings in terms of their bodily components alone.
Final causality is particularly important in the realm of living organisms. The organs of the animal or human body are not intelligible except in terms of their purpose or finality. The brain is not intelligible without reference to the faculty of thinking that is its purpose, nor is the eye intelligible without reference to the function of seeing.
Blogger Michael Liccione has an interesting response to this part of Dulles’ argument in a post entitled, “God and evolution: the state of the question.” Liccione says that there is a good reason for excluding formal and final causes. Progress in the sciences requires their exclusion because including them would undermine the basis for rigorous experimentation. They are good philosophical principles, he says, that help contextualize scientific findings. But that context is philosophy, not science.
I like the way Liccione summarizes Dulles’ position: “Dulles' view may be summed up thus: he finds ID too dependent on a God of the gaps, and TE too deistic. Rather, and given the Church's irreformable teaching about the origin of the human soul, we should look to some form of vitalism as a viable option.” Science, of course, does not think God should interfere at all in the natural order of things. But Dulles is correct when he asserts that Christians believe in a God who incarnates, who works miracles, who reveals—indeed, who intervenes! He warns theistic evolutionists not to hold too tightly to the reasoning that is current in modern science. “Science and technology (science’s offspring) are totally inadequate in the field of morality.” And morality is where Dulles leaves off.
Right and wrong, and the inner understanding that it is a noble thing to choose the right even at the cost of suffering or pain—what can science tells us about this innate higher law, he asks. Evolutionists, he says, say that morality and religion arose for survival value. “But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system.” And just because science explains a belief, does this discount it? One might also point out that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is, itself, an incorrigibly moral act.
We should recover reason, Dulles concludes. Reason is the full range of human thinking, and we must discover and embrace all of it, and not limit its range merely to that which is empirically verifiable. In this, Dulles’ call to good thinking agrees entirely with Philip Kitcher [see my post “Evolution, providence, and the political”] who said that religious people should look to the riches of their theological and philosophical traditions and discover ways of understanding and dialoging in a secular world of science.
faith and science; John Haught; evolution; epistemology; Avery Cardinal Dulles; causation ; scientific method ; Etienne Gilson
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Let's ask the Catholic about science
Roman Catholic theologian John Haught, Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, was interviewed by journalist Steve Paulson in the Salon article "The atheist delusion," on December 19, 2007. Though Haught is a follower of the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, deeply influenced by Paul Tillich, and, subsequently, a classic liberal when it comes to, say, the historicity of the physical resurrection, I found many of his comments quite helpful. Therefore, in the spirit of previous copyright infringements, I intend to copy from it liberally. Bold questions are Paulson.
On the Relationship Between Science and Religion
John Haught is quite plain that he finds Steven Jay Gould's idea of a "non-overlapping magisteria"--that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value--too simplistic. Gould, he says "defines religion as simply concerning values and meaning. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth." Paulson adds that the entire split "seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians."
By truth, are you talking about reality?
Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.
We can't get our minds around this transcendent reality because we're limited by our language and our brains?
We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don't accept Gould's complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It's an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin.
In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein--just as after Galileo and Copernicus--we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before. My view is that theology, instead of ignoring or closing its eyes to [Darwin's thought], should look it squarely in the face. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. In my view, Darwin's thought is a gift to theology because it goads modern theologians to clarify their thinking [and, says Paulson, reject "outdated arguments about God as an intrusive designer."]
[Richard] Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.
Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science.
Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding. Suppose you asked me, why am I thinking right now? I could say, my neurons are firing, the synapses are connecting, the lobes of my brain are activated. And you could spend your whole career, as neuroscientists do, unfolding that level of understanding. But I could also say I'm thinking because I have a desire to know. I want to figure things out. That's an explanation that can't be mapped onto the first because a dimension of subjectivity enters in here. You cannot find it by the objectifying method of neuroscience.
So science as it's now practiced has nothing to say about subjective experience, about what happens in our minds?
I think science, especially neuroscience, does a very good job of saying what has to be working cerebrally and in our nervous systems in order for consciousness to be present. And it can also do a very good job of pointing out what has broken down physically and chemically if my brain is failing to function -- for example, in Alzheimer's. But it doesn't have the complete explanation. Many cognitive scientists and brain scientists are saying the same thing. They're almost in despair at times about whether we'll ever be able to jump from the third-person discourse of science to the first-person discourse of subjective consciousness.
Let me try to pin you down a little more. You're saying the scientific method has only so much explanatory power. At least right now, it has very little to say about subjective experience. That still leaves open the question, is the mind more than the brain? Or does consciousness always have some physical correlate?
Don't get me wrong. I want to push physical explanations as far as possible. I'm a man who loves science. I'm in awe of science. I don't ever want theology to put restraints upon science. I believe every thought we have has a physical correlate. But at the same time, I believe there's something about mind that does transcend, while at the same time fully dwelling incarnately in the physical universe. I see that as a microcosmic example of what's going on in the universe as a whole. So I want a worldview that's wide enough to ask the question, why does the universe not stand still? Once radiation came about early in the universe, why didn't the universe say, "Well, we're just fine here. This is a pretty good universe." Instead, there's a restlessness, a tendency of the cosmos to go beyond itself.
We experience this in ourselves. We're just as much a part of the universe as rivers and rocks are. Therefore, we should use what's going on in our own experience as a key to what's happening in the cosmos as a whole. I call this a "wider empiricism." Most modern science has acted as though subjectivity and consciousness are not part of the natural world. It doesn't reflect adequately on why subjectivity enters the universe at all. Why does the universe transcend itself from purely material to living and then to conscious phenomena? Teilhard himself said that what science left out was nature's most important development--human phenomena.
Earlier, you said cosmic purpose is a question that lies outside of science. But it sounds like you're bringing it into science. If you want to look for purpose -- whether it's in evolution or the larger universe -- you'll find it in this inexorable drive toward greater complexity.
We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite. And what is the purpose? The purpose seems to be, from the very beginning, the intensification of consciousness. If you understand purpose as actualizing something that's unquestionably good, then consciousness certainly fits. It's cynical of scientists to say, off-handedly, there's obviously no purpose in the universe. If purpose means realizing a value, consciousness is a value that none of us can deny.
Haught on ID
Ironically, ID advocates share with their ideological enemies, the evolutionary materalists, the assumption that science itself can provide uultimate explanations. Advocates of intelligent design are really proposing a kind of watered-down version of natural theology. That's the attempt to explain what's going on in nature's order and design by appealing to a nonnatural source. So it's not science. It's not a valid scientific alternative to Darwinian ideas. It's also extremely poor theology. What intelligent design tries to do--and the great theologians have always resisted this idea--is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.
This becomes the "God of the gaps." When you can't explain something by science, you say God did it.
Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, said that kind of thinking was the foundation of modern atheism. Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.
Haught on the Creedal Commitment of Science
[In response to naturalism's demand for proof of the existence of God:] The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed. The idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.
Haught on the Confession that Ultimate Reality is Personal
God (ultimate reality) is personal, meaning he is intelligent and capable of love and making promises. Theologically speaking, personality is a symbol, like everything else in religion. Like all symbols, "personality" doesn't adequately capture the full depth of ultimate reality. But the conviction of the Abrahamic religions is that if ultimate reality were not at least personal--at least capable of everything that humans are capable of--then we could not surrender ourselves fully to it. It would be an "it" rather than a "thou" and therefore would not reach us in the depth of our being. It's when you come to the belief in a personal God that the question of science and religion becomes most acute.
Einstein is certainly relevant in this context. He called himself a "deeply religious nonbeliever." He talked about having genuine religious feelings when he marveled at the inherent order and harmony in the universe. But he thought the idea of a personal God was preposterous. He couldn't believe in a God who interfered with natural events or intervened in the lives of people.
Let's look at why Einstein found that idea of God objectionable. Einstein was a man who thought the laws of physics have to be completely inviolable. Nature is a closed continuum of deterministic causes and effects, and if anything interrupted that, it would violate the fundamental scientific worldview that he had. So the idea of a responsive God--a God who answers prayers--would have to violate the laws of physics, the laws of nature. This is why Einstein said the problem of science and religion is caused by the belief in a personal God. But it's not inevitable that a responsive God violates the laws of physics and chemistry. I don't think God does violate those laws.
I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there's no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection -- this apparently random series of genetic mutations -- it would seem that there's no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.
Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there's life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that's not necessarily true.
faith and science; John Haught; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Paul Tillich; Steven Jay Gould; Albert Einstein; evolution; naturalism; epistemology
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